Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

Freud is the known cartographer of the unconscious world. He compared the different layers of consciousness to the surface of Earth and specified deep valleys, high mountaintops and in-between plains, hills and craters. The mountains, which are illuminated by the sun, represent the contents we are aware of. The valleys represent the darkness of the unconscious. In between the mountains and the valleys, there are plains, which represent the subconscious. The subconscious contains contents that are on the edge of consciousness but have yet to cross it (preconsciousness). Sometimes they “climb” up and are exposed to the glowing sun of consciousness, and sometimes they remain in the shadows, untouched by the rays of the sun of consciousness. Some relate the effect of contents from the plains area to the psychological sense of knowing that the information exists in our brain but is not available to us at this specific moment, as in the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon.

  Experimental psychology is like an inverted periscope that enables us to glimpse, under the water surface of consciousness, into the unconscious depths of our soul.

  Hunger Burns a Hole in the Pocket—an Example of the Subconscious in Action

  One should not go hungry to the supermarket. This street wisdom derives from the fact that when we are hungry, we tend to estimate our needs inaccurately and purchase many more groceries than we really need. Our conscious decisions are affected by our physiological state, which triggers unconscious thinking, which trickles into our conscious thinking.

  The Invisible Hat

  Edward De Bono, who wrote with considerable talent about thinking processes, compared six different types of thinking to hats of various colors that we are wearing while we are thinking. The white hat represents fact-based thinking; the red hat represents intuition-based, emotional thinking; the black hat represents critical thinking that emphasizes shadowed differences; the yellow hat represents positive thinking that emphasizes illuminated aspects; the green hat represents creative thinking, which “shatters conventions”; and the blue hat enforces the rules on the various thinking modes. A seventh hat may be added: the colorless hat as a representative of unconscious thinking. As this type of thinking, it is invisible, thus colorless, but it most certainly exists.

  In order for the seventh hat to truly represent the wide scope of this type of thinking, the hat should be wide brimmed, like a sombrero.

  The Bricks Composing the Tower of Thinking

  The inner layout, which enables us to think, is mostly invisible to the eye of consciousness. Usually, we are aware of the external products of our thinking, such as ideas that are uttered out loud, written messages, actions (think on the end before you begin), and problem solving. The bricks from which the tower of thinking is built are made of different raw materials. Some of them are made of words, some are made of images, and some are made of senses that are hidden from the eye of consciousness.

  The allegedly nonmaterial thoughts leave a distinct material signature behind them.

  The composition of the coalition of the brain parliament, which formulates the thoughts, constantly changes (even more frequently than the Italian government).

  The thinking bricks are piled in a modular pattern—the fruits of contribution of different brain areas.

  The first experiences build mental scaffoldings for the conceptual worldview. The emotional experiences we experienced at the beginning of our life leave their imprint, which is learned intuitively, such as the verbal and nonverbal dialogue between mother and baby.

  “A rational city of thought” is built in accordance with some rules. One must follow the building rules so that the towers of thought will not collapse under the heavy burden of reality. Freethinking allows for more liberal rules, so that even “castles in the air” are sometimes built.

  “No, no, you are not thinking, you are just being logical,” said Niels Bohr to Albert Einstein.

  Although it is clear that Einstein’s brain was a master of thinking, and not only of logic, this saying reflects the insight that thinking is more than using one’s logic. An additional, central component of its formation is emotion, which is mixed with the products of logic and is weaved through them, usually inseparably.

  We tend to “speak thoughts”—to conceptualize verbally. Words are the central bricks of the towers of conscious thinking, but they are not the only bricks.

  The weight of non-verbal thinking in the cognitive sphere is controversial, though no one denies its existence.

  Sometimes, the products of thinking are improved as a result of using both conceptualization of words and conceptualization of visual images and images perceived by other senses such as the auditory sense, the sense of smell, and the sense of touch.

  Verbal conceptualization is suitable for representing certain conceptual worlds. Nonverbal conceptualizations are more suitable for other conceptual worlds.

  The Stork’s Nest of Thoughts, or How Thoughts are Born

  Thought is created in the virtual gap between the neurons—the thinking cells.

  The manifestation of thinking products is a behavioral output (externalized product), a pattern of silent thought (internalized product) or various combinations of the two.

  In a common scenario of multilayered thinking, the initial conceptual skeleton often represents the valued core—for example, altruism-oriented thinking. On top of this layer, an oppositional layer, which considers cost-benefit analysis, is laid. The behavior is the result of a clash—the vector that wins the argument in the brain’s parallelogram of forces.

  While we manage to preserve conceptual vectoriality, in the sense of directionality and focus, the threads of thinking are woven in the loom of our brain to create a thinking cocoon that represents a regulated, thorough, and reasoned process.

  Genealogy (generations’ lineage) of thought traces the thoughts from which it was born, thoughts that are its relatives, and its offspring thoughts.

