Category: Brain

Beyond Metaphors

Posted on by japineda

In my attempt to understand the mind beyond metaphors, I began exploring other alternatives in addition to science. One path led me into meditation and the spiritual realm. At some point in the 20 years of this exploration, the boundary between science and spirituality gave way. What became obvious at that point was that the thing I was searching for and trying to understand (mind, consciousness, God, Buddha-nature, enlightenment) was in fact the world I inhabited. I recognized my true nature in the life around me. And this new world stared at me as it had always been staring me in the face. This realization, as anyone who experiences it will tell you, is both funny (Is this a joke?) and infinitely “enlightening.”  Funny because it seems so obvious in retrospect. Infinitely enlightening because it is but the beginning of our real journey of discovery.

The most immediate change I experienced was a lessening in my need to achieve in terms of my career and professional goals. The self-evident purpose of my life wasn’t to achieve anything per se but to enjoy my beingness. Having studied to be a scientist, I had convinced myself that achievement drove my work. Accolades, grants, publications, and other aspects of research appeared to define the importance of who and what I was. Now, that discernment was reversed. I saw scientific knowledge for the sake of knowledge and as having its own unique beauty without the need to make anything out of it. Everything else became secondary.

Along with this experience, I sensed a developing confidence.  I knew this realization was not a temporary state or another creation of the mind that would be soon forgotten. It was a real awakening to and appreciation of life. I developed a sensitivity to the “sacredness” of all things.   Sacredness in the sense of appreciating the beauty and uniqueness of everything, while appreciating their role in the larger unity of which I was part. Since that recognition, quiet moments and meditation have become my engagement and appreciation of this new sensibility. These changes in perspective and awareness do not mean I am no longer interested in doing my job, attend baseball games, make friends, or make love. Rather, it’s the motivation for doing these things that’s changed. The doing to achieve a goal is no longer important, just the doing is enough. Thus, an intrinsic joy in being human and doing normal things came to the forefront and was very satisfying. The experience reflected a natural flow, without the anxiety I had felt previously.

I also sense a paradox in all of this. The desire to know the unknown motivated my paths in both science and spirituality. But the closer I got to understanding the true nature of being, the self-centered motivation to know and to do faded and disappeared. Replaced instead by an intense desire to let whatever exists unfold without interference. Further, I learned to be content without having to do anything to garner such contentment. Since childhood, I have had an inner drive giving me the energy to excel and outdo others. It has motivated my desire to learn and explore science, but also facilitated my dissatisfaction, anxieties, discontent and fears. In my old skin, I felt guilty at not being productive. Following my realization, that driving energy still exists, but the sense of movement or needing to move and to do does not. I am calm, yet still motivated to learn and explore, but do not experience the anxieties and fears that accompanied my earlier life. I am not guilty resting. Instead, I am energized by rest and relaxation, by not-doing. As I write this I recognize how “normal” this all sounds, which is the whole point. Recognizing who we truly are, both the small swirl in the stream of consciousness and the stream itself, is as normal as normal gets.

Making the Unknown Known

Posted on by japineda

Metaphors make the unknown knowable. They do so by taking an ineffable experience or an unobservable condition and comparing it to something known. Metaphors are bridges between the silence of the inexpressible and the language of the intellect. At least that is the argument made by David Thoreau, the 19th century American essayist, poet, and philosopher, and William Bronk, the 20th century American poet. From their perspective, silence is “the world of potentialities and meanings beyond the actual and expressed.” What makes these potentialities actual and expressed is metaphorical language. The power of this is reflected in the bible verse John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

A metaphor such as “the pandemic of 2020 is a world war” doesn’t capture the entire essence of what it is trying to describe, but it captures an important aspect of it: a world-wide catastrophe causing death and panic. Finding the right, distinguishing label is satisfying. And perhaps why we have a fuller sense of knowing when we label what is unknown. Whether this truly increases our understanding or just the ability to communicate with others, is really not relevant at this point.

