Once there was a team of ferrets, exploring mysteries, who landed upon a small blue planet and discovered a hidden valley that opened onto the land of the humans. The ferrets found these creatures a promising species, of grace and charm, intelligence and curiosity, of warm humor and great courage.

Because of this, and because of the dangers and promises ahead for the young race, the ferrets gave to the humans four powers with which they could prevail over the challenges to come.

The first was the power of fire, the second was the power of the wheel the third was the power of written language, the fourth was the power of courtesy and respect, one to another.

The humans were quick to learn, and cherished the gifts that the ferrets had brought. As the explorers prepared to depart, the humans begged them to stay and to share with humankind the delight of the brave new civilization that would rise.

The ferrets were touched, and promised to return. On the day of their departure, one human turned to them. “Of these powers, dear ferrets, which is the first among them, which would you have us guard above all others?”

“Well asked,” replied the ferrets. “Without fire can you prosper, and without the wheel and without the alphabet, for many have prospered on your planet and across the galaxies without these. The one power without which no civilization can long survive,
however, is the last, the power of courtesy and respect for each other and for all life.”

The humans murmured, understanding, and used their new letters to scribe the Courtesies on tablets of onyx, the words finished in purest silver. When the ferrets had departed, the new race learned swiftly, mastering the natures of fire and wheel and alphabet.

They pondered long, however, how best to protect the most precious of powers, and at last it was agreed to keep the Tablets of the Courtesies in the safest place their world could offer. From reverence, no copy was made, nor were its holy words read but by those who first had heard them from the ferrets.

And so it came to pass that the one essential of the Four Gifts was weighted in rare metals and precious jewels, locked within a giant chest of iron, and after a long voyage and with great ceremony, was given to the waves and buried, safe forever in the uttermost part of the sea.

How others deal with gifts we’ve given is not our decision, but theirs.
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12

“You Don’t Remember sir?” Shamrock Ferret stood by a shattered window-wall that had once lifted seamless from rooftops far below, knowing she. dreamed, unafraid of the height.

‘Not laws,’ you said, sir, ‘not rules: Here is a constitution of courtesies, should you choose to live by them. The courtesy you show to those you love, show the same to all, be you a civilization of one . . .’ “

Avedoi Merek wrote on scorched paper in the ancient Ferrune, his own words echoing from a reader generations removed.

“. . . or of millions,” he whispered as Shamrock fell silent, watching. He wrote as though in trance himself.

“. . . these courtesies to self and others will be your justice, lifting you beyond strife and destructions, now and forever.”

He no longer cared about too late, about hopeless, no longer despaired what one animal could say to a shattered planet. Letters flew beneath his paws, listing the Courtesies without so much as slowing, one to the next:

Whatever harm I would do to another, I shall do first to myself.

As I respect and am kind to myself, so shall I respect and be kind to peers, to elders, to kits.

I claim for others the freedom to live as they wish, to think and believe as they will. I claim that freedom for myself.

I shall make each choice and live each day to my highest sense of right.

Shamrock stood fascinated, a silent witness. The Courtesies were so fundamental to her race that many insisted they were not declaration but ferret nature, genetic code. Now, word by word, she watched the ideas written.
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14

It was a stage, she saw, a raised circular platform, brighter than the dim about. It stood before an auditorium of seats empty save for herself. Beyond the seats, a council chamber.

Inlaid, high on a wall of dark wood, a silver map of the planet Ferra. Beneath it, the harsh figure of a two-headed creature, a winged serpent, emerald green, thunderbolts in one claw, arrows in the other.

Beneath the serpent stood a wide, curving desk, places there for nine governors; in four of them sat ferrets of varying furs and masks but of one defeated countenance. Each wore a black scarf, and an emblem affixed, the emerald serpent.

As Shamrock looked about her in the empty place, Avedoi Merek entered and walked down the aisle of the auditorium, alone. The gentle animal stepped to the center of the platform, stood quietly in his white scarf, the emblem of the serpent pinned at his throat.

An unimposing figure, she thought, no chiseled features, no penetrating gaze, yet about him . . . it was as though, when he took the stage, some great magnet energized.

As the remains of ferret civilization watched, the philosopher faced a world’s cameras and the surviving members of his nation’s council.

“You will forgive me if I am not so eloquent or entertaining this evening,” he said. “I have little to say, but perhaps I speak for most of us still alive.” .

He studied the remaining leaders, looked into the cameras beyond them to survivors on every corner of the globe.

“From this day forth,” he said, and then he paused for the longest while, “I withdraw my consent from evil.”

The words echoed from speakers in halls and homes and public spaces.

I withdraw my consent from evil. Any other time, the idea would have been a puzzle, a trick of words. Today, however, Avedoi Merek became the voice of a civilization’s conscience, stark and straight, and today a race of animals listened.

“I withdraw my consent,” he said, “from war.” Soft-spoken, an impossibility all of a sudden required.

“I withdraw my consent from violence,” said Merek. “From hatred. From malice.”

He looked into the heart of every one of his race left alive.

“I withdraw my consent from these. In my actions. In my thought. In my choices.”

He reached to the emerald serpent pinned at his throat, unfastened it, let it fall. “I withdraw my consent from evil. Forever,”

Once there would have been a flicker of lights across the map of the continent, protest from those needing to argue definition and circumstance, to cry for patriotism. Now, after what had happened, the map was still.

An entire society with the freedom and the power to destroy itself listened, numbed at how close it had come to doing so.

“We have one chance to save ourselves and our future. There is one way, and it is so simple that it is impossible.”

Watching, some ferrets fancied that they could see light around the face of this gentle creature, once chained and jailed, enemy of the state for speaking against a ferret war. The first hearts felt hope glimmer in darkness.

“May I ask?” he said. “Who has enjoyed our experiment with destruction? Who is happy for what has happened?” Two questions, and silence.

Enjoyed? the ferrets thought, smoke still rising from ruins about them. Happy?
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Book 4
Monty and Cheyenne
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“Good barn,” said his visitor.

“Thank you. A little stouter than need be.”

“No. You’ll be glad, this winter.”

Monty studied his visitor in silence. How could she know about a winter yet to come? A philosopher ferret, he concluded. Rare ani mals, mystical and strange, they say. Now here one stands.

“Welcome,” he said.

“Thank you for inviting me.”

Don’t remember inviting, he thought. But I’m curious, of course.

Maybe curiosity’s the invitation. “I get three wishes?”

“No. One. All else follows.”

“I want to know.”

“That’s your wish?”

He nodded.

“And it’s done.”

That phrase again, he thought, like a sorcerer’s incantation.

“What’s done?”

“Your wish. It’s done. You know.”

“I don’t feel any different.”

“Nothing’s changed, but different you are.”

“Why?”

She explained, as to a kit, “I give you permission to become aware of what you know.”

“Show me.”

“Show yourself. I ask, you answer.” The little animal moved, now,just a few steps in the dust of the morning, backing away from him as though she planned to become the size of a house. “Who am I, Montgomery Ferret?”

“I’m not sure. . .”

“Wrong. You are sure. You ate absolutely certain. But you lack courage to say the unusual.” She sighed. “I give you permission to be courageous.” Then, patiently: “Who am I, Montgomery Ferret?”

“You’re a philosopher ferret.”

“Was that so hard? I am, in your terms, a philosopher ferret.

How do you know that?”

He reached for his truth. “I know.” Would she understand?

A smile for the bravery of his answer. From courage, she thought, does wisdom spring.

The nutmeg creature rubbed her paws together, delighted that Monty had allowed her to appear at last. So much to say! “Where do I come from?”

Habit told Monty, I don’t know. Fear said, How could I know? Yet like all ferrets, he tested choices every day against his highest right, and thus had he been led, so far, along his way. His highest right had chosen Montana for his home, had chosen to meet his friend Cheyenne when both were kits. His highest right had let her go toward her destiny as hers had let him go to his. His highest right had lifted a roof beam this morning, and his highest right would find a way to teach his gift to others who cared.

Yet never had he asked for more than guidance, never had he asked his highest self to light those darks unlit by others. Now a lightning bolt: How can it answer if I don’t ask?

“I’m a philosopher ferret,” Kinnie said, quiet patience. “Where do I come from?”

Highest self, he asked silently, where do philosopher ferrets come from?

He didn’t have to wait, or to think. “Not from a place.” Of course. So simple: “From a direction of spirit,” he said, “a direction of caring.”

“Yes. Can you come from there?”

“Of course I can,” he said. Anyone can.

“Now a quiz. You know that I am a philosopher ferret because. . .”

She hinted, expecting a certain answer, “Because I leave no . . .”

She wants me to give her words, not mine? Monty tilted his head, puzzled. “. . . stone unturned?”

She frowned. “Pawprints! I leave no pawprints!”

Be patient when she veers, he told himself. She wants me to notice.

He looked, and sure enough. In the fine powder-dust, the floor of Monty’s barn-to-be, not a mark where she had stepped.

“I leave no pawprints because. . .”

Trusting, accepting her permission to be brave: “. . . because I watch your image within and project it where I will. You leave no pawprints because you are not of my outer world but my inner.”

Kinnie inclined her head, almost a bow to him. “Good! Not ‘the outer world,’ you said, ‘my outer world’!” She stepped to one side, looked down. “Of course I could leave pawprints. . . .”

It felt like puzzle pieces falling into place, for Monty, permissions like snowflakes, gentle, unique. He could have explained everything about her that instant, about her and about himself. Of course she could leave pawprints, if she wanted to.

How strange, he thought. Find the greatest teachers, ask the hardest questions, they never say, Study philosophy, or, Get your degree. They say, You already know.
The little ferret watched this in Monty’s eyes. “Then where’s the school for philosopher ferrets?”

“On the corner,” he replied, a smile for the picture he saw, one room in a forest glade, bright curtains at the window, a little chimney. “The school’s on the corner of the trail where I ask what I need to know and the road where I realize the answer.”

“I like the ‘realize’ part, Monty. That’s the place, all right. And I’m your teacher.”

Monty laughed. “No, ma’am. You’re the same as me.”

“Oh? Indeed.” She frowned again, paws akimbo, clove-color fists at her waist. “Don’t you mean I am like you, I am similar to you? Not the same as you.”

“You’re the same as me.”

Kinnie was quiet, studying him. When they get the idea, she thought, they get it fast.

“And who, then, are your fellow philosopher ferrets?”

Once the answer would have been impossible. “Every creature who cares to ask, find their own answers.”

“Every creature? You mean every ferret who cares to ask. Otherwise, philosopher ants? Philosopher humans? Philosopher elephants?”

“No,” said Monty. “What’s real for elephants is real for ants.”

All at once she approached, looked up to him, touched his shoulder. “Not bad, Monty Ferret. It took you a lifetime, but you’ve got the idea. The fun begins!”
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He told his stories and he listened to hers, about her first days in a strange city, jammed with auditions, with disappointment, tri­umph, with acting classes.’ About her discovery as an actress, in spite of her comment when the floodlight fell. The screen test for First Light, the leading role, how lucky she had been . . .

“Not lucky, Cheyenne,” he said.

“There are lots of kits in Hollywood, Monty. Looking for a break.

Not many of them ever. . . there’s a lot of support, but it’s really hard. . .”

He lifted his water glass, watched her in a quiet toast over the rim. “‘She’s magic in the camera!’ Gemini Ferret said that, yesterday. He said everybody knows it: Jasmine Ferret’s one of the greatest stars in the history of film. ‘She’s not her character, Monty, she’s the soul of her character!’”

“He said that?”

Monty nodded.

“How. . ,” She reached for her glass. “How very kind , . .” Then she turned the conversation back to Montana. “Trish and Zander?” He smiled. “Zander’s in Scotland.”

“Scotland!”

“So much I haven’t told you. Zander cloned what they call rain­bow sheep. There’s thousands of them now, they all want to see the Wild West. I’ll be working with him, a little, on that. And Trish found her mate, she’s married, moved to West Palm Beach, plays her harp still, recitals. Nakayama Ferret’s a CPA, his own accounting firm. “

“Trish loved her music and her numbers.”

“So does Nakayama. He plays the flute, they do quadratic equa­tions, for fun,” Monty ran his paw over his forehead. “I’m an uncle, Cheye! Little Chloe. As cute a kit as you ever did see . . .”

His voice trailed off, lost in how swiftly the old days had passed. He hadn’t known so many choices had gone by till this moment with his friend.

“And Monty?” she said.

He paused, decided not to burden her with his feelings. “Monty’s doing fine. I’ll probably never see the sights, like you and Zander and Trish. Don’t really much want to. I’m happy in Montana. That’s my home, Cheyenne. Montana and the delphins, ranchkits come learn to be paws. Pretty soon a fair-size flock of sheep coming to visit. I guess I love animals.” He wondered, do I sound like a failure, explain­ing?

He knows himself, she thought. What a success he’s become! She smiled, shy. “Is there somebody in your life?”

She thought he hadn’t heard, her friend studying his water glass.

Then he raised his eyes, looked directly into hers. “Why, yes, Cheyenne. There is somebody in my life.”

She pushed his meaning away. “That’s good to hear. I’m happy for you, Monty.”

“Thank you. I hope there’s somebody in your life, too.”

Since she had become the world’s Jasmine Ferret, since her first role in The Lady Speaks, the match-loving tabloid press had pondered who should be her mate. Her name had appeared a dozen times in the “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” column of Celebrity Ferrets Today, linked with Heshsty, with most of her leading actors. Once there had been rumors of Jasmine and Stilton Ferret, when she and the billionaire had passed through Los Angeles International Airport on the same day.

She thought about his question, wondered how to answer. “There is someone,” she said.

“If you have any trouble with this animal,” said Monty, “you tell him you’ve got a friend back home, he’s a wild ferret and he fancies he’s looking out for Cheyenne.”

“You don’t want to believe the press too much,” she said. “The tabs mean well, but how they carry on! Heshsty’s a dear, he’s my pal, we love to work together. I’d like you to meet him, someday.” She sighed. “No, the somebody I care about, I don’t have any trouble with him, Monty.” A trace of sorrow in her voice.

And there they left it. The hours weren’t enough for what they needed to say, but neither would the day have been enough, or the week. Meal finished, candle burned low, Monty rose. “It’s late. I’d best be on my way.”

They stepped from her trailer into the cool air, her silver fur turned bright as snow in the moonlight. “You’re glad, too, Monty? You’re happy being a ranchpaw?”

He smiled. “I get kidded sometimes, I don’t mind. I like being the ferret who talks to delphins, I like being a sheep-whisperer. There’s a lot to learn that nobody knows, or probably much cares. I care. That’s enough.”

“I care, too.” She hugged him gently, kissed his cheek the way she had when they had parted in Little Paw, so long ago.

They stood close in the quiet. If I tell her how I feel, he thought, and if she told me the same, what of her career? I’ll not say a word to change her future.

“Well,” he said, finally. “G’night, Cheyenne. You don’t know how much…”

“I know.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. If she told him how she felt, and if he felt the same, might it turn his destiny, might it stop a gift he would otherwise give to the world? She watched him for the longest seconds, considering. “I miss you, Monty. I miss home.”

“I miss you too, Cheye. Someday maybe you’ll come home. Not now. Not for a while. But . . .”

She warmed in his reminder that she had a choice. “Sometimes I forget I have a home. But I love my work.”

He said nothing.

At last she let him go. “Night, Monty. Thanks. So much . . .” She returned to the trailer, forced herself not to look back. She so missed him, the quality of him, his confidence. She missed the home she saw, shimmering there in the window of her friend. Had Montgomery Ferret lifted a paw or said a word, she would have stayed with him for the rest of her life.

He did not. Quietly, the door between them closed.
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I’m just a country ferret, loved my mountains, the outdoors, Montana, and here I live. I loved my delphins, wanted to understand all the animals around me, now I do, pretty well, and we all get along just fine. I wanted to make their dreams come true, the little Scots, and the ranchkits, too. He smiled. We show ‘em Action, Adventure, Romance on the High Plains! and sure enough, the sheep are happy and the kits go home strong and wise and kind, they earn their own respect. That’s what I wanted for them, and that’s what I got.

I’ve had a few questions of my own, he thought, found a few answers that work for me.

He lifted his hat and ran a paw over his forehead, smoothing the fur. A soul can learn a lot, in one lifetime, but even so . . .

Ladyhawke huffed, stopped, blinked to watch a small ferret, appeared from empty air.

On the middle of the stream, a shimmering nutmeg coat, a clove­ color mask, solemn amusement.

“Hello, Monty.” The ferret’s dark eyes locked on his. “Need some help?”

The rancher smiled down at her, nodded at the current splash­ing over her paws. “Counts as pawprints, does it?”

“It does, thank you,” she said. “Need some help?”

“I miss her, Kinnie. I miss Cheyenne.”

“She’s-”

“I know she’s got her destiny, I know I’ve got mine. I ask within, and the answer comes back that everything’s okay, it’s just the way we meant it to be. I’ve done mostly what I came here to do, seems to me. Maybe she has, too, maybe not. But when I ask why did we want to be born in Little Paw, why did we become such good friends if all we were going to do was part forever” -he touched his hat lower- “what I get is there’s a reason, and I’m not sure that’s what I want to hear.”

“It won’t be-”

“Is there something we have to do that we haven’t done? You got some sort of cosmic agenda for us, Kinnie, or is this what it feels like, to know everything and still be sad? Missing her, that’s a sign I’m not a finished philosopher ferret, I guess.”

“Could be.” The little animal took a small step upward, to the top of the wavelets. No more splashing about her ankles, no more paw­prints in the water. “And it could be that missing her’s a sign of another destiny between you. Could be a sign that you haven’t done everything you came to do, after all.”

“You can tell me what’s going to happen, can’t you?”

She shook her head. “Sorry. I can tell you a rule of space-time:

What’s going to happen has already happened. I can tell you a rule of consciousness: What you perceive is up to you.”

“And you’re going to tell me I’m a fool, feeling sad when always and everywhere I’m surrounded by love?”

The dark eyes twinkled. “No. I’ll let you say that yourself.”

He smiled at her. “Did I ask you to come find me here, talk to me this way?”

As though she hadn’t heard, Kinnie looked to the horizon, to Northstar Mountain. Then she turned back and nodded brightly. “You’re a dear ferret, Monty. You’ve learned much. You are greatly loved. “

Ladyhawke blinked at where her rider’s other-level friend had stood, the stream chuckling over empty stones. The delphin tossed her head, Wouldn’t hurt to listen, Monty Ferret.

I listen, Lady-H, he said to her in his mind. Takes me a while, sometimes, but I listen.
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1. Laying The Ground For Insight to Grow

1. All counterproductive emotions are based on and depend upon ignorance of the true nature of persons and things.
2. There are specific ways to suppress lust and hatred temporarily; but if we undermine the ignorance that misconceives the nature of ourselves, others, and all things, all destructive emotions are undermined.
3. Ignorance sees phenomena-which actually do not exist in and of themselves-as existing independent of thought

2. Discovering The Source of Problems
Consider:
1. Does the attractiveness of an object seem to be integral to it?
2. Does the attractiveness of an object obscure its faults and disadvantages?
3. Does exaggeration of the pleasantness of certain objects lead to lust?
4. Does exaggeration of the unpleasantness of certain objects lead to hatred?
5. Notice how you:
• First perceive an object
• Then notice if the object is good or bad
• Then conclude that the object has its own independent basis for existing
• Then conclude that the object’s goodness or badness exists inherently in the object
• Then generate lust or hatred according to your previous judgment.

3. Why Understanding The Truth is Needed

Consider this:
1. Ignorance leads to exaggerating the importance of beauty. ugliness, and other qualities.
2. Exaggeration of these qualities leads to lust, hatred, jealousy, belligerence, and so on.
3. These destructive emotions lead to actions contaminated by misperception.
4. These actions (karma) lead to powerless birth and rebirth in cyclic existence and repeated entanglement in trouble.
5. Removing ignorance undermines our exaggeration of positive and negative qualities; this undercuts lust, hatred, jealousy; belligerence, and so on, putting an end to actions contaminated by misperception, thereby ceasing powerless birth and rebirth in cyclic existence.
6. Insight is the way out.

Part II. How to Undermine Ignorance

4. Feeling The Impact of Interrelatedness

1. Bring to mind an impermanent phenomenon, such as a house.
2. Consider its coming into being in dependence upon specific causes: lumber, carpenters, and so forth.
3. See if this dependence conflicts with the phenomenon’s appearance of existing in its own right.
Then:
1. Bring to mind an impermanent phenomenon, such as a book.
2. Consider its coming into being in dependence upon its parts-its pages and cover.
3. See if its dependence upon its parts conflicts with its appearing as if it exists in its own right.

Then:
1. Consider consciousness paying attention to a blue vase.
2. Reflect on its coming into being in dependence upon its parts-the several moments that constitute its continuum.
3. See if its dependence upon its parts conflicts with its appearing as if it exists in its own right.

Then:
1. Consider space in general.
2. Reflect on its coming into being in dependence upon its parts-north, south, east, and west.
3. See if its dependence upon its parts conflicts with its appearing as if it exists in its own right.
Also:
1. Consider the space of a cup.
2. Reflect on its coming into being in dependence upon its parts-the top half and the bottom half of the cup.
3. See if its dependence upon its parts conflicts with its appearing as if it exists in its own right.

5. Appreciating The Reasoning of Dependent-Arising

Consider:
1. Dependent and independent are a dichotomy. Anything that exists is either the one or the other.
2. When something is dependent, it must be empty of being under its own power.
3. Nowhere in the parts of the body and mind that form the basis for the “I” can we find the “I”. Therefore, the “I” is established not under its own power but through the force of other conditions-its causes, its parts, and thought.

6. Seeing The Interdependence of Phenonmenon

Consider:
1. Inherent existence never did, never does, and never will exist.
2. However, we imagine that it does exist and thereby are drawn into distressing emotions.
3. The belief that phenomena inherently exist is an extreme of exaggeration. a frightful chasm.
4. The belief that impermanent phenomena cannot perform functions, or act as cause and effect. is an extreme form of denial, another frightful chasm.
5. The realization that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence because of being dependent-arisings avoids both extremes. Realizing that phenomena are dependent-arisings avoids the extreme of dangerous denial; realizing that they are empty of inherent existence avoids the extreme of dangerous exaggeration.

7. Valuing Dependent-Arising and Emptiness

Consider:
1. Because persons and things are dependent-arisings they are empty of inherent existence. Being dependent, they are not self-instituting.
2. Because persons and things are empty of inherent existence, they must be dependent-arisings. If phenomena did exist in their own right, they could not depend on other factors: either causes. their own parts, or thought. Since phenomena are not able to set themselves up, they can transform.
3. These two realizations should work together, the one furthering the other.

Part III. Harnessing the Power of Concentration and Insight

8. Focussing Your Mind

1. Look carefully at an image of Buddha, or some other religious figure or symbol, noticing its form, color, and details.
2. Work at causing this image to appear internally to your consciousness, imagining it on the same level as your eyebrows, about five or six feet in front of you, about one to four inches high (smaller is better), and shining brightly.
3. Consider the image to be real, endowed with magnificent qualities of body, speech, and mind.

9. Tuning Your Mind For Meditation

1. Place your mind on the object of meditation.
2. Using introspection, from time to time check to see whether your mind remains on the object.
3. When you find that it has strayed, recall the object and put your mind back on it as often as needed.

Then:
1. To counter laxity, which is a too-loose way of perceiving the meditative object:
• First try to tighten just a little your way of holding the object.
• If that does not work, brighten or elevate the object or pay closer attention to its details.
• If that does not work, leave the intended object and temporarily think about a joyous topic, such as the marvelous qualities of love and compassion or the wonderful opportunity that a human lifetime affords for spiritual practice.
• If that does not work, leave off meditating and go to a high place or one where there is a vast view:

2. To counter excitement, which is a too-tight way of perceiving the meditative object:
• First try to loosen just a little your way of imagining the object.
• If that does not work, lower the object in your mind and imagine it as heavier.
• If that does not work, leave the intended object and temporarily think about a topic that makes you more sober, such as how ignorance brings about the sufferings of cyclic existence, or the imminence of death, or the disadvantages of the object to which you have strayed and the disadvantages of distraction itself.

Part IV. How to End Self Deception

10. Meditating On Yourself First

Consider:
1. The person is at the center of all troubles.
2. Therefore, it is best to work at understanding your true nature first.
3. After that, this realization can be applied to mind, body, house, car, money, and all other phenomena.

11. Realising That You Do Not Exist in And of Yourself

1. Imagine that someone else criticizes you for something you actually have not done, pointing a finger at you and saying, “You ruined such-and-such.”
2. Watch your reaction. How does the “I” appear to your mind?
3. In what way are you apprehending it?
4. Notice how that “I” seems to stand by itself, selfinstituting, established by way of its own character.

Also:
1. Remember a time when you were fed up with your mind. such as when you failed to remember something.
2. Review your feelings. How did the “I” appear to your mind at that time?
3. In what way were you apprehending it?
4. Notice how that “I” seems to stand by itsel£ selfinstituting, established by way of its own character.

Also:
1. Remember a time when you were fed up with your body or with some feature of your body such as your hair.
2. Look at your feelings. How did the “I” appear to your mind at that time?
3. In what way were you apprehending it?
4. Notice how that “I” seems to stand by itself self-instituting, established by way of its own character.

Also:
1. Remember a time when you did something awful and you thought, “I really made a mess of things.”
2. Consider your feelings. How did the “I” appear to your mind at that time?
3. In what way were you apprehending it?
4. Notice how that “I” seems to stand by itself, self-instituting. established byway of its own character.

Also:
1. Remember a time when you did something wonderful and you took great pride in it.
2. Examine your feelings. How did the “I” appear to your mind at that time?
3. In what way were you apprehending it?
4. Notice how that “I” seems to stand by itself, self-instituting. established by way of its own character.

Also:
1. Remember a time when something wonderful happened to you and you took great pleasure in it.
2. Watch your feelings. How did the “I” appear to your mind at that time?
3. In what way were you apprehending it?
4. Notice how that “I” seems to stand by itself, self-instituting. established by way of its own character.

12. Determining The Choices

1. Analyze whether the “I” that is inherently self-established in the context of the mind-body complex could have a way of existing other than being part of or separate from mind and body.
2. Take other phenomena, such as a cup and a table, or a house and a mountain, as examples. See that there is no third category of existence. They are either the same or different.
3. Decide that if the “I” inherently exists as it seems to, it must be either one with or separate from mind and body.

13. Analyzing Oneness

Consider the consequences if the “I” is established in and of itself in accordance with how it appears to our minds and if it also is the same as mind-body:

1. “I” and mind-body would have to be utterly and in all ways one.
2. In that case, asserting an “I” would be pointless.
3. It would be impossible’ to think of “my body” or “my head” or “my mind.”
4. When mind and body no longer exist, the self also would not exist.
5. Since mind and body are plural, one person’s selves also would be plural.
6. Since the “I” is just one, mind and body also would be one.
7. Just as mind and body are produced and disintegrate, so it would have to be asserted that the “I” is inherently produced and inherently disintegrates. In this case, neither the pleasurable effects of virtuous actions nor the painful effects of nonvirtuous actions would bear fruit for us, or we would be experiencing the effects of actions we ourselves did not commit.

14. Analyzing Difference

Consider the consequences if the “I” is established in and of itself in accordance with how it appears to our minds and if it also is inherently different from mind-body:

1. “I” and mind-body would have to be completely separate.
2. In that case, the “I” would have to be findable after clearing away mind and body.
3. The “I” would not have the characteristics of production, abiding. and disintegration, which is absurd.
4. The “I” would absurdly have to be just a figment of the imagination or permanent.
5. Absurdly, the “I” would not have any physical or mental characteristics.

15. Coming To A Conclusion

Repeatedly review the four steps to realization:

1. Zero in on the target, the appearance of the “I” as if it is established in and of itself
2. Determine that if the “I” exists the way it seems to, it must be either one with mind and body or separate from mind and body.
3. Thoroughly contemplate the problems with “I” and the mind-body complex being the same.
• “I” and mind-body would have to be utterly and in all ways one.
• Asserting an “I” would be pointless.
• It would be impossible to think of “my body” or “my head” or “my mind.”
• When mind and body no longer exist, the self also would not exist.
• Since mind and body are plural, a person’s selves also would be plural.
• Since the “I” is just one, mind and body also would be one.
• Just as mind and body are produced and disintegrate, the “I” is inherently produced and inherently disintegrates. In this case, neither the pleasurable effects of virtuous actions nor the painful effects of nonvirtuous actions would bear fruit for us, or we would be experiencing the effects of actions we ourselves did not commit.

4. Thoroughly contemplate the problems with “I” and the mind-body complex being inherently different.
• “I” and mind-body would have to be completely separate.
• In that case, the “I” would have to be findable after clearing away mind and body.
• The “I” would not have the characteristics of production, abiding, and disintegration, which is absurd.
• The “I” would absurdly have to be just a figment of the imagination or permanent.
• Absurdly; the “I” would not have any physical or mental characteristics.

16. Testing Your Realization

1. Go through the four steps of analysis described in Chapter 15.
2. When the sense that the “I” is self-instituting falls apart and vanishes in a void, switch to considering your arm, for instance.
3. See whether the sense that your arm inherently exists immediately vanishes due to the previous reasoning.
4. If the previous analysis does not immediately apply to your arm, your understanding is still on a coarser level.

17. Extending This Insight To What You Own

1. Internal phenomena, such as your mind and your body; belong to you and therefore are “yours.”
2. External belongings, such as your clothing or car, also are “yours.”
3. If the “I” does not inherently exist, what is “yours” could not possibly inherently exist.

18. Balancing Calm And Insight

For the time being, alternate a little stabilizing meditation with a little analytical meditation in order both to taste the process and to strengthen your current meditation.

1. First focus your mind on a single object, such as a Buddha image or your breath.
2. Use analytical meditation as described in the four steps for meditating on the nature of the “I” (see Chapter 15).
3. When you develop a little insight, stay with that in sight in stabilizing meditation, appreciating its impact.
4. Then, when feeling diminishes a little, return to analytical meditation to reinstate feeling and develop more insight.

Part V. How Persons and Things Actually Exist

19. Viewing Yourself As Like An Illusion

1. Remember a time when you mistook a reflection of a person in a mirror for an actual person.
2. It appeared to be a person but was not.
3. Similarly; all persons and things seem to exist from their own side without depending on causes and conditions, on their parts, and on thought, but they do not.
4. In this way, persons and things are like illusions.

Then:
1. As you did earlier, bring the target of your reasoning. the inherently established “I,” to mind-by remembering or imagining an instance when you strongly believed in it. .
2. Notice the ignorance that superimposes inherent existence, and identify it.
3. Put particular emphasis on contemplating the fact that if such inherent establishment exists, the “I” and the mind-body complex would have to be either the same or different.
4. Then forcefully contemplate the absurdity of assertions of the self and mind-body as either the same or different, seeing and feeling the impossibility of those assertions:

ONENESS
• “I” and mind-body would have to be utterly and in all ways one.
• In that case, asserting an “I” would be pointless.
• It would be impossible to think of “my body” or “my head” or “my mind.”
• When mind and body no longer exist, the self also would not exist.
• Since mind and body are plural, a person’s selves also would be plural.
• Since the “I” is just one, mind and body also would be one.
• Just as mind and body are produced and disintegrate, so it would have to be asserted that the “I” is inherently produced and inherently disintegrates. In this case, neither the pleasurable effects of virtuous actions nor the painful effects of nonvirtuous actions would bear fruit for us, or we would be experiencing the effects of actions we ourselves did not commit.

DIFFERENCE

•”I” and mind-body would have to be completely separate.
•In that case, the “I” would have to be findable after clearing away mind and body.
• The “I” would not have the characteristics of production, abiding. and disintegration, which is absurd.
• The “I” would absurdly have to be just a figment of the imagination or permanent.
• Absurdly; the “I” would not have any physical or mental characteristics.

5. Not finding such an “I,” firmly decide, “Neither I nor any person is inherently established.”
6. Remain for a while, absorbing the meaning of emptiness, concentrating on the absence of inherent establishment.
7. Then, once again let the appearances of people dawn to your mind.
8. Reflect on the fact that, within the context of dependent-arising. people also engage in actions and thus accumulate karma and experience the effects of those actions.
9. Ascertain the fact that the appearance of people is effective and feasible within the absence of inherent existence.
10. When effectiveness and emptiness seem to be contradictory, use the example of a mirror image:
• The image of a face is undeniably produced in dependence on a face and a mirror, even though it is empty of the eyes, ears, and so forth it appears to have, and the image of a face undeniably disappears when either face or mirror is absent.
• Similarly; although a person does not have even a speck of inherent establishment, it is not contradictory for a person to perform actions, accumulate karma, experience effects, and be born in dependence on karma and destructive emotions.
11. Try to view the lack of contradiction between effectiveness and emptiness with respect to all people and things.

20. Noticing How Everything Depends on Thought

1. Revisit a time when you were filled with hatred or desire.
2. Does it not seem that the hated or desired person or thing is extremely substantial, very concrete?
3. Since this is the case, there is no way you can claim that you already see phenomena as dependent on thought.
4. You see them as existing in their own right.
5. Remember that you need frequent meditation on emptiness to counter the false appearance of phenomena.

Then Consider:

1. The “I” is set up in dependence upon mind and body.
2. However, mind and body are not the “I”, nor is the “I” mind and body.
3. Therefore, the “I” depends on conceptual thought, set up by the mind.
4. The fact that the “I” depends on thought implies that the “I” does not exist in and of itself
5. Now notice that you have a better sense of what it means for something to exist in and of itself the inherent existence that realization of emptiness is aimed at refuting.

