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Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ Category

3 kinds of active dreaming

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, neuroscience, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on February 1, 2015| 1 Comment »

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In the A to Z of Becoming, D can stand for Dream. Let’s consider three different kinds of active dreaming this week.

Probably when you first think of dreaming, you think of the dreaming you do when you are asleep. Dream experiences are astonishingly diverse. From almost mundane rehearsing a day’s events, to bizarre, symbolic totally baffling dreams, to dreams which feel important somehow. And how annoyingly common it is for the dreams to vanish in a flash as you wake leaving you with some kind of memory of having been dreaming, but the content has suddenly become inaccessible. Lucid dreams are ones where the dreamer is aware of dreaming. It doesn’t happen often for me, but when it does the dream always has the feel of significance. My most recent lucid dream was like that. As I flew above the Earth I was aware I was dreaming and that this experience was potentially important to me so chose to zoom down and look carefully to see what I could see. What I saw astonished me and is working its way out in my life in a myriad of incredible ways. (Maybe I’ll describe it some time for you)

Scientists have discovered something very interesting about lucid dreams. The part of the brain which seems active during self-reflection is especially well developed in lucid dreamers, raising this interesting prospect –

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich have discovered that the brain area which enables self-reflection is larger in lucid dreamers. Thus, lucid dreamers are possibly also more self-reflecting when being awake.

This is one of those fascinating chicken and egg scenarios. If you could train people to experience lucid dreaming more frequently, would that assist them in becoming more self-reflective? And the other way too…..if you practice more self-reflection, do you have more lucid dreams?

So, there’s the first type of active dream to consider – lucid dreaming. If you have a lucid dream stick with it. My experience suggests that it will pay off in abundance. If you don’t have lucid dreams, developing daily self-reflective practices such as journaling, or meditation, might increase your chances of having one. (And you will probably receive the benefits of the self-reflective practices anyway)

A second kind of active dream is the conscious, heading towards something kind of dream. I find it is very common to discover that top musicians, artists, or sportsmen and women, dreamed of their achievements even as children. If you have such a dream, if you desire with all your heart to develop a particular skill or talent, then that dream may well contribute to its coming true. Whilst we can’t all be top performers in some area, I do think that the consistent dreams which run over many years generate both motivation and commitment. I dreamed of being a doctor when I was three years old, and I can’t remember a time throughout my whole childhood that I didn’t have that dream. Once I became a doctor, the dream modified to become more specific. I dreamed of being a particular kind of doctor. By that, I mean a doctor who practiced according to certain values. That dream underpinned all my career choices. I’ve also had a dream since childhood to become a writer, and that’s something I’m realising more consistently now, than at any previous stage of my life.

What dreams do you have for you life? What does your heart desire? What does your soul long for? If you know, why not take some time to write it out. Describe it, make it more concrete, lay the foundations for the life you hope for. If you don’t know, you could start to journal about it, or to meditate about it, or to discuss it with a loved one. Explore potential dreams and see what makes your heart sing. (By the way, that constitutes self-reflection, so such a practice might increase your chances of lucid dreaming)

Finally, a third kind of dream is a day dream. Now you might think day dreaming is a passive experience, not an active one. But that’s only partially true. Day dreams usually begin with a contemplation or a reflection. They usually have a focus. However, instead of rigorously wrestling with whatever we are focusing on, day dreaming involves an active letting go. Letting the mind find it’s own way without being too directive.

I think day dreaming has a bad press. It’s one of the things children are scolded for, and is considered to be sloppy or lazy. I think that completely fails to see the potential in day dreaming. Actively choosing to day dream can bring a whole other dimension to your life. What comes up may well surprise you, bringing you much deeper insights than other exercises can. Solutions to problems can appear in day dreams as “aha!” moments.

So, there’s three kinds of active dreaming to consider and play with this week – lucid dreaming, getting in touch with the foundation dreams of your life, and active day dreaming.

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Where does your genius reside?

Posted in creativity, from the living room, from the viewing room, life, neuroscience, psychology on December 1, 2014| 1 Comment »

The other day I watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk about genius.

