no kidding, some real ‘weird’ science
Michael S. Gazzaniga book, ‘Who’s in Charge: free will and the science of the brain’ discusses some brain science that I am interested in. This stuff I am going to disclose is weird stuff, but it is science and to me it is just as weird as the stuff the physicists give us when they discuss double slit experiments and the wheeler experiments. There are other sources, but this one seems prominent enough that if you’re interested and start here, you can leap frog from that. I share this book because I have recently read it. I read it because I love reading science. I want more brain stuff. I like reading. The thing I miss most about school is free access to scholarly journals. Given how most states require licenses to be maintained by CEUs, you would think professionals would have free access to academic journals for life. I would go further and say the colleges should do all the CEU’s for life, because they are gatekeepers to knowledge by definitions; also, I would like a pathway for CEU’s to advance people to the next level, as opposed to just maintaining status quo. If CEU’s are the states way of maintaining proficiency, why would we aim for status quo, and why wouldn’t the university want in on CEU action? Maybe because we don’t really want people to be educated?
To be honest, I didn’t like Gazzainga’s book. I don’t share the author’s conclusions. I had to force myself to read the book, and as I was doing it I reminded myself it is okay to be uncomfortable and you need to understand why it bothers you. If I were to generalize the conclusion using my own words, your conscious experience of the world is a hallucination. You don’t exist. More precisely, the you that you think you are doesn’t exist. I don’t think I am overstating that. You have no conscious say in your experience. You think you are choosing between the myriad of life choices you are confronted with, but you are not. You had no choice in reading this book. It was chosen for you. You were compelled by unseen forces.
There is evidence to support this. fMRI studies suggest we are not making decisions in real time. We are making decisions anywhere from 80 milliseconds upwards of ten seconds prior to being consciously aware of having made a choice. The people that influence your shopping habits know this. Las Vegas knows this. Product placement increases the likelihood of impulse buying because people do not choose. The item is in your basket before you even think, “oh, I think I might like this tonight.” You go into any casino, you go into the dark, games are illuminated, and you are bombarded with subliminal message that everyone is winning.
Think of it this way. You’re watching the superbowl at home with friends and family. You cheer at a goal. You are not cheering in synch with the actual event. That event occurred 8 seconds ago, but a delay to your television was induced just in case someone used profanity or moons the camera; the powers that can be can change the image to a commercial or to any other feed. You don’t get to choose what comes to your television any more than you get to choose what gets uploaded into your conscious awareness. Someone else is deciding that for you. Back to the above fMRI. The techs making the measurements know what you’re going to decide before you do!
Hearing this is difficult. It challenges our beliefs about the world. Most people can’t hold this. The physicist will tell you the universe and everything you know is made up of energy and is insubstantial and matter can be in two places at once, or nowhere, it’s a probability wave, and that this hard fact of science is not limited to quantum particles, but even macro object exhibit the same properties. It’s weird and they (physicists) go home and continue with a paradigm that you and I share. It’s impossible to hold the other because it doesn’t relate to our experience of the world. It’s measured. There’s no doubt. And we can’t hold it. The people that know we have no conscious choice still believe they have choice, and they’re making choices all the time, even though they believe it’s not a choice, it’s an illusion.
Additional studies corroborate this. There is an operation where the corpus callosum is severed, which is a procedure done for/to severe epileptics. They don’t remove the right hemisphere, they just remove the gateway between hemisphere and the two halves no longer communicate. They become two separate systems, that seem to operating as two wholes, which most think is absurd. Most folks don’t believe it’s two whole personalities. It is recognized that right brain personality is not the same as the left brain. They have talked to that other brain, in clever ways.
The left part of the body feeds into the right brain, and the right side of the body feeds into the left brain. The left brain is verbal and dominant and in charge of the body most the time. Sometimes the right brain will fight, because it is angry or confused. Say for example, left brain thinks I am hungry and gets up and goes to the kitchen, the right brain doesn’t know why and so it stalls the left foot. Or the left hand refuses to cooperate. The remedy was for the left brain person to say out loud, “I am hungry, I want a sandwich.” Right brain hears, and agrees, and they go together.