Part VI. Deepening Love with Insight

21. Feeling Empathy

Apply these six similarities to yourself to understand the nature of your suffering and develop a strong intention to transcend this dynamic.

1. Just as a bucket in a well is bound by a rope, so I am constrained by counterproductive emotions and actions driven by them.
2. Just as the movement of a bucket up and down the well is run by an operator, so the process of my cyclic existence is run by my untamed mind, specifically through mistakenly believing that I inherently exist, and that “mine” inherently exists.
3. Just as a bucket travels up and down the well over and over, so I ceaselessly wander in the great well of cyclic existence, from the uppermost states of temporary happiness to the lowest states of temporary pain.
4. Just as it takes great exertion to draw the bucket up but it descends easily; so I have to expend great effort to draw myself upward to a happier life but easily descend to painful situations.
5. Just as a bucket does not determine its own movements, so the factors involved in shaping my life are the results of past ignorance, attachment, and grasping; in the present, these same factors are continually creating more problems for my future lives, like waves in the ocean.
6. Just as a bucket bumps against the walls of the well when it ascends and descends, so I am battered day by day by the suffering of pain and change, and by being caught in processes beyond my control.
7. Therefore, from the depths of my heart I should seek to get out of this cyclic round of suffering.

Then:
Bring a friend to mind and think with feeling:

1. Just as a bucket in a well is bound by a rope, so this person is constrained by counterproductive emotions and actions driven by them.
2. Just as the movement of a bucket up and down the well is run by an operator, so the process of this person’s cyclic existence is run by his or her untamed mind, specifically through mistakenly believing that he or she inherently exists, and that “mine” inherently exists.
3. Just as the bucket travels up and down the well over and over, so this person ceaselessly wanders in the great well of cyclic existence, from the uppermost states of temporary happiness to the lowest states of temporary pain.
4. Just as it takes great exertion to draw the bucket up but it descends easily, so this person has to expend great effort to rise upward to a happier life but easily descends to painful situations.
5. Just as a bucket does not determine its own movements, so the factors involved in shaping this person’s life are the results of past ignorance, attachment, and grasping; in the present, these same factors are continually creating more problems for his or her future lives, like waves in the ocean.
6. Just as a bucket bumps against the walls of the well when it ascends and descends, so this person is battered day by day by the suffering of pain and change and by being caught in processes beyond his or her control.

Now cultivate three levels of love:
1. This person wants happiness but is bereft. How nice it would be if she or he could be imbued with happiness and all the causes of happiness! ,
2. This person wants happiness but is bereft. May she or he be imbued with happiness and all the causes of happiness!
3. This person wants happiness but is bereft. I will do whatever I can to help her or him to be imbued with happiness and all the causes of happiness!

Now cultivate three levels of compassion:
1. This person wants happiness and does not want suffering. yet is stricken with terrible pain. If this person could only be free from suffering and the causes of suffering!
2. This person wants happiness and does not want suffering. yet is stricken with terrible pain. May this person be free from suffering and the causes of suffering!
3. This person wants happiness and does not want suffering. yet is stricken with terrible pain. I will help this person be free from suffering and all the causes of suffering!

Now cultivate total commitment:
1. Cyclic existence is a process driven by ignorance.
2. Therefore, it is realistic for me to work to achieve enlightenment and to help others do the same.
3. Even if I have to do it alone, I will free all sentient beings from suffering and the causes of suffering. and set all sentient beings in happiness and its causes. One by one, bring to mind individual beings- friends, then neutral persons, and then enemies, starting with the least offensive-and repeat these reflections with them.

22. Reflecting On Impermanence

Take this to heart:
1. It is certain that I will die. Death cannot be avoided. My life span is running out and cannot be extended
2. When I will die is indefinite. Life spans among humans vary; The causes of death are many and causes of life comparatively few. The body is fragile.
3. At death nothing will help except my transformed attitude. Friends will be of no help. My wealth will be no use, and neither will my body.
4. We are all in this same perilous situation, so there is no point in quarreling and fighting or wasting all our mental and physical energy on accumulating money and property.
5. I should practice now to reduce my attachment passing fancies.
6. From the depths of my heart I should seek to get beyond this cycle of suffering induced by misconceiving the impermanent to be permanent.

Then consider:
1. My mind, body, possessions, and life are impermanent simply because they are produced by causes and conditions.
2. The very same causes that produce my mind, body, possessions, and life also make them disintegrate moment by moment.
3. The fact that things have a nature of impermanence indicates that they are not under their own power; they function under outside influence.
4. By mistaking what disintegrates moment by moment for something constant, I bring pain upon myself as well as others.
5. From the depths of my- heart I should seek to get beyond this round of suffering induced by mistaking the impermanence for permanence.

Then:

Bring a friend to mind and consider the following with feeling:
1. This person’s mind, body, possessions, and life are impermanent because they are produced by causes and conditions.
2. The very same causes that produce this person’s mind, body, possessions, and life also make them disintegrate moment by moment.
3. The fact that things have a nature of impermanence indicates that they are not under their own power; they function under outside influence.
4. By mistaking what disintegrates moment by moment for something constant, this friend brings pain upon himself or.herself as well as others.

Now cultivate three levels of love:
1. This person wants happiness but is bereft. How nice it would be if she or he could be imbued with happiness and all the causes of happiness!
2. This person wants happiness but is bereft. May she or he be imbued with happiness and all the causes of happiness!
3. This person wants happiness but is bereft. I will do whatever I can to help her or him to be imbued with happiness and all the causes of happiness!

Now cultivate three levels of compassion:
1. This person wants happiness and does not want suffering, yet is stricken with terrible pain. If this person could only be free from suffering and the causes of suffering!
2. This person wants happiness and does not want suffering, yet is stricken with terrible pain. May this person be free from suffering and the causes of suffering!
3. This person wants happiness and does not want suffering, yet is stricken with terrible pain. I will help this person be free from suffering and all the causes of suffering!

Now cultivate total commitment:
1. Cyclic existence is a process driven by ignorance.
2. Therefore, it is realistic for me to work to achieve enlightenment and to help others do the same.
3. Even if I have to do it alone, I will free all sentient beings from suffering and the causes of suffering, and set all sentient beings in happiness and its causes. One by one, bring to mind individual beings-first friends, then neutral persons, and then enemies, starting with the least offensive-and repeat these reflections with them.

23. Absorbing Yourself In Ultimate Love

1. As you did earlier, bring the target of your reasoning, the inherently established “I,” to mind by remembering or imagining an instance when you strongly believed in it.
2. Notice the ignorance that superimposes inherent existence, and identify it.
3. Put particular emphasis on contemplating the fact that if such inherent establishment exists, the “I” and the mind-body complex would have to be either the same or different.
4. Then forcefully contemplate the absurdity of assertions of the self and mind-body as either the same or different, seeing and feeling the impossibility of those assertions:

ONENESS

• “I” and mind-body would have to be utterly and in all ways one.
• In that case, asserting an “I” would be pointless.
• It would be impossible to think. of “my body,” or “my head,” or “my mind.”
• When mind and body no longer exist, the self also would not exist.
• Since mind and body are plural, a person’s selves also would be plural.
• Since the “I” is just one, mind and body also would be one.
• Just as mind and body are produced and disintegrate, so it would have to be asserted that the “I” is inherently produced and inherently disintegrates. In this case, neither the pleasurable effects of virtuous actions nor the painful effects of nonvirtuous actions would bear fruit for us, or we would be experiencing the effects of actions we ourselves did not commit.

DIFFERENCE

• “I” and mind-body would have to be completely separate.
• In that case, the “I” would have to be findable after clearing away mind and body.
• The “I” would not have the characteristics of production, abiding, and disintegration, which is absurd.
• The “I” would absurdly have to be just a figment of the imagination or permanent.
• Absurdly, the “I” would not have any physical or mental characteristics.

5. Not finding such an “I.” firmly decide, “Neither I nor any person is inherently established.”
6. Resolve: From the depths of my heart I should seek to get beyond this round of suffering brought on myself by misconceiving what does not inherently exist as inherently existing.

Then:
Bring a friend to mind and, while remembering the process of self-ruinous cyclic existence, consider the following:
1. Like me, this person is lost in an ocean of misapprehension of “I” as inherently existent, fed by a huge river of ignorance mistaking mind and body to be inherently existent, and agitated by winds of counterproductive thoughts and actions.
2. Like someone mistaking a reflection of the moon in water for the moon itself, this person mistakes the appearance of “I” and other phenomena to mean they exist in their own right.
3. By accepting this false appearance, this person is powerlessly drawn into lust and hatred, accumulating karma and being born over and over again in a round of pain.
4. Through this process this person unnecessarily brings pain upon himself or herself as well as others.

Now cultivate three levels of love:

1. This person wants happiness but is bereft. How nice it would be if she or he could be imbued with happiness and all the causes of happiness!
2. This person wants happiness but is bereft. May she or he be imbued with happiness and all the causes of happiness!
3. This person wants happiness but is bereft. I will do whatever I can to help her or him to be imbued with happiness and all the causes of happiness!

Now cultivate three levels of compassion:
1. This person wants happiness and does not want suffering, yet is stricken with terrible pain. If this person could only be free from suffering and the causes of suffering!
2. This person wants happiness and does not want suffering. yet is stricken with terrible pain. May this per’ son be free from suffering and the causes of suffering!
3. This person wants happiness and does not want suffering. yet is stricken with terrible pain. I will help this person be free from suffering and all the causes of suffering!

Now cultivate total commitment:

1. Cyclic existence is a process driven by ignorance.
2. Therefore, it is realistic for me to work to achieve enlightenment and to help others do the same.
3. Even if I have to do it alone, I will free all sentient beings from suffering and the causes of suffering. and set all sentient beings in happiness and its causes. One by one, bring to mind individual sentient beings first mends, then neutral persons, and then enemies, starting with the least offe.nsive-and repeat these reflections with them.

The apprehension of inherent existence is the cause
of all unhealthy views.
Afflictive emotions are not produced without this error.
Therefore, when emptiness is thoroughly known,
Unhealthy views and afflictive emotions are
thoroughly purified.

Through what is emptiness known?
It is known through seeing dependent-arising.
Buddha, the supreme knower of reality, said

What is dependently produced is not inherently
produced.

Nagarjuna’s student Aryadeva similarly says that understanding dependent-arising is crucial for overcoming ignorance:

All afflictive emotions are overcome
Through overcoming ignorance.
When dependent-arising is seen,
Ignorance does not arise.

Dependent-arising refers to the fact that all impermanent phenomena-whether physical, mental, or otherwise-come into existence dependent upon certain causes and conditions. Whatever arises dependent upon certain causes and conditions is not operating exclusively under its own power.

Meditative Reflection
1. Bring to mind an impermanent phenomenon, such as a house.
2. Consider its coming into being in dependence upon specific causes: lumber, carpenters, and so forth.
3. See if this dependence conflicts with the house’s appearing as if it exists in its own right.

Dependent Arising and Realism

The theory of dependent-arising can be applied everywhere. One benefit of applying this theory is that viewing a situation this way gives you a more holistic picture, since whatever the situation is-good or bad-it depends on causes and conditions. An event is not under its own power but depends on many present causes and conditions as well as many past causes and conditions. Otherwise, it could not come into being.

When you think from this viewpoint, you can see much more of the whole picture, and from this wider perspective, you can see the reality of the situation, its interdependence. With the help of this relational outlook, the action that you take will be realistic. In international politics, for example, without such an outlook a leader might see a problem as created by a single person, who then becomes an easy target. But that is not realistic; the problem is much wider. Violence produces a chain reaction. Without a broader perspective, even if the motivation is sincere, any attempt to handle the situation becomes unrealistic; the actions taken will not be well founded because of the lack of a holistic picture, of understanding the web of causes and conditions involved.

In the field of medicine also, it is not sufficient to concentrate just on one specialty. The whole body needs to be considered. In Tibetan medicine, the diagnostic approach is more holistic, taking into consideration interactive systems. Similarly. in economics, if you just go after profit, you end up with corruption. Look at the increasing corruption in many countries. By considering all commercial actions to be morally neutral, we turn a blind eye to exploitation. When, as they say in China, “It doesn’t make any difference whether a cat is black or white,” the result is that a lot of black cats-morally bankrupt people-are creating a lot of problems!

Failure to look at the whole picture means realism is lost. The attitude that money alone is sufficient leads to unforeseen consequences. Money is certainly necessary; for instance, if you thought that religious retreat in meditation alone was sufficient, you would not have anything to eat. Many factors have to be considered. With awareness of the fuller picture, your outlook becomes reasonable, and your actions become practical, and in this way favorable results can be achieved.

The chief drawback of afflictive emotions is that they obscure reality. As Nagarjuna says:

When afflictive emotions and their actions cease,
there is liberation.
Afflictive emotions arise from false conceptions.

False conceptions here are exaggerated modes of thought that do not accord with the facts. Even if an object-an event, a person, or any other phenomenon-has a slightly favorable aspect, once the object is mistakenly seen as existing totally from its own side, true and real, mental projection exaggerates its goodness beyond what it actually is, resulting in lust. The same happens with anger and hatred; this time a negative factor is exaggerated, making the object seem to be a hundred percent negative, the result being deep disturbance. Recently, a psychotherapist told me that when we generate anger, ninety percent of the ugliness of the object of our anger is due to our own exaggeration. This is very much in conformity with the Buddhist idea of how afflictive emotions arise.

At the point when anger and lust are generated, reality is not seen; rather, an unreal mental projection of extreme badness or extreme goodness is seen, evoking twisted,-unrealistic actions. All of this can be avoided by seeing the fuller picture revealed by paying attention to the dependent-arising of phenomena, the nexus of causes and conditions from which they arise and in which they exist.

Looked at this way, the disadvantages of afflictive emotions are obvious. If you want to be able to perceive the actual situation, you have to quit voluntarily submitting to afflictive emotions, because in each and every field, they obstruct perception of the facts. Viewed from the perspective of lust or anger, for example, the facts are always obscured.

Love and compassion also involve strong feelings that can even make you cry with empathy, but they are induced not by exaggeration but by valid cognition of the plight of
sentient beings, and the appropriateness of being concerned for their well-being. These feelings rely on insight into how beings suffer in the round of rebirth called “cyclic existence,” and the depth of these feelings is enhanced through insight into impermanence and emptiness, as will be discussed in Chapters 22 and 23. Though it is possible for love and compassion to be influenced byafflictive emotions, true love and compassion are unbiased and devoid of exaggeration, because they are founded on valid cognition of your relationship to others. The perspective of dependent-arising is supremely helpful in making sure that you appreciate the wider picture.

Dependence Upon Parts

Dependent-arising also refers to the fact that all phenomena-impermanent and permanent-exist in dependence upon their own parts. Everything has parts. A pot, for in stance, exists in dependence upon its parts, whether we consider coarse parts, such as the lid, handle, or opening, or subtle parts, such as molecules. Without its essential parts, a pot simply cannot be; it does not exist in the concrete, independent way that it seems to.

What about the atomic particles that are the building blocks of larger objects? Could they be partless? This too is impossible, since if a particle did not have spatial extent, it could not combine with other particles to form a larger object. Particle physicists believe that even the tiniest particle can be broken down into smaller parts if we can create tools powerful enough to do so, but even if they found a physically unbreakable entity, it would still have spatial extent and thus parts; otherwise it could not combine with other such entities to form anything larger.

Meditative Reflection

1. Bring to mind an impermanent phenomenon, such as a book.
2. Consider its coming into being in dependence upon its parts-its pages and cover.
3. See if its dependence upon its parts conflicts with its appearing as if it exists in its own right.

Examining Consciousness

The consciousness involved in looking at a blue vase does not have spatial parts because it is not physical, but it exists as a continuum of moments. Consciousness looking at a blue vase has earlier and later moments in its continuum, and these are parts of a stream of consciousness-no matter how short.

Then consider the briefest moments in a continuum. If even the briefest of moments did not have a beginning, middle, and end, it could not join with other brief moments to become a continuum; it would be equally dose to an earlier moment and to a later moment, in which case there would be no continuum at all.

As Nagarjuna says:

Just as a moment has an end, so it must
have A beginning and a middle.
Also the beginning middle, and end
Are to be analyzed like a moment.
.
.
.
.
Chapter 5
Appreciating the Reasoning of Dependent-Arising

As explained in the previous chapter, all phenomena, whether impermanent or permanent, have parts. The parts and the whole depend on other, but they seem to have their own entities. If the whole and its parts existed the way they appear to you, you should be able to point out a whole that is separate from its parts. But you cannot.

There is a conflict between the way the whole and its parts appear and the way they actually exist, but this does not mean that there are no wholes, because if wholes did not exist, you could not speak of something as being a part of anything. The conclusion must be that there are wholes but their existence is set up in dependence upon their parts-they do not exist independently. As Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Treatise on the Middle called “Wisdom” says:

That which arises dependently
Is not one with that on which it depends
And is also not inherently other than it.
Hence, it is not nothing and not inherently
existent.

How the Reasoning of Dependent-Arising Works

Dependent or independent: there is no other choice. When something is one, it is definitely not the other. Because dependent and independent are a dichotomy; when you see that something cannot be independent, or functioning under its own power, there is no other option but to see that it is dependent. Being dependent, it is empty of being under its own power. Look at it this way:

A table depends for its existence on its parts, so we call the collection of its parts the basis upon which it is set up. When we search analytically to try to find this table that appears to our minds as if it exists independently. we must look for it within this basis-the legs. the top, and so forth. But nothing from within the parts is such a table. Thus, these things that are not a table become a table in dependence upon thought; a table does not exist in its own right.

From this viewpoint, a table is something that arises, or exists, dependently. It depends on certain causes; it depends upon its parts; and it depends upon thought. These are the three modes of dependent-arising. Of these. one of the more important factors is the thought that designates an object.

Existing in dependence upon conceptuality is the most subtle meaning of dependent-arising. (Nowadays. physicists are discovering that phenomena do not exist objectively in and of themselves but exist in the context of involvement with an observer.) For example, the Dalai Lama’s “I” must be within this area where my body is; there is no other place it could possibly be found. This is clear. But when you investigate in this area, you cannot find an “I” that has its own substance. Nevertheless, the Dalai Lama is a man, a monk, a Tibetan, who can speak, drink, eat, and sleep. This is sufficient proof that he exists, even though he cannot be found.

This means that there is nothing to be found that is the “I,” but this fact does not imply that the “I” does not exist. How could it? That would be silly. The “I” definitely does exist, but when it exists yet cannot be found, we have to say that it arises in dependence upon thought. It cannot be posited any other way.

Emptiness Does Not Mean Nothingness

There is no question that persons and things exist; the question is how, or in what manner, they exist. When we consider a flower, for instance, and think, “This flower has
a nice shape, nice color, and nice texture,” it seems as if there is something concrete that possesses these qualities of shape, color, and texture. When we look into these qualities, as well as the parts of the flower, they seem to be qualities or parts of the flower, such as the color of the flower, the shape of the flower, the stem of the flower, and the petals of the flower-as if there is a flower that possesses these qualities or parts.

However, if the flower really exists the way it appears, we should be able to come up with something separate from all of these qualities and parts that is the flower. But we cannot. Such a flower is not found upon analysis, or through other scientific tools, even though previously it seemed so substantial, so findable. Because a flower has effects, it certainly exists, but when we search to find a flower existing in accordance with our ideas about it, that is not at all findable.

Something that truly exists from its own side should become more and more obvious when analyzed-it should be clearly found. But the opposite is the case. Nevertheless, this does not mean that it does not exist, for it is effective-it creates effects. The fact that it is not found under analysis just indicates that it does not exist the way it appears to our senses and to our thoughts-that is, so concretely established within itself

If not finding objects when they are analyzed meant that they did not exist, there would be no sentient beings, no Bodhisattvas, no Buddhas, nothing pure, and nothing impure. There would be no need for liberation; there would be no reason to meditate on emptiness. However, it is obvious that persons and things help and harm, that pleasure and pain exist, that we can free ourselves from pain and gain happiness. It would be foolish to deny the existence of persons and things when we are obviously affected by them. The idea that persons and things do not exist is a denial of the obvious; it is foolish.

The Indian scholar-yogi Nagarjuna demonstrates that phenomena are empty of inherent existence by the fact that they are dependent-arisings. This itself is a clear sign that the view that phenomena do not inherently exist is not nihilistic. He does not give as the reason why ‘phenomena are empty that they are unable to function; instead, he calls attention to the fact that they arise dependent on causes and conditions.

Meditative Reflection
Consider:
1. Dependent and independent are a dichotomy. Anything that exists is either the one or the other.
2. When something is dependent, it must be empty of being under its own power.
3. Nowhere in the parts of the body and mind that form the basis for the “I” can we find the “I.” Therefore, the “I” is established not under its own power but through the force of other conditions-its causes, its parts, and thought.

Chapter 6
Seeing the Interdependence of Phenomena

Realizing the doctrine of dependent-arising, The wise do not at all partake of extreme views. – Buddha

Because phenomena seem, even to our senses, to exist from their own side even though they do not, we mistakenly accept the view that phenomena exist more substantially than they actually do. In this way we are drawn into afflictive emotions, creating the seeds of our own ruin. We need to undo these problems by reflecting, again and again, on the dependent nature of everything.

All phenomena-helpful and harmful, cause and effect, this and that-arise and are established in reliance upon other factors. As Nagarjuna says in his Precious Garland of Advice:

When this is, that arises,
Like short when there is long.
Due to the production of this,
that is produced,
Like light from the production of a flame.

In this context of dependence, help and harm arise, impermanent phenomena can function (and are not just figments of the imagination), and karma-actions and their effects-is feasible. You are feasible, and I am feasible; we are not just mental creations. By understanding this, you are free from what Buddhists call “the extreme of nihilism,” drawing the mistaken conclusion that just because a phenomenon cannot be found to exist independently it does not at all exist. As Nagarjuna says:

Having thus seen that effects arise
From causes, one asserts what appears
In the conventions of the world
And does not accept nihilism.

These two extremes-the exaggerated notion that phenomena exist under their own power, and the denial of cause and effect-are like chasms into which our minds can fall, creating damaging perspectives that either exaggerate the status of objects beyond their actual nature or deny the very existence of cause and effect. Falling into the chasm of exaggeration, we are drawn into satisfying a conception of ourselves that exceeds how we actually are-an impossible feat. Or, falling into the chasm of denial, we lose sight of the value of morality and are drawn into ugly actions that undermine our own future.

To be able to balance dependent-arising and emptiness. we need to differentiate between inherent existence and mere existence. It is also crucial to recognize the difference between the absence of inherent existence and utter nonexistence. This is why when the great Buddhist sages in India taught the doctrine of emptiness. they did not use the argument that phenomena are empty of the capacity to perform functions. Rather, they said that phenomena are empty of inherent existence because they are dependent-arisings. When emptiness is understood this way, both extremes are avoided. The exaggerated notion that phenomena exist from their own side is avoided through realizing emptiness, and the denial of the existence of functionality is avoided through understanding that phenomena are dependent-arisings and therefore not utterly nonexistent.

As Chandrakirti says:
This reasoning of dependent-arising
Cuts through all the nets of bad views.

Dependent-arising is the route for steering clear of the two chasms of mistaken outlooks and their attendant pains.
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PART III
Harnessing The Power of Concentration and Insight

Chapter 8
Focusing Your Mind

Let distractions melt away like clouds disappearing in the sky. -Milarepa

In all areas of thought, you need to be able to analyze, and then, when you have come to a decision, you need to be able to set your mind to it without wavering. These two capacities-to analyze and to remain focused-are essential to seeing yourself as you really are. In all areas of spiritual development, no matter what your level is, you need both analysis and focus to achieve the states you are seeking, ranging from seeking a better future, to developing conviction in the cause and effect of actions (karma), to developing an intention to leave the round of suffering called cyclic existence, to cultivating love and compassion, to realizing the true nature of people and things. All these improvements are made in the mind by changing how you think, transforming your outlook through analysis and focus. All types of meditation fall into the general categories of analytical meditation and focusing meditation, also called insight meditation and calm abiding meditation.

If your mind is scattered, it is quite powerless. Distraction here and there opens the way for counterproductive emotions, leading to many kinds of trouble. Without clear, stable concentration, insight cannot know the true nature of phenomena in all its power. For example, to see a painting in the dark, you need a very bright lamp. Even when you have such a lamp, if it is flickering you cannot see the painting clearly and in detail. Also, if the lamp is steady but weak, you cannot see well either. You need both great clarity of mind and steadiness, both insight and focused concentration, like an oil lamp untouched by any breeze. As Buddha said, “When your mind is set in meditative equipoise, you can see reality exactly as it is.”

We have nothing but our present mind to accomplish this with, so we must pull the capacities of this mind together to strengthen it. A merchant engages in selling little by lime in order to accumulate a pile of money; the capacities of the mind to comprehend facts need to be drawn together and focused in the same way so that the truth can be realized in all its clarity. However, in our usual state we are distracted, like water running everywhere, scattering the innate force of mind in multiple directions, making us incapable of clear perception of the truth. When the mind is not focused, as soon as something appears, it steals away our mind; we run first after this thought and then after that thought, fluctuating and unsteady; powerless to focus on what we want before being pulled away to something else, ready to ruin ourselves. As the Indian scholar-yogi Shantideva says:

A person whose mind is distracted
Dwells between the fangs of afflictive emotions.

Focusing

Despite the fact that distraction is our current state, the capacities for knowledge which we all possess can be drawn together and focused on an object we want to understand, as we do when we listen to important instructions. Through such focus, all practices-whether love, compassion, the altruistic intention to become enlightened, or insight into your own nature and the actual condition of all other phenomena-are dramatically enhanced, so your progress is much faster and more profound.

Buddhism offers many techniques for developing a form of concentration called “calm abiding.” This powerful state of concentration earns its name because in it all distractions have been calmed and your mind is-of its own accord-abiding continuously; joyously; and flexibly on its chosen internal object with intense clarity and firm stability. At this level of mental development, concentration does not require any exertion at all.

Overcoming Laziness

Laziness comes in many forms, all of which result in procrastination, putting off practice to another time. Sometimes laziness is a matter of being distracted from meditation by morally neutral activities, like sewing or considering how to drive from one place to another; this type of laziness can be especially pernicious because these thoughts and activities are not usually recognized as problems.

At other times, laziness manifests as distraction to thinking about non-virtuous activities, such as an object of lust or how to pay an enemy back. Another type of laziness is the sense that you are inadequate to the task of meditation, feeling inferior and discouraged: “How could someone like me ever achieve this!” In this case you are failing to recognize the great potential of the human mind and the power of gradual training.

All of these forms of laziness involve being unenthusiastic about meditation. How can they be overcome? Contemplation of the advantages of attaining mental and physical flexibility will generate enthusiasm for meditation and counteract laziness. Once you have developed the meditative joy and bliss of mental and physical flexibility, you will be able to stay in meditation for as long as you want. At that time your mind will be completely trained so you can direct it to any virtuous activity; all dysfunctions of body and mind will have been cleared away.

Conditions For Practice

For beginners, external factors can have considerable impact on meditation because your internal mental capacity is not particularly strong. This is why limiting busy activities and having a quiet place to meditate are helpful. When your internal experience has advanced, external conditions will not affect you much.

At this early stage of cultivating calm abiding, you need a healthful place to practice, away from busy activities and persons who promote lust or anger. Internally, you need to know satisfaction. not having strong desires for food. clothing, and so forth but being satisfied with moderation. You need to limit your activities. giving up commotion. Busyness should be left behind. Of particular importance is moral behavior, which will bring you relaxation, peace, and conscientiousness. All of these preliminaries will help to reduce coarse distractions.

When I became a monk. my vows required limiting my external activities, which placed more emphasis on spiritual development. Restraint made me mindful of my behavior and drew me into considering what was happening in my mind in order to make sure I was not straying from my vows. This meant that even when I was not purposely making an effort at meditation, I kept my mind from being scattered and thus was constantly drawn in the direction of one-pointed, internal meditation.
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Chapter 18
Balancing Calm and Insight
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To combine calm abiding with special insight, you need to alternate focusing meditation with analytical meditation and bring them into harmony. Too much analysis will promote excitement, making the mind slightly unstable, but too much stability will make you not want to analyze. As the Tibetan sage Tsongkhapa says:

If you solely perform analytical meditation. the calm abiding generated earlier will degenerate. Therefore, upon having mounted the horse of calm abiding, you should remain within analysis and then periodically alternate this with stabilizing meditation.

Union of Calm Abiding and Special Insight

Previously, calm abiding and analysis were like the two ends of a scale, the one becoming slightly lighter when the other became manifest. But now, as you skillfully alternate between stabilizing and analytical meditation, the power of analysis itself induces even greater mental and physical flexibility than before, when calm abiding was achieved by stabilizing meditation. When calm abiding and insight operate in this way; simultaneously with equal power, it is called the “union of calm abiding and special insight.” It is also called “wisdom arisen from meditation,” as contrasted to the wisdom arisen from hearing, reading, study; or thinking.

Earlier, while reading and thinking about emptiness, your consciousness was aimed at emptiness as an intellectual object of inquiry; so your mind and emptiness were
separate and distinct. But now you have the experience of penetrating emptiness without the sense that subject and object are distant from each other. You are approaching a state in which insight and emptiness are like water put into water.

Gradually; the remaining subtle sense of subject and object vanishes, with subject and object entirely merging in total nonconceptuality. AB Buddha says, “When the fire of knowing reality just as it is arises from correct analysis itself, the wood of conceptuality is burned, like the fire of sticks rubbed together.”
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Chapter 20
Noticing How Everything Depends on Thought
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When I was about thirty-five years old, I was reflecting on the meaning of a passage by Tsongkhapa about how the ”I” cannot be found either within or separate from the mind-body complex and how the “I” depends for its existence on conceptuality. Here is the passage:

A coiled rope’s speckled color and coiled form are similar to those of a snake, and when the rope is perceived in a dim area, the thought arises, “This is a snake.” As for the rope, at that time when it is seen to be a snake, the collection and parts of the rope are not even in the slightest way a snake. Therefore, that snake is merely set up by conceptuality. In the same way, when the thought “I” arises in dependence upon mind and body, nothing within mind and body-neither the collection that is a continuum of earlier and later moments, nor the collection of the parts at one time, nor the separate parts, nor the continuum of any of the separate parts-is in even the slightest way the “I.” Also there is not even the slightest something that is a different entity from mind and body that is apprehendable as the “I.” Consequently; the “I” is merely set up by conceptuality in dependence upon mind and body; it is not established by way of its own entity.

Suddenly; it was as if lightning moved through my chest. I was so awestruck that, over the next few weeks, whenever I saw people, they seemed like a magician’s illusions in that they appeared to inherently exist but I knew that they actually did not. This is when I began to understand that it is truly possible to stop the process of creating destructive emotions by no longer assenting to the way “I” and other phenomena appear to exist. Every morning I meditate on emptiness, and I recall that experience in order to bring it into the day’s activities. Just thinking or saying “I,” as in “I will do such-and-such,”will often trigger that feeling. But still I cannot claim full understanding of emptiness.
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After a few months things become difficult. Our colleagues begin to sense something. Rumor of our affair spreads among the patients. We begin to have fights. Sonya weeps and clings to me as if we were being torn apart, says we must end it because of my children. I decide to proceed with a divorce, she dissuades me. A sane decision is not possible in this setting, the strain is too great. We have to get away somehow, be with each other alone and in peace. I fabricate a research conference in New Orleans, and Sonya is reportedly called to Europe on busine. Leaving separately, we meet the following day New York and take a plane for Mexico.

We have then our time of being with each other alone. For a month we travel together without meeting anyone we know. Yet things go wrong from the start. Nothing sudden, nothing definite; we have no fights, but something is awry. We are puzzled and anxious.

I don’t know why it has happened but after a few days I know what has happened: the magic is gone. She had been the woman without whom I could not live; now she is only a woman very dear to me. We had for each other an affinity which flowered into love. This we have lost and do not find again. When I ask myself if I love her I feel sure I do, but I never had to ask before. It is a sensible love now, capable of being weighed in the same balance with contending claims.

I can tell she feels as I, but we are ashamed and do not talk about it. She says our trouble is that we are running away, which makes us feel like cowards. Another time she says she feels guilty toward her hm band and I, toward my wife and children. I agree, but it isn’t my wife toward whom I feel guilty, but Sonya. I am sad and bewildered by our loss but not deeply upset, nostalgic but not determined to have it back, and feel guilty because of not being more distressed.

We seem willing to let it be lost, make only token efforts to find it again.

In the afternoon we sit in the village square in Taxco before the crumbling cathedral. Children swarm around us offering fake antiquities. At dusk we walk up the narrow cobblestone path to the hotel at the top of the hill. The lonely Englishman, drinking gin as always in the damp lobby, looks up with a sickly smile in the hope we will stop to chat with him. In our room we close the door, and standing there by the cold bed embrace tenderly and are enveloped by such a stillness the world seems deserted. Our relationship has become sentimental; we treat each other with unusual gentleness. In Oaxaca we walk behind the loquacious guide through the ruined streets of Monte Alban and Mitla, holding hands, saying little, feeling a deep affection, knowing the madness is gone. Our exaltation had been the meaning of life; and the sad thing is that, having lost it, we are willing to deem it madness. We love each other but are no longer in love, are good for each other but no longer indispensable. It does not seem justified to break up two marriages in order to make a third which would be no more final than either of those we would be scrapping. We do not talk about it, the decision is implicit. When our month is up and we start back we know what has been decided.

