Paul Boyer’s book on beliefs has set me thinking. He has hit upon an excellent idea. The idea is clustering. That indeed may be how our brain and hence our mind works.
The cells in our brain group themselves by function. This functional organization is visible if we were to examine the very structure of the brain itself. Our brain is composed of cells. They are nerve cells. Nerve cells are neurons each of which has a nucleus and a cell body whose surface is fitted with fibrous extensions called dendrites of varying lengths which enable them to connect to other nerve cells. Each neuron may have a few tens up to more than a hundred dendrites. If the dendrites do not make the necessary connections for prolonged periods, they wither and die. Nature is conservative and stingy. It does not wish to waste resources. "Use it or lose it" is a principle which Nature observes, scrupulously and relentlessly.
Neurons tend to group themselves into functional areas in the brain. Evolutionarily, the brain itself first developed as just little more than a tiny bulb sitting at the head of our spinal chord. In time it grew bigger and bigger. But even now, this primitve brain which some scientists call the "reptilian brain", is still concerned with the most basic functions of motion and operates largely automatically, through "reflexes" .Then we developed what some scientists have called the "mid-brain" or the "limbic system" or the "paleomammalian brain" which is concerned largely with mental functioning at a slightly more advanced level than mere "perception" and simple reflexes. It engages in a kind of very primitve and rough and ready screening. It’s screening is done through the generation of new and the recall of old but basic emotions for comparison. It is concerned with the generation and coding of memory with certain emotional values, leading to the formation of a primitive long term memory about certain emotionally significant events in the body’s own personal history (the function of the hippocampus). It determines whether the sensory information sent to it for further processing should be classified as beneficial or prejudicial, friend or foe or a mate (in the last function, the olfactory bulb may be heavily involvedbecause mammals rely heavily on scent identification to select mate and to determine whether their sexual partner is ready to engage in sex) whether other plants and animals are food or poison, to approach or to avoid. It determines whether we should be happy or whether to get addicted to a particular experience (the function of the nucleus accumens) or angry or fearful (the function of the amygdala). Then finally, we have the neocortex, our latest addition which is concerned with fine grained reflection on new, non-routine, complex, puzzling, confusing and ambiguous messages from the enivronment to enable us to assess and then to decide whether to further engage the mid-brain function in mobilizing our body in approaching or avoiding what our senses convey to us. And there are specific areas in our brain to enable us to process different kinds of information, those coming from our eyes, our ears, our mouth/tongue, our nose, our fingers or arms, toes or our legs and those coming from the various organs in our own body like our lungs, our heart, our liver, our kidney, our stomache, our intestines etc.
And for man, we have special areas in our temporal lobes concerned with language and logic (normally left temporal lobe function) and holistic perception (normally right temporal lobe function) and visual signals ( which help us distinguish the boundary of our body at points where it touch the external world in what has been called the visual orientation areas as well as the spatial location of various objects in the visual field called the visual cortex) .We also have specialised areas for recognizing human faces and the emotional expression thereon. What is truly remarkable is that there are complex neural pathways connecting each part of our brain to each part of our body and to each of our internal organs and also different segments within our brain itself so that we are able to constantly monitor changes both in the external environment and the internal environment within our own body, through a complex systems of feedback loops. Contrary to what scientists previously believe, our "memory" is not confined to any particular area of the brain. In a sense, every part of our brain has got "memory" function so that, although we have lost the use of our eyes, we can rely on our auditory memory, our smell memory, our taste memory, our touch memory to enable us to continue to function. And contrary to what scientists previously believe, very often, when one part of the brain is damaged, sometimes, it is possible for our brain to recruit other undamaged parts t of our brain o take over some or all of the function of the damaged parts. But it takes time for the brain to develop the necessary new neural pathways to handle the new assignment. This explains why physiotherapy takes time and also explains how temporarily lost functions may be restored after a period of time and further training. But we must never imagine that the different processing areas of the brain are exclusively devoted to particular function. They still retain limited ability to process all other kinds of information. It is just that they prefer or by long habit have been accustomed to process information of a certain type. That is why children have to learn how to use their brains: to build up all types of different kinds of neural pathways which will enable them to function "normally" in the complex place in which they live which we call the external world.
