Category: Brain

The Dawning of Intimacy: Pathway to A Unity Experience

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Whether we call it nondual awareness, unity, oceanic feeling, or universal love, we have inadvertently placed such an experience out of reach and available only to mystics, saints, and special others. However, as I have written previously, we are born with this unique sense of being only to apparently forget it as our ego and individuality develop. The dark curtain covering our oceanic feeling, or okeoagnosia (from the Gr. okeanos or ocean and agnosia), is, however, overcome through meditation, prayer, inquiry, falling in love, paying attention, or with drugs. It is remarkably recoverable.

The argument I want to make today is that the news is even better than that. If we think of recovery from okeagnosia as a path, then such a path starts from the awareness that we already have a unity experience. We have it moment-by-moment since it is intrinsic to our human nature. What is needed is to “increase” that sense of being. One can do this by focusing on particular aspects of it, such as enhancing our emotional presence (heart) and unifying it with our intellectual presence (mind) (An Enhanced Sensory Experience). In the end, we gauge progress by the regained sense of joy, love, wonder and curiosity.

The following describes a path of recognition, realization, and appreciation that may be cultivated:

  • Attend to how you see, hear, feel, and think of the external world. Whether you see it as full of independent things with which you interact in a distant, objective, cold, or analytic way or as close, intimate, and loving entities.
  • Realize that your experience of the world (objects, feelings) is the result of your brain’s activity. You are a co-creator of that world and partly responsible for what you experience.
  • Realize that you see the world as individual parts but also holistically.
  • Recognize your care for this external, holistic world because what happens out there affects you inside in small and big ways, especially what other people do. Begin to see this common ground.
  • Recognize that caring can extend not only to others like yourself, but to animals, plants and everything in between. See the common ground in all.
  • Realize that the feelings of caring for all of life takes on a sense of intimacy and closeness. The coldness gives way to love and compassion.
  • Recognize that unity reflects an intrinsic sense you have but forgotten.
  • Recognize that this experience of unity is possible in others as in yourself (Trusting Stillness).
  • Recognize that it reflects a non-separation, compassion, and love knowingness (Unencumbered Original Mind).
  • Realize that you experience unity when you participate in some activity in which you lose track of things, of time, of yourself, etc.
  • Appreciate that you experience unity when in love or during focused attention where your ego disappears in the presence of someone special (lover, wife, husband, children) or something that interests you to the exclusion of everything else.
  • Appreciate that as you move down this path of recognition and realization, life becomes more joyous, your curiosity increases, as does love and compassion toward others.
  • Appreciate that as you move down this path, you begin to feel a greater connection, less distance and more intimacy between you and the world.
  • Appreciate that outside and inside are the same. What appears to be outside is also inside. Figure and ground are just different aspects of the same thing. They define each other but are the same. No greater intimacy than this.

In the rest of the blog, I only want to address the first and most important assumption: That we already have a unity experience. Many will undoubtedly balk and argue that it is not so and are not convinced. This is because we all have different notions of what unity means. We may not agree but let’s start by trying to define a common starting point. At the most basic level, a unity experience means that our perception of the world isn’t a jumble mess of sights, sounds, and emotions, scrambled in such a way that what we experience does not make sense.

In his 1890 volume Principles of Psychology, William James, the founder of American psychology characterized a baby’s experience as such: “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” Yet, developmental psychologists now know that James was decidedly wrong. Even at an early age, as we close and open our eyes, what we experience is not a scrambled set of sensations but a unified world that we understand and that makes sense.

Such an integrated, unified world has orderly physical laws that make prediction of events possible compared to a chaotic or random system. Because we live and are part of such a unified, orderly world, humans have evolved unique prediction algorithms to anticipate outcomes, understand the meaning of actions of others, etc. (Reducing Uncertainty in a Chaotic World and Our Predictive Brain).

Unified implies an experience of closeness, intimacy, and love. Each one of us comes into environments varying in love and acceptance. This can either extend our intrinsic unity experience or cause the dark curtain of okeagnosia to descend quickly. How thick that curtain is distorts and destroys our sense of unity. And it affects how we feel toward others and our environment. We become distant, cold, unemotional, fearful.

