I stumbled across this article which explores the topic of how stories are an ideal way of delivering information. I’m the first to concede that this is hardly breakthrough news. We all understand that if you say “Pets save the lives of their owners 3400 times a year in America,” the point tends to go in one ear and out the other but if you augment that fact with a story about a how a 92-year old woman’s pet rabbit dragged her into the car and drove her to the hospital when she was having a heart attack, it has much more impact.

The article goes into some of the neuroscience behind this, but for me, this just feels true – I respond better to stories than a litany of facts. And the article makes another point that also feels correct – we respond to story text that activates our senses. If you say, “the carpet felt great,” that’s one thing. If you say, “the soft, velvety material of the carpet tickled Susan’s fingers and caused tingles to go up and down her spine,” that’s a whole ‘nuther ball of wax. This is something useful to keep in mind while writing fiction (and all writing is ultimately fiction.)

Here’s a section from the article on this point.

When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.

If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up. If it’s about motion, our motor cortex gets active:

“Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex. […] Then, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements.”

As mentioned before, I’m rereading the now classic tome on neuroscience, “Descartes’ Error.” And I’m reminded of the fundamental theme of the book — that what we refer to as emotions are really subtle and not-so-subtle changes in our physiology, changes that we sense in the same way that we sense pain, pleasure, stomach discomfort and whatnot. In essence, we “feel” emotions the same way we “feel” everything else — through our sensory nerves.

This is at odds with the conventional argument that emotion is… well, something almost indefinable. Something that belies description. Something that is both there and not there. And, that was my view up until reading the book, partly because I’d never really thought about it. (Obviously this conventional view ties in with most religious beliefs which espouse the concept of a soul, or some kind of nonmaterial mental presence in the body.)

After I first read the book, I found myself doing some home experimentation. In particular, I would lie in bed early in the morning, half awake/half-asleep, and just notice how thoughts affected my body state. Why just this morning I had a pertinent experience. I was lying there in that blissful “I don’t want to get up” state, and then was reminded of a Facebook post I’d posted the night earlier, one that I was eager to see responses to. Suddenly, sleep’s hold on me diminished, and I wanted to get up. (Fortunately, I was able to talk myself out of it.) The exact feeling was so subtle that it’s hard to describe, but it was almost a mild sense of tingling, perhaps a tightening of muscles. I’m guessing a mild shot of adrenaline was released into my system (I’ve mentioned in the past my idea that this “tingling” is the sense of nerves being stimulated by hormones or neurotransmitters.)

My point here is that this is emotion. It’s very subtle, often only tickling the surface of consciousness rather than brusquely announcing itself like a overweight woman pounding on the door get your support for her candidacy for the school board.

But the other main point of “Descartes’ Error” is that emotion — these subtle, shifting physiological states — are key in helping us reason and make decisions. More often than we want to admit, we make decisions because “they feel right.” (How our emotional systems come to these conclusions is complex and theoretical, but Jonah Leher’s book “How We Decide” explores the topic.)

But if emotions are so sometimes elusive, we can presume there are many people for whom emotions don’t register and that those people probably make shitty decisions. That’s somewhat disturbing. And, there’s another source of concern. I think people can be wired up to be too emotional, and their own emotional chaos overwhelms their decision-making processes so that they also make shitty decisions. (People who are overly anxious and frightened by the world, for example.) When you consider the possibility of people out there whose emotional system is either providing too little or too much information, well, the world starts to make a lot more sense.

I’m rereading the book that really set me off on the journey of understanding neuroscience: Antonio Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error.” The book has a section that kind of introduces the basic functionality of the brain and reading it today led me to an interesting rumination.

We understand the brain as a series of interconnected wires (neurons.) These neurons can only fire in one direction. Additionally, these neurons can receive input from numerous other neurons, not just one. (I think 5000 inputs is about average.) So, you can envision a very complex wiring system with of all these neurons overlapping each other and sending signals across the circuitry. It’s very easy to presume, as some scientists do, that the ethereal thing called consciousness merely arises as a kind of emergent property from all this complex circuitry.

But something struck me about this today. Let’s consider that point that neurons are unidirectional. This means even if you have a signal that is following a complex path through the brain, going through hundreds of neurons, it had to start somewhere. Where? Well, the obvious answer is our sensory nerves — the nerves in our eyes, skin, tastebuds etc. A photon hits a nerve in my eye, and that fires off a signal which goes to my brain and contributes to my sensation of sight. A salt molecule stimulates a nerve in my tongue which also goes my brain, culminating in taste.

So that would explain our brain’s processing of our sensory experience. But what about our internal life? What about thoughts? They seem to arise out of nowhere. What is the initial event that fires them off?

Now, I’m the first to admit that I don’t know. Maybe nobody knows, or maybe this is well understood in neuroscience and I’m just not aware of it. But I can offer a couple ideas. One is that a lot of thoughts ultimately do arise from some kind of external sensory stimulation. You find yourself thinking about your ex-girlfriend named Rose, but as you trace the origins of that thought, you realize that you just passed a guy who had a nose ring, and Rose had a brother who had a nose ring. So this seemingly random rumination actually had an external source. (There’s a parallel to this in dreams. You’ll have a strange dream where a unicorn starts playing Paganini on a violin, and when you wake up it occurs to you did see an ad for a Paganini record sometime last week. This observation has just been filtering around in your unconscious, waiting to be expressed in a dream.)