We created for each other an illusion. We fell in love, not with each other, but each with the image of himself in the other’s eyes. These reflections, flashing back and forth, expanded a modest affection into an overwhelming passion. At the file cabinet I saw a tragic beauty in her face, and on that foundation built a fairy castle. For at that moment she saw my perception of her, found the image pleasing, and thought better of me for my discernment. My next perception discovered in her, therefore, not only the beauty already noticed, but her enhanced appraisal of me; whereupon I realized her to be a woman of unusual sensitivity. And when next she glanced at me she noticed this added element in my perception of her, which led her again to revise upward her image of me. So it progressed, with lightning rapidity. I came to believe that she had found in me something for which she would risk all she had, and I responded with thumping affirmation of that fineness in her which enabled her to discover this quality in me. But she had looked, not into my heart, but into the mirror of my eyes and had seen there an embellished image of herself. A single candle of affection, reflected back and forth between us, became a blaze of illumination and, finally, the meaning of life itself.

Such a passion feeds on its own hunger, consumes itself. We could not long live on reflected appraisals. There are other things to life, troubles and tasks and preoccupations, and one day, looking at Sonya, I see, not myself, but her concern with other persons, , other matters. Failing to find in her that retouched portrait of myself to which I have become so attached, I no longer feel that passionate approval of her which she had so merited. And when next she looks at me she fails to see herself, for I too have other concerns, or else finds an image of herself scaled down from that to which she has become accustomed, whereupon her feeling for me is correspondingly diminished.

It was a small thing that got this magic started, and a small thing that made it start to disappear. Of all those qualities which I perceived in her when I was so enraptured, only one is now missing. Everything else is still there-the soft hair, the receptive body, the generous heart, the impassioned spirit-but the blaze of love has diminished to the candlelight of affection and left us where we started. The affair has ended, but we remain friends. I think of her fondly; and sometimes, looking at her across the conference table, I feel her in my arms again, hear her whispering that she cannot live without me. She has developed the habit of chewing slightly at the inside of her cheek, which gives her face a ruminative cast. For a while after our return from Mexico she was remote and sad, but now her old intensity and enthusiasm have returned.

Apostate without alternative creed, I’m sick in search of something holy. Grail-hunger is making me mad.

To kneel in fear is despicable. In our stricken nights we struggle to hold honor above survival. Evil lurks and we stride forever the silent streets of fear.

Not to kneel at all is madness, is to look only down, to be alone in the universe, to have no place in any thing larger than one’s self.

To kneel in reverence, by choice, without fear, this is man’s glory.

Ah but where is God? Where might we find him?
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What is to follow? Getting up? dressing? parting? Could I tolerate a life of such encounters, of relationships so truncated? Would I not rather be appalled that the exalted and selfless relatedness of which man is capable can be reduced to this carnal straining at each other? Would I not be moved to elevate it, to transform it into love? And would not that loving, because of its more intimate connections with dependence and vulnerability, come quickly to place faithfulness above variety? And would not then the mind and character of one’s lover, her style, generosity, and above all her heart-qualities all more rare and special, and much harder to find, than physical contours-would not these things stand forth as what I sought, displacing the curves of undifferentiated flesh which plague me now? And would not this vision of what, in those circumstances, I would most desperately want, be, indeed, exactly what I already have?

Whence then this ache for which, even in principle, there is no relief? this hunger that can be fed but never satisfied?

Girl-hunger, grail-hunger-two views, perhaps, of the same striving. Lips and legs, smiles and breasts, drawing us on, ceaselessly-is this not spirit thrusting itself into the future, creating and extending itself into ever more knowing forms of life, rushing on profligately, endlessly, through wave after wave of unresisting and expendable flesh? It sweeps through us, uses us, discards us, whirls on into a future we shall not know. Yet we yearn terribly, not to be left behind. We want to be, not the medium through which the wave passes, but the wave itself which rushes on. So we go searching after God-and is this not spirit, becoming aware of itself, reaching for a vision of that toward which it moves? We want to see what it is this striving strives toward. Being used, we seek to know the purpose we serve, want then to give to the great design our holiest word, God.

On being asked “Do you love each other?” those who live only in the present become confused, do not understand the question, don’t know what to say. “We get along,” they say uneasily, or “We get a lot of kicks,” or “We get it together.”

Love is created anew by each generation from lust, and loneliness. For this to come about, primary needs may not be primarily spent, must be accumulated. But the promiscuous accumulate nothing. They wander about improvidently paying out the common need in a common and recurrent coupling, never bringing together enough of the elemental drives, never subjecting them to sufficient pressure, to ignite them into love.

What eventually becomes reality appears first as illusion. The hope attached to illusion sustains life when all else is lost.

All my life I have been in search of God. That’s why I’ve never been able to enjoy anything. One has to have found God-to have a place in something larger than one’s self, to which one belongs-to enjoy anything. Lacking it one is in anguished search, or else, despairing, becomes one’s self God and then is responsible for everything.

A woman of lively interests is my wife. She loves to travel, to walk about in strange cities, breathe a foreign air, hear another tongue. Swimming delights her; the presumptuous intimacy of the unresisting medium makes her laugh. She likes to talk with friends, always wants to know what they are doing, to hear about their children. She loves to walk, to feel the sun on her face, to browse in new stores, to visit museums and look reverently upon the past.

All these things, so desirable to her, I find tedious. She does not, however, like to do them alone; so I go along and, while apparently participating, actually am waiting for whatever it is we are doing to be done with. And as I go on like this, tolerating in benign martyrdom a way of life created from her initiative, it comes somehow to seem that, on my own, I could arrange things better, that I know how to live, but am constrained by her needs to banal diversions.

One day something goes wrong with my knee. I’m not so crippled as I portray, but enough to be excused from obligations. My wife is all sympathy. tells me it will get better. “What do you want to do?” she says. “Come! Get in the car. I’ll drive. It’s a marvelous day. We’ll go anywhere you want. do anything you like. It’s Sunday. it’s springtime. the sun is shining. You mustn’t be sad. Where do you want to go?”

I have no idea. Anywhere. Nowhere. My mind is not blank, but neutral. Places parade before imagination and all are equal. She drives us to the beach, thousands of people swimming, oiling themselves on bright towels, playing in the sand; along a golf course where we pause to watch a man take three practice swings, then hit a perfect drive, the ball sailing straight away, up, up, and out of sight; by a museum with a show of French Impressionists, throngs of people entering and leaving. In the park we drive by picnickers, teen-agers throwing Frisbees, barefoot girls playing volleyball, young couples pushing baby carriages, smells of cooking, of charcoal fires, sounds of baseball, of guitars, and of laughter. My wife, delighted with this panorama, drives slowly, glances at me eagerly, ready to stop wherever my inclination may suggest, do anything I want, go on to any place I wish, while I, looking out on this unhesitating life process, fall into a well.

Everyone of these people knows what to do, how to enjoy it. It looks terribly simple, yet I have not the knack. I can do these things, go through the motions, simulate the responses-to an observer it might seem that I, too, know how to enjoy a holiday-but in the manner of a brain-damaged patient who, thinking intently what each leg must do, can somehow get there, but not with a natural walk. I lack a kind of native knowing which is the legacy of everything that lives. Now, suddenly, without the obligation to do those many things which, as it seemed, I have not really wanted to do, I have nothing better to put in their place, indeed nothing whatever to put in their place. Free, I cannot improvise. Relieved of my burden, I am bereft.

How strange! I have worked hard all week, now along comes a day of utter leisure. Must there not be something I want? something that would give me pleasure? I must observe these people more closely. There must be a secret, some simple solution.

Always and forever the student and still I don’t know how. Are there no classes in living? Would someone take me as an apprentice?

Not knowing how to live is separateness, the division of the world into self and others. I sit inside my skull and look out as a frightened man from a moated castle. Me in here and the world out there. We negotiate, we make deals, exchanges, but we are not one. I am an entity, complete. Never do I lose sight of where I stop and the world begins. With sleepless vigilance I patrol the edges of selfhood, warn visitors away. I am independent within this domain, but am dying. It is my wholeness that destroys me. I long for partness in a greater whole.

Knowing how to live is oneness with the world. I die of the hunger of oneness. I find it never. I read about it, and the words are ghosts. Dharma is not for me, nor “the way” of Lao Tzu. I feel it in the patience of trees, the wind in their branches sighs about it. hear it in the rote of the surf and the song of the lark. I see it in animals and in children. I touch it but cannot make it mine. Mine! I’m trying to grab it, suppose, ravage it back into this moated castle, and that’s the trouble-this division of everything into self and others which I can’t escape because it’s not, something that limits me, it is me.
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Chapter IV
The Task
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Nothing endures but a futile yearning. There’s a natural grace to youth, age hovers on the grotesque.

I’ll try no more to force myself into acts of creation on a field of nihilism. I must find new ground. What I seek is a vision of life within which love and joy are possible. I cannot go back to discarded beliefs of the past, cannot go on in this desert, must seek something new.

Seek to find or seek to create?

We are plunging down a cataract, and what’s important is to call out. Not for help, there is no help. Not in despair-what can anyone do but shrug, look away? But to give a signal. A gesture of love and humor to acknowledge drowning so others who drown will know they are not alone. We are all drowning; deny it with blindness, transcend it with laughter. The laughter I seek is that which looks straight in the eye of despair and laughs. The proper subjects for comedy are fear, loneliness, and death.

I dream of escape, a change of view, a different life, a rebirth perhaps of the will to go on searching. One more surge, Lord, before I’m through.

Life as the acting out of illusion, life as the achievement of meaning. The distinction itself may be illusory. Maybe there is no meaning but only life; and in art, no meaning but only the illusion of life. Maybe that’s the whole thing-to observe life so closely, to search it out so carefully, with so much love, that it comes alive, that it is.
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I do not use myself up in living. A part of myself I save, like a miser, hoping to transmute it into something that will go on living for me in the future. With the quick I have little to do; the eminent dead are my models, the yet unborn my legatees. I am a time-binder, obsessed with mortality, spend my life creating an effigy to outlast me. In the graveyard, ceaselessly I carve at my epitaph, trying to make of it something so beautiful, so compact of meaning, that people will come from afar to read.

It need not be in vain, this elaboration of self-great treasures have been so fashioned. What gets served up to the future may be a tasty dish indeed, but what shall we say of the chef, oblivious of the hungry ones around him, garnishing himself for the gourmets of the future? Rather than miss a day of painting, Cezanne did not attend his mother’s funeral. Rilke could not spare from his poetry the time for his daughter’s wedding. The world cannot do without such people, but pity those whose lot it is to live with them.

I think rather more of those who use themselves up, die with nothing left over, disappear without a trace. My wife holds nothing back, spends her life on the living, gives herself to the hungry who feed on her, consume her substance. I see her getting smaller, becoming transparent, beginning to disappear. But look at her face! It grows finer, more beautiful! She has time. Come and be fed. She prepares no delicacies for the future, but soup today for everyone, even for those hungry chefs who think only of future banquets. Better get to know her now, for she will soon be gone, and you’ll not then recover her from the history of our time. But without the likes of her there would be no future for which the present could be a history.

I find myself wanting to fall in love again. With her of the volatile spirit, the open and generous heart. I have been holding myself aloof for years, invulnerable, to protect the search. But love can’t live on the shelf, must be fed with those confidences which create vulnerability. Without risk of hurt there is no love. Not, anyway, of the kind we used to have, she and I-the soaring, the despair, the exaltation. Now I have no search to protect, have lost direction, find nothing, create nothing, want back the deep, deep
joy. I must open myself to pain, must see it as minor beside the passion it makes possible.

I have defined and clarified the nihilistic position until it includes everything, and goodness itself becomes a random throw. Yet even so it is unthinkable not to try. Standing by the freeway and seeing there before me in the fast lane an injured child, would I not try?

But there is an injured child. In Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh, Babi Yar-the list is endless. Always there is an injured child. Of what trying then am I capable, I who for so long have burrowed within, ever more deeply down and inward, who live now in an airless world of phantoms, who no longer know even where the fast lane is?

I must give up this lamentation. Life offers no task with transcendent authorization, no goal the accomplishment of which can be guaranteed to have lasting value. I must accept that whatever I undertake is as risky, of both achievement and value, as darting out on that freeway. Probably I shall be killed before reaching the child, or, if I succeed in snatching him up, he will die of injuries already received-or survive to become a murderer. There’s nothing sure to go on-only that it’s unthinkable not to try, that there isn’t anything else. If ultimate tasks are illusory I must have at the tasks near at hand, at the transient tasks, the cries for help in a confused and changing field.

I fall at times into such a brave, constructive mood. It doesn’t last. The possibility of doing useful work commands no energies of mine. What these energies will respond to, and to nothing else, is a task which is faithful to the crushing and exceptionless nihilism by which I am riven and yet shot through-like Mahler’s Ninth Symphony-with a vision of lyric beauty. The former without the latter is intolerable; the latter without the former is trivial. I must maintain the search for a task which will embody both. Were I to find it, energies would become available, would bend to this vision.

Chapter V
The Path of Spirit
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Man is the vessel of the Spirit,” writes Erich Heller; “. . . Spirit is the voyager who, passing through the land of man, bids the human soul to follow it to the Spirit’s purely spiritual destination.”

Viewed closely, the path of spirit is seen to meander, is a glisten of snail’s way in night forest; but from a height minor turnings merge into steadiness of course. Man has reached a ledge from which to look back. For thousands of years the view is clear, and beyond, though a haze, for thousands more, we still see quite a bit. The horizon is millions of years behind us. Beyond the vagrant turnings of our last march stretches a shining path across that vast expanse running straight. Man did not begin it nor will he end it, but makes it now, finds the passes, cuts the channels. Whose way is it we so further? Not man’s; for there’s our first footprint. Not life’s; for there’s still the path when life was not yet.

Spirit is the traveler, passes now through the realm of man. We did not create spirit, do not possess it, cannot define it, are but the bearers. We take it up from unmourned and forgotten forms, carry it through our span, will pass it on, enlarged or diminished, to those who follow. Spirit is the voyager, man is the vessel.

Spirit creates and spirit destroys. Creation without destruction is not possible; destruction without creation feeds on past creation, reduces form to matter, tends toward stillness. Spirit creates more than it destroys (though not in every season, nor even every age, hence those meanderings, those turnings back, wherein the longing of matter for stillness triumphs in destruction) and this preponderance of creation makes for that over-all steadiness of course.

From primal mist of matter to spiraled galaxies and clockwork solar systems, from molten rock to an earth of air and land and water, from heaviness to lightness to life, sensation to perception, memory to consciousness-man now holds a mirror, spirit sees itself. Within the river currents turn back, eddies whirl. The river itself falters, disappears, emerges, moves on. The general course is the growth of form, increasing awareness, matter to mind to consciousness. The harmony of man and nature is to be found in continuing this journey along its ancient course toward greater freedom and awareness.
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But could it be that man, recognizing spirit in others, exercising forbearance, creating morality, brotherhood-could it be that just here he ceases to be the advancing edge of spirit? Could it be that those rules whereby man determines that the continuing upward journey of spirit shall be infused with love halt the journey altogether? Could it be that the thrust of spirit leaps now from man to those aggregates of men, nations, which know not rules, which preserve in sovereignty the no-means-excluded struggle for power whereby spirit from the very beginning has advanced? Who is man, himself a latecomer, his civilization and morality later still, and still aborning, to make rules for universal spirit? Will spirit take heed? Or will we but legislate ourselves to some dark eddy, some back-looping current which spirit, unheeding, unhindered, will remorselessly rush by?
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Two hundred years have passed and the world is greatly changed. We have become, as Descartes promised, lords and possessors of the earth. It is unclear whether we shall destroy it or preserve it, but the enormity of our power is beyond doubt. We have not now the confidence of Hegel. We find but a faltering progression of spirit, a contingent universe in which anything may happen and all may be lost, in which historical figures mayor may not, and often do not, serve spirit. An opposing tendency is afoot: as spirit becomes conscious of itself the vessels of spirit lose moderation, grow arrogant as well as drunk with power.

No longer can we see man as a puppet jiggled by a beneficent God. Freedom is concentrated in man; God stands in awe of what we shall do. As the vessels of spirit become more conscious and more powerful, reaching in man an explosive acme of knowing and of power, spirit becomes more vulnerable to its carriers. It has lost divine protection without gaining safe conduct from us who carry it forward. Man chooses, may go this way or that, may worship spirit, move on in its ancient path, or may oppose it, deny it, perhaps destroy it utterly.

Spirit does not contend with freedom. We are as free as we are able to be, are dangerously free, and may in our arrogance destroy more than we can afford to lose. Nothing guarantees our progress or even our survival. Forms perish. Spirit does not require mankind. We now are the leading edge of spirit but nothing insures we shall so remain. The place of vision, the opportunity created by freedom, is so to live as to further the voyage of spirit, to remain its swiftest vessel.

The jungle, we say in our civilized arrogance, is lawless. Struggle is to the death; everything that grows and develops does so by killing something else which itself would want to grow and develop. Civilization invents morality, reduces this ruthlessness to a competition according to rules. Morality, that is to say, marks the advent of something radically new in the adventure of spirit: the attempt to continue according to law a journey which from the start has been lawless.

Spirit has come an enormous journey in darkness, blindly achieving ever-increasing form and awareness, leaping forward and upward with whatever force its leading vessel can command, ruthlessly discarding forms it has used and surpassed, catching a ride on whatever goes its way and goes the fastest, destroying anything that would stop or slow its going on. Living forms are transient vessels of something which passes through them and on, leaving them broken and forgotten, used-and used up-for a purpose not their own. The activities of these perished forms by which spirit so used them would seem to have served the individual purposes and the species purposes of these living things-to survive, to grow strong, to prevail-and so they did, so do they still, but behind these limited purposes, these ends in view, rides a larger purpose without end. The strong devour the weak, growth follows upon destruction, struggle is to death, and on the crest of this ceaseless wave of agony and triumph spirit is borne forward. Civilization, no more than thirty thousand years old, is but the latest moment in this long wash, and morality but the fledgling creation of that moment. With civilized man, for the first time ever, a living form decrees a change in the mode by which spirit shall advance. Morality is born of that moment in which spirit becomes aware of itself and aspires to direct its own future progress. It attempts to revoke the ruthlessness which heretofore has been the means of progress, and to continue that progress according to rules.

It is a grand view, but turns the truth around. Jungle and civilization are indeed opposed, but it is civilization that is lawless. Animals do not make rules, know not that they obey them, yet behave within the limits of what is permitted by norms inscribed in their nature. Only man denies the authority of such norms, declares that everything is permitted. Morality stands against this license but not, thus far, with great success.

Long did spirit live and move in the leaves of plants, in branches, in flowers. The movement of spirit is glacial. Animals seize for themselves a freedom unimaginable to plants, move about, roar, pounce, copulate. Their wanderings and their struggles conform to looser norms, but still conform; they wander within limits. Spirit rides their still lawful backs, and the movement of spirit is slow. During the span of man’s time this movement becomes faster, most dizzyingly fast in the latest moment which is civilization.

Now arises a dark question. Could it be man’s increasing lawlessness which yields this accelerating pace of upward-leaping spirit?

One by one and then in bunches, indiscriminately, have we challenged those traditional norms which limit what we may do. Ever faster do they fall, none now are left. Everything is permitted. Never has spirit been so free. Shall we get away with this arrogance? Do we overreach ourselves? Do we prepare in the atomic furnace of our Titans a great immolation? Perhaps spirit will be thrown back, will then once more move forward at a slower pace, borne by forms which know that some things are not permitted. And then? Will the whole tale be told again and again, endlessly?

The end of certainty chastens morality. For what justifies violence is the certainty of being right. Having lost this certainty we must accept that we struggle toward provisional goods, oppose provisional evils. Because of this provisionality we should undertake to resist evil rather than to destroy it, to support the good rather than to instate it by murder. The absolute must take refuge in absolute modesty.

Chapter VI
The Flail
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Valery speaking beyond the grave to Rilke, recalling their last meeting at Muzot: “. . . a terribly lonely, very small chateau in a vast sad mountain region; old-fashioned, serious rooms with dark furniture, narrow windows: it constricted my heart. My imagination could not restrain itself in your rooms from eavesdropping on the endless monologue of a completely isolated soul with nothing to distract it from itself and from the consciousness of its uniqueness. A life so withdrawn seemed hardly possible to me, eternal winters long in such excessive intimacy with silence, so much space for dreams, so much freedom for the quintessential, the all too concentrated spirits which inhabit books, for the writer’s Fluctuating powers, for the forces of memory. Dear Rilke, you seemed to me locked up in pure time, and I feared for you the transparence of the too monotonous life which through the line of eternally similar days gives a clear view of death.”

Friends die and the mystery envelops us. Something here calls for attention. With tenacious thought it might be grasped and understood. But from the nothingness toward which our lives are tending we are easily distracted. We lay it aside. Values are winnowed by bereavement and pain, by loneliness and guilt, but death is the ultimate Hail. It may revoke any prior position on value, and it precludes any subsequent revision.

To see death clearly one may wait till one is dying, but to see life in the momentarily brilliant illumination of death one may not wait so long. For then fear supervenes. One dares not look, or else looks through blurred eyes and sees not what is there, but a landscape of longing. He who would see life clearly in its final illumination must invoke death early. When only a murmur is audible he must conjure the panic roar. From the serenity of the placid stream he must transport himself in imagination to the lip of the cataract. How then, looking back, seems the course of the river?

Friends die more frequently as we get older, and each death brings back the mystery, reminds us there is something here to be contemplated, some wisdom to be sifted from fear. But the empty heavens are too much, we turn away. There is so much to be done. We rush back to our problems, for the existence of problems affirms our existence. Unfinished business means that we, too, are unfinished. We lose ourselves in the daily round.

Then one day it’s not someone else. The coronary occlusion is happening to the heart inside; the name on the report of malignancy is one’s own. Then it’s too late.
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Chapter VII
The Man of Reason
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Betrayed by transcendence, we return to the present. We look around, we touch, we taste, we feel. Presently we begin to say, “This is better than that.” We value it, we want to hold on to it, point it out to others, and almost at once there’s a trying to create, to contribute, a drive for transcendence which leads us to betray the present, commit our energies to the future. Love of the present leads us to betray the present; the effort to hold something forever leads us to lose even that moment of possession we might otherwise have.

It is not the disorder and confusion of the marketplace which drives me to the mountaintop; it’s my delight in the marketplace that impels me to desert it. Love of life leads me to betray life; love of the actual sends me searching after the ideal; love of the present leads to the sacrifice of the present to a future that never comes.
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Bayesians in finance redux

In November last year, I wrote a brief post about Bayesians in finance. The post was brief because I thought that what I was saying was obvious. A long and inconclusive exchange with Naveen in the comments section of another post has convinced me that a much longer post is called for. The Bayesian approach is perhaps not as obvious as I assumed.

When finance professors walk into a classroom, they want to build on what the statistics professors have covered in their courses. When I am teaching portfolio theory, I do not want to spend half an hour explaining the meaning of covariance; I would like to assume that the statistics professor has already done that. That is how division of labour is supposed to work in a pin factory or in a university.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with this division of labour – most statistics professors teach classical statistics. That is true even of those statisticians who prefer Bayesian techniques in their research work! The result is that many finance students wrongly think that when the finance professors talk of expected returns, variances and betas, they are referring to the classical concepts grounded in relative frequencies. Worse still, some students think that the means and covariances used in finance are sample means and sample covariances and not the population means and covariances.

In business schools like mine where the case method dominates the pedagogy, these errors are probably less (or at least do less damage) because in the case context, the need for judgemental estimates for almost everything of interest becomes painfully obvious to the students. The certainties of classical statistics dissolve into utter confusion when confronted with messy “case facts”, and this is entirely a good thing.

But if cases are not used or used sparingly, and the statistics courses are predominantly classical, there is a very serious danger that finance students end up thinking of the probability concepts in finance in classical relative frequency terms.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. To see how differently finance theory looks at these things, it is instructive to go back to some of the key papers that established and developed modern portfolio theory over the years.

Here is how Markowitz begins his Nobel prize winning paper (“Portfolio Selection”, Journal of Finance, 1952) more than half a century ago:

The process of selecting a portfolio may be divided into two stages. The first stage starts with observation and experience and ends with beliefs about the future performances of available securities. The second stage starts with the relevant beliefs about future performances and ends with the choice of portfolio.

Many finance students would probably be astonished to read words like observation, experience, and beliefs instead of terms like historical data and maximum likelihood estimates. This was the paper that gave birth to modern portfolio theory and there is no doubt in Markowitz’ mind that the probability distributions (and the means, variances and covariances) are subjective beliefs and not classical relative frequencies.

Markowitz is also crystal clear that what matters is not the historical data but beliefs about the future – historical data is of interest only in so far as it helps form those beliefs about the future. He also seems to take it for granted that different people will have different beliefs. He is helping each individual solve his or her portfolio problem and is not bothered about how these choices affect the equilibrium prices in the market.

When William Sharpe developed the Capital Asset Pricing Model that won him the Nobel prize, he was trying to determine the market equilibrium and he had to assume that all investors have the same beliefs but did so with great reluctance:

… we assume homogeneity of investor expectations: investors are assumed to agree on the prospects of various investments – the expected values, standard deviations and correlation coefficients described in Part II. Needless to say, these are highly restrictive and undoubtedly unrealistic assumptions. However, … it is far from clear that this formulation should be rejected – especially in view of the dearth of alternative models

But finance theory quickly went back to the idea that investors had different beliefs. Treynor and Black (“How to use security analysis to improve portfolio selection,” Journal of Business, 1973) interpreted the CAPM as saying that:

…in the absence of insight generating expectations different from the market consensus, the investor should hold a replica of the market portfolio.

Treynor and Black devised an elegant model of portfolio choice when investors had out of consensus beliefs.

The viewpoint in this paper is that of an individual investor who is attempting to trade profitably on the diiference between his expectations and those of a monolithic market so large in relation to his own trading that market prices are unaffected by it.

Similar ideas can be seen in the popular Black Litterman model (“Global Portfolio Optimization,” Financial Analysts Journal, September-October 1992). Black and Litterman started with the following postulates:

1. We believe there are two distinct sources of information about future excess returns – investor views and market equilibrium.
2. We assume that both sources of information are uncertain and are best expressed as probability distributions.
3. We choose expected excess returns that are as consistent as possible with both sources of information.

Even if we stick to the market consensus, the CAPM beta itself has to be interpreted with care. The derivation of the CAPM makes it clear that the beta is actually the ratio of a covariance to a variance and both of these are parameters of the subjective probability distribution that defines the market consensus. Statisticians instantly recognize that the ratio of a covariance to a variance is identical to the formula for a regression coefficient and are tempted to reinterpret the beta as such.

This may be formally correct, but it is misleading because it suggests that the beta is defined in terms of a regression on past data. That is not the conceptual meaning of beta at all. Rosenberg and Guy explained the true meaning of beta very elegantly in their paper (“Prediction of beta from investment fundamentals”, Financial Analysts Journal, 1976) introducing what are now called fundamental betas:

It is instructive to reach a judgement about beta by carrying out an imaginary experiment as follows. One can imagine all the various events in the economy that may occur, and attempt to answer in each case the two questions: (l) What would be the security return as a result of that event? and (2) What would be the market return as a result of that event?

This approach is conceptually revealing but is not always practical (though if you are willing to spend enough money, you can access the fundamental betas computed by firms like Barra which Barr Rosenberg founded and later left). In practice, our subjective belief about the true beta of a company involves at least the following inputs:

• The beta is equal to unity unless there is enough reason to believe otherwise. The value of unity (the beta of an average stock) provides an important anchor which must be taken into account even when there is other evidence. It is not uncommon to find that simply equating beta to unity outperforms the beta estimated by naive regression.
• What this means is that betas obtained by other means must be shrunk towards unity. An estimated beta exceeding one must be reduced and an estimated beta below one must be increased. One can do this through a formal Bayesian process (for example, by using a Bayes-Stein shrinkage estimator), or one can do it purely subjectively based on the confidence that one has in the original estimate.
• The beta depends on the industry to which the firm belongs. Since portfolio betas can be estimated more accurately than individual betas, this is often the most important input into arriving at a judgement about the true beta of a company.
• The beta depends on the leverage of the company and if the leverage of the company is significantly different from that of the rest of the industry, this needs to be taken into account by unlevering and relevering the beta.
• The beta estimated by regressing the returns of the stock on the market over different time periods provides useful information about the beta provided the business mix and the leverage have not changed too much over the sample period. Since this assumption usually precludes very long sample periods, the beta estimated through this route typically has a large confidence band and becomes meaningful only when combined with the other inputs.
• Subjective beliefs about possible future changes in the beta because of changing business strategy or financial strategy must also be taken into account.

Much of the above discussion is valid for estimating Fama-French betas and other multi-factor betas, for estimating the volatility (used for valuing options and for computing convexity effects), for estimating default correlations in credit risk models and many other contexts.

Good classical statisticians are quite smart and in a practical context would do many of the things discussed above when they have to actually estimate a financial parameter. In my experience, they usually agree that (a) there is a lot of randomness in historical returns; (b) the data generating process does not remain unchanged for too long; (c) therefore in practice there is not enough data to avoid sampling error; and (d) hence it is desirable to use a method in which sampling error is curtailed by fundamental judgement.

On the other side, Bayesians shamelessly use classical tools because Bayes theorem is an omnivore that can digest any piece of information whatever its source and put it to use to revise the prior probabilities. In practical terms, Bayesians and classical statisticians may end up doing very similar stuff.

The advantage of shifting to Bayesian statistics and subjective probabilities is primarily conceptual and theoretical. It would eliminate confusion in the minds of students on the ontological status of the fundamental constructs of finance theory.

I am now therefore debating in my own mind whether finance professors must spend some time in the class room discussing subjective probabilities.

How would it be like to begin the first course in finance with a case study of subjective probabilities – something like the delightful paper by Karl Borch (“The monster in Loch Ness”, Journal of Risk and Insurance, 1976)? Borch analyzes the probability that the Loch Ness monster exists (and would be captured within a one year period) given that a large company had to pay a rather high 0.25% premium to obtain a million pound insurance cover from Lloyd’s of London against that risk? This is obviously a question which a finance student cannot refuse to answer; yet there is no obvious way to interpret this probability in relative frequency terms.

One day I encounter Roy, my arch tormentor, on a deserted road. He drops a loop of rope over my head. “Nice tie,” he says, takes the short end and yanks as, with his other hand, he forces the knot into my throat. We scuffle. He slaps me. I push, he falls. When he gets up, he has become serious: I have been aggressive, that’s what he wanted; I have given him license; now he need not hold back. I see in his face a surging zeal. I flail and retreat; he moves in. Unexpectedly I land a blow that interferes with his breathing, and immediately press my advantage, hit him in the face. He throws up his left arm, I hit him in the ear.

I am moving forward. Now I feel the fierce joy. What my father has done to me, I can do to another. I land my fist in his midriff; he reels back. A different expression comes to his eyes. Fear, that despicable thing, that cravenness uniquely my own-it has leapt from me to him. There it is, mine, in his eyes. And with that leap we are transformed: I now am the brave one, he the coward. I push him back. He twists away, I deliver a rain of blows.

And now I encounter in myself something new, something other than bravery: I have become my father, I am going to crush him. I feel deep joy. I grab him by the shirt, jerk him toward me; he sees my fist coming at his eye; his face crumples. I hesitate. Predator with partially mangled prey, what shall I do? He has been tormenting me: Why not take revenge? Delight in it? He begins to cry.

The paths diverge. I look both ways. I see myself more truly in Roy’s fear than in my father’s harshness. I let him go.

I did not fight again. Often with longing and with loss I remembered the fierce delight, the exultant moving in for the kill. I went the other way, found my place and my work among those who are afraid. I understand them better. I help them be less afraid. I cannot help myself.

My Father entered into me. Day by day, insidiously, he usurped inner ground that should by rights be mine. There now is his voice, his fury, his judgment. What he demands is that I demand nothing. Meekness and self-abnegation are the price of his tolerance. If I regard myself as nothing, he will leave me alone, but should I get any fancy ideas, he will slap me down. To exist, I must abjure power.

The World is full of danger and opportunity. The strong adapt by changing the world, the weak by changing themselves. The weak look inward at desires, outward at possibilities of gratification, measure the danger, find the risk to be high, and try to bring things in line by reducing their needs. The unafraid leap into the fray, seize such power as they can, move things around, rearrange the world to fit their needs.

I am seventeen. The woman I love, ten years older, has told me never again to call her. I wander the streets of Baton Rouge. A drizzle of rain, the air motionless and chill. A day of vast silence, the drip of water, and, far in the distance, the disappearing sound of a car. Visions of violent acts, of tuberculosis, suicide notes.

I walk along a wall of gray brick topped in wisteria. Heavy purple blossoms hang beside my face. I stop before an iron gate, look into a garden of oleander, gardenias, roses. The heavy scents pour forth. Sinuous vertical bars rise above me to a filigree arch of vines, leaves, grapes. I grasp the bars, think: I will remember this moment. However long I live. Pain is branding it into my soul: the chill of wet iron, the flaking green paint, the whisper of rain, numb feet in wet shoes, the drip, drip, drip. My knuckles become white, my arms rigid. The pain swells, moves toward a more ample expression, perhaps a throwing back of my head and sobbing, perhaps a shaking of the gate till someone appears to love me, to drive me away, or to call the police.