Now that you know, are you ready to step into the path of regaining the greatest gift you were born with, the jewel at the center of your being? Start by asking yourself, which sense did I display as a baby? What sense do I display now? How do I get from here to there?

Our Intrinsic Sense of Unity

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Romain Rolland, French dramatist, novelist, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915, and all-around mystic coined the term “oceanic feeling.” He used it to describe a sensation of eternity and unity, a perception of being one with the external world. Rolland studied Hindu Vedantic philosophy through the works of Swami Vivekananda and was likely familiar with the Vedantic notion of nondual awareness. Like nondual awareness, Rolland’s oceanic feeling describes an overwhelming experience of non-separation, compassion, and love. It is, for some, the ultimate unification of heart and mind.

A friend of Sigmund Freud’s, Rolland wrote him concerning his ideas about nondual awareness. He construed it as a deeper reflection of religious feelings than Freud had considered in his book, The Future of an Illusion (1927). Unfortunately, Freud could not identify with the feeling and viewed it in more psychoanalytic terms, as a vestige of an infant’s consciousness that had not yet differentiated itself from others. He described it as a sense we have at birth but lose very early on as we develop our egoic personality. In his next book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud appeared open to the possibility that a similar feeling could occur to someone who has fallen in love. In love, a person has a sense of ego-dissolution and merging with another.

Science, unfortunately, has failed to rigorously or systematically study this feeling of unity or nondual awareness. For most of us, identifying with it is difficult since it is the rarest of experiences associated with mysticism or love. Yet, a few people never lose the sense of connection to everything. Many others regain, recover, or re-experience it through the practice of meditation, doing inquiry, falling in love, or with drugs. The sense of unity resembles the experience of synesthesia (such as the ability to “hear” colors as sound or “see” sounds as colors) in that a small percentage of us experience synesthesia. But this transformative experience occurs under unusual circumstances, in autism or with LSD.

There is compelling evidence that nondual awareness is real and the perception of unity is recoverable. One can return to this original undifferentiated beingness, if not permanently then temporarily. Perhaps this is the implication of what Jesus meant in Matthew 18:1-5 when He said: “Truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” During development we lose the ability to recognize this intrinsic unity experience. An agnosia (Gr. for lack of knowledge) develops to it.  Agnosia refers to a rare condition involving one (or more) of the senses. For example, losing the ability to recognize objects through touch or what we call tactile agnosia, or inability to recognize faces or prosopagnosia. I call our inability to recognize nondual awareness okeagnosia (from the Gr. okeanos or ocean and agnosia).

One key characteristic of okeagnosia is the inability to create a general percept or understanding of the whole from the individual parts. In the 1995 book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks describes a patient with prosopagnosia. This person can describe individual facial parts but is unable to recognize the person or even his own image in a mirror. Similarly, we experience the individual parts that make up our world but not the sense of how they are unified, as an ecosystem, a oneness. We now know that brain areas in the occipital-temporal stream of visual processing (or ventral stream) are associated with prosopagnosia. Specifically, the fusiform gyrus, in the temporal lobe, plays a crucial role in the ability to assemble together a recognizable “face.”

A logical hypothesis is that our capacity to sense unity is also located somewhere in the brain. Whether it involves a specific area like the fusiform gyrus, or a distributed network. The fact that unity isrecoverable through meditation, love, or drugs implies it is inactive temporarily, perhaps under active inhibition. Or, equally likely, disuse has weakened the functional connections and activity does not reach the threshold of awareness when the network is activated. Drugs potentiate such a response. While other explanations exist for okeagnosia, it begs the question of why science has dropped the ball on this most important of senses. The responsibility falls on each one of us to do what we can. For, recovering the brain area or circuit that provides a unitive experience foreshadows an unimaginable well-beingness that humanity can use. We are, in this moment in time, in dire need of recovering our intrinsic sense of non-separation, compassion, and love.

My next blog will describe the path to recovering our unity experience.