She recounts how the ancient Greeks had the concept of a “daemon” which would communicate the great ideas and creative breakthroughs from the gods. The Romans adopted this concept but used the term “genius” instead.

The really interesting thing about this concept is that inspiration came from somewhere “out there” – whereas nowadays we tend to think that it is entirely up to us. She tells several stories of artists who experienced inspiration as coming from “out there” somehow and how the artist’s job is to turn up and do their work every day in order to give the “genius” a chance to deliver something.

I think this is a really interesting perspective. It doesn’t lessen the need to be disciplined and to do the work, but it also allows the artist to be a little kinder to themselves, and to know that not all “genius” resides in them. Potentially this could make an artist more humble….if they truly believed that their creations weren’t entirely their personal brilliance.

For me, this makes me think of two things.

First, we all live “on the shoulders of giants” – we all emerge from all that is and all that has existed before. I start at this point in human development, at this moment in the emergence of consciousness in the Universe. I don’t exist in a vacuum. I don’t exist in isolation. My relationships with other human beings now, and other human beings in the past, will, and do, influence what I write, what I compose, what I create. In that sense, at least, inspiration will often turn up from one of those sources.

Second, the idea reminds me of Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of memory. He suggests we think of memory not as a filing cabinet in some part of our brain cells (in fact no “place” in our neural structure has been discovered to be the repository of any specific memories), but instead, we should think that everything that happens, every thought we have, every word we express ripples out into the continuous web of the universe and remains there. To access a memory then is more like tuning in to a radio station than looking in a filing cabinet. He suggests the “store” as such is “out there” and we can tune in to it to access the specific memories. Now, I’m sure that is a very controversial idea and not one which has been even remotely proven, but there is an interesting one in the context of the old ideas of the sources of inspiration, don’t you think?

Here’s her talk in full

 

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The A to Z of Becoming. Part 2. V for Vary

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on November 30, 2014| 3 Comments »

barometer

In the second part of the A to Z of Becoming, V stands for the verb “vary”.

I found this photo of an old barometer in my collection and it really captures something about the natural function of variation. A barometer is pretty constantly moving, responding continuously to the rising or falling of the atmospheric pressure. I’ve always thought it quite funny that one of the words on these old barometers is “variable” because I tend to think, when it comes to weather, when is anything other than “variable”?! But then, that’s probably down to my experience of living in Scotland for 60 years! I’ve never lived in a country where the weather is the same, day in, day out.

The truth is Nature is constantly varying because all of Nature is a dynamic phenomenon. And the Universe so loves diversity!

But there’s an interesting aspect of human experience, which is “tolerance”. All of our sensory systems have a tendency to tolerance. That is, when something new comes along we notice it, but once its been there for a bit, we stop noticing it. How often have you had the experience of suddenly becoming aware of a noise just when it stops?

Not quite the same as tolerance, but in some ways related, we also tend to move to the “back of our minds” the routines of our lives. This can lead to living on auto-pilot (or as I say in this blog, living like a zombie).

It’s good that a lot of things are dealt with on auto-pilot. What on earth would life be like if we had to think about every breath we take, if we had to initiate every beat of our hearts, if we had to actively, consciously digest all our food, and so on…..? What on earth would life be life if we had to be consciously aware all the time of every single sensory signal our body picks up, second by second?

But the problems come when we default our whole lives to auto-pilot. What happens then is that we tend to just keep repeating the same behaviours, having the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings, and, ultimately, neither making choices, nor creating any life anew.

So, it’s also good to disrupt the default, to break the routines, and raise our conscious level to higher state of awareness.

One way to do that is to vary something.

Walk a different way to work. Choose something different for breakfast. Read a different newspaper. Deliberately introduce a variation to your “normal” habits.

Go on, try it. Vary some things this week and see what that feels like.

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Change

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on November 24, 2014| 1 Comment »

creeper

One of the most striking characteristics of living organisms is change.

These little leaves I photographed in the garden at the weekend are gone now. (which reminds me of the importance of taking a camera everywhere and not hesitating to use it!)