Then there comes to me a thought, fully formed, coming not from the center of the pain but from a place slightly apart: It is not necessary to suffer like this. I stand still, startled, pursue the thought: I must be doing this to myself. The pain is given, but I am choosing to hallow it, to drive it toward some dark fruition, to walk for hours through a wet city, staring into forbidden gardens.

This is an order of power not much needed if one can bend the world to one’s wants. When Nero is bored, he is not thrown back on inner resources; he tosses Christians to the lions. But if one is powerless in the world, power over one’s self is a matter of life and death.

Works of imaginative reach bear a reciprocal relation to the lives of their creators. They portray, and in fantasy realize, things lacking and longed for and only potential in the creator’s life. What the artist aspires to but can never achieve in living becomes that which exerts the most lasting and powerful effect on his imagination, becoming thereby the subject of his work, his task.

Who but a weakling would analyze power?

In this work, glancing back at the path taken, I examine the path not taken.
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Chapter VI
Sovereignty
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People have always believed-have seemed driven and determined, in the face of overwhelming countervailing evidence, to believe-that moral society as well as moral individual life is possible; that however rare or partial its actual achievement, it is in principle possible for individuals to live morally with the advantages of security, order, and opportunity provided by a powerful state, and for that state itself to behave morally with its constituents and with its neighbors. It was the accomplishment of Machiavelli, in a kind of Godel’s Proof of political economy, to show that such is not the case, that the good and moral life within an orderly society is contingent on the amorality of the state that makes it possible.

Chapter VII
Tarzan
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Why don’t I ask? The overwhelming humiliation of the question. . . the intrusion of bodily need . . . I can’t. I writhe. Why doesn’t he move? Why doesn’t he resign? Can’t he see it’s hopeless? Why don’t I resign? . . . But with a sure win. . . it’s crazy, would be perverse. If I should ask to use the bathroom, they would hear. Mr. Allison ponders patiently. I make little hopping movements. It shakes the table. He adjusts the pieces. The pain is unbearable.

Then it happens. Exploding. Suddenly, copiously, irresistibly flowing, silently, down my leg, into my shoe, onto the floor. With slow inevitability the smell of warm urine and wet wool rises between us. Mr. Allison shifts slightly, but-God rest his soul!-says not a word, registers the mishap only by taking somewhat less time with his next several moves and soon resigning.

I disappear into the night, in my wet pants and squishy shoe, know that I can never enter that house again.

A splendid fellow, Peter, chunky, good-natured, quick-tempered, smart, a bit on the coarse side, fond of anal jokes. A strong player, he crouches in his chair as if to spring, sinks into the board; his face darkens; he growls. I lean back, away from the board, relaxed, move delicately, taking a piece between middle and ring fingers, palm up, lifting it lightly, putting it down like a feather. The more devastating the consequence of a move, the more important to me that it be executed lightly, elegantly. Peter grabs a piece in his fist, bangs it down.

One evening he is relentless, parrying every thrust, crowding me, driving me irresistibly toward impotence. Finally, a&er a long deliberation, he finds the crushing combination, crashes his bishop down on R6 as if driving a nail, jumps up out of his chair, tweaks my nose, roars, “Ho! Ho! Ho! Now I’ve gotcha!” and dances a little jig.

I am offended by this eruption of aggression, however jovial, into a game designed in its essence for the translation of such aggression into formal patterns. My nose tingles. I withdraw stiffly. Our weekly games come to an end.

“You’re being stuffy,” my wife says.

Always I delay calling my mother-because it is so hard to get off the phone. One thing reminds her of another; the chain of reminiscence is endless, not only ranges over her own long life, but gathers in friends and relatives, extends back into what her grandmother told her about her great-great-grandmother. After five or ten minutes I begin trying to say good-bye: “It’s time for me to stop. I must help with dinner now.” Whereupon she tells me what she has had for dinner, and the wonderful dinners her mother used to prepare, the vegetable garden when she was a child, and Mamie, the black cook, and the time when her sister Mittie Mae left the arsenic in the pantry and everybody got sick and they all thought it was Lit, the handyman, who had done it. “Now I really have to stop, Mother,” I say; “there are things I have to do before-” “Yes, I know,” she says, “and I mustn’t keep you, but before we say good-bye, I want to tell you that . . .” and off into another story.

That’s the way it was until her ninety-seventh year, when, one day, I realized with surprise that I had called her during my ten-minute break between patients, that I had fallen into the habit of calling at such times, and that it was easy to get off the phone. The stickiness was gone. Her densely peopled past had, like old film, faded to uniform gray.

When I go to visit her in the nursing home, I try to bring it back. “Do you remember our house in San Antonio?” She looks puzzled, then troubled. “No. . . I can’t say I do. . . . Not exactly, no.” I then describe it for her, the kitchen, the long veranda, the hackberry tree, the mesquite, the honeysuckle that covered the fence, the cot on the back porch where I slept. As I talk, I see in her face glimmers of recognition. I step up my pace, try to compact those glimmers into a chain reaction of recall. Everything is lost. I ask about her marriage. Nothing. Her years in college? Nothing. I remind her of the time when her father took her as a little girl on a riverboat to New Orleans, where, having bought an entire bunch of bananas, he locked her in the hotel room so she would be safe while he went off to play poker. The high point of her childhood. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Don’t you remember? Nothing. She peers back into a void.
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Chapter IX
Psychoanalysis
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Several People love me. Many think highly of me. Were you to ask, they would tell you of my kindness, intelligence, generosity, empathy. And offer little by way of qualification- other than that I am difficult to know.

Viewing myself, I see a different person, find no ground for love. Anxious, petty, self-centered, tormented, meanspirited, weak. Too bad. I would have it otherwise, would wish for the noble features others ascribe to me. But I know myself better than they, make reference to a range of thought and feeling, of motivation and behavior, unavailable to them. Even those closest to me can know but a fraction of what I know. I’ve really got the dirt on me.

And beyond what I know lies what I have not permitted myself to know, wherein things even more damaging are hidden.

Since I intend in this work the utmost honesty, the reader, if I am successful, cannot in the end think well of me. If he does, I will have failed.

Is this credible? Is not every book written in the hope of love? Could any writer knowingly undertake such candor as would call for rejection?

Well. . . stranger things have happened. And anyway there’s no end to my deviousness. Perhaps I’m angling for some kind of meta-acceptance; perhaps I hope the style with which. . . Enough!

Self-Awareness comes into being in the midst of struggles for power and is immediately put to use. One defends oneself or seeks advantage by misrepresenting oneself. One doesn’t think about it; it happens instantly, automatically, inalienably. It is not possible to abstain. One cannot be oneself. To be human is to be false. Awareness is inseparable from misrepresentation. The soul of self-awareness is deception.

One must bend the world to fit one’s needs or bend one’s needs to fit the world. Unafraid, one moves for power and bends the world; afraid, one flinches at power and bends one’s self. The peasant thinks the prince has a free ride; the prince thinks the peasant’s life is easy.

The bending of self is renunciation. But needs die hard. We can renounce the having, but not the desiring. The hungry nose against the glass of the patisserie; the young man alone, alone, on the windy street, seeing, as the Mercedes takes the corner, the pretty girl fling herself across the driver and kiss him on the mouth. What can one do with that? It won’t go away. One is stuck with it, bitten by it, one turns it over and over, endlessly, the worm of envy burrows deeper, and it comes presently to seem that this agony of heart is unique, that it has never happened this way before, that it should be rendered in words.

And here, very indirectly, the warded-off, the renounced, is allowed back into play, for-who knows?-the novel about to be begun may prove a masterpiece. One will be acclaimed, honored, sought after by beautiful women; and here, exactly at this imagined future moment, is invoked the love that in the present one has not the nerve to seek. In the present it is hidden, out there somewhere perhaps, but withheld; one would have to go knocking on doors; but in that illusory future it will be lavished. Thus the strategy of withdrawing from power and changing the self may subtly transform itself into the ambition to change the world, by way of literary accomplishment, to fit one’s needs.
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There are the seekers, and there are those others. The seekers are hoping still to find it; someone powerful and wise will lead them to it. Those others, knowing that what they yearn for does not exist, strain to escape a wounded self.

Two kinds of longing ensue. In the first instance, one’s pain construed as remediable, a river of longing flows out to the healer. Though it may clamor for closeness, such longing is contingent on distance; for the master capable of such healing must obviously exist at a higher level than one’s self. Should a condition of mutuality come about, belief would be lost. One sits at his feet for as long as it takes. Perhaps forever. Such longing is the stuff of psychoanalysis.

In the second instance, construing one’s pain as incurable, one longs to escape the self. One seeks a beautiful face, falls sick with desire. Such longing is not content with distance, wants union, a flying together like magnets, arms outstretched, rushing together, clinching, fusing. Such longing is the stuff of despair.
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“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…” — Hosea 4:6

Meera Seth

Jeev Thimappa felt rewarded. By 5 a.m. he had knitted together the story on ‘pure’ juices, questioning Medit Juices’ ‘other natural flavours’ as taking away from the ‘pure’ claim. The cue had come from a health trainer who had challenged Medit with, “I have gluten intolerance. How do I know ‘other flavours’ does not contain gluten?”

But the rewards kept flowing in as Ram Sahukar was to give him a new story at 6 a.m. as he worked his shins at Joggers’ Park. “I say Jeev, I believe some obnoxious Japanese computer game has entered Indian markets! The success objective of this game is to rape a woman and her two daughters. I was shaken and shocked and demolished! How come your paper did not carry this news?”

Jeev: Problems must have solutions, kaka, if not they will cause more panic.

Sahukar: (Angry) Do you have a solution for swine flu? For AIDS? Aren’t you exerting to gather intelligence on hidden terrorists? H1N1, Headley, etc., are huge, but this game did not confront your sense of threat? What RDX are you guys slaving over? The one that will destroy humans and buildings and cities? That is okay! People will die and it will end there. But this Japanese game? That is the real RDX! The one that will destroy our minds and culture forever!”

Sahukar was an ardent writer of letters to the editor since 1992, when he was also the MD of an Indian bank. In the wake of liberalisation and the ensuing chaos in the business world, Sahukar fed NewsIndia with debates and doubts over the correctness of India succumbing to the IMF pressure. And Sahukar was a fiery man — then as MD and now as a consumer of everything, including NewsIndia.

“Times are changing, Jeev,” he said, “With television and internet getting active and aggressive, newspapers have to go beyond ordinary reporting. Even today, newspaper reading is a pleasant habit. Verandahs are built to enhance the joy of reading a newspaper. And, mind you, these are 100-year-old habits, not easily replaced. While advantage is yet on your side, you must redefine your profile. “

Next day, Jeev mentioned the Japanese game to Bhrigu Pant, deputy editor of NewsIndia.

Bhrigu: Yes, my son’s school principal too called, and made an interesting point. “That which is sensational sells… it is only a matter of finding the first toehold… a country where it is not illegal. Then you cannot stop it. Do you see that they have seen India as a sitting duck?”

Jeev: Absolutely! In India many things are not illegal, or regulated by the law — but the fact that something which is not illegal but can be wrong, is exactly what we are stubbornly resisting, Bhrigu. That is why when the Yamuna waters are reclaimed to build a games village, the debate hinged on ‘is not illegal, so can build’. That is why companies use big print to sell and small print to save their posteriors, because ‘making claims’ is not illegal in India.

News has to add value too. There is a difference between data and information. When data is processed and value is added to it, it becomes information. A mere communication that says ‘Japanese Rape game in India’ is like saying ‘Mary had a little lamb’. It does not tell you how to deal with it. Then why bother? The Internet is there, who needs newspapers?

Bhrigu: How do you mean?

Jeev: Read this mail from Advait Khemka, a principal — “Anything that is known to have entered a country illegally needs to be immediately addressed and systems built around it. Is that not what we did for AIDS? But entertainment in the form of sexual assault on women? How come newspapers are not moved?  Having read about this ‘game’, what should I do with the news? You tell me…”

Khemka had more angst. He had just read about the amendment to the Delhi Excise Bill that allowed 21-year-olds to serve liquor, even though the legal drinking age remains 25. What stunned him was the corollary to the news from the media: “Bartending then may just become a cool new career opportunity for those fresh out of campus.” Khemka had written again two days ago: “Just look at what you guys publish. It seems to reflect unformed minds. The other day I was at a five-star hotel with my wife. A young comely girl came up to our table — dressed in all black, a very tiny skirt, fishnet stockings and a starkly made up face. She was no more than 18 or 19. She was promoting a foreign brand of liquor that promised us an elegant nail cutter if we bought a drink from her! How dare we do this to our children! Who is auditing this?”

Jeev said, “He has a point, Bhrigu. Do you just give data but not the means to deal with it?”

Bhrigu: A newspaper’s core task is to report events, not run campaigns against bin Laden and other perceived demons like computer viruses, money laundering, match fixing, etc. Reporting on them is adequate. Reporting on the Japanese game is adequate without doing reader surveys, clinical studies on how the game has affected society, etc.

Jeev: The point here is the potent risk of communication through silence, Bhrigu. When the media publishes a news item about a Japanese game that aids and abets perversion and undesirable attitudes among the people — especially when recent research points to the idea of the adolescent brain and how it is still growing until age 23 — and does n-o-t-h-i-n-g about it, it is according the news the same tone and tenor that it did to ‘two people found dead’, ‘Parliamentarians throw chairs at each other’. I thought newspaper was about being the collective voice of a people and compelling the government to pay attention. I believe journalism is about intelligence, not data entry!”

Bhrigu called in Antara Bakshi, another senior correspondent. “Did you hear about the Japanese game thing?”

Antara: I have! Where no one takes responsibility because responsibility cannot be assigned, the ones to be hit badly are the young who are wading in the murk.  Somewhere we need to see this as market dynamics too. Don’t think publisher-reader, think marketer-consumer. Today reading has rivals in television, podcasts and mobile radio. Your consumer today is way ahead of what he was in 1940. The only thing we have to show for 70 years is colour printing. I believe our product is communication, not news, and this is how I want to redefine our role. When a newspaper reports in a deadpan way, and does not follow up, it is not communicating.

Parenting and teaching is about communication! And that is what the consumers are asking for: a new product that will communicate. They are saying, come out in the open and discuss. Talk to our children. Make them a part of the newspaper. They want a product that becomes a part of their lives, which places things on the table, and carries all families together towards a brave new world, a safe new world.

Bhrigu: These games are just products of the times. They will rise and fall. Fleeting fantasies.

Jeev: I am also a product of today’s desperate times, Bhrigu, with a mission to create order for those who seek it.

Bhrigu: And how, just how does underground gaming become media’s responsibility?

Jeev: Not responsibility; it is opportunity. Autism has always been there in India; yet it took an Aamir Khan to make Taare Zameen Par to place it in the open and invite people to look at it and deal with it. And then suddenly there is a spate of movies and tele-serials on autism —there is Antara, Paa, My Name is Khan. The movie industry has helped people become comfortable with what they did not want to face. But I am sure now when they face it, they are dealing with it better. That is the role of media. The opportunity to communicate and draw people to yourself, tell them this ‘happens’ but ‘this’ can be dealt with… and this is how… then it ceases to be a bogey man. Aamir need not have made that movie. He could have made a ha-ha-hee-hee one, like our news.

That evening Antara stopped at Jeev’s cubicle and said, “I do feel our life should be applied to improving, bettering, enabling. That I am able bodied, and have the right opportunities, yet I apply these for self glory has begun to rankle. To be known as a writer is only an ability to flash a premium Press card. All I am doing is earning money, not applying life!”

Jeev: Bhrigu is not wrong, but he’s not right either. Convince him why NewsIndia must have a different vision.

At the school carnival at 8 p.m., Antara hobnobbed with some parents of her children’s friends. As she paid for her coupons and bought her first coffee, Atul Divakar, a senior manager father was telling a bunch of parents: “Is the media ruled by people who worship power, wealth and fame? Of course! It is primarily money that motivates. Coverage can be paid for and had. Content is driven by advertiser agendas, and I know because I myself have engineered this at times…”

Antara winced and squirmed unhappily. Stepping into the fray as if propelled by some force, she said, “A bit unfair to use the same brush to tar the entire media, Atul. Writing about NASA does not get every journalist a free ride on the next shuttle, now does it? The paper’s target audience determines the advertising. Yes, editorial coverage can and does affect the decision on where advertising rupees are parked, but you have to be within the right target group anyway. So, some degree of natural selection is involved — a filter of sorts — before the nexus between ads and editorial can be established. Give the editor the benefit of doubt, please!”

Atul: Fair, then explain some of the classified ads; offers for ‘escorts’ by men and women. How how does an editor allow those? Or are you now going to say that he does not know about these?

So I called the head of my media agency who said: ‘To the best of my knowledge, they (newspapers) are not concerned. Classified ads are booked through depots which are franchise operations. The franchisee or booking agent is not concerned about what is being advertised. The only time they insist on verification is when you book an obit. Then they insist on seeing the death certificate. Rest, anything goes.’

Let me give you a parallel. I work in a company that also makes hair care products. We use an ingredient called sodium laureth sulphate or SLS in every shampoo. It is toxic and carcinogenic. Yet we continue to use it. Why? The same reason that some newspapers carry ads for ‘escorts’ but look the other way. In our case, we know but we are busy shrugging our shoulders.

The worst is this, Antara. No manufacturer is willing to invest in a decent R&D lab. No one wants to spend on researching a consumer-friendly alternative to SLS. You talk to shampoo makers and they are wont to tell you it is pretty harmless, at least less harmful than 1,000 other things you expose yourself to daily. But is that the point? Drinking tap water is far less harmful than drinking ditchwater. So is relativity the logic? It is this senseless logic called ‘statistical significance’ that justifies profiteering. There is a verse in the Bible — “my people die because of ignorance” — that sums it up, period!

Principal Dave: I tend to agree. It’s the very same relativity logic that also says ‘rape as a game is better than…’ If adults contemplated on what goes into building a human child into an adult, they will watch out. Our nutritionist has now come up with a warning on instant noodles. The kids are angry we don’t serve those anymore. Dr Karnik says the packaging material and glues used for these are suspected to contain dioxin and other hormone-like substances that mix with the food when hot water is added to the noodles. Also, there is talk that these noodles are coated with wax to make them non-stick. This wax does not get ejected from the system for 48 hours, and if you continue eating without giving your body time to eject that wax — which is what many students do — then you end up with cancer! These young are born into new cultures — instant noodles and Japanese games, whose sales we allow blindly. Who will research their risks? Should not our media spend time on such information services? These are the doubts that we want addressed. If not, why buy newspapers? I think they are stuck with their definition.
Gaurav Misra (CEO of business consultancy 2020 Social and Dave’s guest): My opinion is that print is the medium that is most threatened by the Internet. Television and radio are real time, and can, therefore, co-opt the Internet to become more interactive. Newspapers and magazines have to try harder to overcome their “published yesterday” nature.

In India, however, there are still 600-700 million people who don’t read newspapers, so there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. Still, if newspapers have to hold on to the young, urban, upwardly mobile readers, they will have to become more interactive and innovative.

Manas Tripathi (parent and accountant): So true! Today’s young are natural non-readers of newspapers. So, you, in fact, have a good reason for making your newspapers far more stimulating! And if newspapers track dealers that sell these kinds of games, point them out to the public so they know where the danger zones are, talk to the young directly and not as if they are kids, they will have a far better readership!

Principal Dave: I believe that is most important. When one of my students commits a wrong, we don’t shovel it under the carpet. We don’t pretend it did not happen; we place it on the table in the assembly and we talk to our students. We allow them to express all kinds of views on it. We can also take the stance that the role of schools is to teach as NCERT dictates and let parents worry about all else. But we have come to realise that education, like news, has to be complete and well-rounded to be meaningful, if it has to serve its purpose.

The next day, Antara was called to Bhrigu’s room for an edit meeting. On his table she saw a McKinsey report on why/how American consumer behaviour has changed during the recession. Bhrigu smiled as he caught her staring at it. Antara matched his smile and said, “You are paying to read something that will at best enhance some editorial you will write about ‘US: receding or recovering’. Why isn’t a study of the Indian consumer’s doubts and ignorance not relevant? That Palika Bazaar dealer, or Burmah Bazaar dealer in the rape game in all probability wears devotional marks on his face and flings flowers on a gold Laxmi idol. I would love to expose such a dealer. But you wouldn’t, Bhrigu!”

Bhrigu: Did you know that the only reason why he could go behind bars is because he has acquired the stocks through illegal means, and not because the product itself is harmful?

Antara: Yet our newspaper reports about where RDX was found, what RDX can do, where terrorist training schools were found, what colour shirt Headley was wearing… why, we even report and dissect the personal lives of people because somehow we imagine that we are adding value to readers. Media vie with each other to be the first to write about marital discords and sibling rivalries, yet, when an RDX like this game is found to have entered the country nobody raises an eyebrow!

Bhrigu: It is time for people to take responsibility for their own actions. The only solution is to shut down the Internet.

Jeev: Wow! After Headley, did you shut down the airports or just strengthen the visa barriers? When cholera hit the country, did we stop eating food? What did we do instead? Think… that is what we are asking to be exercised. Where illegal works, illegal will sell. Where corruption is the currency of transacting, people are known to buy innocence and acquittal with a few lakhs. We have shown the way that authority is flexible. But I do believe that today too the public continues to love and respect the printed word, and we must employ this faith to save the country. Instead, have we, as a people, as a country, communicated to the world outside that we have no filters? That anything can come in and the law cannot stop it?

Antara: But the problem is that media does not want to antagonise any of their golden geese. That is why news is so inane these days — some teacher’s face blackened, some actor caught in a rape case. Are we enabling our readers to wake up to real truths besieging our country? Then why admonish the Indian for intellectual lethargy when we don’t care to inform him? Is this because the real issues that need to be covered are backed by powerful lobbies, the ones which pay for the media’s existence?

Bhrigu: What does that mean?

Antara: Patancheru is a place in Andhra Pradesh, Bhrigu. Many large companies have their plants there. The people there are suffering from diseases wrought by the effluents dumped into their rivers and that have seeped into their groundwater. The Patancheru committee of villagers  is fighting to get back their basic need. Their protests have been covered by bloggers, social agencies and international publications. But what is the Indian media doing about it? Ditto for the mining community in Bihar. No whiff of this topic. They have driven viewers to a level of dumbness by feeding them social gossip and extramarital catastrophes. Are those life or death questions? No. Patancheru is.

Media today is not what media was. If the Indian media content is defined by advertisers’ agendas, then what is happening at a global level? Are there greater compromises at play?”

Analysis: Engaging Minds

With rights, we have lost sensibility. With laws, we have forgotten to be alert

G. Gautama

This case highlights several layers of questions and conflicts (see flowchart in ‘Back To The 30s: Silent Media’). For a long time, the market has ruled the openness to new ideas, and products have become symbols of modernity and civilisation. Spices, carpets, machines started unifying the world on ships, camel backs, trains and airplanes. With the death knell of colonialism came the ascendancy of the marketplace — the right to trade.

This has been brought to the forefront through the World Trade Organization, or WTO. But much was lost in the headlong rush for more things, ideas and gloss.

Who was to decide if something was good to sell? Who could challenge the pollution, the poisons? Who could temper the right to trade and sell with the vigilance of history? And who will protect the rights of our unborn children?
This case shows the impotence of humankind in dealing with tough questions. With rights, we have lost sensibility. With laws, we have lost alertness. With markets, we have discovered that everything has a price, even our children’s lives and their future. Isn’t the Japanese rape game just a small extension of the ‘Game of Life-2009 India Edition’? (See flowchart in ‘Back To The 30s: Silent Media’).

I am reminded, anachronistically, of the molestation on Ruchika Girhotra by S.P.S. Rathore, one of the senior-most police officials of Haryana. With increasing chagrin, I see the reports dragging in chief ministers, four of them, and listening to their impotent denials of ‘I can’t help’. I wonder how they would have acted if it had been one of their daughters who suffered this unhappy fate.

My mind rushes back to the story of the cow, the lame bull and Parikshit, Abhimanyu’s son. After the Mahabharata war was over and Parikshit was the king of the Pandava kingdom, he once saw a fearsome man brutally hitting a lame white bull on its only unbroken leg while a miserable cow sat next to it. He learnt that the cow represented mother Earth while the white bull signified Dharma, which stood on penance, cleanliness, compassion and truth. Pride had destroyed penance; indulgence destroyed cleanliness and arrogance strangled compassion. The person hitting the bull, Kali yuga, was trying to kill truth, and replace it with his weapon, untruth. And the cow was crying over the golden days that had gone by and the dark ones that were to come in the future.

Today, if the highest elected and appointed officials of the land, not marauders from another part of the planet but people we know and recognise, behave like thieves, murders and rapists, who can we turn to? Draupadi, abandoned by her protectors, who were the high and mighty of the land, turned to Krishna. Is that the only recourse left today for the weak and poor? As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, is it too early to speak about egality, respect for all and one law for all citizens? Has enough historical time gone by for human beings to have learnt that as we sow, so we reap?

At present, we seem to be saying what the worst despots have always said — “I have power, and so I can do anything” or “if you have power, you can do anything”.

I use newspapers a lot for my general studies classes with senior students. I try to teach them to read critically and look at the overall picture on any given day. Unfortunately, most students do not read the newspaper well. One may ask if this is so because the newspaper is only reporting but not engaging them?

Most youngsters dip into the sports pages, or metro plus and the odd two or three may read an editorial. But almost all watch the news on television and catch the broad headlines. However, here too, the garbling is immense. News channels mix what I would call ‘understanding the nuances’ kind of news with just ‘gossip’ news. If my paper spoke to me, I would speak to it and ask questions, and even learn.

The difference is between ‘engaging’ and ‘catering’. The world is full of caterers. First, you soften the person with advertisements and brain-numbing images and find out what makes him or her tick. Then you give them what they ask for. But who wants a discerning public, one whose brain and heart are engaged in enquiring into goodness, truth and egality?

To draw in students for a higher level of enquiry and learning requires some depth of conviction and a more clearly established sense of purpose. Are there any channels and newspapers that take the responsibility of speaking to the discerning individuals and adding to the shaping of an intelligent community of people? Or has the challenge of survival and viability driven everyone into ‘catering’? Is the mandate about exposing facts and their nuances? Or is it about covering up and moving quickly to the superficial, becoming a tool in the hands of the seductive marketplace?

Case Study: An Educational Chernobyl

“Each word has an echo. So does each silence.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

Meera Seth

Bhrigu Pant entered Principal Achint Dhawal’s office where another parent was also seated. The GM School, where Bhrigu’s sons studied, was one of the first to call Bhrigu in November 2009 when Dhawal had sighted news reports about a nefarious Japanese computer game that had entered India.
“It’s an underground game, sir,” Bhrigu had said then attempting to minimise Dhawal’s indignation. But Dhawal had pointed out, “The papers covering it are all ‘above the ground’, no Mr Pant? If you publish it, then an explanation must follow; a condemnation. The game’s entry into India is a cognisable act. Its condemnation and eradication must likewise be cognisable for it to not accumulate interest value.” While Bhrigu’s senior staff at NewsIndia had argued variously for the print medium to gain expression, Bhrigu wanted to verify what it was that bothered the schools.

Meanwhile, Ms Raman in the primary school was teaching the idea of ‘headlines’ to class 1 students. Little Kartikey had looked at the newspaper she had, and said, “That is a big word ma’am, speak it ma’am… what is that big word?” Succumbing, she said, “Molestation.”

Little Ranveer said, “My father told me it was about grown up people.” Kartikey’s face grew intense as he asked, “What does it mean ma’am? I am grown up…”

Raman told her class, “There is a bigger word. Let me see if you can write it.” She wrote ‘Constantinople’ on the board and asked the students to write it in cursive. “Tell me if it fits in one line!” And she went to meet the principal.

As Dhawal dealt with Bhrigu and parent Arjun Honaver, in walked Ms Raman. Honaver stood up and greeted her awkwardly saying, “Sorry for calling on you without notice… I need to talk to you. It’s about Ranveer.”

Bhrigu watched the goings on of a school, an organisation like any other, but whose daily story was refreshingly different from the rest, at least for Bhrigu, whose day began with deadlines and delays and cast-in-stone adult behaviours. He enjoyed watching Dhawal tend to different problems, including student Ronit Singh’s excuse for not wearing his school colour patka.

Honaver: See, daily when we drive to school, we play a ‘Point-the-word’ game with the newspaper. This morning Ranveer pointed towards ‘molestation’ and asked me for the meaning; I didn’t know what to say!

Raman: Your company’s recent advertisements for water purifier Swach talks about H1N1 and amphoteric surfactants. How did you explain that to consumers?

Honaver: Of course, we do communicate, but there is no risk of embarrassment there! I guess that is the fundamental difference. Besides, the consumer is not my child, you see… if my consumer is misinformed, it does not hurt me or give me sleepless nights.

Raman then narrated to Dhawal the chaos in her class over her unwitting choice of headlines, Dhawal advised her to approach it like she would any word.

Raman: One can go with the dictionary meaning which is “pester or harass (someone), typically in an aggressive or persistent manner. The crowd was shouting abuses and molesting the two police officers”. The other meaning is “assault or abuse (a person, esp. a woman or child) sexually”. I feel unsure about the latter meaning; do we need to address that at all?

Dhawal: Don’t we teach our children the rules of safe and unsafe touch? We do teach them that if there is an unsafe touch they experience, they must say ‘No’ and go tell an adult. Therefore, we have a responsibility to speak to children frankly. They trust us to give them answers, and that the answers will be correct.

Bhrigu: (Alarmed) Are you prepared for this? Won’t some kids react with fear or anger or helplessness or anxiety?

Dhawal: The solution then is silence. Unfortunately, that is not even an option! Here we are, grown up adults, unable to keep this country and world safe and clean, and in order to protect our own sense of comfort or discomfort, will we choose to keep information away? Information that is critical for the safety of our young? I am aghast that we can even think like this!

Raman: What should I do if the children say “the police officer was a bad man”? Should I endorse their feelings or deflect the question?

Dhawal: How would you answer that to your own child? What do you really feel and think: what the senior police officer and his office did, is it right? Stand by what you consider right. It may not be easy. But go ahead.

Arjun: How can you say ‘yes’ to that? It will break their faith in the law!

Dhawal: Once your little boy steps out of school, these are the people he will be dealing with. Can you afford to disguise meanings and call them ‘for grown ups’? Is it that you don’t know how to answer, or are you saying that the child should not be asking such questions?

Bhrigu watched them and thought, what a lot of song and dance over a news item that has probably died by now. To Dhawal he said, “I am amazed! Since when did schools begin to pay such attention to life outside the text books?”

Dhawal: Since the time life could not be contained just in books. And since a lot that is learnt is from society, from the system. Since the time news reporting exploded, grew variegated, insensitive and undependable. Since the time the world grew unhappier and parents adopted dynamic methods to make their kids smart but not wise. Tending to their EQ (emotional quotient) is our business, our calling, our responsibility.

We don’t just teach text books, we also teach our students ‘right attitude’. For this, we depend a lot on the external environment to be supportive (read, honest). Incidentally, sir, the girl whose experience has brought this ugly word into the front pages, was a child, a school student. It angers me that this country does not have respect for our young!

Realising how angry he had become, Dhawal paused and said, “For you, Mr Honaver, it is one child asking for one meaning. For me it is 1,100 students. My responsibility is to ensure that they get honest answers because we as teachers know that eight out of 10 kids do not get responses at home. Why? Because they are not taken seriously!

“Are you aware that about 50 per cent of the children in our country experience sexual abuse? In most cases, the abuser is somebody the family knows well. There is one more very troubling fact: on an average, a child needs to complain seven times before he or she is taken seriously, and one reason is that most of us seem to think that our children are safe. A young mind that grows with fear and anxiety, cannot grow into a healthy adult. Don’t your companies need healthy adults? Doesn’t our government need healthy adults to run it?

“How safe are our children? You tell me Mr Pant… you are a newspaper-wallah! Do newspapers know about children-youth-safety or only liquor, fashion, politics, crime, business and stockmarkets? Where is life in all this? When sexual imagery is the language of advertisement, when family magazines carry sexual surveys, when contraceptives are freely advertised with copy lines that are unnecessary, do you think the children are being ‘educated’ rightly by the media? Safely? Do you consider children and youth for other than selling things to and through? What are they? Little people who don’t matter?

“This is why I asked you, Mr Pant last month, what has NewsIndia done to exonerate the Japanese rape game. No one chose to condemn it. Why? This is a part of rightly informing our children. You need to partner parents and teachers. It is thanks to education, my good men, that newspapers have editors and soap companies CEOs! And just as parents are often ill-prepared for such conversations, so are school teachers!”

Bhrigu was strangely reassured. He had been unprepared too. And Dhawal was saying just that now. “Nobody is prepared for this! Which teacher is prepared for an answer to ‘Ma’am, what is a rape game?’ or ‘If he is a policeman, why did he trouble that girl?’ Mr Honaver, you tell me, how do you feel when a consumer calls to say that your soap brand did not deliver its promise? We feel sick when the students come back and tell us they are unable to deal with the world outside. Hear what my ex-student, Ishayu Sen, who is studying to be an accountant, writes: ‘sir, this profession is veiled in curtains of lies and deceit. It hurts me to know what I will have to participate in. I know that I do not want to become like my bosses or colleagues. They may be very professional, but they are not good people; and I frankly do not care to be associated with them.’ In Ishayu’s words I read a certain sadness and I feel responsible. Do you feel responsible, Mr Pant?