  Usually it is easier to become a collector of thoughts than a producer of thoughts. All of us represent a mix of the two accumulating-knowledge approaches. Thoughts collection is an approach based on thinking creatures that were born in another brain’s conceptual womb and which are collected in the archive of our insights. Self-production of thoughts is a more demanding, difficult process, and our brain tends to minimize it.

  Practical Wisdom

  The practical aspects of wisdom (guiding knowledge) are based on knowledge of the world (descriptive wisdom). Wisdom provides us with devices that we use to solve problems, in the sense of mental tools to identify patterns. On the basis of methods of coping that proved to be successful and, alternately, in light of the lessons that were learned from methods that proved to be unsuccessful, we shape our thoughts and responses to given stimuli.

  We Think as We Act

  Organization of thinking processes is similar to organization of movement. The brain, as a frugal artist, relies on structural and operational infrastructure, which is similar to thought in the spirit, and to the act as a material manifestation.

  In Parkinson’s disease, there is failure in the output of the basal ganglia, which are structures of clusters of neurons in the brain core. The disrupted output reaches the motor cortex, in which plans of performing movement are formed, and leads to prominent slowing down of movement. Thinking processes that are slower than the norms (bradyphrenia) might also be part of Parkinson’s, in addition to slow movements (bradykinesia), which characterize the disease. This phenomenon possibly supports the assumption that thought, as movement, also contributed by the motor cortex. The flow chart of performing a motor task probably also serves the formation of thought as a conceptual sequence, as a motor task is formed from a sequence of separate movements.

  The Brain’s Chimera

  We are hybrids: a little reptile, a little mammal, a little ape, and a little human, in the ideal sense. The relative proportions of the mix ingredients change from one person to the next, or, as the joke goes, the ape is the ancestor of mankind, but some people demonstrate it mo
re than others.

  Our thoughts are also heterogenic and derive from the various ingredients in various mixes.

  A clash between conflicting thinking patterns is like a clash between two tectonic plates. It creates an earthquake at the halls of thinking, a situation that is known to us as “cognitive dissonance.” Other people, like us, are not made of one piece, and they are also trapped in a jungle of conflicting desires that routinely fight one another in the arena of their brain, as they do in the arena of our brain.

  The Eternal Flame of Thoughts

  The fountain of thoughts never ceases to flow, like the stories of Scheherazade; they never end, since her life depends on them.

  A thought follows its former thought in an associative course, and a conceptual slalom is created in the tracks of the feedback loops of the neural network. One association resurrects the other in a repetitive pattern.

  Our brain moves across the continuum between associative laxity and strict adherence to reality (over concretization).

  The mention of the smallest piece of information might activate the galloping train of thoughts, whose railways are created in real time while it gallops. Most of them cross the territories of the unconscious, and a few of them cross the territories of active attention. This process was well described by writer José Saramago: “one muse leads to another, and many a time we reach the next muse without paying attention to the path that connected them. Like walking from one riverbank to the next on a covered bridge. We walk without seeing around us—crossing a river without knowing it exists.”

  Sometimes the maps of our thoughts interface, edge to edge, and enable us to navigate. At other times, our thoughts are formed as a recursive reflection of one another when a basic thought is contained within a more complex, detailed thought.

  The Time Arrow of Thought

  The choreography of the thoughts’ dance takes place in the dimensions of time and space (the involved brain areas and the timing of their operation).

  The birth of thinking products does not take place simultaneously with the stimulus that allows their creation. Thought is formed at the interval between stimulus and response: between the water flowing from Archimedes’ bathtub and the crown, which is not made of pure gold—between the test question and its answer.

  The chronoarchitecture of thought (the pattern of its development along the time axis) is unique to each of our thoughts. Constant practicing of information processing of a certain type, however, will allow us to learn lessons from the past and shorten the processing processes when a similar problem is presented again.

  Through thinking, we try to grant order and meaning to the reality representations in our head. Sometimes our brain does that by enforcing patterns, such as single directionality of time and cause-and-affect relations on the world of phenomena.

  The consistency of the flow of thoughts is like legato playing, in which the toe of a certain sound touches the heel of another. Sometimes it seems that our thoughts follow one another, as in a ceaseless continuum.

  In the spirit of hegemony among the various clocks’ hands of our body, there is a method of relaxation that aims to synchronize the rhythm of thinking (the part which can be consciously guided) with other selected body rhythms, such as the pace of breathing. An example is a thought that is designed to last three cycles of inhaling–exhaling and the like.

  When the stork of thoughts does not reach its destination, the thought it carries will not be born.

  In most cases, we cope with thought in its completed form, but our worldview does not include those cases in which the thought is not visited by the stork, which is supposed to carry it to the world of completed thoughts. This type of thought remains unripe, and sometimes it is dropped from the womb of thinking as a stillborn, and we are not even aware of the attempt to form it.

  The art of writing involves the art of erasing, and, as a metaphor, contemplation of a deep thought involves desertion of numerous unripe thoughts that did not turn into a deep thought.