Using special lenses that allowed the left part of the eye to see one thing and the right side of the brain to see another thing, scientist began talking to the right side of the brain. Right brain doesn’t speak. Left brain owns the tongue. Right brain could point to pictures, and sometimes spell using scrabble words. Instructions could be given to the right brain, like ‘get up and go get water from the fountain…” the body would get up. Scientist would ask person, why are you getting up?” Left brain never said, “I don’t know.” It always responded with some nonsense, like, “Oh, it’s cold in here” or ‘the chair is uncomfortable and I needed to walk…” Right brain points to a picture of a bus. Left brain is asked, “why are you pointing at a bus?” “I had to take a school bus to get here today.” Left brain never gave the right answer. The interpretation, not only do we not operate consciously in real time, but the information that gets uploaded into the conscious brain is not accurate.
Let’s be very precise here. The brain rationalizes behaviors and experiences and uploads an explanation into the conscious awareness that may or may not reflect the truth behind the thing. The word used is ‘confabulates.’ The brain has staple responses that can be uploaded in a pinch, usually lazy answers. “Why did that person do that?” “He’s an ass.” Problem solved. Reality is more complicated than the simple answers we come up with. We have filters based on experience, education, culture, age, gender, and the explanations we utilize may or may not reflect an actual reality we are experiencing. We know this from other examples. Witness to a car crash will give as many explanation descriptions as there are witnesses. They may agree there was a car crash, but color, speed, direction, who was at fault, well, you’re lucky if you get coherence between reports.
Milton H Erikson, therapist and hypnotist stated a long time ago, almost all of our decision are made unconsciously. I think this correlates to the above information but no one has really connected the two in an explicit way. Until recently, hypnosis was another academically taboo subject.
My personal opinion is we got it backwards. Consciousness first, physicality second. Gazzainga would likely say I am crazy for making that assertion, but would acknowledge most people believe that. The Wheeler experiment suggest that the particle coming through the double slit was determined in the past. If your photon source is distant quasar, well- that means the particle you ‘experienced’ into a manifesting by collapsing the wave front had to have been predetermined a billion years ago. That’s absurd, right? Well, they’re also saying consciousness first is absurd. Scientist: “Consciousness is an illusion. We’re meat zombies.” Me: Consciousness first, and we are predetermining our past.”
There can be no other way about it; if you assume consciousness is first, not only are we choosing our reality, but we’re choosing our past, and explaining our past. Future determines past. We are conscious beings writing our own histories backwards, but perceiving it as linear progression forwards. This brings a whole new perspective to that book “the Secret.” It’s not just that we’re manifesting our reality by wishing what we want, but we are also scripting the past in a way that makes sense to what we know, or will know, because we know what we need to experience in order to improve as souls.
Translation, ‘we need things to make sense.’ We need a story to hold our logic.
Alright, but that’s me spinning explanation. Here’s another science fact. People report during crisis that time slows down. I would say that makes sense. If we’re not making decisions in real time, but rather our experience of time is a product of an uploaded experience into the ‘I’ center of the story of self, then it would make sense that during a crisis our filters go away and we get all the information uploaded in real time, which would make things seem as if time slowed. Dr. David Eagleman says this aint so. Apparently it’s against the rules to substitute real people with crash test dummies, so he figured out he could do the same thing on a roller coaster, simulate a crisis, and determine what people can actually see. If time slowed down, a number flashed at a particular frequency should be apparent. It didn’t. Conclusion- it aint so.
The experience of time slowing still baffles us. We have subjective time. We have real time. But real time isn’t real, either. We know for a fact a clock will tick faster in orbit than clock on the ground. A clock at the top of a building will click faster than on the ground. The closer one gets to a black hole, the more time appears to come to a stop from the perspective of someone outside. Time for the subject continues to flow, but from our perspective on earth, they stopped. Time dilation also occurs the faster you go. At the speed of light, or at least so they say, you wouldn’t experience the passage of time. A photon experiences no time.
Time has to be a part of our discussion because we live in space-time and we can’t have one without the other. Even though it looks like space and time are separate things, they are not. All things are actually one thing, like the single electron theory, which require faster than speed transmission of information. I need you to table space/time is one because it will come back. Metabolism also affects experience of time. Different computers have different clock times, well, so do cells. We count time in human years, dog years, cat years, humming bird years. Different cells have different turnover rates. Time is not so simple as following the hands of the clock. It is much more ambiguous. Your sense of identity has a temporal component.
I started this chapter with, you are not who you think you are. That’s really not new.