Is there anything else that could set off trains of thought? It seems possible that our body processes might lead to the creation of thought. For instance, your stomach starts rumbling, and this reminds you of the last time your stomach rumbled and how you solved the problem by eating cheese and crackers and boy you sure like cheese and which is better? Cheddar or Swiss? My point here being that your stomach rumbles and suddenly you’re on train of thought. And your stomach rumbling has nothing to do with external stimulation*, but internal, visceral. (Again, we have a parallel in dreams. I recently had the experience of eating something that disagreed with my tummy, and I had nightmares.)

*Not entirely true. Your stomach rumbles because you haven’t eaten, which could be thought of as external simulation (or the lack thereof.)

But this opens up a more interesting question. I’m alleging that all brain processing (thoughts) ultimately needs some kind of stimulus, either from the external world or our internal body processes. What happens if that stimulus never comes in? Does the great and powerful Oz, er, I mean brain (a construct some have called the most complex thing in the universe) fall silent? Maybe, I don’t know. Certainly it’s noticed that minimizing your stimulation — through meditation, immersion tanks or just going to the park and staring at the lake — seems to eliminate some of the chaos of brain activity and provide a certain peace.

The topic of dream logic is interesting, and — I’m sure you will agree — worth a blog post. By the term, I’m referring to the built-in knowledge you have in dreams, knowledge which often makes no sense. For instance, you’ll have a dream where a UFO descends from the skies and an alien steps out and approaches you. Then your real-life friend Paul appears and somehow you know that Paul is this alien’s brother. Another example: you’re in a dream and someone says “Let’s go to McDonald’s.” Even though this is the first time the topic has appeared in the dream, you immediately know that McDonald’s is behind the building you’re standing next to.

When you think about this, this is fascinating. You’re dreaming not of an event or image, but knowledge itself. You’re dreaming of those great intangible things called ideas.

Bit of a tangent here, but this article, by a cognitive scientist, comments on the topic.

We need to see, first, that in approaching the topic of human thought, we usually stop half-way through. In fact, the human mind moves back and forth along a spectrum defined by ordinary logic at one end and “dream logic” at the other. “Dream logic” makes just as much sense as ordinary “day logic”; it simply follows different rules. But most philosophers and cognitive scientists see only day logic and ignore dream logic — which is like imagining the earth with a north pole but no south pole.

So how can dream logic work? I was thinking along the following lines. I’ve stated before my belief in the notion that our mental concepts are kind of like networks. I have a mental concept of Marilyn Monroe which ties together nodes representing blond hair, a mole, good looks, a person fated to tragedy etc. And, of course, each of those nodes is really itself a network. Blond hair is comprised of nodes representing yellow, long stringy things, silkiness etc.

Additionally, I think these networks are essentially real things: interwoven groups of neurons in the brain, ending at the most granular point, the synapse between two “arms and legs” of different neurons. (That’s the basic argument of modern neuroscience in a nutshell.)

My thinking about dream logic is that we have networks not just for concrete concepts like a person e.g. Marilyn Monroe, but for ideas. Ideas like “that guy is that guy’s brother” or “this thing is behind the building I’m next to.” These are basically the ideas of relationships; they can exist on their own but to really function they need to be tied into other concepts. So I have a network representing the idea that two people are brothers, and it can be connected to Paul and the alien, John and Robert Kennedy, me and my brother etc. During the course of dreaming, these “relationship concepts” get activated for mysterious reasons, but no more mysterious than the reasons dreams occur at all.

On a side note, it would then follow that if I had a stroke or something that obliterated the neural network representing “these guys are brothers” then I would not be able to fathom the concept. And while I’ve never heard of that specific example happening, I have heard of things like people losing the ability to categorize life into plants and animals etc. They lose their sense of certain categories, and categories are really what relationships are.

Lately, I’ve been reading an interesting book entitled “The Great Animal Orchestra,” which takes a look at sound and music as it occurs in the world of wildlife. I passed one interesting anecdote today. We’re often told that “silence is golden” and that distracting background noise stresses us out (indeed, I think I’ve made comments to this effect on this very blog.) But, apparently, pure silence is no picnic. The book’s author states…

Once, while on assignment, I accidentally stumbled across a nearly anechoic location at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was the quietest place I’d ever been in the natural world — a remote box canyon with high sandstone walls about a mile in from the river. I had hiked there and set up camp one afternoon. Resting quietly for a moment, I quickly realized that all I could hear was the blood coursing through my veins; a low-level pulsing thud at one of the spectrum and a whine I had never heard before at the other, probably from a nascent case of tinnitus… For a moment, I thought I’d lost my hearing…. After a short period, I became so disoriented by the complete silence that I started to talk and sing to myself and throw rocks at the canyon walls just to hear some kind of sound other than the blood in my head and the growing internal din in my ears. I was being driven insane by the lack of any acoustic cues.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks has noted a related phenomenon. People who go deaf in their ears (as opposed to having some issue with processing sound in their brain) will sometimes suffer from grand audio hallucinations like hearing elaborate and detailed symphonies playing their brain over and over, sometimes nonstop for years. His presumption is that the audio cortex — the part of our brain that processes sound —becomes “bored” from lack of stimulation (due to the nonfunctioning ears) and therefore it creates its own sound.

You might ask, “are the voices telling me to kill also hallucinations?” No, those are real.