The above is a pretty interesting video detailing a process in which scientists poured wet concrete into an giant anthill. They waited a bit and then removed all the dirt surrounding the now solidified concrete and were able to get a good view into the structure and architecture of this gigantic ant metropolis. What was impressive was that the design and construction of this ant city — carried out by numerous worker ants — seemed as if it had been designed by a single architect, a mind that had some kind of oversight of the larger project.
This is, of course, impossible, because as we all know, ants are stupid. The other day, I saw an ant and I said, “Hey, ant, can you tell me the chemical structure of chlorophyll?” He didn’t even answer; he just wandered off. Then I saw another ant and I said, “Hey ant — what movie starring comic songsmith Weird Al Yankovic also featured Michael Richards (Seinfeld’s “Kramer”) among its cast?” The ant just kept climbing up a tree. I was like, “Don’t ignore me! Get back here you cocksucker! The answer is ‘UHF’!”
So we’re left with a conundrum. How can a population of feebleminded creatures design a habitat of such complexity that it is clearly beyond their individual intelligences? Do the ants have some kind of bizarre and complex communication system by which the bits of information possessed by individual ants can somehow be combined into a group ant intelligence?
Can these questions offer insights into our own human intelligence? If an individual human designs a complex building or structure, it’s not considered all that unusual. But in that case, who is doing the designing? A single human entity, or the brain, a collection of billions of neurons grouped together in networks which perform specific calculations which are then passed on to other parts of the brain? Is our brain really nothing more than a swarming collection of ants, writhing in the dirt, crawling through filth, antennas ever quivering?
Or, dig this: are we — individual humans — nodes in a vast cosmic intelligence, a super advanced ant colony? Are we merely parts of a machine whose complexity is so vast and overwhelming that we can’t begin to comprehend it?
I’ve been continuing my reading of the book “Mapping the Mind” (which really is a good overview of all things brain) and have been going through the section on memory. It’s a fascinating topic if only because, well, er… hmmm… I forgot.
But seriously folks – science has some general understanding of the brain as a vast network of interconnected nodes (nodes being at their most base level, neuron cells.) Memories seem to be either momentary or permanent “strengthenings” between these nodes. You play fetch with your dog today and, for a while, the nodes linking dogs and balls and parks are strengthened. But eventually, unless you constantly recall the event, they wither. Episodes of extreme emotional impact, particularly distress – say, being raped by your dog – form very strong connections between these nodes.
One interesting thing is that memories seem to move around in the brain. The past two or three years of your life are stored on a section of brain called the hippocampus. As a result, if your hippocampus gets damaged or destroyed, you lose those years of memories (along with other faculties) while other previous memories remain.
Dreams play an interesting role in memory. It’s supposed that during dreaming you replay recent events, thereby strengthening the neural connections between parts of these events. At first this idea struck me as odd. My dreams are not mere recreations of my day, they are often bizarre fantastic stories. However, we do often see the inspiration for elements of our dreams in recent events. For instance, I read a magazine about lizards and have a dream about riding a giant lizard that night. I read a book on human perception and have a dream about expanding my vision that night. My dad recently had someone talk about sending him a homeopathic medicine and had a very real dream later that day about a “miracle cure.” It may be these are not mere coincidences, but the means our brains use to “wire” in these memories.
As a child, I developed an interest in ghost stories. I was frightened and intrigued by tales of people who saw dead relatives appearing before them. Of course, as I’ve grown up, I’ve become a man of science. A man of cold hard logic, logic which destroys any element of the incredible or fantastic that can be found in the human imagination, leaving me with a forlorn and joyless life experience.
Recently, I’ve been reading another general neuroscience tome, this one called “Mapping the Mind,” and it has an interesting look at what scientists know about hallucinations. This knowledge goes a long way towards explaining what people throughout history have referred to as ghosts. Consider the following cases…
Psychiatrist Morton Schatzman reported the case of a woman called Ruth who was haunted by her abusive father. She would wake in bed and find him leering over her, or walk into her living room and find him ensconced in her favorite chair. Sometimes she would lean over to pick up her baby and find her father’s face superimposed on the child’s. The man was still alive when this happened, but the experience was otherwise very similar to the classic tales told by people who see ghosts, right down to the accompanying feeling of a presence.