  A Thought as Promoting Itself

  A neural pathway (neural network) becomes stronger each time a thought passes in its route and each time the behavioral skill to which it is encoded is performed in practice. These are as metaphorical feet that tread its course. The more frequent the marching is, the wider it becomes, and it might turn from a narrow goat trail into a broad, paved highway.

  These findings might bear moral complexity. The thought police might claim that thinking about a felony is the first step of performing it in practice, since it relies on the same neural infrastructure, and that it might be required to monitor our thoughts in a preventative manner. Such a disturbing argument might be raised in the future, when there will be machines capable of decoding our thoughts.

  Attempts to ask people to consciously block thoughts about a certain subject often lead to, in a paradoxical manner, an amplification of the flow of thoughts about this subject. In a study in which a group of people was asked not to think about white bears, and to describe, out loud, the thoughts that appear on the screen of their consciousness in real time, five or six white bears walked peacefully along the subjects’ field of thoughts. Thus, for instance, the neuroses entrench themselves in the trenches of our brain as a neural map that deepens its roots by force of habit.

  Thoughts and actions in practice intensify the tendency to think them or repeat them in the future. This fact constitutes a neurologic basis for the saying “Examine your thoughts—they become words. Examine your words—they become actions. Examine your actions—they become habits. Examine your habits—they become your personality. Examine your personality—it becomes your destiny” (paraphrased from the Upanishads—the Hindi scriptures).

  Thinking Etched in DNA

  Thoughts shape genes and genes’ products (proteins), and vice versa.

  The pattern of activation and inactivation of genes, which exist in the nucleus of the neuron, and as a result of the genes’ products, the proteins, is affected by our thoughts and our actions and by our various experiences in the world. The thought and the accompanying emotional stimulation are capable of using their fingers to press the activation and shutdown switches of different genes and, by doing so, to change our brain’s anatomy from the micro to the macro level. Constant dialogue takes place between “soft” thinking and the strict genetic information etched in the DNA. As a result, thinking as an action is capable of stirring up dormant genes and, alternately, to bring about unemployment of active genes (thus the epigenetic impact on genetic agents).

  Thoughts have biochemical and anatomic manifestations. In this sense, thoughts that supposedly lack materiality have a clear material manifestation. Such an understanding leads psychology to graze in the pasture fields of biology.

  In the animal kingdom, there are many examples for behavioral conditionings etched in the DNA. For instance, the cuckoo nestling that has just hatched immediately pushes away the other eggs from the nest that is forced to host it. In the twilight days of its life, the salmon fish, impressively, navigates itself to the exact same stream in which it was born, traveling thousands of kilometers on its way.

  Studies that focus on human behaviors show that a considerable part of our behavior derives from genetic encoding at the DNA level. In fact, we are, in a sense, evolution robots encased in a biological straitjacket—thus the importance of emphasizing the non-programmed (or, at least, less-programmed) functions and maximal usage of our unique human capabilities pertaining to our intelligence.

  The Wisdom of the Swarm—as a Whole Bigger than the Sum of its Parts

  In the case of life forms that live in colonies, such as ants, the wisdom of the whole (in this case, the entire swarm) is bigger than the sum of its parts (the wisdom of individual ants).

  The collective wisdom minimizes the levels of freedom of individual thinking.

  Preferring innate rigidity over acquired flexibility characterizes the behavioral patterns of colony insects like ants and bees. The
role of each individual at the colony is dictated from birth. The rigid programming, etched in the DNA, does not allow any freedom of independent behavior that deviates from the genes’ dictation.

  For example, the cooperative lifestyle in burrows of ants’ nests and beehives’ cells is a result of accumulation of behaviors etched in the DNA of these creatures, which structures their brain according to this unified path. The gathering ant is not equipped with reproductive organs, and it is destined to act as patroller, gatherer of food, warrior, or nanny of the queen ant’s offspring, having no offspring of its own.

  “The ant’s handcuffs” partially handcuff our brain, as well.

  The wisdom of the collective serves, in a way, as mental handcuffs that reduce the levels of freedom and decrease behavioral options. The ants and the bees, in many senses, are DNA programmed. Their wisdom is mainly systemic wisdom.

  The genetic programming is, in this sense, a very tight biological straitjacket, and, at least to some extent, we are also born wearing it.

  Reincarnation and genetics: Various folk traditions around the globe refer to reincarnation, such as the reincarnation of the grandmother in her granddaughter. Some will say that, in western societies, it is referred to as genetic heredity.

  With respect to pairs of identical twins, the level of identicalness partially depends on the stage at which the common fertilized egg was split. The question is, to what extent does a single soul look at us through two separate sets of eyes? To what extent do they share brotherhood of thoughts?

  Adaptation that was preserved due to neural Darwinism, such as preserved representations, is also reflected in action modes related to the function of memory and thoughts.