“Education is about an ongoing process of developing a big picture of life and its challenges, Mr Pant. There was a time when I used the newspaper a lot to teach. Instead, I am turning to new media, Internet blogs of George Monbiot or John Pilger or commentaries in the Guardian Weekly for depth and story telling. Yes! That is what is missing, story telling. Mr Pant, reporting is for trainees. Grown men write stories and challenge the edifice on which lies are hoisted! Instead, what do we have? News that crafts untruths to save some pompous agendas.

“I bookmarked this sentence from an old post from John Pilger for my class 12 debate on ‘the metaphysics of lying’. Here, let me read it out to you: ‘… the BBC’s director of news was asked (by Media Lens) why the BBC had remained silent on known atrocities committed by the Americans in Fallujah. She replied, “Our correspondent in Fallujah at the time [of the US attack], Paul Wood, did not report any of these things because he did not see any of these things.”’ Pilger adds wryly, ‘It’s a statement to savour’.”

Raman: Silence speaks louder. That is why I wanted to give Kartikey and Ranveer the right answer. Tell me Mr Honaver, how do we shepherd our students? Can we afford to be coy too? How do I enable them to discern aberration from rule?

Yes, thought Dhawal, how do you say, “Son, this is molestation, but you may not do it”. If an act should not be done, how did it get a name, then? This is why working in schools is only for the bravest! You cannot tell lies and spin fairy tales, but have to meet the frank questions of the young and search inside for any wisdom.

Dhawal left Bhrigu to continue his chat with other teachers, and walked towards class 11G for the English class. He saw the boys reading the news on the Yahoo homepage. “What’s news?” he called out, and the four sheepishly shut the laptop saying, “Nothing serious, sir.” Dhawal smiled, “Okay, rapid fire round: what were you reading about?” The four laughed knowing Dhawal’s ploys, and said, “Okay, there was some news about Rakhi Sawant…”

“Tell me,” said Dhawal. Jimmy Walia, a prefect, said, “It was less about Rakhi Sawant. It seems the chap who forcibly kissed her is so angry that she had lodged a complaint, that he has said he will never work with her in a film.”

“Okay, back to class now. We are reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Quick, on the double guys,” said Dhawal. But as he set up the podium for the lecture, his mind was droning with what he had heard and seen. Class 11 students were reading gossip when the country was torn by the debate over a police officer’s dishonesty. Turning to the class his thoughts leaked out. “What is today’s burning issue: a) The complicity in corruption and criminality by cabinet rank ministers, cops and courts of your country, or, b) Is Mika using offensive to look holy?”

Param (student): Mika-talk is the world we occupy, sir. We youngsters cannot choose or discard our ministers or the law, for we are young and certainly not ‘relevant’ for the country’s agenda as we are not adding to GDP. But we can choose or discard the actors and singers who inhabit our iPods and Facebook.

Vyas (student): How does it matter if Mika is right or not? Where is the truth in the news, sir? You tell us, how come newspapers are selective about what stories they give attention to and what not? How come some past sins are dug out but others not? Some of us here read Badri Raina on ZNet… they give us thoughts to think. Whereas newspapers only give us events.

Back in his office after the class, Dhawal said to the teachers conferring with Bhrigu Pant, “What paradox! Class 12 students do not seem to be attracted to mainstream news! They read the business papers and The Economist, but that is all business and commerce. What about the world they live in? Today, Sridhar Vyas has hit the nail on the head. He says newspapers are just event reporters. And I now understand what he means; the newspapers are not challenging them! News channels, too, have become like theatre performances with high-pitch voices, dramatic arguments and a generous garnish of Bollywood debates. Tiger Woods or Rakhi Sawant become far more worthy of conversation than starvation deaths in Orissa or BT brinjal or the judge in Karnataka! Their interaction with news is fleeting and flippant.

Mallika Sinha (music teacher): That is because the newspapers do not tell the story. They only report cold facts and walk away, much like ‘Kya aap ke toothpaste mein salt hai?’ Today, can the papers say they are tracking the West Asia wars? Or the emancipation of Iraq as a story like: ‘This is how it began…’? No!

Dhawal: Why invest in the intelligence of human beings, Mr Pant, when all you need is their ‘eyeballs’, isn’t it? Ethics of the market place is removed from the larger responsibility of ‘rightness’ and ‘goodness’. Markets thrive on the grey, undefined, and badly defined. In fact, they thrive on poor definitions, confusion and stirring the unresolved areas of human consciousness.

Here comes the media’s role. Is it their role to cater or to involve and engage? And how much are they willing to think about their mission and how much of themselves as a business, a corporation? I think those days are gone when newspaper barons passionately believed in engaging. Today, this has translated into a corporate empire which is supported by advertisements and sponsorships. And, therefore, media increasingly has taken on the colour of the marketplace. Much the same way that schools and colleges take their colour from the corporations and lose their purpose in their catering.

Mallika: The editorials and comments require one to search and only the clearly oriented reader has a chance of getting something halfway significant out of the paper…

Biren Chogyal (sports teacher): Absolutely. Presenting facts versus shaping an opinion! Dulling the sensibilities of the readers and in fact like the Mobius strip the reader finds himself supporting something that is terrible. Such an insult to individual intelligence. The tragedy at a deeper level is that our education drives out what residual sensibility we carry from the older generations!

Madhav Lal (history): Worse, Mr Pant. We even come to disregard that residual sensibility. I really wonder how we are going to step up the schooling experience. Newspapers offer a platter of ‘news’ but steer clear of tricky stories. Take the Maoist uprising in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, etc. The students have been unable to delve deep and examine the situation. While many newspapers have written about the raids, deaths, counter attacks, there seem to be few pieces that tell the story of poverty, starvation, exploitation and neglect. Few raise historical questions — are these people criminals or freedom fighters? Or examine the reasons for their uprising.

Some students have been sharp and reached columns written by Harsh Mander, P. Sainath etc., which dare to unfold a carefully worked story. Unfortunately, students ‘encounter’ them rarely, as the paper speaks alongside, a language of disjointed and sensational news, while burying significant news between gossip and advertisements.

Dhawal: Exactly my point too. Take any country, Mr Pant, it has a story laden with confusion: West Asia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, and then the bigger chapters are about the involvement of the G8 in their histories and futures.

You must write history as it happens, and unearth the details wherein lies the denudation of a country’s values. Only then can you say you gave your children the truth. Today, lies are written in the language of truth. My student Vyas asks me, “How come some testimonies are admitted and some not?” Do you see, Mr Reporter, to answer Vyas honestly, I will be saying things about the law and order, about newspaper ideologies and revenues and, of course, political optimisation.

Or, are newspapers afraid to speak plainly? Are we unable to take a clear position resting on truth and a sense of rightness? Where is the question of taking on the system and breathing new life, if people who are in positions of influence don’t speak their minds? Can you imagine where India would have been if Mahatma Gandhi had not resisted at Natal? Suppose he had apologised and disembarked from the train? So, conviction Mr Pant, conviction!

Analysis: The Wonder of Why

The media needs to take responsibility for its choice of content, slant and tone

G. Guatama

Make what you may of my silence, my child.
At least I did not feed you lies!
‘Why’ is a difficult question, child…
The first ‘Why’ usually takes us to the surface,
The second — how much we take for granted,
The third ‘Why’ brings us face to face with the depth of our ignorance,
a la C.V. Raman in ‘Why The Sky Is Blue’
By then the whys multiply, leading to wonder,
To unknown facts, exciting questions,
uncomfortable unanswered answers.

Why did the police officer hurt the girl?
What happened to her hurt?
Why did no one listen?
The papers, why were they quiet for 19 years?
The quiet cops, were they terrified, embarrassed?
Or did they protect the wrong doer?
When I am older, and commit a wrong,
will the cops and court protect me too?
Will I too be able to get away with just a tap?

Aha! That’s how it works!
If you have profit, you have power!
You don’t go to jail or pay for your crime,
protected by money, protected by power!
So teacher, please, don’t teach me useless stuff.
Teach me the real world!
Teach me how to fulfill my heart’s desires; ads do.
Teach me to get all I crave; the market does!
I want to look good, like in the magazines,
the stars and the beautiful people.
Did they get there playing by the rulebook?
Or did they duck when inner questions
flew fast and thick?
No one got anything by answering questions.
‘Just do it’ is the only mantra! Don’t ask how!

If you see walls, break them.
If rivers block your path, suck them dry!
Life is an opportunity, and I have just this one.
Teacher oh teacher, don’t waste my time.
Fill my mind with dreams of power.
I hear it so loud that I can’t hear your song
of respect and dignity, of right and wrong.
I learnt it all very early, so did my friends.

You are tall and grownup, did they somehow leave you out?
Teacher, is that why you are still at school?
Teach me that nothing matters beyond power.
Show me how to bury questions and confusions.
Surely you know that this is just a game,
this talk of morals and values, goodness and decency.
Or, did they forget to tell you?
Surely you know I need the prize,
to stand tall a victor.
But I need to quell the little voice within,
the one that asks questions…
Teach me to smile, when I have done wrong,
To forgive myself and deny all wrongs.

Teacher oh teacher, I have nothing against you!
You may not know, but you are in a tight spot.
For you can neither speak the truth nor endorse power.
But know, I was here when yet young, unformed, often I spoke the honest truth;
I was licked into shape with jeers and taunts.
I have learnt my lessons, I learnt what pays.
So Teacher, will you still stand alone?
Or soon sell your soul to the spell of the market?

Why is the school, the last of institutions standing, to be left with this hopeless mandate? Why is there such little support for the emergence of intelligence in the young and old? Could it be that we actually don’t love our children? If we did, would we not find a way out?

Have we, the society, chosen power over care, efficiency over effectiveness, the cat that runs away with the pie over the larger good? And, therefore, have we chosen lament over hope? And if this is what we wish to burn into the consciousness of our children, there is no better broth we can offer. An anachronistic school system and powerful surround messages reinforcing the opposite.

In fact, Mountcastle argues that the reason one region of cortex looks slightly different from another is because of what it is connected to, and not because its basic function is different. He concludes that there is a common function, a common algorithm, that is performed by all the cortical regions. Vision is no different from hearing, which is no different from motor output. He allows that our genes specify how the regions of cortex are connected, which is very specific to function and species, but the cortical tissue itself is doing the same thing everywhere.

Let’s think about this for a moment. To me, sight, hearing, and touch seem very different. They have fundamentally different qualities. Sight involves color, texture, shape, depth, and form. Hearing has pitch, rhythm, and timbre. They feel very different. How can they be the same? Mountcastle says they aren’t the same, but the way the cortex processes signals from the ear is the same as the way it processes signals from the eyes. He goes on to say that motor control works on the same principle, too. Scientists and engineers have for the most part been ignorant of, or have chosen to ignore, Mountcastle’s proposal. When they try to understand vision or make a computer that can “see,” they devise vocabulary and techniques specific to vision. They talk about edges, textures, and three-dimensional representations. If they want to understand spoken language, they build algorithms based on rules of grammar, syntax, and semantics. But if Mountcastle is correct, these approaches are not how the brain solves these problems, and are therefore likely to fail. If Mountcastle is correct, the algorithm of the cortex must be expressed independently of any particular function or sense. The brain uses the same process to see as to hear. The cortex does something universal that can be applied to any type of sensory or motor system.

When I first read Mountcastle’s paper I nearly fell out of my chair. Here was the Rosetta stone of neuroscience-a single paper and a single idea that united all the diverse and wondrous capabilities of the human mind. It united them under a single algorithm. In one step it exposed the fallacy of all previous attempts to understand and engineer human behavior as diverse capabilities. I hope you can appreciate how radical and wonderfully elegant Mountcastle’s proposal is. The best ideas in science are always simple, elegant, and unexpected, and this is one of the best. In my opinion it was, is, and will likely remain the most important discovery in neuroscience. Incredibly, though, most scientists and engineers either refuse to believe it, choose to ignore it, or aren’t aware of it.

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Part of this neglect stems from a poverty of tools for studying how information flows within the six-layered cortex. The tools we do have operate on a grosser level and are generally aimed at locating where in the cortex, as opposed to when and how, various capabilities arise. For example, much of the neuroscience reported in the popular press these days implicitly favors the idea of the brain as a collection of highly specialized modules. Functional imaging techniques like functional MRI and PET scanning focus almost exclusively on brain maps and the functional regions I mentioned earlier. Typically in these experiments, a volunteer subject lies down with his or her head inside the scanner and performs some kind of mental or motor task. It might be playing a video game, generating verb conjugations, reading sentences, looking at faces, naming pictures, imagining something, memorizing lists, making financial decisions, and so on. The scanner detects which brain regions are more active than usual during these tasks and draws colored splotches over an image of the subject’s brain to pinpoint them. These regions are presumably central to the task. Thousands of functional imaging experiments have been done and thousands more will follow. Through the course of it all, we are gradually building up a picture of where certain functions happen in the typical adult brain. It is easy to say, “this is the face recognition area, this is the math area, this is the music area,” and so on. Since we don’t know how the brain accomplishes these tasks, it is natural to assume that the brain carries out the various activities in different ways.

But does it? A growing and fascinating body of evidence supports Mountcastle’s proposal. Some of the best examples demonstrate the extreme flexibility of the neocortex. Any human brain, if nourished properly and put in the right environment, can learn any of thousands of spoken languages. That same brain can also learn sign language, written language, musical language, mathematical language, computer languages, and body language. It can learn to live in frigid northern climes or in a scorching desert. It can become an expert in chess, fishing, farming, or theoretical physics. Consider the fact that you have a special visual area that seems to be specifically devoted to representing written letters and digits. Does this mean you were born with a language area ready to process letters and digits?

Unlikely. Written language is far too recent an invention for our genes to have evolved a specific mechanism for it. So the cortex is still dividing itself into task-specific functional areas long into childhood, based purely on experience. The human brain has an incredible capacity to learn and adapt to thousands of environments that didn’t exist until very recently. This argues for an extremely flexible system, not one with a thousand solutions for a thousand problems.

Neuroscientists have also found that the wiring of the neocortex is amazingly “plastic,” meaning it can change and rewire itself depending on the type of inputs flowing into it. For example, newborn ferret brains can be surgically rewired so that the animals’ eyes send their signals to the areas of cortex where hearing normally develops. The surprising result is that the ferrets develop functioning visual pathways in the auditory portions of their brains. In other words, they see with brain tissue that normally hears sounds. Similar experiments have been done with other senses and brain regions. For instance, pieces of rat visual cortex can be transplanted around the time of birth to regions where the sense of touch is usually represented. As the rat matures, the transplanted tissue processes touch rather than vision. Cells were not born to specialize in vision or touch or hearing.

Human neocortex is every bit as plastic. Adults who are born deaf process visual information in areas that normally become auditory regions. And congenitally blind adults use the rearmost portion of their cortex, which ordinarily becomes dedicated to vision, to read braille. Since braille involves touch, you might think it would primarily activate touch regions-but apparently no area of cortex is content to represent nothing. The visual cortex, not receiving information from the eyes like it is “supposed” to, casts around for other input patterns to sift through-in this case, from other cortical regions.

All this goes to show that brain regions develop specialized functions based largely on the kind of information that flows into them during development. The cortex is not rigidly designed to perform different functions using different algorithms any more than the earth’s surface was predestined to end up with its modern arrangement of nations. The organization of your cortex, like the political geography of the globe, could have turned out differently given a different set of early circumstances.

Genes dictate the overall architecture of the cortex, including the specifics of what regions are connected together, but within that structure the system is highly flexible.

Mountcastle was right. There is a single powerful algorithm implemented by every region of cortex. If you connect regions of cortex together in a suitable hierarchy and provide a stream of input, it will learn about its environment. Therefore, there is no reason for intelligent machines of the future to have the same senses or capabilities as we humans. The cortical algorithm can be deployed in novel ways, with novel senses, in a machined cortical sheet so that genuine, flexible intelligence emerges outside of biological brains.

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Let’s move on to a topic that is related to Mountcastle’s proposal and is equally surprising. The inputs to your cortex are all basically alike. Again, you probably think of your senses as being completely separate entities. After all, sound is carried as compression waves through air, vision is carried as light, and touch is carried as pressure on your skin. Sound seems temporal, vision seems mainly pictorial, and touch seems essentially spatial. What could be more different than the sound of a bleating goat versus the sight of an apple versus the feel of a baseball?

But let’s take a closer look. Visual information from the outside world is sent to your brain via a million fibers in your optic nerve. After a brief transit through the thalamus, they arrive at the primary visual cortex. Sounds are carried in via the thirty thousand fibers of your auditory nerve. They pass through some older parts of your brain and then arrive at your primary auditory cortex. Your spinal cord carries information about touch and internal sensations to your brain via another million fibers. They are received by your primary somatosensory cortex. These are the main inputs to your brain. They are how you sense the world.

You can visualize these inputs as a bundle of electrical wires or a bundle of optical fibers. You might have seen lamps made with optical fibers where pinpoints of colored light appear at the end of each fiber. The inputs to the brain are like this, but the fibers are called axons, and they carry neural signals called “action potentials” or “spikes,” which are partly chemical and partly electrical. The sense organs supplying these signals are different, but once they are turned into brain-bound action potentials, they are all the same-just patterns.

If you look at a dog, for example, a set of patterns will flow through the fibers of your optic nerve into the visual part of your cortex. If you listen to the dog bark, a different set of patterns will flow along your auditory nerve and into the hearing parts of your brain. If you pet the dog, a set of touch-sensation patterns will flow from your hand, through fibers in your spine, and into the parts of your brain that deal with touch. Each pattern-see the dog, hear the dog, feel the dog-is experienced differently because each gets channeled through a different path in the cortical hierarchy. It matters where the cables go to inside the brain. But at the abstract level of sensory inputs, these are all essentially the same, and are all handled in similar ways by the six-layered cortex. You hear sound, see light, and feel pressure, but inside your brain there isn’t any fundamental difference between these types of information. An action potential is an action potential. These momentary spikes are identical regardless of what originally caused them. All your brain knows is patterns.
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Chapter 4
Memory
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Computers have memory too, in the form of hard drives and memory chips; however, there are four attributes of neocortical memory that are fundamentally different from computer memory:

• The neocortex stores sequences of patterns.
• The neocortex recalls patterns auto-associatively.
• The neocortex stores patterns in an invariant form.
• The neocortex stores patterns in a hierarchy.
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The next time you tell a story, step back and consider how you can only relate one aspect of the tale at a time. You cannot tell me everything that happened all at once, no matter how quickly you talk or I listen. You need to finish one part of the story before you can move on to the next. This isn’t only because spoken language is serial; written, oral, and visual storytelling all convey a narrative in a serial fashion. It is because the story is stored in your head in a sequential fashion and can only be recalled in the same sequence. You can’t remember the entire story at once. In fact, it’s almost impossible to think of anything complex that isn’t a series of events or thoughts.

You may have noticed, too, that in telling a story some people can’t get to the crux of it right away. They seem to ramble on with irrelevant details and tangents. This can be irritating. You want to scream, “Get to the point!” But they are chronicling the story as it happened to them, through time, and cannot tell it any other way.

Another example: I’d like you to imagine your home right now. Close your eyes and visualize it. In your imagination, go to the front door. Imagine what it looks like. Open your front door. Move inside. Now look to your left. What do you see? Look to the right. What is there? Go to your bathroom. What’s on the right? What’s on the left? What’s in the top right drawer? What items do you keep in your shower? You know all these things plus thousands more and can recall them in great detail. These memories are stored in your cortex. You might say these things are all part of the memory of your home. But you can’t think of them all at once. They are obviously related memories but there is no way you can bring to mind all of this detail at once. You have a thorough memory of your home; but to recall it you have to go through it in sequential segments, in much the same way as you experience it.

All memories are like this. You have to walk through the temporal sequence of how you do things. One pattern (approach the door) evokes the next pattern (go through the door), which evokes the next pattern (either go down the hall or ascend the stairs), and so on. Each is a sequence you’ve followed before. Of course, with a conscious effort I can change the order of how I describe my home to you. I can jump from basement to the second floor if I decide to focus on items in a nonsequential way. Yet once I start to describe any room or item I’ve chosen, I’m back to following .a sequence. Truly random thoughts don’t exist. Memory recall almost always follows a pathway of association.

You know the alphabet. Try saying it backward. You can’t because you don’t usually experience it backward. If you want to know what it’s like to be a child learning the alphabet, try saying it in reverse. That’s exactly what they’re confronted with. It’s really hard. Your memory of the alphabet is a sequence of patterns. It isn’t something stored or recalled in an instant or in an arbitrary order. The same thing goes for the days of the week, the months of the year, your phone number, and countless other things.

Your memory for songs is a great example of temporal sequences in memory. Think of a tune you know. I like to use “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” but any melody will suffice.
You cannot imagine the entire song at once, only in sequence. You can start at the beginning or maybe with the chorus, and then you play through it, filling in the notes one after another. You can’t recall the song backward,just as you can’t recall it all at once. You were first exposed to “Somewhere over the Rainbow” as it played through time, and you can only recall it in the same way you learned it.

This applies to very low level sensory memories too. Consider your tactile memory for textures. Your cortex has memories of what it feels like to hold a fistful of gravel, slide your fingers over velvet, and press down on a piano key. These memories are based on sequences every bit as much as the alphabet and songs are; it’s just that the sequences are shorter, spanning mere fractions of a second rather than many seconds or minutes. If! buried your hand in a bucket of gravel while you slept, when you woke up you wouldn’t know what you were touching until you moved your fingers. Your memory for the tactile texture of gravel is based on pattern sequences across the pressure and vibration-sensing neurons in your skin. These sequences are different from those you’d receive if your hand was buried in sand or Styrofoam pellets or dry leaves. As soon as you flexed your hand, the scraping and rolling of the pebbles would create the telltale pattern sequences of gravel and trigger the appropriate memory in your somatosensory cortex.

The next time you get out of the shower, pay attention to how you dry yourself off with a towel. I discovered that I dry myself off with nearly the exact same sequence of rubs, pats, and body positions each time. And via a pleasant experiment I discovered that my wife also follows a semirigid pattern when she steps out of the shower. You probably do too. If you follow a sequence, try changing it. You can will yourself to do it, but you need to stay focused. If your attention wanders, you’ll fall back into your accustomed pattern.

All memories are stored in the synaptic connections between neurons. Given the very large number of things we have stored in our cortex, and that at any moment in time we can recall only a tiny fraction of these stored memories, it stands to reason that only a limited number of synapses and neurons in your brain are playing an active role in memory recall at anyone time. As you start to recall what is in your home, one set of neurons becomes active, which then leads to another set of neurons being active, and so on. An adult human neocortex has an incredibly large memory capacity. But, even though we have stored so many things, we can only remember a few at any time and can only do so in a sequence of associations.

Here is a fun exercise. Try to recall details from your past, details of where you lived, places you visited, and people you knew. I find I can always uncover memories of things I haven’t thought of in many years. There are thousands of detailed memories stored in the synapses of our brains that are rarely used. At any point in time we recall only a tiny fraction of what we know. Most of the information is sitting there idly waiting for the appropriate cues to invoke it.

Computer memory does not normally store sequences of patterns. It can be made to do so using various software tricks (such as when you store a song on your computer), but computer memory does not do this automatically. In contrast, the cortex does store sequences automatically. Doing so is an inherent aspect of the neocortical memory system.

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Now let’s consider the second key feature of our memory, its auto-associative nature. As we saw in chapter 2, the term simply means that patterns are associated with themselves. An auto-associative memory system is one that can recall complete patterns when given only partial or distorted inputs. This can work for both spatial and temporal patterns. If you see your child’s shoes sticking out from behind the draperies, you automatically envision his or her entire form. You complete the spatial pattern from a partial version of it. Or imagine you see a person waiting for a bus but can only see part of her because she is standing partially behind a bush. Your brain is not confused. Your eyes only see parts of a body, but your brain fills in the rest, creating a perception of a whole person that’s so strong you may not even realize you’re only inferring.

You also complete temporal patterns. If you recall a small detail about something that happened long ago, the entire memory sequence can come flooding back into your mind. Marcel Proust’s famous series of novels, Remembrance of Things Past, opened with the memory of how a madeleine cookie smelled and he was off and running for a thousand-plus pages. During conversation we often can’t hear all the words if we are in a noisy environment. No problem. Our brains fill in what they miss with what they expect to hear. It’s well established that we don’t actually hear all the words we perceive. Some people complete others’ sentences aloud, but in our minds all of us are doing this constantly. And not just the ends of sentences, but the middles and beginnings as well. For the most part we are not aware that we’re constantly completing patterns, but it’s a ubiquitous and fundamental feature of how memories are stored in the cortex. At any time, a piece can activate the whole. This is the essence of auto-associative memories.

Your neocortex is a complex biological auto-associative memory. During each waking moment, each functional region is essentially waiting vigilantly for familiar patterns or pattern fragments to come in. You can be in deep thought about something, but the instant your friend appears your thoughts switch to her. This switch isn’t something you chose to do. The mere appearance of your friend forces your brain to start recalling patterns associated with her. It’s unavoidable. After an interruption we frequently have to ask, “What was I thinking about?” A dinner conversation with friends follows a circuitous route of associations. The talk may start with the food in front of you, but the salad evokes an associated memory of your mother’s salad at your wedding, which leads to a memory of someone else’s wedding, which leads to a memory of where they went on their honeymoon, to the political problems in that part of the world, and so on. Thoughts and memories are associatively linked, and again, random thoughts never really occur. Inputs to the brain auto-associatively link to themselves, filling in the present, and auto-associatively link to what follows next. We call this chain of memories thought, and although its path is not deterministic, we are not fully in control of it either.
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Chapter 5
A New Framework of Intelligence
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Mammals evolved a large neocortex because it gave them some survival advantage, and such an advantage must ultimately be rooted in behavior. But in the beginning, the cortex served to make more efficient use of existing behaviors, not to create entirely new behaviors. To make the case clear, we need to take a look at how our brains evolved.

Simple nervous systems emerged not long after multicellular creatures started squiggling all over the Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago, but the story of real intelligence begins more recently with our reptilian forebears. The reptiles were successful in their conquest of the land. They spread over every continent and diversified into numerous species. They had keen senses and well-developed brains that endowed them with complex behavior. Their direct descendants, today’s surviving reptiles, still have them. An alligator, for example, has sophisticated senses just like you and me. It has well-developed eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin. It carries out complex behaviors including the ability to swim, run, hide, hunt, ambush, sun, nest, and mate.

What is the difference between a human brain and a reptile brain? A lot and a little. I say a little because, to a rough approximation, everything in a reptile’s brain exists in a human brain. I say a lot because a human brain has something really important that a reptile does not have: a large cortex. You sometimes hear people refer to the “old” brain or the “primitive” brain. Every human has these more ancient structures in the brain,just like a reptile. They regulate blood pressure, hunger, sex, emotions, and many aspects of movement. When you stand, balance, and walk, for example, you are relying heavily on the old brain. If you hear a lightening sound, panic, and start to run, that is mostly your old brain. You don’t need more than a reptile brain to do a lot of interesting and useful things. So what does the neocortex do if it isn’t strictly required to see, hear, and move?

Mammals are more intelligent than reptiles because of their neocortex. (The word itself is derived from the Latin words for “new bark” or “new rind,” because the cortex literally covers the old brain.) The neocortex first appeared tens of millions of years ago and only mammals have one. What makes humans smarter than other mammals is primarily the large area of our neocortex-which expanded dramatically only a couple of million years ago. Remember, the cortex is built using a common repeated element. The human cortical sheet is the same thickness and has very nearly the same structure as the cortex in our mammal relatives. When evolution makes something big very quickly, as it did with human cortex, it does so by copying an existing structure. We got smart by adding many more elements of a common cortical algorithm. There is a common misconception that the human brain is the pinnacle of billions of years of evolution. This may be true if we think of the entire nervous system. However, the human neocortex itself is a relatively new structure and hasn’t been around long enough to undergo much long-term evolutionary refinement.

Here then is the core of my argument on how to understand the neocortex, and why memory and prediction are the keys to unlocking the mystery of intelligence. We start with the reptilian brain with no cortex. Evolution discovers that if it tacks on a memory system (the neocortex) to the sensory path of the primitive brain, the animal gains an ability to predict the future. Imagine the old reptilian brain is still doing its thing, but now sensory patterns are simultaneously fed into the neocortex. The neocortex stores this sensory information in its memory. At a future time when the animal encounters the same or a similar situation, the memory recognizes the input as similar and recalls what happened in the past. The recalled memory is compared with the sensory input stream. It both “fills in” the current input and predicts what will be seen next. By comparing the actual sensory input with recalled memory, the animal not only understands where it is but can see into the future.

Now imagine that the cortex not only remembers what the animal has seen but also remembers the behaviors the old brain performed when it was in a similar situation. We don’t even have to assume the cortex knows the difference between sensations and behavior; to the cortex they are both just patterns. When our animal finds itself in the same or a similar situation, it not only sees into the future but recalls which behaviors led to that future vision. Thus, memory and prediction allow an animal to use its existing (old brain) behaviors more intelligently.

For example, imagine you’re a rat learning to navigate a maze for the first time. Aroused by uncertainty or hunger, you will use the skills inherent to your old brain to explore the new environment-listening, looking, sniffing, and creeping close to the walls. All this sensory information is used by your old brain but is also passed up to your neocortex, where it is stored. At some future time, you find yourself in the same maze. Your neocortex will recognize the current input as one it has seen before and recall the stored patterns representing what happened in the past. In essence, it allows you to see a short way into the future. If you were a talking rat, you might say, “Oh, I recognize this maze, and I remember this corner.” As your neocortex recalls what happened in the past, you will envision finding the cheese you saw last time you were in the maze, and how you got to it. “In turn right here, I know what.will happen next. There’s a piece of cheese down at the end of this hallway. I see it in my imagination.” When you scurry through the maze, you rely on older, primitive structures to carry out movements like lifting your feet and sweeping your whiskers. With your (relatively) big neocortex, you can remember the places you have been, recognize them again in the future, and make predictions about what will happen next. A lizard without a neocortex has a much poorer ability to remember the past and may have to search a maze anew every time. You (the rat) understand the world and the immediate future because of your cortical memory. You see vivid images of the rewards and dangers that lie ahead of each decision, and so you move more effectively through your world. You can literally see the future.

But notice you are not performing any particularly complex or fundamentally new behaviors. You are not building yourself a hang glider and flying to the cheese at the end of the hallway. Your neocortex is forming predictions about sensory patterns that allow you to see into the future, but your palette of available behaviors is pretty much unaffected. Your ability to scurry, clamber, and explore is still a lot like that of a lizard.

As the cortex got larger over evolutionary time, it was able to remember more and more about the world. It could form more memories, and make more predictions. The complexity of those memories and predictions also increased. But something else remarkable happened that led to the uniquely human abilities for intelligent behavior.

Human behavior transcends the old basic repertoire of moving around with ratlike skills. We have taken neocortical evolution to a new level. Only humans create written and spoken language. Only humans cook their food, sew clothes, fly planes, and build skyscrapers. Our motor and planning abilities vastly exceed those of our closest animal relatives. How can the cortex, which was designed to make sensory predictions, generate the incredibly sophisticated behavior unique to humans? And how could this superior behavior evolve so suddenly? There are two answers to this question. One is that the neocortical algorithm is so powerful and flexible that with a little bit of rewiring, unique to humans, it can create new, sophisticated behaviors. The other answer is that behavior and prediction are two sides of the same thing. Although the cortex can envision the future, it can make accurate sensory predictions only if it knows what behaviors are being performed.

In the simple example of the rat looking for the cheese, the rat remembers the maze and uses this memory to predict that it will see the cheese around the corner. But the rat could turn left or turn right; only by simultaneously remembering the cheese and the correct behavior, “turn right at the fork,” can the rat make the prediction of the cheese come true. Although this is a trivial example, it gets to the essence of how sensory prediction and behavior are intimately related. All behavior changes what we see, hear, and feel. Most of what we sense at any moment is highly dependent on our own actions. Move your arm in front of your face. To predict seeing your arm, your cortex has to know that it has commanded the arm to move. If the cortex saw your arm moving without the corresponding motor command, you would be surprised. The simplest way to interpret this would be to assume your brain first moves the arm and then predicts what it will see. I believe this is wrong. Instead I believe the cortex predicts seeing the arm, and this prediction is what causes the motor commands to make the prediction come true. You think first, which causes you to act to make your thoughts come true.
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Chapter 6
How the Cortex Works
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Let me describe this using another mental picture. Imagine two pieces of paper with lots of little holes punched in them. The holes on one paper represent the columns that have active layer 2 or layer 3 cells, our invariant prediction. The holes on the other paper represent columns with partial input from below. If you put one piece of paper on top of the other, some of the holes will line up, others won’t. The holes that line up represent the columns we think should be active.

This mechanism not only makes specific predictions, it also resolves ambiguities from the sensory inputs. Very often the input to a region of cortex will be ambiguous, as we saw with the colored papers, or when you hear a semi-garbled word. This bottom-up/ top-down matching mechanism enables you to decide between two or more interpretations. And once you decide, you relay your interpretation to the region below.