From a psychological and neuroscience perspective mind is an unknown. By mind I mean that which arises when sensory, motor, mnemonic, and cognitive inputs and their associated feedback meld into a unified stream. Metaphors are useful tools to understand that. Mind-metaphors reflect dominant scientific ideas that change as we learn more about this unknown and as our tools and sophistication to describe it improve.

As a consequence of this history, one encounters innumerable variations of what were once useful metaphors that have now lost some of their explanatory power. One of the oldest is the mind-as-container metaphor. The mind as a physical entity that contains other entities in space has been a persistent idea. Plato talked about the mind as an aviary. We think of it as containing thoughts.

A variation of this is the mind-as-landscape (William Bronk’s mind landscape, where journeying is de rigueur); mind-as-stream (William James’s stream of consciousness); mind-as-entity (the mind as tangible, localized, and discrete). Another subtler variation of the container idea is mind-as-body. Here mind is what the body is and even more specifically what the brain is. The mind-as-embodiment is a monistic interpretation that is contrary to mind-as-essence. Mind-as-essence is the dualistic interpretation in which mind is an essence separable from the physical reality of the body.

In contemporary thought, mind metaphors are still grounded in old definitions but increasingly seen as multidimensional, dynamic processes. Mind-as-living-being reflects a mind where thoughts and experiences form a ‘sentient web.’ Mind-as-development or as-blank-slate; mind-as-movie projector; mind-as-connectionist network; mind-as-brain (connectionism); mind-as-computer (symbolisms); mind-as-dynamic system (nonrepresentational, low-dimensional).

All these and the inexhaustible supply of mind-metaphors remind me of the classic parable of the blind men describing an animal they have never encountered before (an elephant) just by touching only one part of it. As long as each experiences only a small portion of the elephant, of mind, of whatever the unknown is, the description is likely wrong. As our experience expands, descriptions change and become more complicated. But metaphors can only approach truth, they are incapable of expressing the entire truth. 

Our Predictive Brain

Posted on by japineda

An often-overlooked human skill is our capacity to forecast future outcomes. We are excellent at anticipating an event in a variety of ways. Look-ahead functions or anticipatory mechanisms occur in how we read sentences and interpret speech. They also exist in how we carry out movements, like walking, grasping an object, or riding a bicycle. With reading or listening to a conversation, for example, we anticipate the words that come next. This facilitates the dynamics of a dialogue. Neuroscience studies show that the cerebellum executes some of these predictive operations for both motor and speech actions. This implies that how we control muscles to execute a movement is similar to how we manipulate sounds to construct a sentence.

An important aspect of our predictive brain is its ability to correct errors. Error correction is necessary to optimize and smooth out behavior by minimizing the adverse effects of deviations or unexpected perturbations in the system. It’s part of the flexibility, adaptability, and neuroplasticity that makes our brain unique. However, because we can expand the time window of processing, from the immediate present to extended past and future, it can complicate predictions. The predictive accuracy is inversely related to the timing of the event. During the very brief intervals required for movement or language, we do nicely. Otherwise, we are not very good. Yet we are predisposed to try. The result is stress, fear, depression and the myriad other disorders that arise when our predictions fail.

The solution to these prediction failures is easy to understand but hard to implement. It is to focus on what our brains evolved to do well. That is, to handle present-moment or immediate contingencies. Large portions of brain power are dedicated to this kind of creative, moment-by-moment living. The phone rings and I answer it; the water on the stove starts boiling over and I turn the gas off; I am watching television and getting angry at the story of the immigrant child who died while crossing the river with his dad. Most of this activity falls below our level of awareness. Error processing, on the other hand, triggers conscious processing and interruptions by our rational mind that require a look into the distant past or into the far future. This can cause problems if our ego decides to interfere. It is best, then, to let our predictive brain do the job of the moment and leave awareness to deal with the past and future. In other words, zip up that egoic intellect.

I will talk about the role of nonconscious and conscious processing in terms of  present, past, and future thinking, as well as egoic thinking, in upcoming posts. Keep tuned!