Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

  The Stuff that Dreams are Made of . . .

  Some claim that dreams are riddles that our subconscious provides to our consciousness, as Sigmund Freud said in his book The Interpretation of Dreams on the verge of the twentieth century (1900). Others claim that dreams are like a dish of fragments of information, pieces of memories and chunks of fantasy, and the boiling of the mix is actually the accompanying soundtrack. Many believe that when we dream we continue to correspond with the events we experienced during wakefulness.

  The parade of additional hypotheses regarding the nature of our dreams is a long one.

  By the time we reach the age of seventy, we accumulate about fifty thousand hours of dreaming, which add up to five and a half years. A considerable part of our life takes place in this forgotten deposit of creativity.

  Timeless Dream

  Night dreams are characterized by a low level of activity in the prefrontal cortex.

  Accordingly, one of the things that characterize dreams is a chaotic, zigzagging course of the arrow of time, since this particular brain area is in charge of assimilating the reality-matching time pattern in our experiences. This might explain the “mix of tenses” and the merge of past, present, and future into a single dreamy moment.

  A Bad Dream

  The sleep disorder known as RBD (REM sleep behavior disorder) takes place at the REM stage in which we dream about 90 percent of our dreams. The disorder is characterized by moving of the body, talking, or screaming while dreaming, as a reflection of active physical participation of the dreamer in the dream experience. Total flaccidity of skeletal muscles (atony), which is normal at this stage, is disrupted. Some might claim that the purpose of flaccidity is to prevent us from participating physically in the dream experience, which might lead to physical injury. Due to the disruption, the muscles in our body can move and may cause self-injury or injury to those who share our bed.

  This sleep disorder was found to be in correlation with future development of degenerative cerebral diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.

  A faulty function of neural pathways, originating in the brain stem, is sometimes first expressed as RBD sleep disorder, which foresees degenerative cerebral disorder that is likely to appear within ten years or more from the appearance of RBD.

  Post-Love Dreams

  The cocktail of neural mediators (neurotransmitters) in the period after lovemaking often brings about a sense of physical fatigue along with mild emotional dullness. In my dreamy experience, on the second night “after,” we experience “vivid dreams”—dreams that are perceived as more real than ordinary ones. These dreams are painted in intense colors, as the colors of the reality, and often leave a deeper imprint on our personal dream diary. It is probably related to the acute change in the cerebral mix of the neurotransmitters that is formed during love making and leads an acute change in the brain activity pattern afterward. The journey of the neurotransmitters swings back to the balance point.

  Personal Perspective on Brain Function at Night

  Personal observation: Many a time, the hour between three and four o’clock in the morning is considered the “dark hour of the soul.” At this time, my brain tends to experience gloomy hyper-realism. Perhaps the one that composes the emotional soundtrack played at this particular time is the right hemisphere—particularly the right frontal lobe, which has a tendency to interpret reality pessimistically. It might be the reason for the fact that people who suffer from depression and anxiety sometimes tend to wake up around this time and find it difficult to fall asleep again. Later on, toward awakening, our mood usually improves and our interpretation of the very same event is usually more optimistic. Perhaps the left frontal lobe, which tends to beautify reality and interpret it more optimistically, is the one that induces the emotional climate at this hour.

  A sleeping pattern in which one-half of the brain is asleep while the other half is awake, alternatively, is called “unihemispheric slow-wave sleep” (USWS). This pattern is known in the animal kingdom and was observed among various animals: terrestrial animals, sea animals, and birds. This sleeping pattern was documented, inter alia, among dolphins whose hemispheres are asleep and awake alternatively during sleep. The teleological explanation to this phenomenon might be that dolphins, as cetaceans, must regularly bring themselves to the surface of the water in order to fill their lungs with air.

  Perhaps a soft version of this “hemispheric dominance” pattern exists in the human brain during sleep, since, among human beings, there is no phase in which one hemisphere is fully awake while the other is fully asleep. It is possible, however, that during human sleep the two brain hemispheres take alternate shifts, and at every given moment one of them is more dominant with regard to setting the brain agenda. In other words, the mix of “hemispheric dominance” is relative; there is never a complete shutting down of one hemisphere while the other hemisphere is fully active but, rather, intense activity of one hemisphere at a time, like a seesaw that tilts to one of the ends alternatively. This supposition regarding relative “hemispheric dominance” during night sleep has not been satisfactorily proven yet.

  The Assumption Regarding the Nightly Journey of the Emotion Pendulum

  According to this assumption, the nightly tour in the land of emotions starts at the anxiety and melancholy regions and, later on, toward awakening, reaches the districts of positive emotions. Although it is not an “organized tour” that ends in the districts of happiness, and sometime the course is reversed, it seems that most of the time there is a basic tendency to visit brain areas that are more prone to optimistic interpretation of reality toward awakening as preparation for another day in the battlefront of our life.