Flexibility In Thinking Is Crucial For Survival

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Considering the billions of life forms present on planet Earth, there are several reasons why eusocial species, notably humans, have progressed to be a dominant force. Big brained, eminently social, collaborative in nature, able to communicate complex thoughts—these are just some explanations undergirding our achievement. From a cognitive science perspective, one significant outcome of these various factors, and a big reason for our success, is cognitive flexibility.  At its most essential, this refers to the ability to control the how, when, where, and why of thought. The human brain allows control, either automatically or deliberately, of what we think, how we think about it, when we think it, and why we are thinking of it. In an ever-changing world where circumstances vary dynamically from moment to moment, a thought-generating process that can adapt and respond equally fast is a decided advantage.

This type of mental flexibility incorporates the rapid analysis of circumstances, assessing of multiple channels of information, determining alternative solutions, eliminating those that do not work, recognizing errors, etc. More than anything, cognitive flexibility requires the “ability to resist the impulse to persevere and keep thinking in a previously active but no longer appropriate way.” Most times this requires the ability to assess the larger context in which such actions are pertinent.  Hundreds of years of neuroscience research have shown that our frontal lobes are the cortical regions critically necessary for this amazing flexibility.

What brought clarity to the role frontal lobes play in higher cognitive functions was the famous case of Phineas Gage. On September 13, 1848, the 25-year-old Gage was preparing a railroad bed using an iron tamping rod to pack explosive powder into a hole. He hit the powder to pack it in but the powder detonated, sending the long rod hurtling upward. The rod peneestrated Gage’s left cheek, tore through his brain, and exited his skull. Amazingly, Gage not only survived the horrific accident but could speak. He walked to a nearby cart, following the disaster so they could take him to a doctor. The injury destroyed an extensive part of Gage’s left frontal lobe. Or what we now consider the central executive region. In doing so, the injury changed Gage’s personality completely.

The chief functions performed by the frontal lobe include intellectual skills responsible for the planning, initiation, sequencing, monitoring, and overall cognitive control of complex goal-directed behavior. Friends of Gage did not recognize him following the accident, for he could no longer perform these skills. Professor of neuroscience Patricia Goldman-Rakic (1937-2003) advocated for the role of a special part of the frontal lobes called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the building blocks necessary for abstract understanding. Abstraction is the unique human ability to uncouple thinking from environmental stimuli – the basis for symbolic deliberation. She showed that impairments in a subdivision of the PFC, the dorsolateral part or DLPFC, contributes to thought disorders, such as those observed in schizophrenia. 

Goldman-Rakic’s work, along with others, further showed that the frontal lobes are an important site for inhibitory control. It appears that executive control operates, at one level, in a top-down manner, with the PFC having a leading, controlling role over many lower-level structures. This control over other brain regions is exercised through response inhibition which involves circuits that use chemicals such as gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA), an inhibitory neurotransmitter.

Another remarkable discovery by Goldman-Rakic and others was that the brain matures in an organized way, starting in the back and moving to the front. And these maturational changes do not stop with puberty. It means that the frontal lobes, home to key executive functions like planning, working memory, and impulse control, are among the last areas to mature in the brain. Full maturity of these circuits extends well into the late 20s or 30s.  Thus, for the first two to three decades of development, the human mind is in a state of reduced efficiency. During this time, cognitive control is susceptible to impulsiveness (or lack of inhibition) and reduced flexibility. The personality has a high likelihood of developing antisocial tendencies, delinquency, spoiled mind syndrome and other early criminal conduct. What all this suggests is the undeniable importance of flexibility in thinking, as orchestrated by frontal lobe circuits, and how critical it is for our survival.

The Deafening Silence

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In this moment of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have, for the most part, voluntarily detached from the sources of our connection to life. These relationships provide the glue that makes us social beings and involve family, friends, and those in the larger community. Circumstances have mandated social isolation for a few weeks. But if such a period is prolonged, the downsides begin to appear.  Three months into the pandemic, the deafening silence of social isolation is creating a rising tide of loneliness. Like a slow-motion wave, it is gaining speed and momentum.