Every moment in your waking life, each region of your neocortex is comparing a set of expected columns driven from above with the set of observed columns driven from below. Where the two sets intersect is what we perceive. If we had perfect input from below and perfect predictions, then the set of perceived columns would always be contained in the set of predicted columns. We often don’t have such agreement. The method of combining partial prediction with partial input resolves ambiguous input, it fills in missing pieces of information, and it decides between alternative views. It is how we combine an expected pitch-invariant interval with the last heard note to predict the next specific note in a melody. It is how we decide whether a picture is of a vase or of two faces. It is how we split our motor stream either to write or to speak the Gettysburg Address.

Finally, in addition to projecting to lower cortical regions, layer 6 cells can send their output back into layer 4 cells of their own column. When they do, our predictions become the input. This is what we do when daydreaming or thinking. It allows us to see the consequences of our own predictions. We do this many hours a day as we plan the future, rehearse speeches, and worry about events to come. Longtime cortical modeler Stephen Grossberg calls this “folded feedback.” I prefer “imagining.”

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One last topic before we leave this section. I have pointed out several times that most often what we see, hear, or feel is highly dependent on our own actions. What we see is dependent on where our eyes saccade and how we turn our heads. What we feel is dependent on how we move our limbs and fingers. What we hear is sometimes dependent on what we say and do.

Therefore, to predict what we will sense next, we have to know what actions we are undertaking. Motor behavior and sensory perception are highly interdependent. How can we make predictions if what we sense next is largely a result of our own actions? Fortunately, there is a surprising and elegant solution to this problem, although many of the details are not understood.

The first surprising discovery is that perception and behavior are almost one and the same. As I mentioned earlier, most if not all regions of the cortex, even visual areas, participate in the creation of movement. The layer 5 cells that project to the thalamus and then to layer 1 also seem to have a motor function because they simultaneously project to motor areas of the old brain. Thus, the knowledge of ”what just happened”-both sensory and motor-is available in layer 1.

The second surprising thing, and a consequence of the first, is that motor behavior must also be represented in a hierarchy of invariant representations. You generate the movements necessary to carry out a particular action by thinking of doing it in a detail-invariant form. As the motor command travels down the hierarchy, it gets translated into the complex and detailed sequences required to perform the activity you expected to do. This is happening in both “motor” cortex and “sensory” cortex, which blurs the distinction between the two. If region IT of visual cortex is perceiving “nose,” the mere act of switching to the representation for “eye” will generate the saccade necessary: to make this prediction a reality. The particular saccade necessary to move from seeing a nose to seeing an eye varies depending on where the face is. A close face requires a larger saccade; a more distant face requires a smaller saccade. A tilted face requires saccading at an angle different from the one for a level face. The details of the needed saccade are determined as the prediction of seeing the “eye” moves toward V1. The saccade becomes increasingly specific the farther down it goes, resulting in a saccade that lands your foveas right on target, or pretty close.

Let’s look at another example. For me to physically move from my living room to my kitchen, all my brain has to do is mentally switch from the invariant representation of my living room to the invariant representation of my kitchen. This switch causes a complex unfolding of sequences. The process of generating the sequence of predictions of what I will see, feel, and hear while walking from the living room to the kitchen also generates the sequence of motor commands that makes me walk from my living room to my kitchen and move my eyes as I do so. Prediction and motor behavior work hand in hand as patterns flow down and up the cortical hierarchy. As strange as it sounds, when your own behavior is involved, your predictions not only precede sensation, they determine sensation. Thinking of going to the next pattern in a sequence causes a cascading prediction of what you should experience next. As the cascading prediction unfolds, it generates the motor commands necessary to fulfill the prediction. Thinking, predicting, and doing are all part of the same unfolding of sequences moving down the cortical hierarchy.

“Doing” by thinking, the parallel unfolding of perception and motor behavior, is the essence of what is called goal oriented behavior. Goal-oriented behavior is the holy grail of robotics. It is built into the fabric of the cortex.

We can turn off our motor behavior, of course. I can think of seeing something without actually seeing it and I can think of going to my kitchen without actually doing so. But thinking of doing something is literally the start of how we do it.
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How the Cortex Learns
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When you are born your cortex essentially doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t know about your language, your culture, your home, your town, songs, the people you will grow up with, nothing. All this information, the structure of the world, has to be learned. The two basic components of learning are forming the classifications of patterns and building sequences. These two complementary memory components interact. As one region learns sequences, the inputs it sends to the layer 4 cells in higher cortical regions change. These layer 4 cells therefore learn to form new classifications, which changes the pattern projected back to layer 1 in the lower region, which affects the sequences.

The basics of forming sequences is to group patterns together that are part of the same object. One way to do this is by grouping patterns that occur contiguously in time. If a child holds a toy in her hand and slowly moves it, her brain can safely assume that the image on her retina is of the same object moment to moment, and therefore the changing set of patterns can be grouped together. At other times you need outside instruction to help you decide which patterns belong together. To learn that apples and bananas are fruits, but carrots and celery are not, requires a teacher to guide you to group these items as fruits. Either way, your brain slowly builds sequences of patterns that belong together. But as a region of cortex builds sequences, the input to the next region changes. The input changes from representing mostly individual patterns to representing groups of patterns. The input to a region changes from notes to melodies, from letters to words, from noses to faces, and so on. Because the bottom-up inputs to a region become more “object-oriented,” the higher region of cortex can now learn sequences of these higher-order objects. Where before a region built sequences of letters, it now builds sequences of words. The unexpected result of this learning process is that, during repetitive learning, representations of objects move down the cortical hierarchy. During the early years of your life, your memories of the world first form in higher regions of cortex, but as you learn they are re-formed in lower and lower parts of the cortical hierarchy. It isn’t that the brain moves them; it has to relearn them over and over. (I am not suggesting that all memories start at the top of the cortex. The actual formation of memories is more complex. I believe layer 4 pattern classification starts at the bottom and moves up. But as it does, we start forming sequences that then move down. It is the memory of sequences I am suggesting re-form lower and lower in the cortex.) As simple representations move down, the regions at the top are able to learn more complex and subtle patterns.

You can observe the creation and downward movement of hierarchical memory by observing how a child learns. Consider how we learn to read. The first thing we learn is to recognize individual printed letters. This is a slow and difficult task requiring conscious effort. Then we move on to recognizing simple words. Again, it is difficult and slow at first, even for three-letter words. The child can read each letter in sequence and sound out the letters one after another, but it takes a fair amount of practice before the word itself is recognized as a word. After learning simple words, we struggle with complex, multisyllable words. At first, we sound out each syllable, concatenating them as we did with letters when learning simple words. After years of practice, a person can read quickly. We get to the point where we don’t actually see all the individual letters but instead recognize entire words and often entire phrases at a glance. It isn’t just that we are faster; we are actually recognizing words and phrases as entities. When we read an entire word at one time, do we still see the letters? Yes and no. Obviously, the retina sees the letters and therefore so do regions of V1. But the recognition of the letters is occurring fairly low in the cortical hierarchy, say in V2 or V4. By the time the signal gets to IT, the individual letters are no longer represented. What at first took the effort of your entire visual cortex-recognizing individual letters-is now occurring closer to the sensory input. As memory of simple objects like letters moves down the hierarchy, the higher regions have the ability to learn complex objects like words and phrases.

Learning to read music is another example. At first you have to concentrate on every note. With practice, you start to recognize common note sequences, then entire phrases. After much practice, it is as if you don’t see most of the notes at all. The sheet music is there only to remind you of the major structure of the piece; the detailed sequences have been memorized lower down. This type of learning occurs in both motor and sensory areas.

A young brain is slower to recognize inputs and slower to make motor commands because the memories used in these tasks are higher up the cortical hierarchy. Information has to flow all the way up and down, maybe with multiple passes, to resolve conflicts. It takes time for the neural signals to travel up and down the cortical hierarchy. A young brain also has not yet formed complex sequences at the top and therefore cannot recognize and play back complex patterns. A young brain cannot understand the higher-order structure of the world. Compared to an adult’s, a child’s language is simple, his music is simple, and his social interactions are simple.

If you study a particular set of objects over and over, your cortex re-forms memory representations for those objects down the hierarchy. This frees up the top for learning more subtle, more complex relationships. According to the theory, this is what makes an expert.

In my work designing computers, some people are surprised by how quickly I can look at a product and see the problems inherent in its design. After twenty-five years of designing computers, I have a better-than-average model of the issues associated with mobile computing devices. Similarly, an experienced parent can easily recognize why his child is upset, whereas a first-time parent may struggle with how to handle a situation. An experienced business manager can readily see the flaws and advantages of the structure of an organization whereas the novice manager just can’t understand these things. They have the same input, but the novice’s model is not as sophisticated. In all such cases and a thousand more, we start by learning the basics, the simplest structure. Over time we move our knowledge down the cortical hierarchy and, therefore, we have the opportunity at the top for learning higher-order structure. It is this higher-order structure that makes us experienced. Experts and geniuses have brains that see structure of structure and patterns of patterns beyond what others do. You can become expert by practice, but there certainly is a genetic component to talent and genius too.
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Chapter 7
Consciousness and Creativity
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Imagine you are about to have dinner in an unfamiliar restaurant and you want to wash your hands. Even though you have never been in this building before, your brain predicts that there will be a restroom somewhere in the restaurant with a basin suitable for hand washing. How does it know this? Other restaurants you have been in have a restroom, and by analogy this restaurant will likely have one, too. Further, you know where and what to look for. You predict there will be a door or sign with some type of symbol associated with men or women. You predict it will be toward the back of the restaurant, either by the bar or down a hall, but generally not in plain view of the eating areas. Again, you have never been in this particular restaurant before, but by analogy to other eating establishments you are able to find what you need. You don’t look around randomly. You look for expected patterns that let you find the restroom quickly. This kind of behavior is a creative act; it is predicting the future by analogy to the past. We don’t normally think of this as being creative, but it very much is.

Recently I bought a vibraphone. We have a piano, but I had never played the vibraphone before. The day we brought it home, I took a sheet of music from the piano, placed it on the stand over the vibraphone, and started playing simple melodies. My ability to do this was not remarkable. But in a fundamental way, it was a creative act. Think about what was involved. I have an instrument that is very different from a piano. The vibraphone has gold metal bars; the piano has black and white keys. The gold bars are big and gradually change in size; the keys are small and of two different sizes. The gold bars are arranged in two different rows; the black and white keys are interleaved. On one instrument I use my fingers, and on the other I swing mallets. For this I’m standing up, and for that I’m sitting down. The particular muscles and motions needed to play the vibraphone are completely different from those needed to play the piano.

So how was I able to play a melody on an unfamiliar instrument? The answer is that my cortex sees an analogy between the keys on a piano and the bars on a vibraphone. Using this similarity allowed me to play a tune. It isn’t really any different from singing a song in a new key. In both cases, we know what to do by analogy to past learning. I realize that to you the similarity between these two instruments may appear obvious, but that is only because our brains automatically see analogies. Try to program a computer to find similarities between objects such as pianos and vibraphones and you will see how incredibly difficult this is. Prediction by analogy-creativity-is so pervasive we normally don’t notice it.

We do, however, believe we are being creative when our memory-prediction system operates at a higher level of abstraction, when it makes uncommon predictions, using uncommon analogies. For example, most people would agree that a mathematician who proves a difficult conjecture is being creative. But let’s take a close look at what’s involved with her mental efforts. Our mathematician stares hard at an equation and says, “How am I going to tackle this problem?” If the answer isn’t readily obvious she may rearrange the equation. By writing it down in a different fashion, she can look at the same problem from a different perspective. She stares some more. Suddenly she sees a part of the equation that looks familiar. She thinks, “Oh, I recognize this. There’s a structure to this equation that is similar to the structure of another equation I worked on several years ago.” She then makes a prediction by analogy. “Maybe I can solve this new equation using the same techniques I used successfully on the old equation.” She is able to solve the problem by analogy to a previously learned problem. It is a creative act.

My father had a mysterious blood disorder that his physicians could not diagnose. So how did they know what treatment to offer? One of the things they did was to look at months of data taken from analyses of my father’s blood to see if they could identify patterns. (My father printed a beautiful chart so the doctors could see the data clearly.) While his symptoms did not closely match those of known diseases, there were some similarities. The doctors ended up basing his treatment on a mixture of strategies that had worked for other blood disorders. The treatments used were guesses based on analogies to diseases the physicians had previously treated. Recognizing these patterns required extensive exposure to other uncommon diseases.

Shakespeare’s metaphors are the paragon of creativity. “Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.” ”Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy.” “There’s daggers in men’s smiles.” Such metaphors become obvious when you see them but they’re very hard to invent, which is one reason why Shakespeare is regarded as a literary genius. To create such metaphors he had to see a succession of clever analogies. When he writes “There’s daggers in men’s smiles,” he is not talking about daggers or smiles. Daggers are analogous to ill intent, and men’s smiles are analogous to deceit. Two clever analogies in only five words! At least that is how I interpret it. Poets have the gift of correlating seemingly unrelated words or concepts in manners that illuminate the world in new ways. They create unexpected analogies as a means of teaching higher-level structure.

In fact, highly creative works of art are appreciated because they violate our predictions. When you see a film that breaks the familiar mold of a character, story line, or cinematography (including special effects), you like it because it is not the same old same old. Paintings, music, poetry, novels-all creative artistic forms-strive to break convention and violate the expectations of an audience. There is a contradictory tension in what makes a work of art great. We want art to be familiar yet at the same time to be unique and unexpected. Too much familiarity is retread or kitsch; too much uniqueness is jarring and difficult to appreciate. The best works break some expected patterns while simultaneously teaching us new ones. Consider a great piece of classical music. The best music has an appeal at a simple level-good beat, simple melody and phrasing. Anyone can understand and appreciate it. However, it is also a little different and unexpected. But the more you listen to it, the more you see there is pattern in the unexpected parts, such as repeated unusual harmonies or key changes. The same is true with great literature or great movies. The more you read or see them, the more creative detail and complexity of structure you observe.

You’ve probably had the experience of looking at something when a twinge of recognition goes off in your head: “Hmmm, I’ve seen this pattern before, someplace else. . .” You may not have been trying to solve a problem, it’s just that an invariant representation in your brain was activated by a novel situation. You saw an analogy between two normally unrelated events. I might recognize that promoting a scientific idea is similar to selling a business idea or that bringing about political reform is like raising children. If I’m a poet, voila!, I have a new metaphor. If I’m a scientist or engineer, I have a new solution to a long standing problem. Creativity is mixing and matching patterns of everything you’ve ever experienced or come to know in your lifetime. It’s saying “this is kinda like that.” The neural mechanism for doing this is everywhere in the cortex.

Are Some People More Creative than Others?

A related question I often hear is, “If all brains are inherently creative, why are there differences in our creativity?” The memory prediction framework points to two possible answers. One has to do with nature and the other with nurture.

On the nurture side, everyone has different life experiences.Therefore everyone develops different models and memories of the world in his or her cortex, and will make different analogies and predictions. If I have been exposed to music, I will be able to sing songs in new keys and play simple melodies on new instruments. If! have never been exposed to music, I will not be able to make these predictive leaps. If I have studied physics, I will be able to explain the behavior of everyday objects via analogy to the laws of physics. If! grew up with dogs, I am apt to see analogies about dogs and will be better at predicting their behavior. Some people are more creative in social situations or in language, math, or diplomacy, all based on the environment they grew up in. Our predictions, and thus our talents, are built upon our experiences.

In chapter 6, I described how memories are pushed down the cortical hierarchy. The more you are exposed to certain patterns, the more the memory of these patterns are re-formed at lower levels. This allows you to learn the relationships among higher-order abstract objects at the top. It’s the essence of expertise. An expert is someone who through practice and repeated exposure can recognize patterns that are more subtle than can be recognized by a nonexpert, such as the shape of a fin on a late-fifties car or the size of a spot on a seagull’s beak. Experts can recognize patterns on top of patterns. Ultimately there is a physical limit to what we can learn constrained by the size of our cortex. But as humans, our cortex is large compared to other species and we have a tremendous flexibility in what we can learn. It all depends on what we are exposed to throughout our lives.
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We continued this line of argument-a yes you are, no I’m not kind of thing-until it was time to head up to dinner. I don’t think I changed anyone’s mind about the existence and meaning of consciousness. But I was trying to get them to realize that most people think consciousness is some kind of magical sauce that is added on top of the physical brain. You’ve got a brain, made of cells, and you pour consciousness, this magical sauce, on it, and that’s the human condition. In this view, consciousness is a mysterious entity separate from brains. That’s why zombies have brains but they don’t have consciousness. They have all the mechanical stuff, neurons and synapses, but they don’t have the special sauce. They can do everything a human can do. From the outside you can’t tell a zombie from a human.

The idea that consciousness is something extra stems from earlier beliefs in elan vital-a special force once thought to animate living things. People believed you needed this life force to explain the difference between rocks and plants or metals and maidens. Few people believe this anymore. Nowadays we know enough about the differences between inanimate and animate matter to understand that there isn’t a special sauce. We now know a great deal about DNA, protein folding, gene transcription, and metabolism. While we don’t yet know all the mechanisms of living systems, we know enough about biology to leave out magic. Similarly, no longer do people suggest it takes magic or spirits to make muscles move. We have folding proteins that pull long molecules past one another. You can read all about it.

Nevertheless, many people persist in believing that consciousness is different and can’t be explained in reductionist biological terms. Again, I am not a student of consciousness. I haven’t read all the philosophers’ opinions. But I have some ideas about what I think. people are confusing in this debate. I believe consciousness is simply what it feels like to have a neocortex. But we can do better than that. We can break consciousness into two major categories. One is similar to self-awareness-the everyday notion of being conscious. This is relatively easy to understand. The second is qualia-the idea that feelings associated with sensation are somehow independent of sensory input. Qualia is the harder part.

When most people say the word conscious, they are referring to the first category. “Were you conscious that you walked past me without saying hello?” “Were you conscious when you fell out of bed last night?” “You aren’t conscious when you sleep.” Some people say this form of consciousness is exactly the same as awareness. The two are close, but I don’t think. awareness quite captures it correctly. I suggest this meaning of consciousness is synonymous with forming declarative memories. Declarative memories are memories that you can recall and talk about to someone else. You can express them verbally. If you ask me where I went last weekend, I can tell you. That is a declarative memory. If you ask me how to balance a bicycle, I can tell you to hold the handle bar and push the pedals, but I can’t explain exactly how to do it. How to balance a bicycle has mostly to do with neural activity in the old brain, so it is not a declarative memory.

I have a little thought experiment to show how our everyday notion of consciousness is the same as forming declarative memories. Recall that all memory is believed to reside in physical changes to synapses and the neurons they connect to. Therefore, if I had a method to reverse those physical changes, your memory would be erased. Now imagine I could flip a switch and return your brain to the exact physical state it was in at some point in the past. It could be an hour ago, twenty-four hours ago, whatever. I just flip the switch in my way-back machine and your synapses and neurons return to a previous state in time. By doing so, I erase all your memory of what occurred since that time.

Let’s assume you go through today and wake up tomorrow. But just as you’re waking up, I flip the switch and erase the last twenty-four hours. You would have absolutely zero memory of the previous day. From your brain’s perspective, yesterday never happened. I would tell you it’s Wednesday and you’d protest, “No, it’s Tuesday. I’m certain of it. The calendar has been altered. No way, this is Tuesday. Why are you pulling this trick on me?” But everyone whom you had met on Tuesday would say that you had been conscious throughout the day. They saw you, had lunch with you, and talked with you. Don’t you remember it? You’d say no, it didn’t happen. Finally, shown a video of you having lunch, you gradually become convinced that the day did happen, even though you have no memory of it. It’s as if you were a zombie for a day, not conscious. However, you were conscious at the time. Your belief that you were conscious disappeared only when your declarative memory was erased.

This thought experiment captures the equivalence between declarative memory and our everyday notion of being conscious. If during and at the end of a game of tennis I ask you if you are conscious, you would, of course, say yes. If! then erased your memory of the last two hours, you would claim to have been unconscious and not responsible for your actions during that time. In either case, you played the same game of tennis. The only difference is whether you have a memory of it at the time I ask you. Therefore, this meaning of consciousness is not absolute. It can be changed after the fact by memory erasure.

The more difficult question about consciousness concerns qualia. Qualia is often phrased in Zen-like queries, such as “Why is red red and green green? Does red look the same to me as it does to you? Why is red emotionally laden with certain feelings? It has a certain inextricable quality or feelingness to me. What feelingness does it cause in you?”

I find such descriptions difficult to relate to neurobiology, so I’d like to rephrase the question. For me, an equivalent question, but one I still find hard to explain, is, Why do different senses seem qualitatively different? Why does sight seem different from hearing and why does hearing seem different from touch? If the cortex is the same everywhere, if it works with the same processes, if it is just dealing with patterns, if no sound or light enters the brain,just patterns, then why does vision seem so different from hearing? I find it difficult to describe how sight differs from hearing, but it self-evidently is. I assume it is for you, too. Yet an axon representing sound and another representing light are, for all practical purposes, identical. “Lightness” and “soundness” are not carried down the axon of a sensory neuron.

People with a condition called synesthesia have brains that blur the distinction between the senses-certain sounds have a color, or certain textures have a color. This tells us that the qualitative aspect of a sense is not immutable. Through some sort of physical modification, a brain can impart a qualitative aspect of vision to an auditory input.

So what is the explanation for qualia? I can think of two possibilities, neither of which I find completely satisfactory. One is that although hearing, touch, and vision work under similar principles in the neocortex, they are handled differently below the cortex. Hearing relies on a set of audition-specific subcortical structures that process auditory patterns before they reach the cortex. Somatosensory patterns also travel through a set of subcortical areas that are unique to somatic senses. Perhaps qualia, like emotions, are not mediated purely by the neocortex. If they are somehow bound up with subcortical parts of the brain that have unique wiring, perhaps tied to emotion centers, this might explain why we perceive them differently, even if it doesn’t help explain why there is any sort of qualia sensation in the first place.

The other possibility I  can think of is that the structure of the inputs-differences in the patterns themselves-dictates how you experience qualitative aspects of the information. The nature of the spatial-temporal pattern on the auditory nerve is different from the nature of the spatial-temporal pattern on the optic nerve. The optic nerve has a million fibers and carries quite a bit of spatial information. The auditory nerve has only thirty thousand fibers and carries more temporal information. These differences may be related to what we call qualia.

We can be certain that however consciousness is defined, memory and prediction play crucial roles in creating it.

Related to consciousness are the notions of mind and soul. As a child I used to wonder what it would have been like if “I” had been born in another child’s body in another country, as if “I” was somehow independent of my body. These feelings of a mind independent of physicalness are common and a natural consequence of how the neocortex works. Your cortex creates a model of the world in its hierarchical memory. Thoughts are what occur when this model runs on its own; memory recall leads to predictions, which act like sensory inputs, which lead to new memory recall, and so on. Our most contemplative thoughts are not driven by or even connected to the real world; they are purely a creation of our model. We close our eyes and seek quiet so that our thinking will not be interrupted by sensory input. Of course our model was originally created by exposure to the real world through our senses, but when we plan and think about the world, we do so via the cortical model, not the world itself.

To the cortex, our bodies are just part of the external world. Remember, the brain is in a quiet and dark box. It knows about the world only via the patterns on the sensory nerve fibers. From the brain’s perspective as a pattern device, it doesn’t know about your body any differently than it knows about the rest of the world. There isn’t a special distinction between where the body ends and the rest of the world begins. But the cortex has no ability to model the brain itself because there are no senses in the brain. Thus we can see why our thoughts appear independent of our bodies, why it feels like we have an independent mind or soul. The cortex builds a model of your body but it can’t build a model of the brain itself. Your thoughts, which are located in the brain, are physically separate from the body and the rest of the world. Mind is independent of body, but not of brain.

We can clearly see this differentiation through trauma and disease. If someone loses a limb, his brain’s model of the limb may nevertheless remain intact, resulting in a so-called phantom limb, which he can still feel attached to his body. On the flip side, if he suffers cortical trauma he may lose his model of the arm even though he retains the arm itself. In this case he may suffer what’s known as alien limb syndrome and have the uncomfortable, perhaps intolerable, feeling that the arm is not his own and is being controlled by someone else. Some even insist that the limb should be amputated! If our brain stays intact while the rest of our body becomes ill, we have the feeling of a healthy mind trapped in a dying body, although what we really have is a healthy brain trapped in a dying body. It is natural to imagine that our mind will continue after the death of our body, but when the brain dies so does the mind. The truth of this is evident if our brains fail before our bodies. People with Alzheimer’s disease or with serious brain damage lose their minds even if their bodies stay healthy.

What is Imagination?

Conceptually, imagination is rather simple. Patterns flow into each cortical area either from your senses or from lower areas of the memory hierarchy. Each cortical area creates predictions, which are sent back down the hierarchy. To imagine something, you merely let your predictions turn around and become inputs. Without physically doing anything, you can follow the consequences of your predictions. “If this happens, then this will happen, then this will happen,” and so on. We do this when preparing for a business meeting, playing a game of chess, preparing for a sports event, or doing a thousand other things.

In chess you imagine moving your knight to a certain position and then visualize what the board will look like after the move. With this image in mind, you predict what your opponent will do and what the board will look like following that move. Then you predict what you will do, and so on. You walk through the imagined steps and their consequences. Ultimately you decide, based on this imagined sequence of events, whether the initial move was a good one or not. Certain athletes, such as downhill skiers, can improve their performance if they mentally rehearse the racecourse over and over in their head. By closing their eyes and imagining each and every turn, every obstacle, and even being on the winning stand, they increase their chances of success. Imagining is just another word for planning. This is where the predictive ability of our cortex pays off. It permits us to know what the consequences of our actions will be before we do them.

Imagining requires a neural mechanism for turning a prediction into an input. In chapter 6 I proposed that cells in layer 6 are where precise prediction occurs. Cells in this layer project down to lower levels of the hierarchy, but they also project back up to the input cells in layer 4. Thus a region’s outputs can become its own inputs. As I mentioned earlier, longtime cortical modeler Stephen Grossberg calls this circuit for imagination “folded feedback.” If you close your eyes and imagine a hippopotamus, the visual area of your cortex will become active, just as it would if you actually were looking at a hippo. You see what you imagine.
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Penfield explored all over the brain and found a handful of other, smaller body maps as well. Even before he zapped the brain of his first patient, he knew that he would find touch and motor maps, since his contemporaries had already found them in cats, dogs, monkeys, and other mammals. By the same token, Penfield also knew of a few other maps he should look for, and found them.

For instance, he was able to locate a region known as the secondary somatosensory cortex, which penorms a slightly higher level of shape, texture, and motion analysis than the primary touch map. Yet he found this secondary map much harder to explore and understand. For one thing, it is quite a bit smaller than the primary map, and its neurons have larger receptive fields that are wired to make more complex sensory discriminations. (Every neuron in a given body map receives information from a specific group of “downstream” neurons, known as that cell’s receptive field. Receptive fields in your primary touch map are made up of receptors in the skin itself. For cells in most other body maps, receptive field inputs come from other, lower-level body maps elsewhere in the cortex.) Penfield’s difficulties were compounded by the fact that the secondary touch map is difficult to access, half-buried where the parietal lobe plunges beneath the temporal lobe like a tucked-in bedsheet.

Penfield had better luck in the frontal lobes. Just in front of the primary motor cortex he found a small, higher-order body map where action plans are made. It is imaginatively known as the premotor cortex. Penfield found that stimulation to this map produced far more complex movements than he could get out of the primary map. While stimulating the hand region of the primary map causes random jerking of the fingers and wrist, stimulating the premotor hand area brings forth more complex and fluid action fragments, such as moving the hand smoothly up to the mouth. To extend Penfield’s piano metaphor, if zaps to the primary motor map are like the discordant din of notes from a palm striking a keyboard, then zaps to the premotor homunculus reel off simple melodies like musical scales or “Chopsticks.”

Higher-order motor maps like those in your premotor cortex also afforded one of the earliest glimpses into the neural mechanisms behind intentionality and free will. Penfield’s patients reported that the movements induced through the primary motor cortex felt involuntary-like something that had been done to them. But the actions produced by stimulation to the premotor cortex were accompanied by an inkling of intention-like something being done by them. Or sometimes Penfield would stimulate a spot and no movement would be produced, but the patient would report a sudden desire to perform some simple gesture or action.

These motor map signals are the basis of modem brain-machine interface systems, by which a paralyzed person can have electrodes implanted in his or her motor cortex and learn to move a cursor or a robot arm through pure thought.
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Chapter 4
The Homunculus in the Game
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Practice Makes Perfect

Alvaro Pascual-Leone is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Born in Valencia, Spain, he trained in his native country, Germany, and the United States. before joining the Harvard faculty in 1997 with the goal of exploring the brain using powerful electromagnets.

The technique he uses is called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. The doctor wields a heavy wand with a figure-eight-shaped coil on the end. When he holds the wand over a volunteer’s scalp, the magnet discharges, which induces a weak electrical current an inch or so below, down in the cortex itself. It’s like a magic electrode that can probe and zap the brain remotely. Wilder Penfield would have been green with envy.

What do you think happens when a TMS magnet is used to stimulate, say, the ankle region of a volunteer’s primary motor map? At high power it induces a twitch in the ankle, just as Penfield described in his patients. At low power you may not see a twitch, but it still has an effect. The homunculus is still sending a signal down to the ankle muscles each time the TMS coil goes “pop,” but the signal doesn’t quite reach the threshold required to trigger a full-blown twitch. Still, the muscles respond by tensing ever so slightly, and this tension can be measured by electrodes taped to the skin. By probing around people’s primary motor maps in this way, Pascual-Leone can map out the location and size of their homuncular ankle region, elbow region, neck region, you name it.

Among other things, Pascual-Leone is interested in using TMS to see how the primary motor map changes when the brain learns a new skill. ”The brain changes with anything you do, including any thought you might have,” he says. Any time you learn something new, any time your brain deems an experience worthy of remembering over the long term, new connections sprout between cells and previously existing connections are strengthened. The process is called plasticity.
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Imagining Versus Doing

As a weekend athlete, Pascual-Leone says he was curious about mental practice and sports. “Anybody who likes watching sports can see that certain athletes appear to mentally rehearse what they are about to do,” he says. “You can see it when they’re preparing for a free throw or getting ready to bomb down a slope in a ski slalom race. Before they get going, they prime themselves.”

Many famous musicians do the same thing. Vladimir Horowitz practiced mentally before concerts to avoid disturbing his motor skills; feedback from pianos other than his own Steinway was upsetting. Arthur Rubinstein, eager to enjoy life and practice as little as possible, used mental rehearsal to minimize time spent sitting at the piano. A violinist who spent seven years in prison and practiced playing in his mind every day gave a flawless performance the night he got out of jail. Injured ballerinas have been known to lie on the floor running through dance steps with their fingers to retain their skills.

So Pascual-Leone repeated his five-finger exercise with one specific form of mental practice: internally generated motor imagery.

Imagery takes different forms that are important to distinguish. You know what it is like to imagine an object. Close your eyes and picture a hippopotamus. Now imagine a belly dancer. This is visual imagery. You are the spectator. Visual imagery engages parts of your brain involved in visual perception and conjures up pictorial memories of what you have seen with your eyes.

Motor or kinesthetic imagery is the process of imagining a movement. Imagine yourself erasing a blackboard, signing your name, or washing a dish. You are the actor. You perform the movement, virtually, in your mind. You aren’t using your mind’s eye so much as your mind’s body. Motor imagery engages a subset of your body mandala, including maps involved in motor planning and proprioception. It simulates the inner feeling of an action.

Using the same setup as before, Pascual-leone’s new subjects spent two hours a day five days a week imagining the five-finger piano key strokes. They were told to repeat each finger movement mentally, as if they were playing. They could rest their fingers on the keyboard but were not allowed to move them in any way.

The results were astonishing. After one week, motor imagery practice led to nearly the same level of body map reorganization as physical practice. As far as your motor cortex is concerned, executed and imagined movements are almost identical.

The “almost” is fascinating. When you mentally rehearse a movement, all but one of the brain regions that control your movements become active in the absence of movement. You imagine throwing the dart but your body is immobile. You imagine pressing the piano key but your muscles are still. So motor imagery is the off-line operation of your brain’s motor machinery unfolding as if it were happening in real time. It takes you about as long to imagine walking across your bedroom as it would if you actually did the walk. Such a walk takes longer if you imagine yourself carrying a heavy box. If you imagine yourself running, your breathing speeds up and your heart rate increases. If you imagine moving your little finger for ten minutes a day, after four weeks it will be up to one-fifth stronger.

Coaches and athletes of every skill level mustn’t ignore this. While many types of mental practice are undoubtedly helpful, motor imagery is the only technique that alters your body maps in the same way physical practice does. Visual imagery (as from a spectator’s point of view), relaxation, hypnosis, affirmation, prayer, and other techniques may help you in one way or another, but will not alter your motor maps. Remember, the students in Straub’s dart experiment who improved the most were those who carried out motor imagery.
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Chapter 7
The Bubble Around the Body
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Scientists have never been able to detect with advanced instruments the kind of energy field that allegedly gives rise to auras in the paranormal sense. When the philosopher Sir John Eccles talked about a “field of psychons” as creating a unity of subjective experience, he did not base his claims on any experimental evidence or designs for empirical testing. When New Age gurus invoke the mysteries of quantum physics to explain the mysterious nature of energy fields and human consciousness, they are essentially explaining one mystery with another mystery.

But the fact that our body and peripersonal space maps are tremendously flexible provides a new scientific window into understanding many strange experiences. Jet fighter pilots sometimes say they enter an altered state when flying for long periods in monotonous conditions-uniform clouds, engine noise, vibrations. In this condition, they sometimes “leave” the aircraft and float outside the cockpit, looking back in at themselves. Eventually they force themselves to snap to and get back into their bodies. Mountaineers trekking at high altitude and sailors crossing the ocean alone also report losing their bodies.

