The Girl With the Sun in Her Eyes

She leans forward in the sensible chair. Her voice is soft but earnest, and her gaze intent, as the questions cascade from her mouth. What can I tell her? What do I know? I do at least know that I don’t know, and perhaps I know something of another way of not knowing. ‘Curious minds like ours stay open to the new questions that emerge from our original ones,’ I venture. This probably isn’t helping. ‘I don’t mean that you shouldn’t ask those things. I just mean that it’s OK to find that they lead you to more and “better” questions instead of to fixed answers. What was there before there was time? I don’t know. But it’s good to ponder, because it leads to physical questions about the origins of time and the universe. Human brains process that universe in a way that gives rise to a sense of duration. It’s in here, not “out there”.’

‘You should talk to my son,’ she says. ‘I think you’d get along. He had cancer, but he’s recovering now. He gets down sometimes. I do too – or I used to. It’s better here. Sometimes I just sit awake in my bed for hours, thinking. They keep asking if I’m OK, but I’m fine. I’m just going through all this... stuff, in my head. Your book – I keep starting it, but then I get stuck with more...’

The musak has come back on, so I have to lean forward in my chair so that she can hear me. The easy-clean pad squeaks under me. One of my legs is going numb.

‘I used to stare at the sun,’ she says. Her eyes are quite... bloodshot. ‘I’d look at it for ages, and think I could see things there – like a sort of halo. I probably damaged my eyes – I can’t see a ball coming at me if someone throws one in my direction – but nobody told me I shouldn’t look at it.’

I agree that it probably did damage her eyes. She is remarkable.

‘This thing with your brain... your head. I’m not against it; I think it’s fascinating. But how do you...? How does it work?’ she asks.

‘Well, the brain is a physical thing. It’s made of atoms, like everything else. So I’m very curious to know whether it can be “put on hold” in some way. They idea of cryonics is to do that using ultra-cold temperatures to stop all chemical reactions – to stop all decay. It’s an experiment. It’s about potentialities – I’m trying to leave open the small possibility that some future technology might fix me and revive me,’ I explain.

‘The brain is amazing. I sometimes wonder if we have any idea how to use it properly,’ she says, smiling. Her hand smooths down the cover of the newly signed book.

‘I met Doris Stokes, you know. She came into the shop where I was working when I was young. You won’t believe any of this, but she told me a lot of things about my life that have turned out to be true.’

‘If you mean I don’t believe she could predict your future, you’re right,’ I say. ‘But I do find it fascinating that some people have that skill, that level of... empathy, where they can tune into other people and make guesses so good that they sound like they must be psychic.’

The Catholic priest two sensible chairs across the lounge from us raises his voice as he switches into formal prayer mode. Is this a competition? He is kneeling in front of one of the other residents, eyes tight shut, holding her hands.

Ruby is oblivious. We continue our catechism.

‘But Swein Macdonald said similar things. I met him too, much later, when I was married. He said there was something special about me. He said I’d be happy. And I am, now.’

‘I’ll bet he could see that you were curious, looking for something. A lot of people mistake that for some kind of “spirituality”,’ I say.

‘Oh, I go to the church service every week,’ she says.

‘Good entertainment?’ I ask.

‘Well... a lot of it just makes me angry.’

It makes me angry, too. These people are like vultures. Stupid fat head on white collar with his intrusive, empty words and contact. Leave. Her. Alone. ‘Me too,’ I say. ‘Any notion of “God” is sort of “out of bounds” – there are no useful questions we can ask about a being who is supposed to exist “outside” of everything we can ask questions about, if you see what I mean. It’s a blind alley.’

‘When I was living up north – when I was married – my husband started to drink a lot. He beat me sometimes,’ she says.

With those red-ringed whites, I can’t tell whether she’s about to cry or not. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that, Ruby. I...’