Loneliness, according to many psychologists, is not necessarily about being alone. Rather, it is about feeling alone and isolated. Because loneliness is a state of mind, it has straightforward solutions. The question is when and where to apply them. The easiest way to decrease and even end loneliness is to focus on activities that distract. They distract us from the missing social bonds that we ache to experience. Such distractions are effective temporary measures. Inevitably, their therapeutic effect wears off and the loneliness returns. But this gives a glimpse into what can be a more permanent solution. That is, loneliness depends on memories to feed the feeling. We recall the friends and family we miss, the conversations we had that are now nonexistent. And we pine for what those memories conjure up.

The more enduring solution, therefore, is similar to the temporary one but involves returning to a more permanent state of mind. A state where memories are no longer the salient thing. This argument does not suggest eliminating memories; It suggests eliminating their saliency and importance. Notice too that the implication is that this is a more natural state of being. How is this possible? The best way is to make focusing on the present moment a way of life. Practicing this leads to making current experiences more salient compared to past events.

I know this because this practice has an extensive history in the psychological and metaphysical literatures. And we can gauge the practice’s efficacy and effectiveness by studying such literature. For me, the experience is also personal. Reducing the saliency of memories, reduces the loneliness created by longing for the past.  To make this a reality, we must persist in the practice. Like other changes in behavior, we need to train the mind until it becomes an automatic response.

What happens when the practice is successful? Most of the time, dwelling on the present means a rising curiosity regarding the world, nature, our bodies. It further means a lessening interest in our inner and deprecating self-talk. This outward curiosity of a child recalls a more natural state that we once experienced. It is a state of mind that wants to know the ‘why’- ness of things. We become absorbed and interested in the smallest and most irrelevant of things. It produces a rise in creative thinking for we recognize that nothing is irrelevant; Everything seems fitting and beautiful. The deafening silence of loneliness becomes the resonant joy of life. It does not mean that loneliness won’t occur and take you by surprise. Instead of dwelling on it, however, the curious, present-focused mind knows what to do and can nip the rising feeling in the bud.

Image by soumen82hazra from Pixabay

In Defense of Science: A Middle Way

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Science is under increasing assault by President Trump and his administration. In his most recent decisions to take the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic for covid-19 and not to wear a mask in enclosed spaces, the President is refuting his own CDC recommendations. This is a pattern of anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-intellectualism that has characterized this administration from the start. It is a reckless and dangerous stance, and something every scientist and health provider should oppose.


I trained as a scientist. And got a first-hand appreciation for the potential of this discipline to cut through the thicket of opinions, assumptions, hopes, and magical thinking to bring us closer to the truth.  I am convinced that science and the scientific method are humanity’s most sophisticated and impactful responses to the world of uncertainty in which we live. Science serves as an efficient way to resolve many of the questions our minds generate.

It works by verifying informed guesses against evidence and using the results as feedback to improve the guesswork. This scientific method involves systematic observation, experimentation, inductive and deductive reasoning, hypothesis testing, theory construction, reductionist and integrative approaches. These are all intellectual achievements of the highest order. They are the jewels of the human intellect, the right and indispensable tools to penetrate the thicket of the unknown.

Using such means, scientists have cured devastating diseases. Their investigations have increased human longevity. They have advanced farming to feed a growing race. And they have raised the standard of living for practically everyone in the planet. These are a few of the many triumphs brought about by science and its methodical approach. Such successes have provided it with an imprimatur of integrity and established an implied understanding that this is a trustworthy discipline.

If asked, most thoughtful people would agree that science, as a process for approaching truth, should be required teaching to our children. It is worth giving it the consideration it has earned. And it deserves defending as critical for the health and well-being of the world at large.

As a neuroscientist, I also realize there are diverse forms of obtaining knowledge, including faith-based methods, intuition, and other ways that complement the objective, scientific approach. Scientists must be modest enough to recognize the limits of the intellectual approach.  For one, science cannot deal with ultimate questions; It does not make moral or aesthetic judgments; It is not self-directed since it doesn’t tell us how to best use scientific knowledge; And it doesn’t draw inferences concerning paranormal explanations. When scientists dismiss these domains, and even worse belittle them, they place science at variance with other ways of acquiring knowledge.