I’m particularly conscious of change just now because I’ve just moved country. Maybe you’ve done that before, maybe even many times, but it’s a first for me. I don’t mean simply travel and holidays, I mean to actually relocate, to go and live in another country entirely, maybe especially in a country where the language is different.

But change has always fascinated me. The byline of this blog is “becoming not being”, not just because I have always resisted being pigeon-holed, or categorised, but because I really don’t think any human being can be understood as an object frozen in time.

That’s just not reality.

The more there is change within a system or organisation, the more we recognise it as “dynamic”, and is there any more dynamic phenomenon in the Universe than a conscious human being? Not only are all of our cells constantly changing, not only is our heart constantly beating, our lungs constantly filling and emptying, our complex immune systems and endocrine systems altering moment by moment, but our minds are never still.

It feels to me there is a constant flow of a life force through me. It never ceases. When it moves on, this physical me will have moved on, but the me of ideas, of thoughts, of creative expression, of ebb and flow between me and the others who share, or have shared, parts of this life with me, that will, in some ways, continue to flow.

Human beings live in both a constantly changing physical universe (some parts of which change very slowly indeed), and in a rapidly changing, shimmering, universe of consciousness. Really, is there anything in the Universe which changes as much (as constantly) as a human being?

As Heraclitus said so long ago, you really can’t step in the same river twice.

That’s why, as a doctor, it didn’t make sense to me to try to categorise patients. It didn’t make sense to me to reduce a person to a diagnosis. A person is a constantly changing, flowing, growing, developing phenomenon, not an object to fitted into a category, to be measured and classified.

Becoming not being………it’s about the reality of constant change.

 

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Categorical or dynamic

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on October 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »

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In “The Secret Life of Pronouns”, the psychologist, James Pennebaker discusses two different kinds of thinker – categorical or dynamic. I hadn’t heard of this distinction before but in the briefest of nutshells –

A categorical thinker is someone who tends to focus on objects, things, and categories. The opposite end of this dimension are people who are more dynamic in their thinking. When thinking dynamically, people are describing action and changes

That sounds very familiar to me. In fact, its got a lot in common with Iain McGilchrist’s left and right hemisphere approaches to life. The left hemisphere RE-presents reality to itself, labelling, listing, naming, categorising. Whereas the right hemisphere focuses on what he calls “the between-ness”, connections, relationships, or the whole.

For the last few months, I’ve been sharing on this blog a series of posts under the title “The A to Z of Becoming” where I take one verb each week for you to think about, and play with. I deliberately chose verbs because I think it’s the “doing words”, the “action words” which determine the kind of life we experience. This is partly in tune with William Glasser’s Choice Theory, and partly with Deleuze’s focus on change, or difference, which provided me with the fundamental principle of this blog – “becoming not being”.

So, there is something insightful about this distinction, but, the way my mind works, I also find myself balking at the “two value” use of “or” – I SO much prefer “and”! (Which is something I picked up from the General Semanticists, before I even heard of Deleuze.

So, maybe now I can be more aware of when I am thinking categorically and when I’m thinking dynamically (and, yes, I DO have a preference!)

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Romanticism and the right hemisphere of the brain – “thisness” not “whatness”

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, neuroscience, personal growth, photography, psychology on August 28, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Moonlight on water

I was struck today by this paragraph about Romanticism in Iain McGilchrist’s Master and His Emissary –

Romanticism in fact demonstrates, in a multitude of ways, its affinity for everything we know from the neuropsychological literature about the workings of the right hemisphere. This can be seen in its preferences for the individual over the general, for what is unique over what is typical, for apprehension of the ‘thisness’ of things – their particular way of being as ultima realitas entis, the final form of the thing exactly as it, and only it, is, or can be – over the emphasis on the ‘whatness’ of things; in its appreciation of the whole, as something different from the aggregate of the parts into which the left hemisphere analyses it in self-conscious awareness; in its preference for metaphor over simile, and for what is indirectly expressed over the literal; in its emphasis on the body and the senses; in its emphasis on the personal rather than the impersonal; in its passion for whatever is seen to be living; and its perception of the relation between what Wordsworth called ‘the life of the mind’ and the realm of the divine; in its accent on involvement rather than disinterested impartiality; in its preference for the betweenness which is felt across a three-dimensional world, rather than for a seeing what is distant as alien, lying in another plane; in its affinity for melancholy and sadness, rather than for optimism and cheerfulness; and in its attraction to whatever is provisional, uncertain, changing, evolving, partly hidden, obscure, dark, implicit and essentially unknowable in preference to what is final, certain, fixed, evolved, evident, clear, light and known.