‘I could take it, most of the time,’ she says. ‘I didn’t stop thinking. I suppose I was in a world of my own. Then, later, I was taking a lot of co-codamol, and that didn’t help.’ This without a hint of bitterness.

‘I hope you keep pondering things... keep thinking. I know it’s difficult for people. They think we’re being weird or awkward. But it’s how we are... how we make sense of things... not that there’s any ultimate sense to be made, of course.’

The musak is now a 60s/70s pop compilation. Telstar, I think, I used to have that somewhere. Odd tracks. Not like stuff they usually play in here.

‘Well,’ Ruby says, looking over her shoulder to where my wife is sitting with my mother-in-law, ‘I’m keeping you from the person you actually came to visit.’

‘Not at all,’ I assure her. ‘I’ve really enjoyed our chat.’ I stretch my numb legs and stand up.

‘So have I,’ Ruby says, rising slowly to her feet. ‘Thank you.’

Oh how she deserves another chance. Another crack at this thing. Why did nobody take the time to listen to her properly, to... nurture her?

She beams and blinks her two wide coronas at me before joining the shuffling, zimmering throng leaving this mortal lounge for the dining room, and the next scheduled meal break.

Tangled Up in Scrub-thought

The true nature of reality is a labyrinthine problem in philosophy. Whatever it is, we are not getting much of it. As I write in Frozen to Life: A Personal Mortality Experiment:

Because we are only tenuously connected to the ‘outside world’ – there are many more interconnections within our brains than between our brains and our sensory organs – it should not surprise us that our ‘inner worlds’ can be this way.

Naturally-selected-for tuning to only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum limits humans (and all other animals) to what biologist Jakob von Uexküll termed the umwelt (‘environment’) of our senses. While kit, scope and specialisation vary between lifeforms, all biological sensoria (‘sensory apparatus’) are electromagnetically narrowband.

Humans, however, face the added bandwidth-limiting problem of reflexive consciousness. So busy are our neurons (particularly our neocortical ones) compounding existing interconnections in their ‘fire together, wire together’ enthusiasm for group hugging that they sometimes render us almost insensate. Lost in our own incessant, jabbering narratives, real-time attention becomes subsumed, often only arising when called upon by our instinctive ‘lizard brain’ alert mechanisms.

Neuroscientist Sam Harris discusses this subject in his 2012 Edge essay ‘We are Lost in Thought’. Harris calls the private narrative ‘discursive thought’; you are engaged in a constant tête-à-tête with somebody who is not present:

I invite you to pay attention to anything – the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair – for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought.

When I say ‘not present’, I mean it in two senses: in the sense that neither participant in the discussion exists and in the sense that you are in not ‘in the moment’ while engaged in it. As Harris points out in his essay, detached, discursive thought is immensely useful for planning ahead, for learning, for abstract reasoning and for driving a host of other human cognitive functions. Nevertheless, the consequences of failure to see the wood of the here and now for the ramifying scrub of reverie and figment – and of failure even to recognize the scrub as scrub – can be severe. Harris identifies it as ‘a primary source of human suffering and confusion’.

We should not assume that thinking in a particular mode is a good thing – for us, for others, for our world – just because we happen ‘naturally’ to think in that mode. Unmanaged, rampant scrub-thought grows a painfully knotted self. Although ostensibly a gentle tool, mindfulness may act as machete.

Tweaking our minds with tailored attention is useful and important, but it only works when we recognise the self for what it is – a construct, a con-struct. In this world all too often influenced by horribly ramified selves, we are conned into believing that that is the way to be. What a sad joke! The obsessive hoarder of money, power, celebrity or other hollow abstracts is a monomaniac. He is not unthinking, he is over-and-over-and-over-thinking hopelessly constricted and shallow fancies.

At the other end of the scale, deep thinkers may stultify their minds with thoughts prodigious but dreadfully self-injurious. Inward and inward they go, mourning countless losses as glimpses of states of mind less brooding, less burning slip away from them again and again. Behold the void of melancholia – the singularity of mental suffering.

