Daily Archives: July 22, 2012

TED : Stroke of Insight

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Time for another TED Talk talk! This time it is about one of my all time favorite subjects amongst all my eclectic grab bag of interests, brain science. Neurology. The science of the MIND!

Hey, when you live between your ears like I do, you begin to wonder about the neighborhood!

And this talk is gripping on a few levels, because it consists of not only science fact, but one person, one scientist’s harrowing, terrifying, yet highly illuminating personal tragedy that gave her a great deal of insight into more than just science.

She got a glimpse into a very different mode of being.

Now before we start on her amazing personal story, I just want to say that I had no idea, before now, that the right half of the brain is parallel and the left half is serial. It makes sense, and actually makes for a very powerful combination. The parallel right brain gathers an enormous breadth of information from the world, filled with subtlety and rich with information. The left brain then sorts through this sensory feast and turns it into sequential consciousness. And all this happens so seamlessly that our frontal lobe can add its pattern seeking predictive powers, the amygdala can give it all emotional context, and the whole thing can be sythesized into one single big process that we are happy to call our “everyday consciousness”.

Just think, even as you read my words, this whole complicated orchestra is coordinating and combining in your head and you do not feel a thing. It is so good at its job that even knowing all this crazy stuff is going on means nothing. Just seems like another day at the office to you.

It is like a very well run stage production, where in the background there is what looks like madness and chaos but is actually highly complex levels of coordination and order.

But all the audience sees is a play, and because it is so well produced, the audience can forget all the details and just enjoy the story.

Now on to Jill Bolte Taylor’s personal story. I was completely unprepared for it. This was, after all, a TED Talk, and she began her talk in quite acceptable academic yet accessible TED mode, and then wham, a bombshell, the fact that she had a massive stroke in her sleep and woke up in a very terrible state, medically and scientifically speaking.

This immediately freaked me out a fair bit, and I am feeling a little freaked right now just writing about it, because this is exactly the sort of nightmare scenario that I worry about. I have a lot of weird mental moments, where my consciousness is not at all normal, and it is only through a concentrated effort for a long period of time that I learned not to panic myself over these moments by imagining they all mean that I am having a stroke or that I am finally going crazy.

So hearing her tell the story of waking up in a highly disordered mental state and that actually literally meaning she was having a stroke and in great danger and yet being unable to get it together enough to get melt at first… well, let’s just say it stirred the embers of a long suppressed fear and made me wonder about the amount of mental noise I suppress just to get through the day in my sad little life, and makes me wonder how much of that might actually be signal.

It helps that she tells her story with such charming casualness and wit, and that we can see that clearly, she is fine now, so we do not have to worry about how it all turns out.

And I was quite pleased when she talked about thinking something like “Wow, what a great opportunity for a brain scientist, to be able to observe her own brain while it breaks down!”, because I had been thinking more or less the same thing and feeling sort of guilty about it.

So when she said that, I laughed out of both humour and relief.

But what really impressed me about the whole thing is how she had basically had a transcendental experience of the exact same kind that others achieve through prayer, meditation, drugs, fasting, and so forth and so on.

The feeling of oneness with the universe, the perception of the universe as being entirely made of energy, the discovery of the infinite eternal now… these things all map precisely to the spiritual revelations of mystics, prophets, gurus, and other transcendental experience seekers all over the world and throughout history.

But this time, it was happening to a scientist who was in the unique position of being able to understand some of what was actually happening in her brain, and so she could interpret the experience without being entirely overwhelmed by it and leaving her grasping at straws to find a way to express it.

The idea that this transcendental experience has something to do with shutting off the left hand side of of the brain fascinates me. One might be tempted, after hearing about he transcendent euphoria, to say “To hell with the left brain, it sucks! I want what she had!”

But remember, it was her left brain that saved her life, and the lack of it that made saving herself so difficult. Spending time in the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind might well do all of us a lot of good, but it is no place to raise your kids. Like she said, she was basically an infant.

And I think it is a tribute to her very strong mind that she was able to keep it together enough to eventually get some help and save her own life, instead of just dissolving into La La Land and never coming out because she died there.

Still turned her into somewhat of a mystic, but then again, after what she has been through, who can blame her for being kind of a hippie?

I would honestly like to have the same experience myself.