…
Ruth was subsequently found to be able to create such intense images that they completely blocked out the real world. In one experiment she was linked to a machine that measured the electrical activity created in her brain by certain stimuli. When she was placed in front of the light her brain first reacted in the expected way. But when she imagined a person sitting between her and the light her brain no longer responded to the light waves coming from the bulb. The figure she’d conjured up actually blocked her vision of the world. This image differed from the hauntings in one way only: she knew she had produced it herself. Once she recognized that her father’s unwelcome visitations were similarly self generated, they ceased to be a factor and eventually disappeared.
Other than the odd insinuation that there’s something inappropriate about a father leering at the body of his sleeping daughter, this anecdote seems quite insightful.
Another…
Ms B, a retired schoolteacher whose case is reported by a doctor in Bristol, first saw her ‘other self’ when she returned home after her husband’s funeral. She opened the door to her bedroom and was confronted by a shadowy shape of a woman facing her. Ms B reached out with her right hand to switch on the light, and the figure did the same with her left hand, so their hands touched on the light switch. ‘My hand immediately felt icy cold, and where it touched me I felt as though all the blood drained out of me,’ she told the doctor.
…
Ms B. was subsequently visited almost daily by her double. She found that she did not just see the figure — she felt it as well. Just as normal people are aware of two legs, two arms and so on, she was aware of four.
I’ve read about this doppelgänger effect before. The theory is that your brain has a kind of body map which keep track of where you are in space, and this map gets “corrupted” so that a shadow version of yourself is sensed.
The book offers some thought as to what causes these kinds of hallucinations.
Phantom sights and sounds are particularly likely to occur when people are deprived of normal outside sensory stimuli. People who lose all or part of their sight or hearing often find that they experience hallucinations for this reason. It also explains why ghosts are more commonly seen at night. In the absence of competing visual stimuli the brain picks up the shadow in the corner and molds it into a sinister figure clothed with whatever visual associations — monk’s habit, funeral gown — leap up from the memory storage areas.
Why does this happen? The brain evolved to keep constant watch on the outside world, sensing, sorting and shaping every stimulus in order to insure that no danger creeps up unannounced, or opportunity pass by unnoticed. It needs to keep active so if the usual stream of clambering external stimuli is turned off, it searches desperately for something to take its place. The slightest sound, sight or sensation is seized upon, amplified and shaped to make something meaningful, and if absolutely nothing comes in from the outside, the brain will generate its own excitement. Hallucinations, like dreams, are part of a continuous cabaret that keeps us primed and ready for action.
So you see, you needn’t fear that sinister apparition appearing in the corner of your eye — the ghostly man holding the razor-sharp butcher’s knife. Even as he comes closer, you know he is merely a mentally created façade.
NO, WAIT! I WAS WRONG, THAT’S A GENUINE SERIAL KILLER. GET OUT OF THE HOUSE! GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!
In the Steven Pinker book, “How the Mind Works,” he describes the following thought experiment (not his own): presume it is possible, in a person’s brain, to replace a single neuron with some kind of technological equivalent — a special wire that passes signals exactly the way a neuron would. Now replace not a single neuron, but 10 of them, then 100, then 1 billion, until you have replaced every neuron in a person’s brain with this replacement wire. At what point, if ever, does that person stop being “them”?
I’m reminded of that thought experiment while reading this review for a new book called “Connectome.” The book takes a skeptical but not dismissive look at one of the goals of the trans-humanism movement: to effectively and totally map the complex behaviors and connections of an individual brain’s neurons so that people could “upload” themselves to a computer.
The review breaks it down…
The central question for Seung—and the one that also keeps the transhumanists on tenterhooks—is whether you are your connectome. If you could deduce every connection point of every brain cell, the strength with which each neuron fires, and the way these firing patterns change as the cells interact with each other, would, in fact, you be left with a copy of you?
