Busy brain

I did not sleep well last night. There was no major feeling of dis-ease but there was a mild background mood with traces of low self esteem and of me being a chancer.

I watched bits of movies on YouTube but they were not active enough to hold my attention.  I was able to be the nonjudgemental witness most of the time except there were shades of the witness in all the carriages of the thought train - so focus was slight and it changed rapidly. 

This piece of writing is going very slowly. There is a tendency to drift off on a mixed bag of thought trains.

There is a mild inclination to make an index of the more common thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM). But that is not easy as most of them are shortlived. And, while I try to do justice to one thought train, many others pass unrecorded.

A niggle at the moment is that I have misplaced my tablet. It will be in the house somewhere because I have not been out. It is usually my glasses that get misplaced and many precious minutes are dedicated to searching in likely and then in unlikely places.

There is guilt for not having a specific place for everything. Sometimes I put this down to laziness; at other times to the emergence of my inner anarchist. I have a problem with rules and often feel that they are carried over from my early days in the family. This is associated with feelings of joy in knowing that there is no forward planning group in evolution. 

Then there are thoughts about parenting. New born babies have enormous potential but it is rarely realised. Biological evolution is not aiming for peace and love. The bottom line is to give rise to more and more viable genes, individuals and social groups.

As a childless school teacher I could get angry about the way kid’s are socialised into being wage slaves and consumers of everchanging fads and fashions. More money than sense. “A feel and his siller are seen pairtit.”

There is need for changing minds and brains. We have three variables to play with – nature, nurture and chance. And we can be more or less mindful while playing with them.

It is useful to think of three modes of evolution – cosmic, biological and cultural. The cultural mode is possible because of the development of the pre frontal context. Tinkering with the brain has led to more consciousness in the mind: this includes the concept of a self with a need to understand and control the world. Many modern people are “neurotic nihilists living in an existential vacuum.”

SO – a busy mind. But what I have written is a tiny part of all the stuff that passed through the mind while writing and this was an even tinier part of the underlying unconscious churn.

A mind of its own

Once upon a time even clever people believed that the earth was flat and heavier than air machines could not fly. There was a lot of myth and magic in those days. These days most clever people, and many of the not so clever ones, know better.

On the bright side it is never too late for people to change their minds and beliefs. The only constant thing is change. Scientists no longer pretend to have embraced the real reality. What they have is the best working hypotheses in the light of evidence presently available.

Note in passing that the good and great, our elders and betters, the ruling elite, fear that changes of view will loosen their hold on power. Free thinkers are banished, tortured and burned at the stake. The streets are knee deep in blood and the chaos of smart bombs.

The human world view remained largely unchanged during the time that we were hunters and gatherers. It began to change more quickly when speech evolved and when settled farming became the normal way of life. This caused distrust within and between different groups of labour. Then there was the mechanisation of agriculture and the clearance of people from the land to be wage slaves in foul factories.

The big change in the last 50 years or so has been in the growing sophistication of our appreciation of the structure and function of the brain. New thinking stems from evolutionary psychology which guides multi-disciplinary consilience from sub sets of many new ways of thinking in the hard and psycho-social fields. Various scanning machines enable neurologists to locate functions of the different parts of the brain. Mindfulness meditation is also coming to be understood as a powerful tool for managing the mindbrain.

The grander point is that the mindbrain is (a) constantly figuring the relevance of signals entering through the sense organs and (b) creating fast reactions and slower responses. Short term and long term memories are crucial for maintaining a coherent world view. Much of the hard wiring that first evolved in our ancestral fish and reptiles is still with us.

The role of the self-conscious remains a mystery. Being all that ‘we’ know it is easy to believe that it is all there is. But it is very much a bit player, a tiny unit that appears after decisions have been made in the unconscious. Mindfulness meditators notice the thoughts, feelings and moods that pass through their attention centre and feel that the mind has a mind of its own. It is like that for me. I lose my ‘self’ in quiet sitting but also in doodling, writing, making music and washing the dishes. 

The Chinese call it Wu Wei (effortless non action) when ‘I’ am lost in the groove and zone and just flow.

New thinking outlines ways to have the mind change the brain (use it or lose it) and for the brain to change the mind. It is never too late to change your mind.

“No self, no problem” (Dogen Zenji)

kindle quotes

Kindle allows quotes to be copied and exported. The process includes adding the source. Here is an example from the book I am presently reading.

“It will surprise many to find that the capacity of short - term memory is so small. Current research suggests the average short - term memory can hold a maximum of four ‘items’ at any one time . 1 If someone is given a list of words to remember, they should be able to remember only four words. This is based on numerous experiments where people were made to recall words or items from a previously shown list and on average could recall only four with any certainty. For many years, the capacity was believed to be seven, plus or minus two. This was labelled as the ‘magic number’ or ‘Miller’s law ’ as it was derived from 1950s experiments by George Miller . 2 However, refinements and reassessment of legitimate recall and experimental methods have since provided data to show the actual capacity is more like four items.”

Burnett, Dean. The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To (Kindle Locations 546-553). Guardian Faber Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The author reviews the literature in what seems like an accurate way, and maintains a pleasing jocularity throughout. [Date of publication = 2016]