Um, without the massive brain trauma, obviously.

Time falls in on itself

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REally feeling the sands of time time slipping out from under my feet lately. I can’t believe it will be the last week of July soon. It feels like Canada Day was only yesterday, and summer started the day before that, and my birthday was just a week before that.

They say that once you are over the hill, you pick up speed. But what they do not mention is that at the bottom is the grave and most of us would actually prefer to get there as slowly as possible.

Now I try to tell myself that this is all just a trick of memory and perception. Logically speaking, Every day has exactly the same number of minutes in it that every other day in my life has had. I have the same number of waking hours, more or less. The minutes pass at a minute per minute, no matter what my subjective sense of time tries to tell me. Time has not, in fact, sped up.

This is rock solid scientifically and logically indisputably true.

And I also know the source of the error. As we grow older, our minds grow stronger and broader and deeper, and are hence able to grasp larger units of time all at once. When you are a small child, five minutes seems like an incomprehensibly long time. You do not yet have the mental faculties to encompass it. You cannot imagine what things will be like after such a long period of time. You simply cannot imagine that far into the future. Your frontal lobes lack sufficient complexity.

But as we get older, our frontal lobes develop, and we can grasp larger and larger units of time, and feel comfortable that we can know what the world will be like and what the future will hold for that amount of time.

The problem is that as these chunks of time grow larger, our brain does not fully compensate and keeps thinking of time as the time it takes for a certain number of chunks to pass.

And if the amount of subjective time it takes X number of chunks to pass stays the same, but the amount of real time increases, it makes it seem like time is passing faster.

The amount of time that passes in between the points where we are aware of time, the points where we subjectively speaking “look at the clock”, grows larger, and it feels like we are accelerating, and we go from impatient youths for whom nothing can possibly happen fast enough to grumpy oldsters who want everything to just slow the hell down for a minute so we can catch up.

And this is not entirely illusion. There is a cost to this increasing complexity of sentience. Those points where we “look at the clock” are also our points of decision and reaction. And when you are getting fewer of those in a day, you quite legitimately feel like things are happening faster than you can react to them.

You have fewer moments in which to adjust to change, and hence, absorbing change becomes harder and harder. In fact, at some point, you simply stop being able to keep up. The adjustment rate lags behind the rate of change, and you develop an adjustment backlog that gradually comes to stretch off into infinity with no hope of ever catching up.

And this is why the older people get, the more conservative they become. They will violently and vehemently resist the change that is happening now because they still have not adjusted to the changes from last month, last year, or last decade.

This is also what leads to their overpowering nostalgia for a previous era, once that seems pristine and perfect to them now. They will even say “Back then, things made sense!”

Their error, of course, is thinking that this has something to do with the nature of the world back then, rather than the nature (and content) of the brain perceiving it.

But I have gone on at length before, I believe, about the error of being unable to accept one’s own subjectivity. The lens is not dirty, dammit, the world is!

I find myself prone to this sort of nostalgia myself. I find myself increasingly feeling as though the 1970’s were a time of innocent, goodwill, understanding, and cultural wonders. And anything I see with a strong Seventies vibe gives me a wonderful flood of warm, gratifying nostalgia.

Of course, by sheer coincidence, that happens to be the era of the first seven years of my childhood. What a lucky man I am, to have had my childhood in the one era which was, in a purely scientific and objective sense, was the time when the world was absolutely perfect in all ways and all deviations from that one perfect golden era are a filthy nightmarish deviation from perfection that can only possibly be motivated by the purest and most malign evil.

Luckily, I have not seriously gone that far… yet. I cannot guarantee that I will not end up there. I bet a lot of people who laughed at their parents and said “Thank goodness I will never be like them!” ended up there just the same.

So I will not pretend that I am somehow immune. I have devoted myself to objectivity my entire life, but I am still a human being. The emotional power of nostalgia is incredible. It is like a drug that you can administer yourself with just a picture, a TV show, or a song.

I do not wonder that, given the seemingly out of control world that old people face, they decide that they simply want to leave the modern world and live in the world of their nostalgia.

The problem happens when they insist that the whole world be somehow magically returned to the world of their nostalgia, and try to drag everybody back there with them.

Luckily, it is impossible for them to succeed.

They sure can slow down progress trying, though.