Thanks to our dendrites and thanks also the production of more than a hundred types of "neurotransmitters" which run through our blood circulation system which theoretically reaches to all the cells in each part of our body, nerve cells which have the relevant "receptacles" custom built to accept specific types of neurostransmitters(function of the hypothalamus and pituitary gland involved in maintaining homeostasis like heart beat, blood pressure etc), will either be activated or inhibited from acting along the relevant neural pathways to specific organs and tissues. In addition, such neurological chemicals ( or hormones) can be divided into facilitators and inhibitors and sometimes even facilitators of the inhibitors or inhibitors of the facilitators. Once certain circuits are activated, we then have the possibility of "feeling" different types of emotions which physiologically are merely the end results of the global state of the body e.g fear, anger ( which are physiologically similar). When we are afraid or angry, we either run, or fight. In both cases, we need to get our body into a state fit for such work . We need more oxygen to make it easier to burn up sugars to give us the additional energy needed. We close the pores of our skin, we stop all further digestion to conserve energy needed for the anticipated work. We relax the irises of our pupil to allow more light in so as to allow us to see better. We cause our heart to pump faster to speed up the supply of oxygen from our lungs into our blood stream. We raise our body temperature so that our muscles can function more efficiently.
Thus, when we think or say we are angry or fearful, what we are truly experiencing is the inference done by our "neocortex" upon the completion of its analysis of the global state of the various physiological data from different parts of our body sent to it by its different perceptual systems both internal and external, which conglomerate of states is then "sensed" or "felt" internally as the relevant "emotion". So emotion is a cognitive conclusion arrived at through the analysis of the a whole set of physiological data from different parts of our body. What is significant is that all these physiological data are "happening" simultaneously and until a final analysis has been done by the neo-cortex, involving in that proccess that part of the brain normally used for processing language, such physiological information remain just an inchoate mass of internal "sensations" without any "name". So in a sense an emotion does not truly "become" an "emotion" until the relevant part of the brain responsible for processing human language has given it a "name" in the form of a "word"e.g fear, anxiety, worry, delight, pleasure, joy, anger, envy, jealousy, greed, disappointment, despondency, despair or even numbness, . Hence we always "feel" an emotion before we "realize" the nature of such an emotion. All the processing prior to the "naming" of the relevant emotion goes on inside the various parts of our body and the relevant parts of our brain ‘silently" "autonomously" "unconsciously" or "sub-consciously"! Hence it is right to say that our body often "act’ before we "think" if we were to define thinking as a "conscious" brain activity! The physiological changes inside our body occur before we become "aware" of them. This is something completely contrary to what we normally think happens when we "have" an emotion. From the physiological point of view, an "emotion" is simply the "pre-action" state of our body! So in a sense, an emotion is what its etymology suggests, a particular state of our body which predisposes or gets our body to be ready for and which is designed to "move" the body into "action".
Not only does clustering occur only in the organization of the neurons in our brain in terms of their "functions", our memory or more properly, our "memories" , too also occur in clusters. When we recall a particular scene in the past, our memory may be triggered through any one of a number of sensory modes. Thus, when we walk past a bakery and the smell of fresh buttered cookies were to waft through our nose, not only will our memory of past butter cookies be recalled, we may recall a particularly pleasant occasion in the past when we were with one of our middle school girl friends when she prepared the cookies for us on a beautiful summer day and we experienced that smell of warm butter cookies under that apple tree in her garden when she brought them out piping hot from the oven walking out from the kitchen door with snow white lace curtains and we will also remember how she looked so tenderly into our eyes and fed us the first cookie from that tray with her dainty finger whose skin felt so smooth, to the sound of that beautiful song "Vincent" being played through her portable radio lying on a nearby bench under the sun and we thought we were in heaven but that in her hurry, the kitchen door was left open thus allowing her cat to jump in to catch that mouse on the kitchen table and in the process broke her mother’s favourite souvenir vase, causing that girl friend to be scolded by her mom so fiercely that she cried for three days and we remember also the enormous suffering it caused us in trying to console her. Joy followed by fear and then sorrow. Thus one smell will trigger not just our "scent memory" but also our visual memory, our "face" memory, our event memory and our emotional memories associated with that scent , that scene and subequent scenes. Our memory does not work in isolation. Our memories always work in clusters!