Interestingly, our brains use these contrasting styles of thinking, of intelligence, and original ways of knowing. Linear and nonlinear, intellectual and intuitive approaches integrate seamlessly in our mind according to the needs and demands confronted. It’s a lesson that should instruct us when assessing whether to accept science over faith-based evidence or vice versa.  President Trump and his allies promote the use of faith-based, magical thinking, and intuition as the primary basis for decision making. They oppose science and intellectual thinking and by doing so create a conflict that isn’t real. The key is to know when, where and under what circumstances to apply such contrasting modes of thinking. That is the sign of a wiser mind.

The Mind’s “Thin Blue Line”

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“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

William James

The thinnest of mental boundaries separates the darkest from the brightest thoughts. Our mind, it appears, can travel enormous moral distances in the blink of an eye within its imaginary space. From imagining murder or suicide to planning a wedding or feeding the baby. It’s a dizzying crisscrossing of thoughts that can occur nearly instantaneously without any impediment or remorse. Only when contemplating action or the outcome of these imaginary ideas do we encounter a moral universe. Within this thought-action universe where right and wrong exists, there is a metaphorical “thin blue line” separating order from disorder. It’s a mental safeguard that keeps us safe and sane in a dangerous and insane world.

One sign of sanity in crazy times is when the world becomes too wonderful to ignore. When the gauzy filter of bad, depressing, and sad news lifts and we see spread before us the bare awareness of what life really is. In those moments, life appears beautiful. What we need to realize is that life, through the filter of our mind, creates innumerable experiences we can tune into. But we have a choice of which experiences to attend.  We can, for example, overdose on CNN or FOX news. This creates a sense of doom and gloom given the constant barrage of current disasters taking place in the world or the political shenanigans of our leaders. Or we can change the sensory channel and walk outside to observe the variety of flowers, the blue radiant sky, and our smiling neighbors. We can indulge our appetite for porn to exhaustion, or pick up a Bible, the Tao Te Ching, and Bhagavad Gita and marvel at human wisdom. We can feel sorry for ourselves and fuel our anxiety and depression or reach out our hand to help those in greater need. These choices need not be black or white, there are shades. The amazing thing is that we have choices and each one produces a different mental experience.

Choice becomes harder to exercise when pleasure, pain, or other emotions overwhelm the rational self. We can even reach a point of no apparent alternative and no escape. In such a place, we feel closed off to other avenues and the only path seems to be to end our life. But even then, we have a choice. The choice is to let go of our sense of control and let something else, something greater than ourselves, take over. This is the ultimate choice, the thin blue line of the mind, and its greatest safeguard.

While the pressures of life can exacerbate our difficulties, the root of the problem is our anxious, fear-based, and uncontrollable mind, one centered on ego-based rumination.

When the mind dwells on problems through the viewpoint of past and future, it can get snagged in that mode. It then behaves as what the Buddha called the “monkey mind.” This mind causes confusion and helplessness when unmanaged. The solution, however, is not to get rid of it but to place its operation in the proper context. For the monkey mind is also the creative mind. Training and guiding the monkey mind back to a more natural and original state ignites creativity, allowing us to deal with the challenges of living in-the-moment. But this return to an original mind does not mean you gain something new, rather you lose something old. You lose the obsession with past and future. And when you lose this obsession, you experience flowing, problem-solving, present-moment creative living. And this realization, the crossing of this boundary, is the best indicator that whatever or whoever created us did so lovingly. For it wanted us to choose life over death. While many discover this thin blue line by accident or in desperation, it is always available, at any moment we choose.

An Unencumbered Original Mind

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LdV was illegitimate, gay, left-handed, a bit of a heretic, and a misfit. Fortunately, he lived in Florence, Italy, which in the late 1400s was a very tolerant and wealthy city.  As a boy, he had no formal education but received instruction at home in reading, writing, Latin, geometry and mathematics, although spending most of his childhood outdoors. Because of his lack of formal schooling, many of his contemporaries overlooked or ignored his scientific contributions. From childhood everyone recognized his astounding powers of observation; his unusual talent for making connections between unique areas of interest; a skeptical mind with a readiness to challenge dogma and contemporary beliefs; and a preternal ability to imagine the future. Today, we know him as the epitome of the creative Renaissance man. We consider him a painter and artist, an engineer, architect, scientist, inventor, cartographer, anatomist, botanist and writer. His active imagination conceptualized the tank, the helicopter, the flying machine, the parachute, and the self-powered vehicle. He was a “man ahead of his time” and many of his visionary inventions became real only centuries later.