Poets, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have been telling us that for ages. It’s still more complicated than being a composite of just brain centers. So with the neuro people, such as Gazzainga, we can reduce consciousness down to a variety of brain centers working in gestalt to assemble a picture of the world and an ‘I’ to experience it. You are also affected by the flora and fauna you are host to. There is a correlation between gut bacteria and memory. An absence of a particular bacteria resulted in decreased memory, and the brain’s inability to generate new neural connections. Antibiotics are helpful in fighting infections, but they also kill good bacteria, the bacteria that helps us digest food, make memories. If all gut bacteria is lost, your memory declines. Scientist are exploring links between gut bacteria and mental health, such as schizophrenia. It seems like a no brainer though, if you’re not digesting food right, mental health is likely to decline. There is a really good study linking a particular bad bacterium to autism. This particular bacterium is usually the one that survives antibiotics, and in the absence of good bacteria takes over the gut and changes the way the brain works.
But get this. Gut bacteria can determine weight! Prevotella in the intestine can result in weight loss, and increase antioxidants. The story that caught my eye, though was a woman, a person who had been thin all her life, had a medical procedure in which she required a fecal transplant. Yeah, no shit, real thing. She was radiated to kill bacteria in her gut and intestine. She had the procedure. She received a transplant from a family member who happened to be obese her entire life. The recipient of the fecal transplant began to gain weight, inexplicably. Her diet didn’t change- until the weight started getting out of control, so she modified- and still kept gaining. Medical intervention occurred, trying to curb her weight. Apparently, though, scientist working with rats already knew this. Fecal transplants from thin rats to fat rats resulted in fat rats becoming thing rats. Fecal transplants between fat rats and thin rats resulted in thin rats becoming fat rats. Also, there were rats that were not risk takers, that got bacteria transplants from risk taking rats, and they become risk takers. Risk taker rats got bacteria transplant from no risk taking rats and became more inhibited. Isn’t science fun? Yeah, we are not who we think we are and we are not even what we are in a vacuum! We are a community of one.
There is a parasite that can highjack the brain of its host and make them do stupid things.
One particular one causes rats to run towards cats. The parasite needs the cat to eat the rat because the next stage of life is in the gut of the cat. People that have cats could be host to this parasite. They tend to be risk takers… No one ever says, though, I have a parasite or bad gut bacteria. We simply say, “Oh, I just felt like jumping out of planes.” If you’re a drug user, society blames you because ‘you have a choice.’ Well, if you believe science- no you don’t! You can’t say ‘there’s a genetic component’ and then say you have a choice. You can’t say ‘your choices are predetermined before you’re conscious’ and say, you have a choice not to do drugs. IT’S WAY MORE COMPLICATED THAN THIS. The choice was made before you even picked up the bottle at the store and put it in your cart. There is a genetic component. Does the ETOH gene make you an alcoholic? We don’t know how much ETOH must be consume before that gene is activated, but once it’s on, quitting is not just an act will power. But again, if you believe the science, there is no will power. And still, our medical practices and laws are still based on rationality and choice.
In short, we are not who we think we are. It is much, much more complicated than you ever imagined it to be. In the past, life moved slow. We had more time to think and make decision, but life moves really fast and most the time we’re on the fly, running on automatic, and we not even afforded the opportunity to make decisions in real time. Meditation, yoga, it’s about slowing it down. I don’t know about you, but life is speeding up. And it’s not just my perception of time is speeding up. That may be happening, too, as time did seem to go much slower when I was child, but it’s not just that.
We don’t live in a vacuum. We live with other organisms in us, on us, and around us. We are hosts to creatures that improve our health we work with them. We live in a biosphere, and we’re part of that. Did you know trees talk to each other? Suzanne Simard discovered this while working on a PhD and it makes you wonder if James Cameron’s Avatar wasn’t an accident.
Trees will help each other out, by moving nitrogen to a tree in need. If a tree gets attacked by a bacteria or an infestation, the trees around it get an immunity. Older trees have memories! They share it with the younger trees. In the old days of loggers, people came in and killed the ‘elder’ tress because it was assume they’re old timers, take them out- and on taking them, the health of the surrounding trees deteriorated. Trees recognize their own offspring and are more likely to favor them by moving memory and carbon and water that towards them. Bacteria in the roots help trees communicate… Almost sounds like what I’ve already been sharing. Almost makes you want quote spiritualism, ‘same above same below…”