There is an astonishing amount of information from the environment flooding into your brain every single second. Think just about the information picked up by your sensory organs. All the sounds your ears can hear, all the light, colours and shapes your eyes can see, all the scents your nose can smell, all the textures your body can feel, all the flavours your tongue can taste. All of these, plus all the information being sent to the brain from within your body, plus all the information generated by your brain itself (your thoughts, memories, imaginings), are continuously flooding through the billions of neurones in your brain.
Why doesn’t that overwhelm us?
I’m nor sure anyone can fully answer that question, but at least we do know we have two ways of dealing with all these continuously changing information flows.
One way handle it is to use our brains as filters or valves.
William James, the psychologist said
one function of consciousness is to carve out of the vast sensory environment—what he called the “blooming, buzzing confusion”—a manageable, edited-down version. Only a limited amount of information reaches our conscious awareness, and for the very good reason that the majority of it is irrelevant.
The “blooming, buzzing confusion”….nice phrase!
He thought that
consciousness selects from the world at large elements that are of particular value and interest to it
In other words, consciousness enables us to “edit” the information flows, to focus on what is of “value and interest” – that, of course, opens up a whole other can of worms about how we decide what is of “value and interest”, but let’s leave that for another day.
Henri Bergson, the philosopher, argued that the brain’s function
was to act as a kind of “reducing valve,” limiting the amount of “reality” entering consciousness.
He said
“The brain is the organ of attention to life,” and the part it plays is that of “shutting out from consciousness all that is of no practical interest to us
Same idea as James…..the brain, or consciousness at least, as an editor, or a valve. In both cases the idea is that we reduce the full flow of information and pay attention to only part of it.
Iain McGilchrist argues that this is primarily the function of the left hemisphere – which “re-presents” the information flows to the brain.
There are great benefits to be had from being able to abstract information from the vast rivers washing through our brains, to be able to focus, and to concentrate on, just a subset, or a part of the world. We use this ability to both “grasp” and manipulate the world…..to exert our will on it, to exert control.
The downside is that we can begin to forget that we’re doing the editing in the first place. We lose sight of the filters and valves and think that what we “see” is all there is.
As Gary Lachman says in his “Secret History of Consciousness”
Yet one drawback to the brain’s highly efficient ability to focus on necessities is that it “falsifies” reality, which, as Bergson earlier argued, is in truth a continuous flow of experience…….The mind constantly takes snapshots, as it were, of reality, which enables it to orient itself amidst the flux. The problem is that science, which takes the most comprehensive snapshots, makes the mistake of confusing the photographs with reality itself.
Just as we have an immediate, irreducible awareness of our own inner states, through intuition we have access to the “inside” of the world. And that inside, Bergson argued, was the élan vital
there is a process in the brain that is itself antireductionist and is concerned with creating wholes out of parts, and hence with giving meaning to our experience.
I like the ideas you are presenting but not necessarily how they are presented. Given that not every Joe on the street talks about it does limit what we can borrow from to talk about it. Here are a couple of thoughts for you.
I am at a point where I am seeing the brain as much more utilitarian than what we seem to want it to be. An example is the connection between visual and audio processing – they are connected, not necessarily because they are linked by astral energy or something but because to filter the data presented by either requires a bit of hardware designated for that kind of filtering. That said, it is often useful to use such filtering for the other function also to produce a different result. Sound identifies location and motion of a sound – this same function is done by vision – locaton and motion.
Imagine a dark shadowy object in your back yard at night. You strain your ears and eyes, hear nothing, but can determine from other objects a general size and motion pattern, then your olfactory senses kick in and you KNOW it is a skunk. This is not done by picking out patterns in the sensory data but by picking out outliers in the data and approximating those datum to some pattern you can recognize. By treating all the ‘normal’ data as noise we find outliers. This does not filter out the noise but raises the bar on what we consider interesting information – what makes it to our conscious processes.
Imagine the left side of your brain looking for outliers and non-patterns in the tsunami of information that your right side is searching for patterns. The bump in efficiency is more than double and there is a mathematical formula for this increase. Multiply that by all your senses… the world suddenly gets interesting because you’re not seeing it once but many times all at once. Many sections of the subconscious mind analyzing the data and feeding weighted information to the conscious mind which then votes on what data is most accurate in conjunction with the other data. Your subconscious mind does not wait for the conscious mind if the patterns recognized present danger: you don’t have to know what kind of object it is if your mind sees it in the periphery of your vision and calculates that it will hit you in the head, your body will move involunarily through subconscious volition.
We know there is specialized hardware for things like facial recognition, determining normal from not-normal (see uncanny valley) and so on. Our subconscious attempts to do this for us in the first pass of the data, but if there is no clear recognition it falls to the conscious mind. How much energy do I have rarely takes conscious effort though if you consider the task of 5 hours of yard work your conscious mind will consider the task against energy levels and other considerations. It’s not the same question but close because the question ‘how much energy do I have’ is relative to some assumed task(s).