I’m dubious about this for two reasons. One, even if it were possible to totally map out an individual’s brain, you’re effectively only creating a clone of that person. I might be able to create a clone of myself, a technological marvel that could continue my philosophical and musical endeavors, as well as adding to my vast repertoire of sexual pleasuring techniques, but that would not be me. The real me, a biological entity, will eventually wither and die. Unless someone can explain how the consciousness in my body could somehow be passed to this clone, I fail to see how we could live forever. (And this isn’t even getting into the fact that we have a very vague, ethereal understanding of what consciousness is.)
Secondly, I’m largely of the opinion that our experience as individuals is not simply a matter of what’s in our brains, but in how our brain interacts with our body e.g. the sensations it gets from the body, the feelings generated by hormones coming from non-brain organs in the body etc. This software simile of me would have none of that, and likely very quickly evolve into an entity seeming very different from “myself.”
In one of my recent readings on the subconscious, I came across an interesting point: Certain people, the text argued, have a lot of difficulty relating their feelings to the correct cause. For example, a person’s dog dies and they feel crappy e.g. down in the dumps, stomach tight, aches and pains etc. We (“we” being intelligent readers and authors of this blog – the cream of society really) might say to such a person, “Of course you feel shitty! Your dog just died!” But these people (in extreme cases called alexthymics) have difficulty relating their visceral sensations to their life situation. The don’t “get” that their dog’s death is creating these feelings of sadness.
Seems pretty weird, huh? You’d have to be a class A nut to experience that situation, right? That’s what I was thinking until I experienced it myself, only a few days ago. I was doing a little guitar practice, learning some new songs to back up a singer I (at that time) hadn’t even met. I had a couple days to learn the songs but my schedule was tight and I was a little worried how well I was going to perform in the live situation. I was sitting there, figuring out the tunes, on some level conscious of the upcoming performance, and I actually got the jitters – my body took on a mild tremor. “Jesus!” I thought, “If you’ve already got stage fright now, what’s it going to be like when you actually have to perform.” It was dispiriting. BUt then I realized something. I was hungry. The shakes were at least partly from being hungry, not “stage fright.” I was blaming these physical sensesation on the wrong cause.
As it was, I did the performance a few days later and it ruled. I rule.
I’ve started reading a book I’ve been interested in for a long time: “Without Conscience — The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths among Us.” It’s written by Dr. Robert Hare, generally considered to be the world expert on psychopaths. Sage readers might consider the book a bit exploitative — it revels in some of the grisly details — but that’s part of what makes it fun.
Some might ask, “what is a psychopath?” That’s a complex question (some details here) but we could certainly say they are amoralists — humans unburdened by conscience. If they want something, they take it, whether it be money, sex or another person’s life, and they are untroubled by the damage their actions cause.
I’m finding reading this ties in with much of my recent readings on the neuroscience of emotion. To some degree, the pathways of emotion in the brain (and the body) have been mapped out and are understood. If we see a snake out of the corner of our eye, our amygdala fires off a jolt of fear. If we contemplate the fact that our girlfriend might dump us, we start to feel the dull ache of impending loneliness. The thing to keep in mind here is that these “emotions” are physical sensations — ghostly cousins of actual pain. And these sensations help impose notions of morality on our life. If we do something bad, we feel guilt, which might mean a stomach ache, physical anxiety or whatnot. Since we wish to avoid such physical sensations, we avoid “immoral” actions. “Without Conscience” examines the moral life of the psychopath…
For most of us even the imagined threat of criticism functions to control our behavior. We are haunted to some degree by questions about our self-worth. As a consequence, we continually attempt to prove to ourselves and others that we are okay people, credible, trustworthy, and competent.
In sharp contrast, the psychopath carries out his evaluation of the situation — what he will get out of it and at what cost — without the usual anxieties, doubts, and concerns about being humiliated, causing pain, sabotaging future plans, in short, the infinite possibilities that people of conscience consider when deliberating possible actions.