Some use religious contemplation, trusting prayer to lift what Harris calls ‘the veil of discursivity’. But far too often religionistic brooding births a monstrous super-self. The product of fantastical scrub-thought, this impossibly dual thing grovels tiny on its knees yet stands tall and wide enough to blot out the sun, the stars, the past, the future and all the multi-layered cynosure of the cosmos. Enchained by myth and custom, the religious super-self froths, rolls its eyes and snaps wildly at empty air. Feed it at your peril.

To a greater or lesser extent, we are all confused and suffering. Taking a scientific view and learning about neurological processes may not free you from mental anguish, but it will provide you with new schemata for understanding it. Switching schema from time to time allows you to break the discursive flow, if only tempor... the last ten min… negative thoughts about her because she told another friend that I was treating her with contempt by assuming that he’s obsessed with... shallow... mortgage... roof tiles... that paint... wrinkles... ugly... car... spiteful bitc... she said... blood... inadequate... Whoa! Whoa! wHoA! Where did that come from? What was its genesis? THE. THE. THE. Physical things in physical brain. Connections, neurochemistry, plasticity, recursive loops, negotiable loops, building my brain, building my brain.

I cannot adequately represent this schema-switching in words. But you will know it when you think it. Find your technique. Learn to drag yourself free of your own mental mire. At stake is your equilibrium, your happiness, your life and the lives of others.

Would a scientist creating a human-equivalent brain from scratch (let us call it a positronic brain) design it to expend most of its processing power on discursive thought? Probably not. It is likely that some level of reflexive, self-reinforcing thought would contribute positively to this synthetic brain’s operation as a human-equivalent one. Nevertheless, without safeguards against predominating levels of such thought this positronic brain might go swiftly negatronic – kernel panics, buffer overflows and system crashes might blight its operation to such an extent as to render it dysfunctional.

You do not design your brain from scratch. It is what it is – naturally-selected-for, biological, chemoelectrical, unfathomably complex. But you do get to intervene in its ongoing development. Although the concept of neuroplasticity is now widely discussed (but also, unfortunately, widely abused), it is still immensely difficult to get across to people that they have some measure of control over their thought-flow, and therefore, over the physical configuration of their brains. Why should this be? We accept readily the idea that learning can restructure our brains, but many resist the idea that discursive thought – our messy, meandering self-narratives – can too.

I think, perhaps, that notion is too raw for some – too visceral, too meaty and too demanding of a response. And at the same time, it is desperately abstruse – there’s nobody and nothing to respond to. As a pragmatic reductionist, however, I find it oddly reassuring. Although no inner friend exists in your mind to provide succour (and conversations with such a ‘friend’ would only compound the problem), self-correcting quasi-interventions are possible: mindfulness, schema-switching, intense pain (perhaps best avoided), empathetic face-to-face conversation. Carefully-controlled chemical intervention may work also, if that is your thing.

This is all that each of us has in this wide world – this tenuous connection to reality, this oft-distorted hall of mirrors that we call ‘mind’. That is a brutal truth, but also an empowering one. Tangled scrub-thought need not be our primary mode. Can we learn to hack it?

If I Only had a Brain

If I only had a brain I would not be conversing or consulting with anything. The flowers would wait in vain for my dulcet repartee; the rain would be forced to seek managerial guidance elsewhere.

It is opportunistic of me to seize upon the jumbled syntax of the title of the song from The Wizard of Oz, and I know it scans better that way, but I have reasons to do so. My rediscovery of the song coincided with a time when I was writing an essay on the subject of personal identity, specifically on its indeterminacy. And – in connection with that – I was delving again into Daniel Dennett’s ‘zombie’ thought experiments. It occurred to me that the Scarecrow – a character for whom I have some fellow feeling – could be a useful metaphor in that regard, not only because he is a brainless zombie but also because the title of the song seems to suggest that he wishes to be the polar opposite. And what is that? Why, a disembodied brain! Oh, my!

