BRAIN TECH STUFF
The daily news is so extreme, so unexpected, so irrational, that one can only exclaim “What were they thinking?” The obvious comment is that they were NOT thinking, but it’s pretty well established that brains never stop thinking. The better question is HOW are they thinking?
Recent reactivation of modes of “thought” that are not restricted — as is traditional — to logic, rational deduction, binary categories, chemistry, physics, math, and other formal modes of reason honored since the Greeks, are helping to understand the way the brain works through “feeling” which has formerly been libeled as childish, women’s work, mere emotion, even dirty and evil.
The very science that has the peculiar idea that a brain in a bucket can be a human computer, owned by someone, has invented the fMRI, which is a way of examining the brain as it is thinking. Not the subjects but the process. It is NOT a matter of assigning categories, but a process that goes through systematic steps, organized into systems. We can see the parts of the brain, each doing their work as information is accessed, processed and stored.
We’ve established that the brain organized around networks, a multitude of them, sometimes networks-in-networks, or networks-OF-networks, all of them guided by an uber-network, the life-frame that each person grows from birth through the next three years or so, a paradigm so powerful that any neurons not used by that time are simply discarded, edited, pruned. Aauugh! But more neurons will be added according to experiences and either elaborate what exists or start new web parts. Two networks are fascinating: DMN and TPN.
“The brain has a default mode nework, or DMN. This is the brain phase that we slip into once we stop attending to specific things or tasks in the external world. It consists of medial or middle brain regions, like the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), the hippocampus (in the medial temporal lobe) and the amygdala (in the medial temporal lobe). This brain system is active when we are in wakeful rest, like mind wandering or daydreaming, mild introspection, and other non-directional or low attention states of mind. As a default system, it characterizes our goal-irrelevant frame of mind. And it contrasts strongly with the task positive network or TPN, which consists of more peripheral brain regions: lateral prefrontal cortex (IPFC), the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the insula, and the somatosensory cortex. The TPN underscores our focused attention and goal-directed activities — everything from concentrating on a chess game or baiting a fish hook or solving a math problem.”
(“The Evolution of Imagination” by Asma, p202.)
This is all highly technical information but it enables conversation about some familiar problems, like inability to go to sleep or writer’s block. Somehow they mean the inability to switch from default drifting to intentional engaging in a task. Or to slip from waking default into a subconscious state that disengages with reality in order to take up “foraging in one’s sleep”, searching through the poetic but unworded concepts of the day and the more distant past, lookin for precedents. Often this takes up the answers in narrative, especially towards waking, when the stories might be remembered.
The TPM engages when waking but might carry one into the mind-function of “flow”, the state of being so “in the groove” that one’s sense of time and identity go blank, irrelevant. Csikszentimihalyi was the man who described this vividly so that the term is used by many people. It is considered the height of rational thinking and engagement with reality, but it is really a matter of interaction and processing that uses melded reason, instinct, and sensory information in what might be called “feeling.”
The coveted skill is being able to go in and out of these brain systems according to the situation. But that part is not really explored yet. Some people do have strategy triggers like Hemingway sharpening a certain number of pencils: a necessary preparation for writing that can become a ritual bridging into a state of mind. At present we use drugs to mute one part or energize another, like aspirin or caffeine. The “Asian” part of the world has become adept at meditation as a way of quieting tumult so as to get sense out of it — or at least escape the need for sense.
I’m still back at the stage of learning what is done by each of the various knots or puckers of the brain tissue that become sort of organelles with special duties. I can barely remember that “dorsal” means back and “rostral” means nose and mouth (snout), much less the molecular actions that constitute organic chemistry.
The amygdala, for instance, is “a roughly almond-shaped mass of gray matter inside each cerebral hemisphere, involved with the experiencing of emotions.” It’s actually amydalaS, plural, since it is twinned, as are the two halves of the brain, like a walnut meat. It is the subject of an entire book as well as the career of the man who wrote it: “Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety.” by Joseph LeDoux. Technical it may be, but it’s useful and practical. Like Asma, LeDoux is a musician.
“You can prevent or stop an amygdala hijack by breathing, slowing down, and trying to focus your thoughts. This allows your frontal cortex to regain control. You can then choose the most reasonable and appropriate way to respond to the situation.”
The earliest response to the environment we learn is attachment to the mother which gradually widens to awareness of everything. What is strange or possibly dangerous causes arousal, partly hard-wired (snake!) and partly taught (“Don’t eat that!), partly amusing and partly destructive. That sorting is what the amygdala does through chemicals in the blood and bioelectric messages in neurons. Of course, this is over-simplified.
We are approaching something like an operator’s manual for a human being, even as we confront a time of hysteria and death that is not just berzerk humans but also a planet that is threatening to destroy us because of our own behavior, a kind of environmental matricide. The stakes have never been higher.
