These days most of us are very head-centric and believe that everything to do with the soul lives in the head. But some people are still quite keen on glands, some of which can have a big impact on our lived experience and behaviour. Glands which, for the most part, live in the abdomen rather than in the head. So just above the kidneys we have the adrenal glands, very mixed up, very involved in our adrenaline life.
Life which gets away from neuronal control, at least to some extent, by taking place in the blood, adrenaline being released directly into the blood by the adrenal glands and then being sent around the body to do its business in the blood stream. Slow but effective.
Associating, my first thought was of headless chickens running around the poultry yard. Second thought was of the periscope of the submarine. One might think of the periscope as the head, the vital organ of the submarine. But actually, while it is important, it does provide an optical window onto the outside world, the real life of the submarine goes on down below. Perhaps the control room should be regarded as the centre of the submariners’ universe rather than the top of the periscope?
All of this coming to my attention by way of a paper flagged up in a newsletter from the Kurzweil organisation, a paper from Messrs. Dum, Levinthal, and Strick about the way that the adrenal glands are, after all, under the supervision of the brain.
Then, quite recently, I read that many scientists were rather surprised to find, not long after (fMRI) brain scans were invented, that one could learn all kinds of things by scanning the brains of people who were not doing anything in particular, who were not doing any of the experimental tasks that scientists like to set their subjects. What I think is now called the default mode network of the brain proved to be interesting and eventually spawned much activity in academe. Another phrase which pops up quite a lot in this connection is ‘resting state’.
It amused me to think that Freud had a right battle to convince his colleagues that there was plenty going on in the subconscious, in the unconscious mind, more than a hundred years ago now.
His tool for getting at the subconscious was free association: having the subject relax on a couch and report what goes on in his or her resting head; to translate the goings on of the mind into words for the analyst to opine on. When things go well, this can provide a very good window onto the unconscious, with the absence of purposeful activity allowing all kinds of stuff which is not normally available, of which one is not usually aware, to come into consciousness. So perhaps this is just the sort of thing that the scanner is engaging with when it looks at the default mode network, just the sort of thing that might come into view in a scanner when the subject is not busying the brain with something purposeful, something task orientated.
My own tool is to try to keep an eye on what is going on in my head when I am waking up in the morning. And this morning what seemed to be happening was that when I stopped thinking in phrases and sentences, which I seem to do quite a lot of the time, more elementary stuff came into view. A lot more images (pictures) and a lot more single words. A line of enquiry to be pursued, although not sampled, as one does not want to be messing about with a bleeper so early in the morning. See reference 1.
Also a sense that the head was a sort of hollow cave, with lots going on around the roof and the walls, with the essential me, my soul if you will, being on the floor, towards the back of the cave, in other words, somewhere near the top of the brain stem. The size of the cave seemed very large compared with the actual size of my head, large though that might be, and the rest of the body seemed to be rather remote. There was no emotional tone to the experience, I was just there. Nor were there any of the sort of blanks of which I have quite a lot when I am up and running, when, for example, I just gaze blankly at the screen of the laptop for a second or two while the subconscious, as it were, catches up with itself, before my fingers can resume their business.
A cave experience which, I might say, I have had from time to time, sometimes quite frequently, ever since I was a child, say nine or ten years old. With the difference that, when I was younger, the experience was much more intense, frightening even, and I sometimes used to shake myself out of it.
So, to conclude, I think that today’s takeaway is the idea that there is lots of ancient wisdom out there. People have been thinking about the workings of the mind for a very long time, say 10,000 years or so, and there are nuggets of real wisdom to be extracted from the stories that they wrote down. Nuggets of real wisdom which can usefully augment that to be extracted from scanners.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.
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