Walter Isaacson, author of “Leonardo da Vinci,” describes the following about his unique subject: “Leonardo spent many pages in his notebook dissecting the human face to figure out every muscle and nerve that touched the lips. On one of those pages you see a faint sketch at the top of the beginning of the smile of the Mona Lisa. Leonardo kept that painting from 1503, when he started it, to his deathbed in 1519, trying to get every aspect exactly right in layer after layer. During that period, he dissected the human eye on cadavers and was able to understand that the center of the retina sees detail, but the edges see shadows and shapes better. If you look directly at the Mona Lisa smile, the corners of the lips turn downward slightly, but shadows and light make it seem like it’s turning upwards. As you move your eyes across her face, the smile flickers on and off.”

Much of this reality is mixed with mythology. For in life, Leonardo da Vinci created an endless succession of untested contraptions, unpublished studies and unfinished artworks. His uncontested genius rests on several foundations. Foremost, everything interested him. Curiosity was his defining trait. As an engineer, he foresaw more than most about how the design of machines informed by the mathematical laws of physics are better than those relying on practice.  He was the first to design separate interchangeable components deployed in a variety of devices. And no-one drew machines with more attention to detail and reality. His insatiable curiosity about nature drove his efforts to devise flying machines. He didn’t seek to imitate flying birds, but to apply the principles of bird flight to endow man with the ability to fly on his own. His genius lay in his mastery of engineering principles, design, and natural law.

From iconic paintings, such as the “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper,” designs for flying machines, and ground-breaking studies on optics and perspective, Leonardo da Vinci fused science and art. He created works that have become part of our human story. He is the ultimate expression of an unencumbered, original mind.

Devil, Playful Monkey, Creative Genius

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That the brain is the origin of the mind is a concept permeating even the most secluded parts of the earth. In this second decade of the 21st century, most educated people agree that the origin of the mind, of who they are, and of their sense of self and personality is the brain, as opposed to any separate structure in the body. This level of scientific judgment is inconsistent with ancient Egyptian and Greek notions about the heart or liver being the house of reflection and soul.  Most individuals would likewise concede that human actions have a wide assortment of expression, from optimistic, gloomy, caring to envious. We identify mind with the devil, with the intermittent and restless behavior of the anxious monkey mind, and with the piercing insight of creative geniuses.

As a neuroscientist, I start with the assumption that the brain plays a sizable role in producing the mind. I likewise appreciate that our experiences change the intellect, by when and where we have such encounters, and with whom we share them. The brain as the origin of the mind does not mean there is unanimity in seeing mind as more than the brain. In cognitive science there is the beginning of an appreciation of this asymmetry. We see the mind as extending into and comprising the interactions we have with objects and people around us. This extended mind, or what we call distributed cognition, is an acknowledgement of mind being more than the individual brain. Carl Jung (1875-1961), a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was the founder of the Analytical Psychology movement. He conceived of the intellect, and the unconscious, as products of both personal and collective experiences (what he called the “collective unconscious”).  He conceptualized the collective unconscious as the aggregation of human knowledge accessible to us because of our ancestral experience and something passed on in our genes. On another edge of the continuum is the Buddhist notion of “not-self,” which claims that what we conceive of as self, and as our identity, is an invented narrative. As a neuroscientist, it’s imperative for me to integrate these contrasting perspectives.

The phenomenon of non-identity may determine the efficiency by which most of us can detach our action from our personality. It is the reason we can justify acting unfriendly toward friend or rival and split those feelings from what we know ourselves to be. I can continue to see myself as a friendly person even as I act antagonistically towards another. What allows the separation in character does not establish this as a dualistic idea, for while the brain expresses the mind, the mind is not just the brain. One metaphor is to conceive of the image on a television or movie screen as the larger mind, while the pixels are individuals with smaller minds and brains. The individual pixels reflect the local changes in light but interdependently with the wider image being shown on the screen.

This larger mind is a concept we need to discern better to understand the narrower individual fluctuations and to carry out wiser human actions.