What the Scarecrow really wants is to be whole. He wants the complete set – a body and a brain. He can carry a tune, but he doesn’t think he can carry any thoughts, and that is a source of some distress for him. He is a zombie that knows he’s a zombie, so just what kind of zombie does that make him? Perhaps it makes him what Dennett called a ‘zimbo’:

A zimbo is a zombie that, as a result of self-monitoring, has internal (but unconscious) higher-order informational states that are about its other, lower-order informational states.ⁱ

The Scarecrow clearly has self-monitoring enough to inform himself that he doesn’t have a brain, but if he can’t really carry any higher-order informational states (due to his lack of a brain) then maybe he is merely a zombie, not a zimbo.

Meanwhile – in my version of this tale – the Scarecrow’s brain awaits him in a vat of cerebrospinal fluid, at the Wizard’s lab. The Wizard knows that the Scarecrow is coming to collect it, because wires implanted into the brain produce a display of the brain’s thoughts, which the Wizard can then read. How could the brain know that the Scarecrow is coming? Is it telepathic? No. It knows the Scarecrow is coming, because it is the scarecrow that’s coming.

The cruel Wizard wished to perform an experiment to do with location of ‘self’. So he removed a man’s brain and placed it in a vat; he altered the brain’s memories so that it thought it was a scarecrow; then he connected the brain-in-the-vat wirelessly to the man’s body. After the encephalectomy operation, he dressed up the brainless body in ragged clothes stuffed with straw, and then staked it out in a field near the yellow brick road.

The scarecrow man wakes up in the field, beset by crows, knowing that he has no brain but not knowing that he was ever anything but a scarecrow. A girl with a dog frees him from his stake and tells him that a great wizard will give him a brain, if he goes along with her. This seems an attractive proposition. Given the circumstances, Dorothy believes that the man is a scarecrow. And the brain-in-the-vat’s perception of its remote body has been altered so that it sees only straw, even upon detailed self-examination of its body.

We now understand the great mystery of how the brainless Scarecrow could walk, dance, sing, and even hold a conversation: he could do all those things because he actually had a brain all along; it just wasn’t in his body.

Your brain is located in your skull, but that does not mean that you are located there. Your senses – such as vision, touch, and hearing – inform you of the position of your body in relation to other things and people; your sense of proprioception tells you the position of your limbs in space. That is all. If we were to stretch your complete sensorium out over many miles, then you would be gigantic. You might argue that, under those circumstances, you would only feel gigantic, but why should that be the case? You feel that you are the size you are only because your senses provide you with that information. If your senses were different, you would be different. As we don’t know where we, as selves, are located – indeed we have no evidence that we are anywhere – we have this potential adaptability and zoomability.

So we are not so different from our unfortunate friend the Scarecrow. When he eventually encounters his brain in the vat, behind the Wizard’s screen, the Wizard restores his memory of being a man. Does he now, seeing his brain before him, understand himself as a man whose thoughts are occurring not in his body but in his brain in the vat? No. In fact – apart from remembering who he is and realising that he is not a scarecrow – he feels no different. The Wizard is content that the experiment has validated his hypothesis.ⁱⁱ

The mainland across the bay looks beautiful today, bathed as it is in hazy sunshine. I am now being located there, but only very poorly – this sensorium is so restrictive. Perhaps I’ll pour another coffee, go and sit outside, and try to think some thoughts I’ve never thunk before.

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i Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1993), 310.

ii Much of the above is based upon Daniel C. Dennett, “Where Am I?,” in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).

The Brain of Richard Feynman

I've been interested in the life and work of Richard Feynman for some time. I've read some of the collections of lectures, such as "Six Easy Pieces" and also the collection of reminiscences "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". I don't purport to understand a great deal of the Physics in the lectures, except on a superficial level. I know that I would need to get a decent grasp on mathematics if I really wanted to go there. Maybe one day.

