For a few seconds this morning, I had the odd and distressing feeling of being trapped in my own brain; a victim of invisible forces, shuttled from one experience to another at the whim of incomprehensible neural machinery. I wanted out. I even wondered briefly where I might go—could I exist in a computer?
As the distress faded I thought, “What a strange idea, that I could somehow exist separately from my brain, that it could imprison me.” It seemed ludicrous that I could have such a thought, and yet the feeling of being locked in and pushed around had felt totally real and oppressive. It was perplexing and laughable at the same time.
I found my brain thinking through the convolutions of how it could create an entity that then felt trapped inside it.
It soon came up with a parallel: conscious visual experience. I have the feeling that I have seamless visual access to the world, but that experience is the product of much complicated processing in which the brain uses shortcuts and workarounds to convert an avalanche of fragmented data into a useful model.
Despite my intellectual understanding of its construction, my visual world-model still looks seamless, “out there,” flawless, and instantly accessible. For the most part, there’s no real advantage in dwelling on the fact that it’s all in my head; it works well just as it is.
My sense of self is the product of even more complex processing, and in some ways it’s equally constrained by reality. If my visual system misrepresented the real world I might walk off an unseen cliff; if my self-model misrepresented my abilities, I might walk off an accurately visualized cliff, thinking I was immune to gravity.
While the physical world puts constraints on the self-model, in describing the brain’s internal processes it is susceptible to wide departures from reality. The brain doesn’t have conscious access to most of what it does, and is free to imagine a self that makes decisions freely, independent of prior circumstances or reason. It can even imagine the self as a soul-like thing that exists outside the brain. Scientific understanding of how brains work shows that this antiquated model deviates wildly from reality, and that such deviations exact a price in guilt, shame, anxiety, and more.
I could see now that my distress this morning had resulted from the temporary activation of this ancient and inaccurate soul-like self-model, despite my brain’s trying to develop the habit of keeping such inaccuracies in check. A lapse of mindfulness had allowed the culprit through.
Mindfulness comes up fairly often in discussions of the brain these days; in fact I had just seen reference to it in an article on daydreaming and the “default network,” by Josie Glausiusz in the March 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind. (Here’s a more research-oriented article on the same subject.) It seems most people spend about 30 percent of their waking hours in the non-task-focused default network—day-dreaming, spaced-out, etc.—and most people are unaware that they’ve drifted away from what they were supposed to be doing.
The default network is an interesting subject in itself, but what struck me was that here, once again, no one is in charge of the switch from task-focused to default mode. The brain is pursuing its own nonconscious agenda, and without warning or fanfare, can decide that instead of reading the book in front of you, it would rather take you on an imaginary trip through Spain.
Which reminds me of a Zen story I first encountered in the early 90’s: Having completed his ten-year apprenticeship and become a teacher, Tenno had gone to visit Nan-in, who asked him a question he couldn’t answer. It was a rainy day, and Nan-in asked whether Tenno had left his umbrella to the left or the right of his shoes. Realizing he didn’t know, that he hadn’t reached the level of “every-minute Zen,” Tenno studied with Nan-in for another six years.
My reaction at the time was that the idea of paying attention to every trivial detail of life was ridiculous, and that I certainly had better things to do.
Thinking of every-minute Zen in terms of the “default mode,” it would seem to mean one would never indulge in day-dreaming, never mentally wander from the task at hand, although it might not rule out the possibility that one could activate the default mode deliberately. In any case, assuming Tenno and others accomplished such a state of control, what would that tell us about brain function?
Marvin Minsky might say that different parts of the brain jockeying for control of the brain’s scarce resources is a normal part of how the brain works; that in Tenno’s case, one part of the brain has learned to control other parts. (In fact, he points out that such “direct control” might be dangerous, and evolution may have selected against it.[p. 93])
In an earlier blog post I looked at this idea in greater detail while discussing Minsky’s Emotion Machine, using this quote, among others:
“…when you see the mind as a cloud of conflicting resources… you can imagine that, while some parts of your mind are uncomfortable, other parts of your mind may enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them.”(p. 325)
Mindfulness raises the possibility that we can learn to keep track of which parts are forcing the others to work. While we might not want to go to Tenno’s extreme, we could acquire a useful level of mindfulness in the same way we would acquire any other habit. It first has to come to be seen as valuable, which means that it has to be reinforced by factors in one’s environment, just like any other value. (I’m trying to reinforce it now.) None of us acquires a desire to eat healthy foods, get physically fit, learn to play the piano, etc., unless those desires are reinforced by exposure to media, authorities, and peers, and the same is true of mindfulness, or what is sometimes called “meta-awareness.” Sufficient practice turns these desires into habitual responses and behaviors.
The level of mindfulness my brain has developed so far made it possible to recognize that an undesirable self-model had become dominant this morning, and ushered a preferable one to the fore, which then presided over ruminations about the whole process.
Understanding the brain is a complicated business; sometimes it’s like Abbot and Costello’s Who’s On First in here.

Keeping Things in Perspective