Well, well….for those of you who are already familiar with Iain McGilchrist’s hypothesis about the differences between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere ways of approaching the world, I’m sure you’ll agree this is a terrific, comprehensive summary. He, of course, is at pains to point out, time and again, that he is not saying that the left approach is bad and the right is good, or vice versa…….that we need BOTH, and that we need to integrate the functions of the two hemispheres, not allow the left to dominate the right.

But take your time, and read through that paragraph carefully. He is highlighting what is consistent in the values of Romanticism with the tendencies, or preferences of the right hemisphere of the brain. 

I enjoy what the left hemisphere does for me, but I resonate SO strongly with ALL of these “right hemispheric” qualities he describes so beautifully in this paragraph. It captures my fascination for the personal, the particular, the transient, for “becoming not being…..”

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Is the education system designed to enable children to flourish?

Posted in creativity, education, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on August 27, 2014| 1 Comment »

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What was/is your experience of school?

David Richard Precht, the German philosopher argues that our schooling system continues to be based on the industrialism of about 100 years ago. We still seek to teach sets of facts to all children of the same age, and then test their ability to recall those facts in examinations leading to qualifications. The intention of the education is to produce compliant workers and consumers who will conform to the demands of industrial society.

He argues that we are not fostering creativity, emotional intelligence or relationship skills which enable communities and teams to work together, and individuals to develop and express their unique talents.

He draws his ideas from philosophy, from neuroscience (NOT materialist neuroscience which seeks to reduce all human experience and cognition to identifiable areas of the brain), and from an understanding of how society has changed over the last few years.

Many of his recommendations are in line with teachings from people like Montessori and Steiner, so he can be understood to be part of a more child-centred, holistic movement in education.

I found myself agreeing with much of what he had to say in a recent interview published in Cles magazine (“Notre école est un crime”). He points out that asking children to sit still for an hour and pay attention is not a good starting point – most children, and indeed most adults, are able to concentrate on one topic for about 15 to 20 minutes (which is why TED talks do so well, and why youtube is the new television), and that one thing we know about health is that sitting still isn’t good for you!

He thinks schooling de-motivates learners and that the average 12,000 hours of education leading to the “Bac” qualification in Europe are experienced as pure boredom by most children.

He also thinks we are not teaching the right kind of skills for the 21st century – we need more innovation, creativity, diversity, the ability to use the internet to gain knowledge and to connect with others, more emotional intelligence and a greater ability to form and grow healthy relationships with others.

His proposals include moving away from classroom curriculae to a more project-based system of education which is by its nature multi-disciplinary and encourages children to pursue their own curiosity.

What do you think? How would you change the educational system?

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Perception

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, photography, science on August 14, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Just seeing – vision – amazes me. We know so little about how it happens.

At university I learned about the visual cortex – the area of the brain which processes the signals from our eyes and created the images we “see”. I remember being strangely surprised to think through what it meant that light waves hit the backs of our eyeballs and then that energy was transformed into electro-chemical signals which sent information back along the “optic nerve” and how the exit point from the eyeball where the nerve goes off to the brain received no light information at all so should always be present a gap in the image we see. But there is no gap to see! Our brains seamlessly, instantaneously and constantly process all the information from our eyeballs and creates this experience of moving images which never have any holes in them!

We now know that there is a lot more of the brain involved in creating images for us than we previously thought. Read this wikipedia article for starters.

So, what amazes me is not just how we experience this seamless visual image, but how we instantly know what we are looking at. Take a look at these photos I took of people on the Miroir D’eau in Bordeaux. The first one is taken pointing the camera at a mirror which is reflecting the image from outside the building I’m in. People are in the mist created by the water spray. The second is outside with me actually on the Miroir and the people in the mist. The third is a shot taken after the mist has settled.