Feynman was a fascinating character. A physicist with a supreme disregard for uniforms and honours, despite his sharing in the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, along with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger, for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics (QED). He was a handy (sic) bongo player with a sharp sense of humour and a deep love of finding out how things work. He understood that he may not find the answers he sought but the joy of trying drove him on. He had a darker side too. His involvement in the Manhattan Project haunted him later in his life, as must have the death of his first wife.

There is a huge amount of information available about Mr Feynman, and his books are wonderful, so I won't go into his life or work in any more detail here. What fascinates me, personally, about Richard Feynman is the way that he looked at the world. I really wonder if that way of seeing things is accessible to all of us or just to a select few. Was his brain wired so differently that most of us cannot hope to understand his viewpoint?

The part of it I do truly understand is the hardwired loathing of uniforms and honours. The detestation of the elevation to virtual godhood of other humans when they are, in reality, no better or no worse than ourselves. This feeling - the "I can't stand it!" reaction Feynman talks about in one of his TV interviews, comes through the simple application of logic to our real circumstances. We are smart apes with big brains. Feynman didn't "hate" the Pope but he detested the "idea" of people like the Pope, with their ridiculous uniforms and rotten dogmas.

Also, surely, we are all capable of grasping the constantly-questioning aspect of a brain like Feynman's. We are born inquisitive. We just need to keep that into adulthood, and forego the arrogance of assuming that we know much at all about the world. That way we would keep experimenting (often failing) and continue to feel the joy of discovery throughout our lives. This isn't idealistic. It's the only way to grow.

Is there a particular kind of structure to a human brain; a particular configuration of neurons it must have to allow it to think in the "Feynman mode"? I don't think so. Neuroscience is beginning to reveal how plastic the brain actually is. Maybe the very act of keeping that particular kind of inquisitive aspect of our personalities to the fore would change us; not into Richard Feynmans but certainly into better humans with more humility and more capability to deal with constant uncertainty. Uncertainty is natural, fixedness is not. Look at the structure of an atom.

Much as I am interested in him and his "curious" attitude to everything, I know there's no place for a "Cult of Feynman". He would have hated that. It sounds too much like something you might need a uniform for.

Neuroplasticity and handedness

I used to be ambidextrous.

When I was a child I had the ability to use either hand for most tasks. It was useful but also confusing. I had a nagging feeling that I should be settling on exactly which hand I should use to draw my pictures with. There wasn't much pressure from the adults around me to settle this internal argument but any suggestions I did receive from outside always favoured the right.

I now wonder if I lost something when I finally settled on using my right hand. Some of the old 'confusion' is still there - when cutting with scissors I use my left hand; when playing pool or darts my left hand dominates.

Having now read a fair amount about neuroplasticity - Norman Doidge's "The Brain That Changes Itself" is a particular favourite - I think that my ambidextrous abilities were a result of an earlier and more readily plastic phase of my brain's development. Once settled into a less readily plastic phase the right hand came to dominate. But can that process cause an imbalance?

I would assume that an imbalance would be more likely in an obviously left-handed child forced to use their right. This still happens - the old sinister/dexter nonsense. But when this happens more internally can it be a case of the left brain (right hand) achieving dominance over the right brain (left hand)? The probable answer is that it is much more complicated than that. Left-handed people do not necessarily have a more dominant right brain than right-handed. But I wonder if some of the 'flexibility' of thought and motion from the more plastic and ambidextrous phase would be better retained than lost.

I have started brushing my teeth and sometimes shaving with my left hand. This feels awkward and unnatural at first but it does appear to get easier after a few weeks. A kind of 're-learning' may be happening.

This would seem to tie in somewhat with current neuroplasticity research. There is growing evidence, for example, that stroke victims who lose the use of a limb, can learn to use that limb again by restricting the movement of the good limb. In the case of an arm the good limb could be put in a tight sling so that the non/semi-functional limb is 'forced' into use. Is it so different to try to force a once highly functional hand to undertake some of the tasks now so ably performed by its opposite number in an effort to regain some of its 'lost' function?