Walking Is a Miracle

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It was a warm sunny spring day. The type that justifies living in California. I was meandering and enjoying a hiking trail around our housing complex when I lost my footing and fell. The injury was sufficient so I cannot partake in this exercise, at least for a while. The sudden pause gave me a chance to reconsider an activity I enjoy while sheltering in place during the covid-19 pandemic. In doing so, it made me appreciate walking more than ever.

Our hominid ancestors, Homo erectus, began ambulating upright over two million years ago. But it is only in the last few decades that researchers have gained insights into how we do it. The action is a complex mechanical engineering accomplishment. Complicated and mysterious enough that some have characterized it as a daily miracle we should not take for granted.

The term walking originates in the Old English word wealcan meaning “to roll.” A 2013 article in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Lipfert and colleagues outlines the unique interaction between ankle, knee, muscles and tendons that summarizes how we go about this roll. Wikipedia describes walking from a physics perspective as the kinetic energy of forward motion being traded dynamically for a rise in potential energy. At another level of definition, the movement results from the body “vaulting” (or rolling) over the leg on the ground. One leg moves forward in a way that maximizes motion while using minimal amounts of energy. This raises the center of mass to its highest point as the leg passes the vertical and dropping it to the lowest as the limbs spread apart.

The 2D inverted pendulum model of walking provides an even more explicit description. During forward motion, the leg that leaves the ground swings forward from the hip. This sweep is the first pendulum. Then the leg strikes the ground with the heel and rolls through to the toe in a motion described as an inverted pendulum. The motion of the two legs synchronize so that one foot is always in contact with the ground.

There are two stages necessary for starting this wealcan, the powerful “push-off” phase. The first stage is an “alleviation” in which the action relieves the trailing leg of the burden of supporting the body mass. Then in a “launching” stage, the knee buckles, allowing the rapid release of stored elastic energy in the ankle tendons, like the triggering of a catapult. The catapult energy from the ankle is used to swing the leg, not add sizeable amounts of energy to the forward motion. This makes it energy-efficient and agile, making the human action different from how robots walk. As the hip rotates 40 degrees in the sagittal plane during a normal stride it becomes a smooth, beautiful movement.

Is walking a simple act?  No. It is a complicated mechanical engineering organization of movements and forces that only recently has shed its mysteries. It is a daily miracle. We perform it so easily and overlook it from among the other physiological miracles, like seeing and hearing. The covid-19 pandemic has been a brutal war on humanity but also an opportunity to pause and recognize the many things we take for granted.

An Enhanced Sensory Experience

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The world of my senses did not vanish, nor choirs of angels appear following what I characterize as my realization. There were, nonetheless, interesting new experiences. One was seeing things for what seemed like the first time. My childhood sense of curiosity re-appeared. It gave me an appreciation of the wonder of the world in the smallest things. The dew on the grass in the morning and how it reflected light. It drew me to the intricate details of the leaves and colors of flowers and the light on objects. I awakened from a black and white dream into a world of technicolor. An enhanced attentiveness and focused curiosity accompanied this hypersensitivity. But it was not a negative, schizophrenic-like experience, in which my brain could not filter out irrelevant things and thus felt overwhelmed. Instead, there was a calmness and a joy to it, a genuine delight in the experience.

I remember going outside one afternoon and looking up at the white wispy clouds in the sky. They appeared arranged by a master artist as buds around a bright sun.  I saw the red, pink, and yellow streaks of light from that sun as streaks of color from this artist’s palette painting the sky in translucent pastels. I then looked down and saw the reddish-brown leaves from the western sycamore outside our home and saw the carpet of leaves on the sidewalk. Looking at one leaf, the intricacy of the veins struck me as a well-planned highway transporting chlorophyll, the miracle protein that converts sunlight into oxygen. What struck me with even more force was the sense that all this was for my benefit.  More interesting than this hypersensitivity to sensory experiences was a natural increase in social behavior that connected me more with life. Having been an introvert most of my life, I found a remarkable unfoldment in empathy and concern for the feelings of others. These changes in perspective and my increased awareness of them is, I am certain, the difference between truly living and being lost in the fog of self-centeredness.