  The poet David Avidan once wrote, “A man wakes up in the morning, but the morning does not wake up within the man.” Perhaps this line reflects a failure in the mechanism of reducing glumness toward awakening.

  Emotional Sunrise

  It seems that just before sunrise, a wave of neurotransmitters, comprised primarily of serotonin and dopamine, washes over our brain. The serotonin and dopamine are the main ingredients in the “pre-awakening” cocktail that promotes serenity and prepares us for the struggles of the new day that await us beyond the awakening.

  Chapter 2: The Perception

  Information Filters

  A Tango of the Senses and Brain Interpretation—Forever

  The philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed in his book The Critique of Pure Reason that “The mind can feel nothing; the senses can think nothing; only through their unity knowledge comes into existence.” His insights contradicted the popular approach of the time, according to which the manifestations of phenomena march along the paths of senses toward our brain, in which they are perceived as is. Kant was among the first who believed that the sensorial input is routinely affected by the brain’s interpretive attitude; thus, our understanding of the world does not represent the world phenomena as itself accurately, and various biases are built into the manner our brain perceives the world.

  The Blessing of Forgetfulness

  The spectrum of input patterns related to the world of phenomena is infinite. Our brain, which is finite in many senses, will meet just a fraction of these patterns; thus, it is important that, during its term on planet Earth, it conceptualizes and encodes the patterns most significant to it among the ones it comes across. This is why the information filters that are built-in within us are so important. At any given moment, showers of perception impressions fall onto our brain. They are perceived by the senses, which mediate between the world phenomena and our internal being.

  The perception impressions mostly evaporate once they meet the brain cells as part of the strict filtering process that is meant to protect our pattern of useful knowledge. The reason for this is that most perception impressions are totally irrelevant or have “low relevance coefficient” for us. Information filters are like the doormen of consciousness, and they prevent useless impressions from inviting themse
lves into the lounge of our consciousness. The brain, in this sense, is the biological parallel of the coastal lands in the Netherlands, which are protected by high dams so they will not become flooded or immersed below sea level. When it comes to our brain, it is about a sea of perception impressions that are irrelevant for our function.

  Malthus in the Era of Information Overload

  We are swamped in information deriving from all over, and it seems that this information can be referred to according to the Malthusian principle. It was the economist Thomas Malthus who predicted that, while world population grows in geometrical progression, and, on the other hand, the food-production rate increases only in arithmetic progression, we are doomed to become victims of hunger’s disaster. Information, as a whole, increases in geometrical progression, but the part that constitutes “useful information” seems to be increasing in arithmetic progression, and we keep on drowning in the sea of information that floods our consciousness. In this sense, it seems that it will be necessary to reduce the size of the filter’s holes through which the brain selects the “useful information.”

  Reality Mining

  The brain is a system that sorts and processes perception impressions in a selective pattern.

  The encounter between information and neurons creates the patterns of neural networking that serve as the infrastructure for our unique worldview. In the pattern of creating reality within reality, our brain mines from the mine of impressions, which contains myriad of nature’s phenomena, the selected perceptual impressions in order to achieve a reliable picture of reality. This is how our brain attempts to establish a reliable, linear and predictable story out of the zigzagging concoction of nature’s phenomena, which is full of contradictions, oddities, and an abundance of surprises.

  The pluralism of reality manifestations is reflected in the multiple combinations of the “languages of senses,” which are used to describe it. That is due to the fact that our brain is “multilingual” in terms of sensorial experiences.

  Our brain is capable of conceptualizing an experience with a changing, multisensory mix including visual, auditory, and textural representations and, sometimes, even through a monosensory representation pattern. On the other hand, the language of description (in the sense of the manner of sensory experiencing) suitable for a certain condition is often nontransferable into a different language of description (in the sense of a different manner of experiencing), since, as in poetry, it is “lost in translation” from language to language. Our awareness of conceptualization qualities, which cannot be transferred from one language of expression to another, leads to a more “accurate” mediation of reality.

  We record selective impressions from the internal and external world of phenomena. At least three layers mediate and filter the world of phenomena on the way to our consciousness. One filter is built into the sampling limitations of our senses. The second filter is built into our perceptional conceptualization capabilities, and the third one is formed in focusing our attention on selective world phenomena and derives from our flexibility with respect to choosing the object of attention-focusing.

  In other words, at least three filters stand between the external world of phenomena and our consciousness. We have only partial control over the first filter. The size of the sensory-input window can be increased, to a certain extent, by practicing using our senses. We also have partial control over the second filter, which organizes the perception of the sensory input, since part of it is determined genetically. We have more control over the third filter, however, which is formed by tuning the focus of attention, since this is partially a voluntary process.