Someone I know has, in the fairly recent past, lost a good deal of the function in one leg. He insists the problem is entirely 'physical' and localised to the area of the leg itself, while at the same time talking about how the limb 'won't obey his commands'. It is clear to me that the damage has resulted from a small stroke but the affected person will never agree with this because of the stigma he sees attached to such a brain-associated dysfunction. The physiotherapists he has seen have made no real effort to investigate the root of the problem. I have suggested some kind of restrictive therapy to 'force' the affected limb into better use but he won't hear of it. Meanwhile the leg becomes less functional with each passing day.

Brain plasticity is never lost but it does become harder to 'activate' as the years go by. Exercises, both physical and mental, which re-activate and promote neuroplasticity can be of huge benefit to all. There appears to be resistance in some quarters to the notion of training the brain like a muscle or using it as 'tool' to effect change in itself and in the rest of the body. Some of the methods touted for achieving plastic change are pure hokum but others, such as the software developed by Posit Science, may just have a chance of making a real difference for those struggling with weakening mental agility.

I won't ever be fully ambidextrous again but that doesn't mean I should give up on my left hand. Balance in all things.

Speech Arrest

I recently watched some fascinating live neurosurgery on Channel 4. The patient was awake throughout most of the process and was capable of answering questions posed by the studio audience and viewers phoning in.

The "speech arrest" phenomenon was particularly interesting to witness. The surgeon was removing a large tumour and wanted to ensure that he was not causing any damage to Broca's Area, an area on the brain particularly concerned with speech. He used and electrode to stimulate the approximate area while the patient counted from 1 to 20. If the electrode intruded into Broca's area the patient would "lose" numbers in the sequence but resume consistent counting when the probe was moved away.

Once Broca's Area had been identified the surgeon was able to work past it and go further down into the brain to remove part of the tumour. Unfortunately the tumour was invasive, with webs spreading out deep into the brain, so could not be removed fully. The patient will undergo chemotherapy to try to mitigate this.

Blue brain

The Blue Brain project is exciting. The idea of building a cortical simulation up from the molecular level is a massive challenge but, I think, an essential one if we are ever to fully understand the complex thinking machine that is the human brain.

The initial goals of the project were, in comparison to the current aims, fairly modest. In 2005 the goal was to simulate a rat cortical column (or hypercolumn). With that now achieved the scientists involved are heading in the direction of simulation of an entire human neocortex.

There are concerns that this project cannot tell us much new. It may come up with a working simulation that we can observe functioning and making neuronal connections but of which we have no understanding of what it is actually doing. Sounds a lot like a biological neocortex to me.

The current state of the art at the neuronal level of neuroscience is that we can begin to see such hitherto intangible processes as memories being formed. This appears to me to be roughly equivalent to watching our simulated brain making its virtual connections and forming its virtual memories. Of course the simulation allows us to gather comprehensive and accurate data about these events; something we can't do with a biological brain. When it comes to observing exactly what the world looks like to the entity (biological or virtual) as a result of those neuronal events we are still, largely, in the dark.

What I hope the Blue Brain project will do, and what some of its detractors may fear, is to put an end to any notion of duality. Consciousness will be proved, once and for all, to be an emergent property of the structure, connectional diversity and sheer quantity of neurons (supported by glia) forming the human neocortex. But there is no guarantee that the Blue Brain will ever reach human-level neuronal complexity. A huge investment would be required in this research, currently admirably supported by the Swiss government, to bring that possibility to fruition.

This is pure science and the investment is worth it. Understanding the construction and plasticity of our own brains will give us the tools we need to better shape ourselves and to recognise the negative neurobiological effects of bad interactions with other people and environments. Perhaps our future depends on that understanding.