My interpretation of this is that psychopaths don’t feel the “sting” of emotions (by sting, I mean the physical sensations.) Hare also backs this up.
For most of us, fear and apprehension are associated with a variety of unpleasant bodily sensations, such as sweating of the hands, a “pounding” hard, dry mouth, muscle tenseness or weakness, trembles, and “butterflies” in the stomach…
These bodily sensations do not form part of what psychopaths experience as fear. For them, fear — like most other emotions — is incomplete, shallow, largely cognitive and nature, and without the physiological turmoil or “coloring” that most of us find distinctly unpleasant and wish to avoid or reduce.
The obvious conclusion from all this is that if we wish to experience lives free from such unpleasant bodily sensations we should begin a program of desensitizing our bodies to these emotions by kidnapping, torturing and murdering teenage prostitutes.
The LA Times has an interesting article on recent experiments using hallucinogenic drugs to treat various ailments.
Janeen Delany describes herself as an “old hippie” who’s smoked plenty of marijuana. But she never really dabbled in hallucinogens — until two years ago, at the age of 59.
A diagnosis of incurable leukemia had knocked the optimism out of the retired plant nurserywoman living in Phoenix. So she signed up for a clinical trial to test whether psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — could help with depression or anxiety following a grim diagnosis.
… With two researchers at her side, she embarked on a six-hour journey into altered consciousness that she calls “the single most life-changing experience I’ve ever had.”
Let me state the obvious: only the lamest of hippies would not dabble in hallucinogens until the age of 59.
The article continues…
Delany said her “trip” awakened a deep and reassuring sense of “knowing.” She came to see the universe and everything in it as interconnected. As the music in her headphones reached a crescendo, she held her breath and realized it would OK — no, really easy — not to breathe anymore. She sensed there was nothing more she needed to know and therefore nothing she needed to fear about dying.
And that, paradoxically, has allowed her to live.
This notion that hallucinogenic drugs stimulate the experience of an interconnected universe caught my eye, because it’s very similar to the experience neuroscientist and author Jill Bolte Taylor had upon having a left brain stroke. (Details here.) This opens up an interesting question: does LSD operate on the brain in the same way as a stroke? Does it release certain neural networks from the inhibition put upon them by other neural networks? (In Taylor’s case, her more free-flowing nonsequential right hemisphere was released from the inhibitions of the left hemisphere.) Someone should investigate this fascinating question, if they haven’t already.
I’ve talked extensively about — and probably bored many people in the process — of my readings on the topic of the mind-body connections to pain. Of particular interest is been the work of Dr. John Sarno. His books, and others in the same vein, indicate that tens of thousands of people (at least) have found significant pain reduction using efforts to calm the mind. These efforts include meditation, journaling, and psychoanalysis.
It’s compelling reading, but of course I’m always thinking, “If this is so great, why don’t I hear more about it?” That may be changing — today’s Wall Street Journal has an op-ed on the topic of treating pain from a mind-body perspective.
How you think about pain can have a major impact on how it feels.
That’s the intriguing conclusion neuroscientists are reaching as scanning technologies let them see how the brain processes pain.
That’s also the principle behind many mind-body approaches to chronic pain that are proving surprisingly effective in clinical trials.
Some are as old as meditation, hypnosis and tai chi, while others are far more high tech. In studies at Stanford University’s Neuroscience and Pain Lab, subjects can watch their own brains react to pain in real-time and learn to control their response—much like building up a muscle. When subjects focused on something distracting instead of the pain, they had more activity in the higher-thinking parts of their brains. When they “re-evaluated” their pain emotionally—”Yes, my back hurts, but I won’t let that stop me”—they had more activity in the deep brain structures that process emotion. Either way, they were able to ease their own pain significantly, according to a study in the journal Anesthesiology last month.
I would say this pain reevaluation technique described above has been my most successful tool in fighting my hand and forearm pain.
The millions of frequent readers of this blog are doubtless familiar with a theory I’ve been intermittently ruminating on: the idea that swearing offers some kind of cathartic release for a subconscious part of the brain/mind. In essence, when you swear in anger, you’re giving voice to some part of yourself that is not often allowed to speak. This part may be what Freud would refer to as the id.