 

Through the window

Lost in the mist

miroir d'eau Bordeaux

In all three shots we know we are looking at people. Sure, as the images become more clear we can see more detail, but isn’t it interesting that we have a pretty good idea of what we are looking at right from the first image?

Wow! Isn’t the ability to SEE just amazing? And how wonderful that we continue to learn how we do that. We often forget that our level of understanding is just our current level. It’s never complete. It’s never the “full story”. What more will we learn even in my lifetime?

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Neurones and synapses

Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, neuroscience, personal growth, science on July 7, 2014| Leave a Comment »

There are something like 100 billion neurons in your brain – a literally mind boggling figure.  Are you really able to imagine what a 100 billion of anything looks like?

As if that weren’t challenging enough, each neuron has up to 50,000 connections with other neurons, and each connection (a synapse) is an electro-chemical switch of a sort – passing information and energy across the gap between two neurons. This makes the total number of states of the brain (number of “on” or “off” neurons) a figure which is……well, unimaginably huge!

I was taught at university that a synapse was a pretty simple connection between two cells where on neuron released a chemical, which then crossed the gap and stimulated the next neuron. This, of course, is a huge oversimplification.

Researchers have recently managed to describe a single synapse much more accurately.

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The researchers say –

 

 

The new model shows, for the first time, that widely different numbers of proteins are needed for the different processes occurring in the synapse,” says Dr. Benjamin G. Wilhelm, first author of the publication. The new findings reveal: proteins involved in the release of messenger substances (neurotransmitters) from so called synaptic vesicles are present in up to 26,000 copies per synapse. Proteins involved in the opposite process, the recycling of synaptic vesicles, on the other hand, are present in only 1,000-4,000 copies per synapse. The most important insight the new model reveals, is however that the copy numbers of proteins involved in the same process scale to an astonishingly high degree. The building blocks of the cell are tightly coordinated to fit together in number, comparable to a highly efficient machinery. This is a very surprising finding and it remains entirely unclear how the cell manages to coordinate the copy numbers of proteins involved in the same process so closely.

It’s not just the numbers which are astonishing, its the complexity, and that last sentence particularly struck me – “it remains entirely unclear how the cell manages to coordinate the copy numbers of proteins involved in the same process so closely”

Just how much DO we know about how the human body works? How much DO we know about how it evolves to this level of complexity, both through an individual lifetime from the fertilisation of a single egg cell to a fully grown human being, and throughout history from single celled life forms to the multi celled human beings?

Humility. That’s what we need as scientists. Humility. Our ability to discover and understand is astonishing, but so far pales in comparison with the complexity of a single human being.

I’m amazed.

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Ways of knowing

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on May 26, 2014| 1 Comment »

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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.

Attend

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.
This is exactly the problem Iain McGilchrist describes in “The Master and His Emissary”.
We have another way of knowing which is different from this editing, filtering, re-presenting way. We know by seeing connections, by experiencing the whole. Bergson describes that as intuition. A good example of that is how you answer the question “How are you?” You can ask yourself, “How is my energy today?” and you will come up with an answer instantly. You don’t have to edit, filter, or quantify anything, you know it holistically, or “intuitively”.
I’ve seen the same function again and again when visiting patients. Instantly, even before anyone speaks or before any “findings” are discovered, an experienced doctor knows he or she has to act quickly. The consultant who taught me Paediatrics, said on my first day at work with him that his aim was to teach me “how to recognise an ill child”. I thought that a strange comment at the time, but that’s exactly what he did. That recognising is a holistic, intuitive function which comes with experience.
Here’s Lachman again, in reference to Bergson
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
The neuroscientist Wolf Singer who looks at the problem of “binding” – of how the brain puts all this information together, says
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 suspect this is exactly what McGilchrist highlights as the main function of the right hemisphere.
Isn’t it amazing that our brain can enable us to know in these two amazing ways? To edit, and to bind together; to filter, and to see patterns which enable us to discern meaning?

a strange turn

Inchmahome Priory

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