Numb, but not dumb!
Know your default mode
Sometime in 1999 on the east coast road in the outskirts of Chennai city. He hurriedly got off his motorcycle and mindlessly ran to rescue his friend who was thrown to the margins of the highway by a speeding truck. His friend, miraculously conscious, had his skull half broken exposing the inside. As he tried to lift him, he saw something. He initially mistook it for a foreign object. It was greyish in color. He had never seen such a thing before. He quickly deciphered that it was something that tailed out of the cracked skull. He hurriedly picked it started putting it back into the head. He puked out in the process. His friend, conscious, did not show any signs of pain. He lifted him and escorted him to the motorcycle. His friend was able to stand and move minimally but enough to pillion to a nearby hotel where help arrived. His friend survived the accident but succumbed about three months later. During that brief interval, he often recounted the astonishing fact that he felt no pain when that squishy stuff was put back into his skull.
That squishy stuff, my friends, was a part of the frontal lobe. It is a ~250 cm long folded structure in the brain.
The brain is a numb organ, which is why the victim felt no pain. It processes pain in the body, but it is itself feelingless. Most brain surgeries are done with the patient awake to ensure they recognise kindergarten knowledge like their names, alphabets, numbers one to five and so on.
Numb, but not dumb! Although numb, your brain is one of the most complex things ever discovered in the universe. Its supersonic abilities help us navigate this complex field of life.
Apart from helping with the plethora of complex regulatory functions in your body, your brain helps you think. And more importantly think in a particular way. Your way of thinking is unique quite like your fingerprints. Have you wondered what thinking is? We’re not discussing about what you think about, but the very act of thinking itself? What is thought? How do thoughts arise? And, what makes you think in a particular way that you usually do? Thought arises from memory. Can you observe that?
Let’s take an example. When you’re walking, if you see a vehicle going past you, you either know, or can guess the make of that vehicle instantly. What’s the process that runs in the background? Your eyes first see an object and transmits signals to your brain. Based on pre-loaded memory of all these years, your brain tells you that you are looking at a particular car. And your brain throws all information that is pertinent to cars and more importantly, that car. If what you saw was a BMW, and if it is your favorite car and you own it, you will be happy with a sense of pride. If you want it but do not own it yet, your brain will make you mildly anxious. If your friends or family had experienced an unfortunate accident in a similar car, you would dislike the car, even if this one is different. In the above combinations of reactions, the relevant memories are invoked by the brain to advise you. It advises you by firing a thought. Thought, in a way, is an output of the brain.
All this processing by the brain happens at supersonic speed that you do not notice the finer details. But, as we usually say, ‘the devil is in the details.’ So, let’s dig in a bit more.
Allaying the numerous definitions of memories in a psychology textbook, memories can be categorised into four simple types:
The brain invokes working memories first to guide you with a thought. In the example of the car, if you knew how a BMW looked and if you have been thinking about owning one, your brain instantly helps you recognize it. If you had seen a BMW in your early days and not recalled it so very often, you would not know what car it is instantly. After scanning through distributed memories – and this might take a few seconds or even minutes – your brain will suddenly tell you that what you saw was or may have been a BMW. All of us would have noticed such delayed recall especially when we had tried to recall names of people or things we had briefly met or used a long time ago.
In summary, working memories are used first by the brain to produce relevant thoughts. Distributed memories are invoked later depending on whether the task is still open and not addressed by working memories.
When you are usually by yourself, you keep constantly thinking, isn’t it? You may think about a variety of things ranging from:
All these thoughts are generated automatically. You don’t instruct the brain to think about these things. These thoughts just pour, sometimes even without you being able to control them. Even when you are trying to meditate, you may begin to think about these things after a few moments of silence. This is called the resting state function – or the state of mind when a person is resting or not engaged in any goal-oriented activity. In neuroscience, this state is also known as the default mode network or the default mode.
If you are facing stress, burnout, anxiety, or even prolonged pride or toxic positivity, these are, arguably, outputs of working memory arising from your default mode. These states are instantly generated, aren’t they? So, must they not be coming from working memory? If these states were coming from distributed memory, you would react after a few minutes or even hours. That’s not how you function, do you? Observe it.
You may have many a times wondered why you are not in control of your thoughts. It just seems unstoppable and never ending. That’s because your thoughts are coming from a numb zone, so you have no clue about how and where they are arising from. Imagine a large, automated factory where the control and command center is hidden from plain sight. No one would have a clue of how things are working. That’s the default human state.
But when you observe (not think, but observe your thinking), your brain pauses. And in that pause, lies immense energy to reflect and change. That is the essence behind the plethora of meditative techniques around us.
You may wonder all this awareness and meditation blah blah is easier said than done, is it not? Well, there’s more to the brain than what meets the eye. It is not stranger than we think. It is stranger than we can think. And within all that strangeness lies a simple underlying principle that governs its working. More about it the next article on the subconscious mind.
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