  As aforementioned, an interpretive framework of the world is assimilated in the raw sensory input. The input is sampled through a narrow sampling slot, whose size is determined by the limitations of our senses and through which only selective aspects of the world of phenomena are reflected. The sensory impressions themselves go through yet another layer of filtering of the brain’s interpretive framework. Thus, the mediation of the “world” to our perception is biased, and, as such, there is always a risk of a “broken telephone syndrome,” as in the game in which a sentence is whispered from mouth to ear in a human chain; when it meets the ear of the last participant, it is mostly different from the original message.

  The ability to select the significant input out of the mixture of sensory input perceptions derives from an inherent capability that improves through practice and becomes a skill of directing the focus of attention along with the “sensory attention.” It can be done voluntarily, semi-voluntarily, or involuntarily with regard to pieces of information that are “suspected” to be more relevant than others.

  The sensory-information-processing brain areas react selectively to stimulations and enable us to separate the sheep from the goats—the words of conversation from the noise of passing vehicles and screams of sirens.

  The focusing-of-attention stage is the stage in which our approach to life is manifest—for instance, a tendency to see the glass as half full (or, unfortunately, half-empty). As long as we do not compromise the truth and ignore significant facts, we have mental latitude to select the more positive interpretation of the situation and to focus on the positive aspects of reality.

  Attention-focusing, when done involuntarily, is formed as a subconscious process.

  Fences to Knowledge

  The current borders of our knowledge do not allow us to go beyond the perception “shell” and to prove the existence of a certain entity in a manner that does not depend on our perceptual conceptualization ability. The organizing framework of perception creates borderlines that delimit the information pieces that can be perceived in our brain.

  As aforementioned, we glance at the world through a narrow keyhole. The elements that appear before our brain pass through at least three filtering curtains. All of our world knowledge relies on these patterns in time and space, which penetrate through the keyholes, and the three filtering curtains.

  There is constant mutuality between the three filters. They influence each other’s filtering pattern. Thus, an irregular sensory input will capture our attention, and it will be able to recalibrate our “world perception” pattern.

  The perceptual conceptualization system calibrates, to a certain extent, the diameter of the filter holes of the sensory input. One of the experiments conducted in this field demonstrated the mutual influence when an irregular input induces prolonged perceptual changes. The experiment showed that the visual worldview of people who wear prism glasses, through which one sees the world’s image upside down (upper becomes lower, and vice versa) for a certain period of time changes the visual worldview of their brain, which learns to perform “inverted” processing. The new perception enables them to see the world as standing on its feet and not on its head. Once they remove the glasses, however, their brain perceives the world upside down once again, and only after a restorative learning period it returns to seeing the world as standing on its feet.

  The level of selectivity of our perception is expressed as the diameter of the holes in a fishing net in the following fable.

  A fisherman throws his fishing net into the sea. The diameter of the holes in the net is four centimeters. The fisherman notices that the measurements of the sea creatures that are caught in the net daily are always larger than four centimeters. He conducts multiple observations and concludes that the diameter of all sea creatures is always larger than four centimeters. The fisherman attributed his findings and the following erroneous conclusion to the sea creatures and did not even consider attributing them to the fishing net. Metaphorically speaking, there are built-in biases in the nets spread by our senses that are intended to fish the world’s phenomena, and it makes some of the world manifestations drop from the grip of our mental perception.

  Constant Gap

  There will always be a gap between “all there is” in the world and our knowledge about “all there is”—a gap between the actual entity
and the entity as it is reflected in our consciousness.

  In the language of the philosopher, it might be said that an eternal gap exists between the epistemological (in the sense of nature as perceived by our consciousness) and the ontological (in the sense of nature as is).

  Coping with our world’s challenges should rely on the appreciation that our world perception and our understanding of the world will always be partial. We always choose selected aspects of the world (often unconsciously), and on the basis of these we compose a comprehensive picture of reality. The compatibility between this picture and reality is on a spectrum that ranges from high compatibility to total incompatibility (when the reality testing component is impaired).

  The built-in lack of ability to have a complete knowledge derives from the fact that each point of view dictates sieving part of the information, and what we have is actually a selective observation, which is partial by nature. If we dive into the molecular level of the material, we will expel from our observation field its macro characteristics, such as color and texture. For example, if we focus on this level when we look at water, we will get two gases—hydrogen and oxygen—which lack the “watery” characteristics we are familiar with from our “natural-resolution” level in the world.

  Reality Testing

  Even when we try to document reality phenomena in an asymptotic accurate manner, the real reality seal can’t be imprinted in our perception of the experience.