Michael Murphy tells anecdotes of transcendent experiences in sports in his book In the Zone. Athletes leave their bodies or see other bodies change shape on the playing field. A well-known distance swimmer described how, whenever his physical body was exhausted during a competition, he would relax by floating overhead while his body continued to swim, until he felt refreshed, at which point he would reenter his body. Another swimmer says he can see the entire pool from a larger raised-up perspective and anticipate the moves of the other swimmers.

You can have weird experiences falling into and waking up from sleep. Have you ever awoken to the feeling of an ominous presence in the darkness pressing down on your body? Odds are it wasn’t a dream. People have been reporting these encounters for millennia, which surely lent credence to the existence of otherworldly beings like ghosts and incubi. Or have you ever felt yourself leave your body as you fall asleep? Both phenomena, which are surprisingly common, are created when your brain shifts its state of arousal in the transition from sleep to wakefulness or vice versa. Every night while you’re dreaming, your body is totally paralyzed from the neck down via inhibitory circuits in your brain stem (failures of this system are involved in sleep violence and sleepwalking). Your brain does this to keep your body from jumping out of bed and acting out your dreams. But sometimes you stay paralyzed after you have awoken, and your body mandala’s best-fit interpretation is that a crushing weight is pinning you down. It can be terrifying. But rest assured, when it ends it’s because your brain has reestablished the connection with your muscles, not because the incubus has vanished back to Hell.

When people enter deep meditation or trance, they say that their bodies and minds expand out into space. Body awareness fades, and they are left with a unitary yet diffused and nonlocalized sense of themselves. Along with it come feelings of joy, clarity, and empathy. When Buddhist lamas meditate in brain scanners, activity in their parietal lobes plummets. It can’t be a coincidence that the dissolution of the bodily self accompanies the shutting down of the body and space maps that create it.

Shadowy Illusory Persons

Ever had the creepy feeling, while you are wide awake, that another person is lurking behind your back, only when you turn around, no one is there? What about an out-of-body experience? Have you ever felt yourself floating up near the ceiling, looking down at your corporeal self?

Such experiences, which may be more common than is generally acknowledged, are almost always explained in terms of paranormal forces-an encounter with ghosts or crossing to another realm of reality.

But according to Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Ecole Poly technique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, the feeling of an illusory shadow person or the sensation of leaving one’s body can be induced, in mentally healthy persons, by delivering a mild electric current to specific spots in the brain.

A zap to one spot, the right angular gyrus, recently gave one woman the palpable sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. Current to the left angular gyrus gave another woman the uncanny feeling that a shadowy person was behind her back and that he was intent on interfering with her actions.

Both women were being evaluated for epilepsy surgery at University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland. Physicians implanted dozens of electrodes directly into their brains to pinpoint the abnormal tissue causing their seizures and to identify adjacent areas involved in language, hearing, or other essential functions, so as not to excise them inadvertently. When each electrode activated a different patch of brain tissue, the women said what, if anything, they experienced.

Despite their epilepsy, both women had normal psychiatric histories, Blanke said. The women were stunned by the bizarre nature of their experiences.

One patient was a twenty-two-year-old pharmacy student who had electrodes implanted into the left side of her brain in 2004. “We were checking language areas,” Blanke said, when the woman turned her head to the right. That made no sense because the electrode was nowhere near areas involved in movement control. It was in a multisensory area where the parietal and temporal lobes meet.

Blanke applied more current. Again, the woman turned her head to the right.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

The woman replied that she had the weird sensation that another person was lying directly beneath her body on the bed. It was not in the mattress, but rather stretched out behind. It felt like a “shadow” that did not speak or move; it was young, more like a man than a woman, and it wanted to interfere with her.

When Blanke turned off the current, the woman stopped looking to the right. The strange presence went away. Each time he reapplied the current, she turned her head to try and see it.

The woman sat up, leaned forward, and hugged her knees. Now when the current flowed, she noted that the “man” was also sitting’ and that he was clasping her in his arms. She said it felt unpleasant. When she held a card in her right hand, the person tried to take it from her. “He doesn’t want me to read,” she said.

Because the illusory person closely mimicked the woman’s body posture and position, Blanke concluded that she was experiencing a perception of her own body-a felt double or doppelganger. She did not recognize that the person was an illusion of her own body.

Out-of-Body Experiences

“Heidi” suddenly felt herself lifted out of her body. Floating near the ceiling, she looked down, aghast. Seated around her real body were three people, one of whom held an electrode over the exposed right side of her brain. Blanke was applying small amounts of current to different areas of her cortex to find the locus of her seizures.

When Blanke stimulated Heidi’s right angular gyrus, she felt herself rise up, as if she were the gauzy apparition in a Tim Burton movie.

“I am at the ceiling,” she exclaimed. “I am looking down at my legs.”

This had never happened before. She was stunned.

“What?” Blanke was equally astonished, and removed the electrode. “Wait,” said Heidi.

“I’m back on the table now. What happened?” “I’m not sure,” he said, “Let’s try again.”

Blanke stimulated the same spot in Heidi’s brain for another two seconds. Because the electrode is silent, she had no way of knowing when to expect anything. But while the current flowed, she found herself back at the ceiling, outside her body, floating, with her ghostly legs dangling below her ghostly self. She gasped again.

“What do you see?” Blanke asked Heidi-on-high.

“My back is touching the ceiling. My legs are hanging down a little. I can see the three of you.”

“Do you have arms?”

“I’m not so sure about my arms,” Heidi said. “But I have a head and a body. I see the bed and the side table. I’m lighter than usual, not moving.”

Blanke was fascinated. From the ceiling Heidi saw only the lower part of her body. But why would she tell him that? Why not her whole body? Then it occurred to him to consider the position of her real body propped up in bed, arms straight down at her sides. From her vantage near the ceiling” she saw those same body parts-feet, pajamas, trunk, and legs-that she would see looking at herself from the bed.

Blanke decided that Heidi was not making this up. Given that, he struggled to find an explanation. “Try looking at your limbs,” he said, applying the current for the third time.

“Tell me what you see.”

Again she gasped. Now, when she looked at her outstretched arms, the left arm seemed to shorten to half its normal size. As in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, it grew shorter and shorter, and then, when the current stopped, it popped back out to its normal size.
Heidi had never read a neurology textbook, Blanke says, and had no way of knowing that stimulation to her right brain would affect the left side of her body, specifically her left arm.

Oddly, though, both legs appeared to shorten by a third during the stimulation. Blanke decided to bend her legs in the bed and see what would happen.

Again the current flowed; this time Heidi screamed. Both legs seemed to fly up and were about to hit her in the face, even though her real legs remained motionless. When she closed her eyes, she had the sensation of doing sit-ups, with her upper body approaching her legs.

Heidi’s uncanny adventure, which took place in December 2000, is the first recorded case of an out-of-body experience induced by electrical stimulation of the brain. As long as her body maps were synchronous, her experience and behavior were fluent, holistic, and integrated. But when Heidi’s maps went briefly out of sync, her felt position in space and her seen position in space did not match. Her mind cast about for the best-fit way to turn her confusion into a coherent experience, and concluded that she must be floating up and away with a view downward.

But what if you have an out-of-body experience without someone zapping your right angular gyrus? Plenty of people report briefly perceiving the world from a location outside their bodies, often during a near-death experience. One explanation for the phenomenon is alterations in blood flow. Large arteries converge near the angular gyrus inside your brain. If anything constricts the flow of blood to that area, your felt body sense can become disoriented. You might get the feeling that you are floating above an operating table or the scene of a car accident. At the same time, your field of vision might have what is called a scotoma-a big blank spot, like a black splotch at the bottom of a well-that your brain fills in with images of what it expects or would like to see.
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Place cells and grid cells are space-mapping neurons linked to a memory-forming region called the hippocampus. The hippocampus is evolutionarily much older than the cortex. So despite the amazing power and flexibility of our cortical space and body maps, this ancient system of place and grid cells is still very much with us-you could say it was “grandfathered in.” Instead of mapping personal space from an egocentric point of view, as your parietal and premotor circuits do, place cells and grid cells are what scientists call geocentric.

They are different: Place cells are context-sensitive, while grid cells are context-independent. Place cells map the space around your body in terms of whatever environment you happen to be in-a room, a city street, a basketball court. They tell you where you are relative to the specific landmarks around you. They are what enable you to plan your route through a restaurant full of tables, keep track of where you are in a WalMart, and help you decide where to go next while you’re picking your way through a crowded room.

Grid cells are similar, but they do not attune themselves to landmarks. They map space independently from your environment. They are your dead reckoning cells. The point two feet in front of your nose is the point two feet in front of your nose regardless of whether you’re in a cocktail bar or lying in bed or standing in the middle of a featureless plain.

Place cells were discovered in 1971 when two neuroscientists, John O’Keefe and John Dostrovsky, implanted electrodes into the brains of mice in an effort to study memory. Their target was the hippocampus. As the animals moved around their familiar enclosure, the scientists noticed that some cells fired when a mouse was in the southwest region of its home enclosure. Other cells fired when the animal moved to the northwest region. The same thing happened in different areas of the east half of the enclosure. In fact, it was possible to tell where an animal was inside its enclosure simply by looking at which cell!! were active. Each time an animal moved, a different population of hippocampal cells marked its place in space. If the animal moved back to the same location, the same cells became active again.

The researchers named these cells “place cells.” They went on to learn that a rodent has many thousands of place cells, each tuned to a different region of space, called a place field. Even though there are only thousands of cells, a rat can learn many more locations than it has individual place cells through the power of combinatorics-the same principle that allows ten buttons on a telephone to represent all the phone numbers of an entire nation. The place cells can be active in millions of combinations to map all place fields in a given environment, whether it’s a cage, a ship’s hold, a barn, a wide-open pasture, or any other place a rodent might find itself. Moreover, some place cells fire in response to edges in an environment, like walls. And when a mouse or rat enters a new environment, a new place map is formed in minutes.

You have place cells too. When you walk into your kitchen, certain place cells fire when you are standing in front of your refrigerator. As you move toward the sink, a different set of place cells will mark your new position in the room. If you walk into your dining room or living room, another combination of place cells will mark your spot in space.

Your place cells have, in a sense, memorized the contents of each room, helping you know where you are in each zone of space. Thus in the dark you can move around any room in your house or apartment and not bump into things because your place cells have mapped where each piece of furniture is located, where the doorknobs are, and how far the light switch is from the doorframe. You have an internal map of where objects are located in relation to one another and in relation to your body as you move through space. Your place cells also take information from other parts of your self-motion system, including cells that keep track of where your head is turned, and constantly help update you about your balance and your body schema.

Spin yourself around a few times in the middle of a room. Then try to reach a door. You won’t know which direction to go until you locate an object you recognize. Only with this cue can you work out where the door is located. This means that your place fields are calibrated according to fixed reference points-sofa, chair, table, window, door-that do not usually change. If you move your furniture around, your place fields reconfigure to update your map.
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Chapater 9
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Telepathy

As with many big new findings in science, it took a few more years for the research community at large to grasp the significance of Rizzolatti’s findings. But grasp it they did.
In 2001, V. S. Ramachandran, the neurologist who figured out the nature of phantom limbs, declared, “Without a doubt it is one of the most important discoveries ever made about the brain. Mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: They will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”

Using a variety of brain imaging techniques, scientists went on to discover, in humans, many more elaborate mirror circuits that, cognitively speaking, leave monkeys in the dust. You can think of mirror neurons as body maps that run simulations of what others people’s body maps are up to. In this way, they serve to link our body schemas together across the otherwise tremendous gulf that separates one person’s subjective world from another’s. They allow you to grasp the minds of others, not through conceptual reasoning, but by modeling their actions, intentions, and emotions in the matrix of your own body mandala.

For instance, when you watch someone else perform an action-say, using a broom-you automatically simulate the action in your own brain. You understand the sweeper’s action because you have a template for that action in your own motor maps. When you see someone pull back his arm, as if to throw a ball, you have a copy of what he is doing in your brain that helps you understand his goal. You can read his intentions. You know what he is most likely to do next.

“When you see me doing something, you understand because you have a copy of the action in your brain,” says Rizzolatti. “It’s so strange. You become me. When I see you grasping an object, it is as if I, Giacomo, were grasping it.”

The same principle applies to perceiving and understanding other people’s emotions. When you see a friend choke up in emotional distress, your brain automatically simulates that distress. You empathize. Actors, who can make you laugh or cry, are very good at reading the felt states of their own bodies and transmitting those feelings via mirror system communication.

“We are exquisitely social creatures,” says Rizzolatti. “Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions, and emotions of others. We simulate these automatically, without logic, thinking, analyzing.”

Luckily, he says, when you observe an action you do not automatically act it out, and when you observe an emotion you do not automatically experience it in full. Your mirror neuron system cordons off the simulations in much the same way it inhibits you from acting out while you scheme or plan an action before you’re ready to execute it.
There may be no such thing as telepathy, but mirror neurons are the next best thing.

Shall We Dance?

How do lowly neurons carry off such a sophisticated feat? How can brain cells, even working together in a circuit, be so incredibly smart? Most sensory neurons are rather pedestrian. They devote themselves to ordinary features of the outside world. For example, some fire when they detect a horizontal line, while others are dedicated to vertical lines. Others detect a single frequency of sound or a direction of movement. Moving to higher levels of the brain, scientists find neurons that detect far more complex features such as specific body parts, or flowers, or letters of the alphabet. As you’ve already seen, you have neurons in your higher motor maps that help your body plan complex movements and postures. For example, some neurons fire when you bring your hand to your mouth from any starting point around your body-that is, they represent the goal of moving hand to mouth.

Mirror neurons make these complex cells look like nincompoops. They seem uncannily smart in the way they link perception, action, and intention. Say you are trying to learn French. You can hear the sounds but you don’t know how to repeat them accurately. Somehow you have to form your mouth into the right shape and right nasal resonance to produce those new sounds. You need to bring two complex properties together: sensory detection and motor planning. This is exactly what mirror neurons do. When you learn French or any new language, they map sounds and, using the same circuitry, produce those sounds.
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Parenting

In trying to understand human behavior, evolutionary psychologists suggest that all through the Stone Age, the human brain evolved modules for language and other uniquely human traits. Just as you have eyes for seeing and ears for hearing, the claim goes, you are born with a hardwired set of specialized brain modules for absorbing language, detecting cheaters of the social contract, calculating sexual attractiveness in others, and so on. In other words, the brain is the computational version of a Swiss Army knife.

Mirror neurons provide an alternative explanation for human brain design. Your brain is unique not because it has evolved highly specialized modules, but because it is parasitic with culture, says Ramachandran. Mirror neurons absorb culture the way a sponge sucks up water. “You can learn much more easily how to shoot an arrow or skin a bear by watching your mom and dad [do it] than by listening to them describe it,” he says.

According to Ramachandran and others, mirror neurons are a major factor in the great leap forward in human evolution one to two hundred thousand years ago, answering the question “What made Homo Sapiens so darned sapient?” Unique human abilities like protolanguage (in which sounds were mapped to lip and tongue movements), empathy, theory of mind (attributing thoughts and motives to other people), and the ability to adopt another person’s point of view arguably arose at this time. Mirror neurons set the stage for the horizontal transmission of culture. As science writer Matt Ridley says, nature occurs via nurture.

Mirror neurons do not negate the fact that there are special areas for language in the human brain, Ramachandran says. But these regions do not have to be performed at the moment of birth to explain how they develop. An alternative theory holds that language areas are shaped by mirror neurons as a baby learns to speak by miming and understanding the lip and tongue movements of others. Think of a mother saying “mama” to her infant son. Mirror neurons are active when the baby sees and hears someone say “mama” and when he utters those twin syllables himself. They are the same neurons. The same brain structures that produce language participate in comprehending it. In other words, mirror neurons serve as a bridge for decoding and internalizing the meanings of other people’s actions by processing them directly within the child’s own body maps.

Language can often seem abstract and transcendent of the body, the world, and even time itself. But language is more closely tied to your body mandala than you may realize, especially where its acquisition during childhood is concerned. If you read the verb “lick,” your tongue area will light up. If you hear someone say “kick,” it activates your leg areas. Christian Keysers, a mirror neuron researcher at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, says that mirror neurons may very well be a key precursor to abstract thought and language. For example, he explains, you use the word “break” as a verb as in “I see you break the peanut, I hear you break the peanut, and I break the peanut.” The constant is the mental simulation of breaking even though the context varies in each case. So your body is the foundational source of meaning-not just of words and actions but even the meanings of things you learn about through your eyes, ears, and bodily experience.

Newborns do not talk, but their mirror neurons kick in within minutes of birth. If you stick out your tongue at a newborn infant, he may stick his tongue back out at you. Scientists take this to mean that newborns have an innate sense of a general body plan, but the only muscle they have much control over is the tongue (it is exercised in utero when the fetus sucks its thumb). Newborns cry more when they hear another newborn crying than when they hear white noise, their own cry, the cry of an older baby, or an adult faking a cry. Two-week-old infants sometimes imitate lip protrusion, mouth opening, tongue protrusion, and finger movement.

As the baby matures, his brain receives sensations of touch, proprioception, balance, and the like to build up a model of the world with itself at the center. By the time they are two, children learn quickly and primarily through imitation, which lets them absorb far more knowledge and skill than could ever possibly be explained to them verbally. They then spend years practicing what they have learned. When you realize that children have a system of neurons that is capable of learning by simply seeing, hearing, touching, then you begin to see that the world itself is the teacher, with you, as the parent, in a starring role. Your child’s mirror neurons resonate with your words, intentions, and moods. How you react to adversity or happiness is absorbed by your children through their mirror neuron system as they watch you from moment to moment.

In fact, it has been shown that the imitation instinct in human children is so strong they tend to “overimitate.” Imagine an experiment in which a scientist shows a simple puzzle box to a young child. She watches with interest as the researcher performs a series of simple steps that result in the box opening and a treat being revealed. Some of these steps are mechanically necessary to get the box open, but a few of them are blatantly inessential. He resets the box and hands it to her. As you might expect, it’s monkey see, monkey do: She repeats his actions as faithfully as she can, including the “filler” steps.

Now imagine that the scientist performs the same experiment with a young chimpanzee who is at a roughly comparable stage of cognitive development. The ape wants the treat. He watches and learns how the box is opened. And when he gets hold of it, he opens it in as efficient a manner as possible, omitting the inessential steps. The human child has the same basic ability to analyze and understand the box as the ape child did, but her human mirror system is a much stronger force behind her actions. It may seem counterproductive for her to be such a slavish imitator, but this is only a temporary phase while her mind is immature. Her highly developed mirror system will serve her well as she gets older. She is the one who will go on to absorb the vast array of complex skills and understandings that human culture affords.

Interestingly, says Dr. lriki, even though monkeys have mirror neurons, they don’t actually imitate each other. This may come as a shock, because we tend to imagine monkeys as the quintessential copycat mischief-makers. This isn’t to say monkeys are oblivious to each other. Far from it. They watch each other constantly. Newborns imitate lip smacking and tongue protrusion. Older monkeys take cues from each other, follow each other’s examples, exploit each other’s discoveries. If one monkey sees another lift the lid of a box and pull out a banana, she will quickly run over and take a peek inside the box herself.

You could argue that this qualifies as imitation, but that misses the point. True imitation is of the “aping” variety-mimicking specific gestures that can include arbitrary action sequences. Apes and humans can learn detailed action sequences, like opening a puzzle box to extract a goodie, based on just one viewing. Monkeys can be taught complex action sequences too, but it typically takes a period of patient training in a laboratory setting. In the wild, monkeys imitate each other only at the level of the basic primate repertoire of simple grips and gestures: poking, picking, lifting, pulling, and so on. But for apes and humans, these basic actions can serve as building blocks in long, complicated, and arbitrary action sequences.

Consider a young chimpanzee who watches while an elder snaps a twig off a bush, strips it of leaves and twiglets, pokes it into a termite mound, and comes up with a highly nutritious insect kabob. The young chimp runs off into the bushes to find his own twig and attempts to replicate the same feat. That’s true imitation, and monkeys virtually never approach this level.

So if monkeys don’t use their mirror neurons for imitative learning, what do they use them for? Remember, imitation is not the only function of mirror neurons. They still give monkeys insight into each other’s goals and intentions based on action observation. Even if their mirror neurons aren’t developed enough to generate precise imitation, in the soap opera world of primate society, action understanding and intention reading are essential abilities.
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I Feel Your Pain, I Feel Your Pleasure

In the 1962 film Dr. No, James Bond opens his eyes to find a tarantula in bed with him. As it creeps ever so slowly up his arm, you can just feel the hairy, spidery legs, because your mirror neurons are in overdrive.

You have mirror neurons for emotion reading and empathy in two areas folded deep inside your cortex, called the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. When you see a look of disgust on someone’s face, mirror neurons in your insula give rise to feelings of disgust in your own body. When you see joy, you feel joy. When you see sadness, you feel sadness. When you see pain, you feel pain. When you see someone’s upper arm being jabbed with a needle, the same muscle in your arm tenses up and you start breathing faster.

Tania Singer, a neuroscientist at University College London, illustrated this phenomenon by recruiting lovers and putting one of them (the woman) into a brain scanner and then zapping each person with painful electric shocks. Each woman in the scanner registered a pain response in her anterior cingulate when she received a shock-and also when she witnessed her beloved being shocked. Women who scored higher on an empathy questionnaire showed greater activity in this brain region. This means that when you empathize with someone’s pain, including a stranger’s, at some level you actually feel it. Just as frontal and parietal mirror neurons represent both the observation and execution of actions, these emotional mirror neurons represent both the witnessing and the experience of certain feelings and emotions. (Women tend to have more active mirror neuron responses and to be more empathetic than men, although the reasons for this are not yet clear. It may be that high levels of testosterone limit empathy in some way. In general, women are stronger empathizers, while men are stronger systematizers.)

When someone yawns, you yawn, thanks to mirror activity. When you see someone scratch his chin, you may feel an itch on your own chin. When you see someone afraid, you feel a visceral flutter of fear. This sensation can initiate a fight-or-flight motor preparation in your own body. When danger lurks, fear spreads through the crowd. Everyone gets emotionally aroused and ready to run.
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Chapter X
Heart of the Mandala
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The greatest evolutionary innovation of mammals was to expand the cortex to tremendous size. The cortex imbues the mammalian mind with the capacity to form highly detailed and versatile representations of sights, sounds, and actions. So a rat, for example, has a rich understanding of the space around its head, thanks to its sensitive whiskers and well developed body and whisker maps. And even though rats don’t have particularly good vision, they can still tell an insect from a wad of used dental floss at a glance, because they have cortical vision maps.

But in the rat-and for that matter, in all other mammals aside from primates-the homeostatic information from the body does not form a rich interoceptive map in the insula. Rats do have insular maps, to be sure, but they are rudimentary. In a rat, pain, itch, sensual touch, and that whole ancient group of somatic senses are primarily integrated in the base of the brain and in subcortical emotional centers. Their interoception, then, is more reminiscent of the frog’s automaton-like vision than the primate’s keen, knowing eye.

The same goes for cats, dogs, horses, and other four-legged animals. Because of this difference in mapping, some experts claim that their sensory experiences must be profoundly different from ours, even though we are often tempted to attribute human emotions and intentions to our pets. While a dog may show “shame” through its body language, it does not feel what you feel when you are ashamed. Dogs are clearly emotional and self-aware, but they are not in the same league with you.

In primates, interoceptive information is elaborated through a rich set of mappings in the insular cortex. And in humans it is richer still. Thus you have a little insula map for sharp pain, another for burning pain, one for itch, one for aching, one for overexerted muscles, and so on, along with visceral homunculi that represent the state of your lungs, heart, and the rest of your innards.

And even that is just the beginning of what your brain does with this information. After reading off the internal state of the body from both the left and right insulas, the human brain-and only the human brain-performs yet another level of integration. The information from both your insulas is routed to the right frontal insula, the same region Critchley found corresponding closely in size and metabolic vigor to a person’s empathic talent.

Your right frontal insula “lights up” when you feel all the quintessential human emotions-love, hate, lust, disgust, gratitude, resentment, self-confidence, embarrassment, trust, distrust, empathy, contempt, approval, disdain, pride, humiliation, truthfulness, deceit, atonement, guilt. It also “lights up” when you feel strong sensations, from physical pain to a fluttery stomach to tingling loins.

If your right insula is damaged by a stroke, you will not be able to detect or feel disgust. If you look at someone who takes a bite of food, spits it out, and makes a retching sound with a disgusted look on his face, you will just smile, take a bite of the same food, and declare it delicious.

This dual physical-emotional sensitivity is not just a coincidence. The right frontal insula is where conscious physical sensation and conscious emotional awareness coemerge. Consider this amazing fact: The right frontal insula is active both when you experience literal physical pain and when you experience the psychic “pain” of rejection or the social exclusion of being shunned. It lights up when you feel someone is treating you unfairly. Scanning experiments have proven all this, and the results are profound. Welcome to one of the most important regions in the human brain.

Reason Runs Hot

Arthur “Bud” Craig is a neuroanatomist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and the first person to figure out how interoception is uniquely wired in the human brain. He is the kind of super-intense scientist who unapologetically spouts rapid-fire jargon-ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, solitary tract nucleus, posterior ventral medial nucleus. But for those who listen and translate, Craig is telling a story that drastically revises our scientific understanding of how bodily sensations are mapped in the human brain and turned into feelings, motivations, pain, and sentience.

The right frontal insula is the focal point of all this, according to Craig, because it literally connects the state of your body to the state of your brain. By “your brain,” in this context, he means the sensory perceptions, abstract thoughts, linguistic processing, and motivations that occur elsewhere throughout your cortex. Your right frontal insula gives rise to the map of “the emotional me” and “the emotional now” by integrating homeostatic information from both your body and your brain. This is a profoundly important insight. You detect the state of your body and the state of your mind together in the right frontal insula. It is here that mind and body unite. It is the foundation for emotional intelligence.

If your mirror neurons are activated by another person’s emotional state, your right frontal insula lights up. If you sense fear in a crowd, crave drugs, or see someone cheat, your right frontal insula lights up. If you are a schizophrenic, your right frontal insula is deformed.

Your right frontal insula integrates your mind and body through strong connections with three other brain regions. One is the amygdala, a lower brain area that plays a key role in linking strong emotions to experiences, people, and things. Another is the orbitofrontal cortex, a region that is critical for self-discipline and for setting plans and priorities in relation to rewards and punishments. And finally it is linked to the anterior cingulate cortex, which allows you to monitor your behavior for mistakes, correct and avoid errors, evaluate context, and plan and carry out actions that have emotional and motivational significance. The anterior cingulate also contains a mapping of your body, with your head at one end and your feet at the other, but so far as is known, the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala do not.

In every brain imaging study ever done of every human emotion, the right frontal insula and anterior cingulate cortex light up together, Craig says. He takes this to mean that in humans, emotions, feelings, motivations, ideas, and intentions are combined to a unique degree, and that this is a key element of our humanity.

Actually, the idea that we sense our emotions from our bodies has been around for more than a century. Two psychologists, William James and Carl Georg Lange, long ago developed a theory that emotion arises when you perceive changes in your body. When you run from a bear in the woods, you are afraid not because of your rational assessment that you are about to be eaten, but because your heart is racing, your stomach and sphincter are clenched, and you are running as fast as you can. In the wake of an argument, as long as your heart is still racing you still feel angry. There is an aspect of this with bearing on many relationships: In women, according to the Stanford neuroscientist Dr. Robert Sapolsky, the autonomic nervous system ramps down more slowly than in men. As Sapolsky likes to say to his wife after a spat, “Honey, don’t forget the half-life of the autonomic nervous system!”

This theory explains why people with whole-body paralysis often complain that their passions and emotions have become blunted. It is why psychopaths, who often have trouble feeling sensations from their body, feel no guilt, remorse, or anxiety about their actions. It is also why taking a beta blocker-a drug that quiets your sympathetic nervous system can banish the butterflies from your stomach, still your quivering limbs, turn off your drenching stage-fright sweats, and allow you to speak or perform calmly in public. In other words, the fear is more in your body than in your mind. Dampen your interoceptive signals, and you dampen the fear.

Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist who heads the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, has updated and revised James and Lange’s idea with his somatic marker hypothesis-the notion that your feelings strongly contribute to even the most “rational” decision making in everyday life. Scientists used to assume that reason and emotion were qualitatively different psychic spheres. Clearly these spheres could influence each other, but most believed that the thinking, knowing, reasoning part of the mind was in some fundamental way distinct from the mind’s feeling, sensing, emotional, and more primitive aspects. But James and Lange, and now Damasio, Craig, and others who follow the neuroscience, argue that it’s just not possible to separate them at a deep level.

Emotion is never truly divorced from decision making, even when it is channeled aside by an effort of will. Even a mathematician pursuing the trail of a new proof is driven by a blend of personal ambition, curiosity, and the sometimes spine-tingling Platonic beauty of the math itself. Even a judge who renders a verdict that the law supports but he finds personally distasteful is being driven by a moral emotion about the principle of the rule of law. Even a terrorist coolly gearing up for a suicide attack on innocents is spurred by an intensely felt motivation inspired by his love of God and God’s favored people, who also happen to be his own.

Interoception, then, is the font of your complex emotionality. It breathes life into your cortex, which is otherwise rather machinelike in character. Interoception is the fire under the kettle of consciousness; remove the heat, and the system settles into tepid equilibrium.

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Intutition Cells, aka Von Economo Neurons

In all the talk about what makes humans special, you’ll hear many of the same arguments. We walk upright. We have opposable thumbs. Our brains are enormous. We have language. We’re top predators.

But there is one feature peculiar to humans that you’ve probobly never heard about. You have, tucked into your anterior cingulate cortex and frontal insulas and especially in your right front insula, a special class of cell found in no other species except our cousins in consciousness, the great apes, elephants, and whales. Called Von Economo cells after the scientist who first observed them in 1925, they are big, fat, highly connected neurons that appear to be in the catbird seat for enabling you to make fast, intuitive judgments.

Intuition is your capacity for quick and ready insight. Often you know and understand things instantly, without rational thought or inference. You feel when something’s fishy. You sense it when you have an instant personal bond with a stranger. You are positive that the charismatic politician on television last night is lying through his teeth.

You can make snap judgments because your brain contains Von Economo neurons, but to keep things simple, let’s call them intuition cells. A very small number of intuition cells showed up in your brain a few weeks before you were born. Studies suggest that you probably had about 28,000 such cells at birth and 184,000 by the time you were four years old. By the time you reached adulthood, you had 193,000 intuition cells. An adult ape typically has 7,000.

Intuition cells are more numerous in your right brain. Your right frontal insula has 30 percent more than your left insula. Intuition cells are especially large and seem designed to relay information rapidly to other parts of the brain. They contain receptors for brain chemicals involved in social bonds, the expectation of reward under conditions of uncertainty, and for detecting danger-all ingredients of intuition. When you think your luck is about to change playing blackjack, these cells are active.

John Allman, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and a leading expert on comparative brain development, says that when you meet someone, you create a mental model of how that person thinks and feels. You have initial, quick intuitions about the person-calling on stereotypes, memories, and subliminal perceptions-which are followed seconds, hours, or years later by slower, more reasoned judgments.

When you make fast decisions, Allman says, your frontal insula and anterior cingulate are active. When you experience pain, guilt, or embarrassment or engage in deception, these areas are active. When you think-something is funny, these same cells fire up, probably to recalibrate your intuitive judgments in changing situations. Humor serves to resolve uncertainty, relieve tension, engender trust, and promote social bonds.

All your social emotions and moral intuitions are processed in this circuit, Allman says. Oddly, they are related to food. Recall that your insulas map your visceral sensations, including gustatory experience. You feel the need to eat or eliminate, rest or run, save energy or expend energy, in this body mapping system. Recall, too, that your right frontal insula re-represents these basic bodily functions as social emotions, which are similarly expressed as polar opposites: love-hate, lust-disgust, gratitude-resentment, self-confidence-embarrassment, trust-distrust, empathy-contempt, approval-disdain, pride-humiliation, truthfulness-deceit, atonement-guilt. These emotions cause you to approach or retreat, favor social bands or disrupt social bonds.

Allman thinks that intuition cells, like mirror neurons, may be defective in autism spectrum disorders, which feature an inability to think and interact intuitively. These cells arose late in evolution, he says, and have not had much time to become integrated with other cell populations. This may make them vulnerable to dysfunction in a manner analogous to our propensity to suffer lower back, hip, and knee disorders from adopting our bipedal posture.
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Consider what happens in your brain when motor commands are sent from the premotor and motor cortex to make a fist. Once your hand is clenched, feedback signals from muscles and joints of your hand are sent back through the spinal cord to your brain saying, Slow down, enough. Any more pressure and it could hurt. This proprioceptive feedback applies brakes, automatically, with astonishing speed and precision.If the limb is missing, however, this damping feedback is not possible. The brain therefore keeps sending the message, Clench more, clench more. Motor output is amplified even further (to a level that far exceeds anything you or I would ever experience) and the overflow or “sense of effort” may itself be experienced as pain. The mirror may work by providing visual feedback to unclench the hand, so that the clenching spasm is abolished.