Perhaps because our memories work in clusters, memories are always mixed, unsteady and a bit vague or confusing, mixed with pleasure and pain and often we do not "know" precisely how we feel. Perhaps because our memories work in clusters, it is difficult to predict whether or when we will or will not remember various incidents in our past life. Whether or not we will remember a particular incident or scene will depend on the relative strength of the memory as well as the strength of the stimulus from the external environment which triggers or cues a particular sensory mode . The stronger the original memory which was coded in the past by the hippocampus for its emotional significance, the smaller and weaker will be the energy required to reactivate that particular memory and vice versa. Thus one memory, whether it be visual. audio, olfactory, tactile or emotional will always bring in its train the whole train of memories in different sensory modes, in an undifferentiated cluster and never in isolation! Which memory in which of the sensory mode will return first will depend on the strength of the memory mode competing for attention to emerge from the dark sub-conscious background into the light of awareness, in the foreground of our consciousness. We simply have no way to tell before hand which of the memory embedded in the neural pathways of which sensory mode will become out the winner in this noisy competition between the different sensory mode (either internal or external ) for attention. The bird of memory does not come alone. It always comes with birds of other species. As to which bird will be the first past the winning post of awarness, no one can tell in advance. We will only know after it has become the winner. But then, it does not keep that winning position for long. Its victory will always be short-lived! The constant juggling for being the top dog never ceases!
I have long held what I called the "search light" theory of awareness. I imagine that in the sea of sensations and memories, there are little ships each carrying a different kind of memory cargo and each travelling silently along its own accustomed routes at its own particular pace. They operate in the dark, invisible to our "eyes" (our awareness). At the side of this sea, on a suitably high mountain , there is a light tower from which a search light periodically beams out its bundle of light to survey its surrounding. This is equivalent to the monitoring function of our brain. Only when the search light lands on the little cargo boats will they become visible to our consciousness at which time, it will open its hold and display its own "memory cargo" for inspection and depending on its contents, it may in turn cause the search light to be directed to another ship travelling along a different route. This view has since been confirmed by scientists in their studies of the structure and function of human consciousness . In that chaotic sea of sensations and memories, there are constantly reference from the present to the past and vice versa. From time to time, there may be huge storms and violent upheavals which toss the smaller and bigger crafts of memories about. Such upheavels may be caused by an external event such as a huge meteor crashing into the sea ( e.g when a sudden traumatic event happens in the external world and impacting us) or when a deep sea volcano erupts. ( when the source of the energy came from within the indvidual’s own consciosness such as the evocation or triggering of powerful emotional memories by certain environmental cues e.g strong love or hatred or anger or jealousy or fear) . When we are thus overcome by such powerful memories or emotions, it then becomes most difficult for our neo-cortex and rational faculties to do its "normal" work of analyses and assessment of data.
However, through meditation, we may observe how this constant competition between the memories of different sensory modes actually come and go, how they arise and then die away in the constant flux which constitutes the raging seas of our conscious thought. One of the chief purposes of Buddhist meditation is to train us through constant practice to be aware of the true nature of our conscious thought ie. their instability and constant flux. It trains up and develops our ability to monitor our own "reactions" to the multitude of stimuli from the external world and from internal memories or sensations working through multiple systems operating simultaneously in real time. Such "awareness" is like turning on the "monitor" button of a tape recorder which gives us instantaneously the audio signals which are being recorded from another sound source at the moment of such recording. The ultimate aim of Buddhist practice is to arrive at a state in which we achieve full awareness of our thoughts as and when they occur and to learn to reduce the flow of our "noisy" thoughts and emotions to a minimum so that in the ideal state, our mind becomes as quiet and still as the surface of a winter lake in a windless night and yet we are fully alert to everything which is going on, both externally and internally. When all the buzz of our thoughts have calmed down completely, then only shall we see and feel and experience in person that pristine clarity and peace which the Buddhists say has always been there, awaiting to be discovered and which some call "Nirvana." or "Nibbana"
akt's space 