Month: March 2020

Unencumbered Original Mind

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When original mind, the mind we have at birth, is unencumbered and allowed to flourish, it becomes an active, adaptable, dynamic, inquisitive, and inventive powerhouse. Tragedy encumbers it, as it did for Jean-Dominique Bauby, author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly who suffered from locked-in syndrome, yet still overcame his circumstances. William James, founder of American Psychology, conceived of brain-mind as “endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity.” Plasticity or neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change itself because of experience. It means that seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, feeling, and thinking affects us by altering the wiring connecting sensory experiences to emotions and actions.  As water takes the mold of the container we pour it into, a developing intellect takes the mold dictated by its surrounding. An environment rich with music, laughter, conversation, love, toys, and other people will produce a healthy, curious, energetic brain-mind. An impoverished situation where these elements are missing will not.  Neuroplasticity means the brain develops and programs the skills it needs to adapt to the specific habitat, and experiences the loss of skills unnecessary for that habitat.  This malleability and adaptability makes us different from computers, whose hardware is unchangeable.

We cultivate an unencumbered original mind by encouraging curiosity.

Be like a child. Encourage your curiosity about everything. Ask questions. Focus on a dilemma. Use your creative imagination to visualize the issue. Write the hunches, insights, instincts, answers to the queries your mind conjures up. Writing strengthens the connection to your intellect and intuition.

Try this exercise: As you go to work or to the store, pay attention and note new details you had not observed before. Try to see something new every day on the same route.  Attend to the variety of colors, textures, forms you encounter.

Reducing Uncertainty in a Chaotic World

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In a world where confusion is an unavoidable aspect of being human, the coronavirus pandemic has increased chaos. And changed levels of uncertainty from moderate to extreme. This is a dangerous state from which to live, since high uncertainty inhibits our rational mind. It also dampens other means in our psychological toolbox that we count on—our instinct and intuition. Scientists tell us that instinct and intuition are often the only practical method for assessing uncertainty.  We want to know the future and minimize not-knowing. But our brains have not developed the capabilities or natural means to understand and determine probabilities. This is true of complex events such how this pandemic will affect us; or how our loved one will respond to the needed medical intervention. We don’t waste a lot of time and effort figuring this out because it is beyond our capability. Rather, we decide based on tendencies and beliefs about the likelihood of uncertain events.

Half a century ago, Kahneman and Tversky, two Israeli psychologists, showed that humans evolved strategies called heuristics. These strategies are economical and work well under most cases at predicting the immediate future. We use heuristics to form judgments, decide, and find solutions to complicated problems. They are the best guesses made under the circumstances. And distinct strategies are used to arrive at these judgments. One is focusing on the most important aspect of a problem. Another is basing responses on previous experiences. Heuristics are imperfect means to solve issues or make predictions, but good enough to reach a solution or decision quickly. These convenient and evolved strategies, however, lead to severe and systematic biases and errors. This is because they have a built-in trade-off between accuracy and effort.  Nature designed them to maximize speed of decision making with the least amount of effort. Unfortunately, they suffer in terms of accuracy.

Accuracy, however, is subjective, and what improves reliability is confidence and trust. We need to have confidence in life, God, Buddha nature, the government, anything that is greater than ourself. When uncertainty increases, trust decreases. And vice versa. The more we trust, the less the uncertainty, and the greater the accuracy. The key is to count on something or someone that is reliable. At this moment, trust in government, and maybe even medicine, teeters as the uncertainty grows. But it is important to trust in something. In the next few postings, I plan to share exercises to help cultivate trust in something and reduce uncertainty. Here is one to get started:

EXERCISE:  How to Cultivate an Intuitive Mind

Slow Down and Listen to Your Inner Voice
Learn to recognize “intuition.” Pay attention to your conscience, small inner voice, instincts, insights, and hunches. Before you can recognize your intuition, be able to hear/feel it amid the loudness and distractions of life. To do that, it’s important to first slow down and listen. Take time away from your normal routine. Spend time outdoors, or in an isolated place, with few distractions to practice this exercise.

Take a brief walk in a park, forest, or the beach.  Practice deep breathing and calm down the ongoing chatter of your mind. Imagine that your mind is like listening to noise caused by multiple radio stations playing all at once. You need to turn down the volume; to listen to the one station that is relevant and are searching for—your intuitive channel.

A Sociocultural Singularity?

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The coronavirus pandemic is the extraordinary moment we are experiencing in 2020. As I listen to the news of the coronavirus or COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 there is anxiety and uncertainty in the air. The slow crawl of the coronavirus, from East to the West, is bringing countries and societies to their knees. Economies are grinding to a halt. The frenzied activities of humanity are slowing to a remarkable crawl. The microorganism is powerful enough to devastate the earth’s population, so we shelter in place and isolate ourselves, hoping it will pass by. Paradoxically, the possibility of devastation is offering us a gift – it has forced us to pause and reflect.

Is it a coincidence that amid human-caused climate change, the ultimate challenge facing the earth, we experience the explosion of a pandemic directed at the ones responsible for climate change? From a religious context, some might view it as God’s response, in the form of a plague, to save the Earth. The punishment released on mankind for forsaking their God recalls the flood of Noah. In the realm of science, the explanation is simpler but equally devastating. From that angle, the interpretation relies more on the notion we have crossed a threshold in the fine biological balance established with other species on the planet. Encroachment by humans on territories inhabited by bats, which carry potential for diseases for which we lack immunity, has opened a Pandora’s box. It is an occasion to reflect.

I wish and pray that we see this pandemic as an opportunity to reconsider and reevaluate what our human activity is imposing on our mother planet.

An Exploration of Brain and Mind

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There are several reasons for starting a blog. First, as a scientist, I want to share ideas and observations as they relate to brain and mind. Second, I want to share my writing, which to date involves an autobiography, books of poetry, and a prescriptive nonfiction book on the anxious, monkey mind. Organizing my life on paper to complete the autobiography was satisfying, for the process allowed me to detect patterns in a life, which like all lives make a messy set of data points. Searching for patterns in this immense array of events is why I went into scientific research as a career. Second, as a teacher, I want to help others. I see in my writing an opportunity to share the personal, scientific, and spiritual lessons learned over a lifetime. I hope you enjoy these offerings.

Hello World!

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I am Professor of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. I retired from academic work in 2018. For 28 years, I directed the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory where I explored the relationship between mind and brain.  I am the author of many widely cited papers in animal and human cognitive and systems neuroscience. But I am more than an academic. I have been interested in spiritual matters for over twenty years and have been writing poetry for a good part of my life. Here is my greeting to the world:

May you be attuned to life. May you find it in the silence and stillness of your being. There is no need to move, for you are already there. There is no need to create, for it already exists. There is no need to do, except for the joy of being.