Part of what got me thinking about this was people with Tourette’s syndrome — they seem to have this uncontrollable need to swear. I’m also reminded of several cases of people who were in horrible accidents and lost much of their frontal cortex. These people could not use language, but they could swear. The famous Phineas Gage who lost some of his prefrontal cortex in an accident and went from being a responsible prude to a degenerate brute famous for swearing (a real-life Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation) might also offer anecdotal evidence. And frankly, just my own experience with the catharsis of swearing makes me think it’s offering some release of tensions held deep within the mind.
It turns out that there’s actually been a lot of academic investigation in this topic, much of it nicely summarized in this Time magazine article. First the article discusses a study investigating how cursing alleviates pain.
To figure out why, psychologists at Britain’s Keele University recruited 64 college students and asked them to stick their hands in a bucket of ice water and endure the pain for several minutes. One group was allowed to repeat a curse word of their choice continuously while their hands were in the water; another group was asked to repeat a non-expletive control word, such as that which might be used to describe a table. The result was that swearing not only allowed students to withstand the discomfort longer, but also reduced their perception of pain intensity. Curse words, the study found, help you cope.
The article then takes comments from famed psychologist/scientist Steven Pinker, who offers a theory remarkably similar to my own.
That’s probably because humans are hardwired to swear cathartically, says Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and author of The Stuff of Thought, an exploration of the psychology of language. Pinker distinguishes cathartic cursing from using profanity descriptively, idiomatically, abusively or for emphasis, and points to similar behavior in animals that suggests its evolutionary roots. If you step on a dog or cat’s tail, it will let out a sharp yelp of pain, for example. “Swearing probably comes from a very primitive reflex that evolved in animals,” Pinker says. “In humans, our vocal tract has been hijacked by our language skills,” so instead of barking out a random sound, “we articulate our yelp with a word colored with negative emotion.”
The part of the brain that accounts for the urge to swear — or yelp, in the case of animals — is deep within, suggesting its primitiveness. Studies of non-human primates show that vocalization is nearly always attributed to subcortical processes in the brain, in those regions that control primal, raw emotions, says Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, a professor of speech language pathology and audiology at New York University. In humans too, the urge to swear likely stems from primitive parts, but it is usually overridden by commands from the brain’s more complex cortex — the abundant gray matter on which humans rely for language and reason, among other sophisticated abilities. “We have intact frontal lobes, which inhibit these responses,” Sidtis explains. But in certain circumstances — either because we don’t bother to inhibit them or because the shock of pain or discomfort momentarily surpasses the safeguards — our impulse for obscenity takes over. “In that way, it’s like the dog when you step on his tail,” Sidtis says.
Or, in the case of Phineas Gage and others who suffered cortex destroying accidents, the inhibition of cursing is no longer possible, because the brain parts that do the inhibiting are now splattered outside the brain. And in the case of people with Tourette’s, perhaps the ability of the cortex to inhibit the behavior of their primitive brain is somehow itself inhibited.
Can swearing offer catharsis and help relieve pain? Fuck yeah! I said, fuck yeah you stupid shit eating cunt hole!
(Sorry, I’m just doing this for my health. I feel better already.)
In my various adventures in reading about the brain and mind, I’ve come across a few mentions of Eckhart Tolle. He’s a spiritual guru who claims to have achieved a kind of inner peace overnight. He’s described the experience as follows…
I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void. I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness,” just observing and watching.[11]
Essentially, he argues that his ego was destroyed. The boundaries of time and space that separated him from the world were broken.
I can’t help but notice that this sounds a lot like the experience neuroscientist and author Jill Bolte Taylor had when she had a left brain stroke which she reported about in her book “My Stroke of Insight.”
I wonder if Tolle had a similar, but less damaging brain trauma that simply wiped out the sections of his brain that construct the human ego?
I’m sure you’re wondering the same thing. You’re smart, like me.