Wednesday 22 June 2005

Pic of the day: "Man, I must sound like I'm crazy" says the main character in the anime Final Approach. Dude, you just realized now? You've been holding a conversation with the paper bird you got from your ex-girlfriend, and you're STILL talking to yourself! But you're not the only one.

Voices in your head

(This entry is the fifth in a series. Be sure to catch them all! The first was on June 18th.)

Sad, but true: If you actually hear voices in your head or from the empty air around you, you are probably in trouble. At best you are seriously tired and need to get sleep as soon as possible. But if the voices are still there when you wake up, it's time to seek medical help. In fact, it is probably a bit late already, since there are usually visible changes to the brain when it comes that far. I'm really sorry about this. Those voices could have been so useful too. After all, they are for the rest of us.

Most of us don't actually hear voices, of course. But they are still there. Except they are not exactly voices. They are more like thoughts. If you try meditation or introspection in general, you are likely to notice a lot of disconnected thoughts that seem to bubble up from the subconscious all the time. Especially if you try to not think at all, just be quiet inside. It's like having a whole kindergarten in there: The moment you fall silent, you can hear them babble. (Most people just don't fall silent inside, that may be why they don't notice.)

I can see how this can creep out the unprepared student who just wanted to meditate a little to relax. Suddenly you start wondering if you are turning insane. No, you are not. This is perfectly normal. This is how the human brain works! It works by a joint effort from lots of small subroutines. C.G. Jung called them complexes, but I think a more modern name would be subroutines or applets, expressions we use about software on computers.

***

If you look around at your computer screen, it is likely that you'll find a clock there somewhere. If not, you can probably get to it pretty quickly. On your computer, the clock is an applet, a small application. It runs on its own, independent of what you normally do in the foreground. Whether you read a website, write a letter or play music: The clock keeps ticking. It is actually using the same resources as the rest of your programs, but it doesn't take a lot of them to just run a clock. You may have other applets as well, perhaps one that checks your mailbox every ten minutes to see if you have new mail. Perhaps another that turns on the screen saver if you haven't used the keyboard or mouse in a while. There is probably a small pack of them in there, and you don't think about it much. It's the same way with the brain, only more so.

For instance it is a well known fact that we men have a small piece of mind that scans our surroundings for human females. (There are some small design differences between men and women that make the search simpler, and the subroutine will lock on to these.) This applet will then pop up a message unless we are doing something with very high priority, like running for our lives. You can minimize the message but it maximizes again soon. You can shut it down a hundred times but like one of those crazy pop-up screens, it keeps popping back up.(*) And no, it's not just me, otherwise the industry would not use random women to sell cars, computers, pop-psych magazines and other random unrelated things. (I understand that women have similar applets but most of the month they scan the surroundings for food instead. Thus, the prevalence of cakes on women's magazines, and women on men's magazines.)

Of course we have lots of less obtrusive software running on our brain too, which keeps track of the time (albeit not as exactly as the computer clock), where we are, how much we have eaten and so on. (Fact: People with severe memory problems can eat a lot more than others. Part of the feeling of being full comes from our memories of having eaten recently, and only part from the body's immediate feedback.) And not least, we have background processes that keep track of our relationships with family, friends, enemies, and other people we know. What's more impressive, these processes automatically try to keep track of the relationships between these people as well! We make a kind of internal representation of each of them, an echo inside us, which we can then poll for its status. ("What would my father have done in this situation?" "How would the cutie at work react if he did this to her?") It is almost as if these people live inside us, and in dreams they can be animated to stunningly lifelike acts.

As you see, a large part of the brain's software is actually semi- independent smaller programs that automate much of our thinking. Most of us live on the surface of consciousness and only do a small part of our thinking for ourselves. Instead we depend on the small slaves that live underground in our subconscious. But it gets weirder. A LOT weirder.

***

The human brain comes network-enabled from the factory. Admittedly that's not broadband exactly, but it is still pretty efficient, especially now that we have language. Language lets us exchange symbols for concepts we already have, kinda like when you play an online game and the sound and pictures are actually stored on your own computer, only tokens are passed back and forth. The high compression rate makes language absolutely essential for humans to stay updated, although we also exchange a lot of non-verbal information by body language, facial expressions etc, some more than others.

But the conscious self is not nearly alone in being network-enabled. Our small subroutines will extract what they can from the data stream too, and synchronize with appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate) routines in the people around us. And these subconscious complexes don't necessarily harbor the same delusion as we, of being limited to only one body. So they can gather strength by working simultaneously in a lot of people, even though they are not the dominant function in each of them. This requires a faster connection than you can get over the Internet (yet), but if you have a large group of people, there is the chance that such a complex can orchestrate a response from so many people that it rises up to overwhelm the normal dominant personality. Thus lynch mobs, football arenas, revival tents etc. Afterwards, people may wonder what possessed them. But we are usually pretty good with coming up with explanations for our own behavior.

Usually it doesn't go quite that far. But the distributed processing I've mentioned before, much of that happens subconsciously in some or all of the people involved. When the finished result finally emerges, we are happy to take credit, but most of the work may have happened elsewhere.

***

Again, with the "open field of mind" – what in the past was called mysticism – the conscious self also surpasses the illusion of being bound to one body. It sees itself as the guardian of one particular body, yes, but also as the servant of a greater self that is not so bound. It is only partially a body-self, but partially a greater self that encompasses many bodies and integrates them seamlessly. The body is limited in time, and so the open field self is partially limited in time. But only partially. Although winter is coming to your individual body, a lot goes on forever... even when you can't exactly remember what.(*)

As my friend Skye Knighton said to me in a dream recently: "The amazing thing is that people see death as the end of everything, even though it is really just the end of their own small self." But most of us LIKE our small selves, we become quite attached to them. So it is only natural that we want to preserve them. In fact, quite a few of us would want to keep them indefinitely! Some religions offer this option. Is it really possible? And if so, would it be a good thing? Don't miss the next installment of "The End of the World": "And life eternal." Er.. God willing, of course!