But why the sensation of digging fingernails? Just think of the numerous occasions when you actually clenched your fist and felt your nails biting in your palm. These occasions must have created a memory link in your brain (psychologists call it a Hebbian link) between the motor command to clench and the unmistakable sensation of “nails digging,” so you can readily summon up this image in your mind. Yet even though you can imagine the image quite vividly, you don’t actually feel the sensation and say, “Ouch, that hurts.” Why not?

The reason, I believe, is that you have a real palm and the skin on the palm says there is no pain. You can imagine it but you don’t feel it because you have a normal hand sending real feedback and in the clash between reality and illusion, reality usually wins. But the amputee doesn’t have a palm. There are no countermanding signals from the palm to forbid the emergence of these stored pain memories. When Robert imagines that his nails are digging into his hand, he doesn’t get contradictory signals from his skin surface saying, “Robert, you fool, there’s no pain down here.”

Indeed, if the motor commands themselves are linked to the sense of nail digging, it’s conceivable that the amplification of these commands leads to a corresponding amplification of the associated pain signals. This might explain why the pain is so brutal. The implications are radical. Even fleeting sensory associations such as the one between clenching our hands and digging our fingernails into our palms are laid down as permanent traces in the brain and are only unmasked under certain circumstances—experienced in this case as phantom limb pain. Moreover, these ideas imply that pain is an opinion on the organism’s state of health rather than a mere reflexive response to an injury. There is no direct hotline from pain receptors to “pain centers” in the brain. On the contrary, there is so much interaction between different brain centers, like those concerned with vision and touch, that even the mere visual appearance of an opening fist can actually feed all the way back into the patient’s motor and touch pathways, allowing him to feel the fist opening, thereby killing an illusory pain in a nonexistent hand.
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Both these illusions are much more than amusing party tricks to try on your friends. The idea that you can actually project your sensations to external objects is radical and reminds me of phenomena such as out−of−body experiences or even voodoo (prick the doll and “feel” the pain). But how can we be sure the student volunteer isn’t just being metaphorical when she says “I feel my nose out there” or “The table feels like my own hand.” After all, I often have the experience of “feeling” that my car is part of my extended body image, so much so that I become infuriated if someone makes a small dent on it. But would I want to argue from this that the car had become part of my body?

These are not easy questions to tackle, but to find out whether the students really identified with the table surface, we devised a simple experiment that takes advantage of what is called the galvanic skin response or GSR. If I hit you with a hammer or hold a heavy rock over your foot and threaten to drop it, your brain’s visual areas will dispatch messages to your limbic system (the emotional center) to prepare your body to take emergency measures (basically telling you to run from danger). Your heart starts pumping more blood and you begin sweating to dissipate heat. This alarm response can be monitored by measuring the changes in skin resistance—the so−called GSR—caused by the sweat. If you look at a pig, a newspaper or a pen there is no GSR, but if you look at something evocative—a Mapplethorpe photo, a Playboy centerfold or a heavy rock teetering above your foot—you will register a huge GSR.

So I hooked up the student volunteers to a GSR device while they stared at the table. I then stroked the hidden hand and the table surface simultaneously for several seconds until the student started experiencing the table as his own hand. Next I bashed the table surface with a hammer as the student watched. Instantly, there was a huge change in GSR as if I had smashed the student’s own fingers. (When I tried the control experiment of stroking the table and hand out of sync, the subject did not experience the illusion and there was no GSR response.) It was as though the table had now become coupled to the student’s own limbic system and been assimilated into his body image, so much so that pain and threat to the dummy are felt as threats to his own body, as shown by the GSR. If this argument is correct, then perhaps it’s not all that silly to ask whether you identify with your car. Just punch it to see whether your GSR changes. Indeed the technique may give us a handle on elusive psychological phenomena such as the empathy and love that you feel for a child or spouse. If you are deeply in love with someone, is it possible that you have actually become part of that person? Perhaps your souls—and not merely your bodies—have become intertwined.

Now just think about what all this means. For your entire life, you’ve been walking around assuming that your “self is anchored to a single body that remains stable and permanent at least until death. Indeed, the “loyalty” of your self to your own body is so axiomatic that you never even pause to think about it, let alone question it. Yet these experiments suggest the exact opposite—that your body image, despite all its appearance of durability, is an entirely transitory internal construct that can be profoundly modified with just a few simple tricks. It is merely a shell that you’ve temporarily created for successfully passing on your genes to your offspring.
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Chapter 5
The Secret Life of James Thurber
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But if this argument is correct—if the early visual areas are activated each time you imagine something—then why don’t you and I hallucinate all the time or at least occasionally confuse our internally generated images with real objects? Why don’t you see a monkey in the chair when you simply think of one? The reason is that even if you close your eyes, cells in your retina and in early sensory pathways are constantly active—producing a flat, baseline signal. This baseline signal informs your higher visual centers that there is no object (monkey) hitting the retina— thereby vetoing the activity evoked by top−down imagery. But if the early visual pathways are damaged, this baseline signal is removed and so you hallucinate.

It makes good evolutionary sense that even though your internal images can be very realistic, they can never actually substitute for the real thing. You cannot, as Shakespeare said, “cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast.” A good thing, too, because if you could satisfy your hunger by thinking about a feast, you wouldn’t bother to eat and would quickly become extinct. Likewise, any creature that could imagine orgasms is unlikely to transmit its genes to the next generation. (Of course, we can do so to a limited extent as when our hearts pound when imagining an amorous encounter—the basis of what is sometimes called visualization therapy.)

Additional support for this interaction between top−down imagery and bottom−up sensory signals in perception comes from what we saw in phantom limb patients who have vivid impressions of clenching their nonexistent fingers and digging imaginary fingernails into their phantom palms, generating unbearable pain. Why do these patients actually feel clenching, “nails digging” and pain, whereas you or I can imagine the same finger position but feel nothing? The answer is that you and I have real input coming in from our hands telling us that there is no pain, even though we have memory traces in our brain linking the act of clenching with nails digging (especially if you don’t often cut your nails). But in an amputee, these fleeting associations and preexisting pain memories can now emerge without contradiction from ongoing sensory input. The same sort of thing might be happening in Charles Bonnet syndrome. But why did Nancy always see cartoons in her scotoma? One possibility is that in her brain the feedback comes mainly from the what pathway in the temporal lobe, which, you will recall, has cells specialized for color and shapes but not for motion and depth, which are handled by the how pathway. Therefore, her scotoma is filled with images that lack depth and motion, having only outlines and shapes, as do cartoons.

If I’m right, all these bizarre visual hallucinations are simply an exaggerated version of the processes that occur in your brain and mine every time we let our imagination run free. Somewhere in the confused welter of interconnecting forward and backward pathways is the interface between vision and imagination We don’t have clear ideas yet about where this interface is or how it works (or even whether there is a single interface), but these patients provide some tantalizing clues about what might be going on. The evidence from them suggests that what we call perception is really the end result of a dynamic interplay between sensory signals and high−level stored information about visual images from the past. Each time any one of us encounters an object, the visual system begins a constant questioning process. Fragmentary evidence comes in and the higher centers say, “Hmmmmm, maybe this is an animal.” Our brains then pose a series of visual questions: as in a twenty−questions game. Is it a mammal? A cat? What kind of cat? Tame? Wild? Big? Small? Black or white or tabby? The higher visual centers then project partial “best fit” answers back to lower visual areas including the primary visual cortex. In this manner, the impoverished image is progressively worked on and refined (with bits “filled in,” when appropriate). I think that these massive feed forward and feedback projections are in the business of conducting successive iterations that enable us to home in on the closest approximation to the truth.  To overstate the argument deliberately, perhaps we are hallucinating all the time and what we call perception is arrived at by simply determining which hallucination best conforms to the current sensory input. But if, as happens in Charles Bonnet syndrome, the brain does not receive confirming visual stimuli, it is free simply to make up its own reality. And, as James Thurber was well aware, there is apparently no limit to its creativity.

Chapter 6
Through the Looking Glass
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When you glance at any visual scene, the image excites receptors in your retina and sets in motion a complex cascade of events that culminate in your perception of the world. As we noted in earlier chapters, the message from the eye is first mapped onto an area in the back of brain called the primary visual cortex. From there it is relayed along two pathways, the how pathway to the parietal lobe and the what pathway to the temporal lobe (see Figure 4.5, Chapter 4). The temporal lobes are concerned with recognizing and naming individual objects and responding to them with the appropriate emotions. The parietal lobes, on the other hand, are concerned with discerning the spatial layout of the external world, allowing you to navigate through space, reach out for objects, dodge missiles and otherwise know where you are. This division of labor between temporal and parietal lobes can explain almost all of the peculiar constellation of symptoms one sees in neglect patients in whom one parietal lobe—especially the right—is damaged, as is the case with Ellen. If you let her wander around by herself, she will not pay attention to the left side of space and anything that happens in it. She will even bump into objects on her left side or stub her left toe on a raised pavement. (I’ll later explain why this doesn’t happen with left parietal damage.) However, because Ellen’s temporal lobes are still intact, she has no difficulty recognizing objects and events as long as her attention is drawn to them.

But “attention” is a loaded word, and we know even less about it than we do about neglect. So the statement that the neglect arises from a “failure to pay attention” doesn’t really tell us very much unless we have a clear notion of what the underlying neural mechanisms might be. (It’s a bit like saying that illness results from a failure of health.) In particular, one would like to know how a normal person—you or I—is able to attend selectively to a single sensory input, whether you are trying to listen to a single voice amid the background din of voices at a cocktail party or just trying to spot a familiar face in a baseball stadium. Why do we have this vivid sense of having an internal searchlight, one that we can direct at different objects and events around us?

We now know that even so basic a skill as attention requires the participation of many far−flung regions of the brain. We’ve already talked about the visual, auditory and somatosensory systems, but other special brain regions carry out equally important tasks. The reticular activating system—a tangle of neurons in the brain stem that projects widely to vast regions of the brain-activates the entire cerebral cortex, leading to arousal and wakefulness, or-when needed-a small portion of the cortex, leading to selective attention. The limbic system is concerned with emotional behavior and evaluation of the emotional significance and potential value of events in the external world. The frontal lobes are concerned with more abstract processes like judgment, foresight and planning. All of these areas are interconnected in a positive feedback loop—a recursive, echolike reverberation—that takes a stimulus from the outside world, extracts its salient features and then bounces it from region to region, before eventually figuring out what it is and how to respond to it. Should I fight, flee, eat or kiss? The simultaneous deployment of all these mechanisms culminates in perception.

When a large, threatening stimulus—say, an image of a menacing figure, perhaps a mugger looming toward me on the street in Boston— first comes into my brain, I haven’t the slightest idea of what it is. Before I can determine, aha, perhaps that’s a dangerous person, the visual information is evaluated by both the frontal lobes and the limbic system for relevance and sent on to a small portion of the parietal cortex, which, in conjunction with appropriate neural connections in the reticular formation, enables me to direct my attention to the looming figure. It forces my brain to swivel my eyeballs toward something important out there in the visual scene, pay selective attention to it and say, “Aha!”

But imagine what would happen if any part of this positive feedback loop were interrupted so that the whole process was compromised. You would then no longer notice what was happening on one side of the world. You would be a neglect patient.

But we still have to explain why neglect occurs primarily after injury to the right parietal lobe and not to the left. Why the asymmetry? Though the real reason continues to elude us, Marcel Mesulam of Harvard University has proposed an ingenious theory. We know that the left hemisphere is specialized for many aspects of language and the right hemisphere for emotions and “global” or holistic aspects of sensory processing. But Mesulam suggests there is another fundamental difference. Given its role in holistic aspects of vision, the right hemisphere has a broad “searchlight” of attention that encompasses both the entire left and entire right visual fields. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, has a much smaller searchlight, which is confined entirely to the right side of the world (perhaps because it is so busy with other things, such as language). As a result of this rather odd arrangement, if the left hemisphere is damaged, it loses its searchlight, but the right can compensate because it casts a searchlight on the entire world. When the right hemisphere is damaged, on the other hand, the global searchlight is gone but the left hemisphere cannot fully compensate for the loss because its searchlight is confined only to the right side. This would explain why neglect is only seen in patients whose right hemisphere is damaged.
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Normal adults rarely confuse a mirror reflection for a real object. When you spot a car fast approaching you in your rearview mirror, you don’t jam on your brakes. You accelerate forward even though it appears that the image of the car is approaching rapidly from the front. Likewise, if a burglar opened the door behind you as you were shaving in the bathroom, you’d spin around to confront him—not attack the reflection in the mirror.Some part of your brain must be making the needed correction: The real object is behind me even though the image is in front of me.

But like Alice in Wonderland, patients like Ellen and Steve seem to inhabit a strange no−man’s−land between illusion and reality—a “warped world,” as Steve called it, and there is no easy way to predict how they will react to a mirror. Even though all of us, neglect patients and normal people alike, are familiar with mirrors and take them for granted, there is something inherently surrealistic about mirror images. The optics are simple enough, but no one has any inkling of what brain mechanisms are activated when we look at a mirror reflection, of what brain processes are involved in our special ability to comprehend the paradoxical juxtaposition of a real object and its optical “twin.” Given the right parietal lobe’s important role in dealing with spatial relationships and “holistic” aspects of vision, would a neglect patient have special problems dealing with mirror reflections?
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After a half−hour break, we returned to the lab to try out the mirror. She sat in her wheelchair, fluffing up her hair with her good hand, and smiled sweetly. I stood on her right holding a mirror on my chest so that when Ellen faced straight forward in the chair, the mirror was parallel to the right arm of the wheelchair (and her profile) and about two feet away from her nose. I then asked her to turn her head about sixty degrees and look into the mirror.

From this vantage point Ellen can clearly see the neglected side of the world reflected in the mirror. She is looking to her right, into her good side, so to speak, and she knows perfectly well what a mirror is, so she knows that it is reflecting objects on her left side. Since the information about the left side of the world is now coming from the right side—the nonneglected side—would the mirror help her “overcome” her neglect so that she correctly reached for the objects on the left, just as a normal person might? Or would she say to herself, “Oops, that object is really in my neglected field, so let me ignore it.” The answer, as so often happens in science, was that she did neither. In fact, she did something completely outlandish.

Ellen looked in the mirror and blinked, curious about what we were up to. It ought to have been obvious to her that it was a mirror since it had a wooden frame and dust on its surface, but to be absolutely sure, I asked, “What is this I am holding?” (Remember I was behind the mirror, holding it.)

She replied without hesitating, “A mirror.”

I asked her to describe her eyeglasses, lipstick and clothing while looking straight into the mirror. She did so with no trouble. On receiving a cue, one of my students standing on Ellen’s left side held out a pen so that it was well within the reach of her good right hand but entirely within the neglected left visual field. (This turned out to be about eight inches below and to the left of her nose.) Ellen could see my student’s arm as well as the pen clearly in the mirror, as there was no intent to deceive her about the presence of a mirror.

“Do you see the pen?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, please reach out and grab it and write your name on this pad of paper I’ve placed in your lap.”

Imagine my astonishment when Ellen lifted her right hand and without hesitation went straight for the mirror and began banging on it repeatedly. She literally clawed at it for about twenty seconds and said, obviously frustrated, “It’s not in my reach.”

When I repeated the same process ten minutes later, she said, “It’s behind the mirror,” and reached around and began groping with my belt buckle.

A little later she even tried peeking over the edge of the mirror to look for the pen.

So Ellen was behaving as though the reflection were a real object that she could reach out and grab. In my fifteen−year career, I’d never seen anything like this—a perfectly intelligent, levelheaded adult making the absurd blunder of thinking that an object was actually inside the mirror.

We wanted to make sure that Ellen’s behavior did not arise from some clumsiness of her arm movements or a failure to understand what mirrors are. So we simply tried placing the mirror at arm’s length in front of her, just like a bathroom mirror at home. This time the pen appeared just behind and above her right shoulder (but just outside her visual field). She saw it in the mirror and her hand went straight back behind her to grab it. So her failure in the earlier task could not be explained by claiming that she was disoriented, clumsy or confused as a result of her stroke.

We decided to give a name to Ellen’s condition—”mirror agnosia” or “the looking glass syndrome” in honor of Lewis Carroll. Indeed, Lewis Carroll is known to have suffered from migraine attacks caused by arterial spasms. If they affected his right parietal lobe, he may have suffered momentary confusion with mirrors that might not only have inspired him to write Through the Looking Glass but may help explain his general obsession with mirrors, mirror writing and left−right reversal. One wonders whether Leonardo da Vinci’s preoccupation with left−right reversed writing had a similar origin.
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Therapy aside, the scientist in me is equally intrigued by mirror agnosia—the patient’s failure to reach correctly for the real object. Even my two−year−old son, when shown candy only visible in the mirror, giggled, turned around and snatched the sweet. Yet the much older and wiser Ellen could not do this.

I can think of at least two interpretations of why she might lack this ability. First, it’s possible that the syndrome is caused by her neglect. It’s as though the patient was saying to herself, unconsciously, “Since the reflection is in the mirror, the object must be on my left. But the left does not exist on my planet—therefore, the object must be inside the mirror.” However absurd this interpretation may seem to us with our intact brains, it’s the only one that would make any sense to Ellen, given her “reality.”

Second, the looking glass syndrome may not be a direct consequence of neglect, even though it is usually accompanied by neglect. We know that when the right parietal lobe is damaged, patients have all kinds of difficulties with spatial tasks, and the looking glass syndrome may simply be an especially florid manifestation of such deficits. Responding correctly to a mirror image requires you simultaneously to hold in your mind the reflection as well as the object that is producing it and then perform the required mental gymnastics to locate correctly the object that produced the reflection. This very subtle ability may be compromised by lesions in the right parietal lobe, given the important role of that structure in dealing with spatial attributes of the world. If so, mirror agnosia might provide a new bedside test for detecting right parietal lesions. In an age of escalating costs of brain imaging, any simple new test would be a useful addition to the neurologist’s diagnostic kit.

The strangest aspect of the looking glass syndrome, however, is listening to patients’ reactions.

“Doctor, why can’t I reach the pen?”

“The darn mirror is in the way.”

“The pen is inside the mirror and I can’t reach it!”

“Ellen, I want you to grab the real object, not the reflection. Where is the real object?” She replied, “The real object is out there behind the mirror, doctor.”

It’s astonishing that the mere confrontation with a mirror flips these patients into the twilight zone so that they are unable—or reluctant— to draw the simple logical inference that since the reflection is on the right, the object producing it must be on the left. It’s as though for these patients even the laws of optics have changed, at least for this small corner of their universe. We ordinarily think of our intellect and “high−level” knowledge—such as laws concerning geometrical optics—as being immune to the vagaries of sensory input. But these patients teach us that this is not always true. Indeed, for them it’s the other way around. Not only is their sensory world warped, but their knowledge base is twisted to accommodate the strange new world they inhabit. Their attention deficits seem to permeate their whole outlook, rendering them unable to tell whether a mirror reflection is a real object or not, even though they can carry on normal conversations on other topics—politics, sports or chess—just as well as you or I.  Asking these patients what is the “true location” of the object they see in the mirror is like asking a normal person what is north of the North Pole. Or whether an irrational number (like the square root of 2 or pi with a never−ending string of decimals) really exists or not. This raises profound philosophical questions about how sure we can be that our own grasp on reality is all that secure. An alien four−dimensional creature watching us from his four−dimensional world might regard our behavior to be just as perverse, inept and absurdly comical as we regard the bumblings of neglect patients trapped in their strange looking−glass world.

Chapter 7
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
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Watching these patients is like observing human nature through a magnifying lens; I’m reminded of all aspects of human folly and of how prone to self−deception we all are. For here, embodied in one elderly woman in a wheelchair, is a comically exaggerated version of all those psychological defense mechanisms that Sigmund and Anna Freud talked about at the beginning of the twentieth century—mechanisms used by you, me and everyone else when we are confronted with disturbing facts about ourselves. Freud claimed that our minds use these various psychological tricks to “defend the ego.” His ideas have such intuitive appeal that many of the words he used have infiltrated popular parlance, although no one thinks of them as science because he never did any experiments. (We shall return to Freud later in this chapter to see how anosognosia may give us an experimental handle on these elusive aspects of the mind.)

In the most extreme cases, a patient will not only deny that the arm (or leg) is paralyzed, but assert that the arm lying in the bed next to him, his own paralyzed arm, doesn’t belong to him! There’s an unbridled willingness to accept absurd ideas.
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Anosognosia is an extraordinary syndrome about which almost nothing is known. The patient is obviously sane in most respects yet claims to see her lifeless limb springing into action—clapping or touching my nose—and fails to realize the absurdity of it all. What causes this curious disorder? Not surprisingly, there have been dozens of theories to explain anosognosia. Most can be classified into two main categories. One is a Freudian view, that the patient simply doesn’t want to confront the unpleasantness of his or her paralysis.

The second is a neurological view, that denial is a direct consequence of the neglect syndrome, discussed in the previous chapter—the general indifference to everything on the left side of the world. Both categories of explanation have many problems, but they also contain nuggets of insight that we can use to build a new theory of denial.

One problem with the Freudian view is that it doesn’t explain the difference in magnitude of psychological defense mechanisms between patients with anosognosia and what is seen in normal people—why they are generally subtle in you and me and wildly exaggerated in denial patients. For example, if I were to fracture my left arm and damage certain nerves and you asked me whether I could beat you in a game of tennis, I might tend to play down my injury a little, asserting, “Oh, yes, I can beat you. My arm is getting much better now, you know.” But I certainly wouldn’t take a bet that I could arm wrestle you. Or if my arm were completely paralyzed, hanging limp at my side, I would not say, “Oh, I can see it touching your nose” or “It belongs to my brother.”

The second problem with the Freudian view is that it doesn’t explain the asymmetry of this syndrome. The kind of denial seen in Mrs. Dodds and others is almost always associated with damage to the right hemisphere of the brain, resulting in paralysis of the body’s left side. When people suffer damage to the left brain hemisphere, with paralysis on the body’s right side, they almost never experience denial. Why not? They are as disabled and frustrated as people with right hemisphere damage, and presumably there is just as much “need” for psychological defense, but in fact they are not only aware of the paralysis, but constantly talk about it. Such asymmetry implies that we must look not to psychology but to neurology for an answer, particularly in the details of how the brain’s two hemispheres are specialized for different tasks. Indeed, the syndrome seems to straddle the border between the two disciplines, one reason it is so fascinating.

Neurological theories of denial reject the Freudian view completely. They argue instead that denial is a direct consequence of neglect, which also occurs after right hemisphere damage and leaves patients profoundly indifferent to everything that goes on within the left side of the world, including the left side of their own bodies. Perhaps the patient with anosognosia simply doesn’t notice that her left arm is not moving in response to her commands, and hence the delusion.

I find two main problems with this approach. One is that neglect and denial can occur independently—some patients with neglect do not experience denial and vice versa. Second, neglect does not account for why denial usually persists even when the patient’s attention is drawn to the paralysis. For instance, if I were to force a patient to turn his head and focus on his left arm, to demonstrate to him that it’s not obeying his command, he may adamantly continue to deny that it’s paralyzed—or even that it belongs to him. It is this vehemence of the denial—not a mere indifference to paralysis—that cries out for an explanation. Indeed, the reason anosognosia is so puzzling is that we have come to regard the “intellect” as primarily propositional in character-that is, certain conclusions follow incontrovertibly from certain premises—and one ordinarily expects propositional logic to be internally consistent. To listen to a patient deny ownership of her arm and yet, in the same breath, admit that it is attached to her shoulder is one of the most perplexing phenomena that one can encounter as a neurologist.

So neither the Freudian view nor the neglect theory provides an adequate explanation for the spectrum of deficits that one sees in anosog−nosia. The correct way to approach the problem, I realized, is to ask two questions: First, why do normal people engage in all these psychological defense mechanisms? Second, why are the same mechanisms so exaggerated in these patients? Psychological defenses in normal people are especially puzzling because at first glance they seem detrimental to survival. Why would it enhance my survival to cling tenaciously to false beliefs about myself and the world? If I were a puny weakling who believed that I was as strong as Hercules, I’d soon get into serious trouble with the “alpha male” in my social group—my chairman, the president of my company or even my next−door neighbor. But, as Charles Darwin pointed out, if one sees something apparently maladaptive in biology, then look more deeply, because there is often a hidden agenda.

The key to the whole puzzle, I suggest, lies in the division of labor between our two cerebral hemispheres and in our need to create a sense of coherence and continuity in our lives. Most people are familiar with the fact that the human brain consists of two mirror image halves—like the two halves of a walnut—with each half, or cerebral hemisphere, controlling movements on the opposite side of the body. A century of clinical neurology has shown clearly that the two hemispheres are specialized for different mental capacities and that the most striking asymmetry involves language. The left hemisphere is specialized not only for the actual production of speech sounds but also for the imposition of syntactic structure on speech and for much of what is called semantics—comprehension of meaning. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, doesn’t govern spoken words but seems to be concerned with more subtle aspects of language such as nuances of metaphor, allegory and ambiguity—skills that are inadequately emphasized in our elementary schools but that are vital for the advance of civilizations through poetry, myth and drama. We tend to call the left hemisphere the major or “dominant” hemisphere because it, like a chauvinist, does all the talking (and maybe much of the internal thinking as well), claiming to be the repository of humanity’s highest attribute, language. Unfortunately, the mute right hemisphere can do nothing to protest.

Other obvious specializations involve vision and emotion. The right hemisphere is concerned with holistic aspects of vision such as seeing the forest for the trees, reading facial expressions and responding with the appropriate emotion to evocative situations. Consequently, after right hemisphere strokes, patients tend to be blissfully unconcerned about their predicament, even mildly euphoric, because without the “emotional right hemisphere” they simply don’t comprehend the magnitude of their loss. (This is true even of those patients who are aware of their paralysis.)

In addition to these obvious divisions of labor, I want to suggest an even more fundamental difference between the cognitive styles of the two hemispheres, one that not only helps explain the amplified defense mechanisms of anosognosia but may also help account for the more mundane forms of denial that people use in daily life—such as when an alcoholic refuses to acknowledge his drinking problem or when you deny your forbidden attraction to a married colleague.

At any given moment in our waking lives, our brains are flooded with a bewildering array of sensory inputs, all of which must be incorporated into a coherent perspective that’s based on what stored memories already tell us is true about ourselves and the world. In order to generate coherent actions, the brain must have some way of sifting through this superabundance of detail and of ordering it into a stable and internally consistent “belief system”—a story that makes sense of the available evidence. Each time a new item of information comes in we fold it seamlessly into our preexisting worldview. I suggest that this is mainly done by the left hemisphere.

But now suppose something comes along that does not quite fit the plot. What do you do? One option is to tear up the entire script and start from scratch: completely revise your story to create a new model about the world and about yourself. The problem is that if you did this for every little piece of threatening information, your behavior would soon become chaotic and unstable; you would go mad.

What your left hemisphere does instead is either ignore the anomaly completely or distort it to squeeze it into your preexisting framework, to preserve stability. And this, I suggest, is the essential rationale behind all the so−called Freudian defenses—the denials, repressions, confabulations and other forms of self−delusion that govern our daily lives. Far from being maladaptive, such everyday defense mechanisms prevent the brain from being hounded into directionless indecision by the “combinatorial explosion” of possible stories that might be written from the material available to the senses. The penalty, of course, is that you are “lying” to yourself, but it’s a small price to pay for the coherence and stability conferred on the system as a whole.

Imagine, for example, a military general about to wage war on the enemy. It is late at night and he is in the war room planning strategies for the next day. Scouts keep coming into the room to give him information about the lay of the land, terrain, light level and so forth. They also tell him that the enemy has five hundred tanks and that he has six hundred tanks, a fact that prompts the general to decide to wage war. He positions all of his troops in strategic locations and decides to launch battle exactly at 6:00 a.m. with sunrise.

Imagine further that at 5:55 A.M. one little scout comes running into the war room and says, “General! I have bad news.” With minutes to go until battle, the general asks, “What is that?” and the scout replies, “I just looked through binoculars and saw that the enemy has seven hundred tanks, not five hundred!”

What does the general—the left hemisphere—do? Time is of the essence and he simply can’t afford the luxury of revising all his battle plans. So he orders the scout to shut up and tell no one about what he saw. Denial! Indeed, he may even shoot the scout and hide the report in a drawer labeled “top secret” (repression). In doing so, he relies on the high probability that the majority opinion—the previous information by all the scouts—was correct and that this single new item of information coming from one source is probably wrong. So the general sticks to his original position. Not only that, but for fear of mutiny, he might order the scout actually to lie to the other generals and tell them that he only saw five hundred tanks (confabulation). The purpose of all of this is to impose stability on behavior and to prevent vacillation because indecisiveness doesn’t serve any purpose. Any decision, so long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision at all. A perpetually fickle general will never win a war!

In this analogy, the general is the left hemisphere (Freud’s “ego,” perhaps?), and his behavior is analogous to the kinds of denials and repressions you see in both healthy people and patients with anosognosia. But why are these defense mechanisms so grossly exaggerated in the patients? Enter the right hemisphere, which I like to call the Devil’s Advocate. To see how this works, we need to push the analogy a step further. Supposing the single scout comes running in, and instead of saying the enemy has more tanks, he declares, “General, I just looked through my telescope and the enemy has nuclear weapons.” The general would be very foolish indeed to adhere to his original plan. He must quickly formulate a new one, for if the scout were correct, the consequences would be devastating.

Thus the coping strategies of the two hemispheres are fundamentally different. The left hemisphere’s job is to create a belief system or model and to fold new experiences into that belief system. If confronted with some new information that doesn’t fit the model, it relies on Freudian defense mechanisms to deny, repress or confabulate—anything to preserve the status quo. The right hemisphere’s strategy, on the other hand, is to play “Devil’s Advocate,” to question the status quo and look for global inconsistencies. When the anomalous information reaches a certain threshold, the right hemisphere decides that it is time to force a complete revision of the entire model and start from scratch. The right hemisphere thus forces a “Kuhnian paradigm shift” in response to anomalies, whereas the left hemisphere always tries to cling tenaciously to the way things were.

Now consider what happens if the right hemisphere is damaged. The left hemisphere is then given free rein to pursue its denials, confabulations and other strategies, as it normally does. It says, “I am Mrs. Dodds, a person with two normal arms that I have commanded to move.” But her brain is insensitive to the contrary visual feedback that would ordinarily tell her that her arm is paralyzed and that she’s in a wheelchair. Thus Mrs. Dodds is caught in a delusional cul−de−sac. She cannot revise her model of reality because her right hemisphere, with its mechanisms for detecting discrepancies, is out of order. And in the absence of the counterbalance or “reality check” provided by the right hemisphere, there is literally no limit to how far she will wander along the delusional path. Patients will say, “Yes, I’m touching your nose, Dr. Ramachandran,” or “All of the medical students have been prodding me and that’s why I don’t want to move my arm.” Or even, “What is my brother’s hand doing in my bed, doctor?”

The idea that the right hemisphere is a left−wing revolutionary that generates paradigm shifts, whereas the left hemisphere is a die−hard conservative that clings to the status quo, is almost certainly a gross oversimplification, but, even if it turns out to be wrong, it does suggest new ways of doing experiments and goads us into asking novel questions about the denial syndrome. How deep is the denial? Does the patient really believe he’s not paralyzed? What if you were to confront patients directly: Could you then force them to admit the paralysis? Would they deny only their paralysis, or would they deny other aspects of their illness as well? Given that people often think of their car as part of their extended “body image”(especially here in California), what would happen if the front left fender of their car were damaged? Would they deny that? Anosognosia has been known for almost a century, yet there have been very few attempts to answer these questions. Any light we could shed on this strange syndrome would be clinically important, of course, because the patients’ indifference to their predicament not only is an impediment to rehabilitation of the weak arm or leg, but often leads them to unrealistic future goals. (For example, when I asked one man whether he could go back to his old occupation of repairing telephone lines—a job that requires two hands for climbing poles and splicing wires—he said, “Oh, yes, I don’t see a problem there.”) What I didn’t realize, though, when I began these experiments, was that they would take me right into the heart of human nature. For denial is something we do all our lives, whether we are temporarily ignoring the bills accumulating in our “to do” tray or defiantly denying the finality and humiliation of death.
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Freud bashing is a popular intellectual pastime these days (although he still has his fans in New York and London). But, as we have seen in this chapter, he did have some valuable insights into the human condition, and, when talking about psychological defenses, he was right on target, although he had no idea why they evolved or what neural mechanisms might mediate them. A less well known, but equally interesting idea put forward by Freud was his claim that he had discerned the single common denominator of all great scientific revolutions: Rather surprisingly, all of them humiliate or dethrone “man” as the central figure in the cosmos.

The first of these, he said, was the Copernican revolution, in which a geocentric or earth−centered view of the universe was replaced with the idea that earth is just a speck of dust in the cosmos. The second was the Darwinian revolution, which holds that we are puny, hairless neotenous apes that accidentally evolved certain characteristics that have made us successful, at least temporarily.

The third great scientific revolution, he claimed (modestly), was his own discovery of the unconscious and the corollary notion that the human sense of “being in charge” is illusory. He claimed that everything we do in life is governed by a cauldron of unconscious emotions, drives and motives and that what we call consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg, an elaborate post hoc rationalization of all our actions.

I believe Freud correctly identified the common denominator of great scientific revolutions. But he doesn’t explain why this is so—why would human beings actually enjoy being “humiliated” or dethroned? What do they get in return for accepting the new worldview that belittles humankind?

Here we can turn things around and provide a Freudian interpretation of why cosmology, evolution and brain science are so appealing, not just to specialists but to everyone. Unlike other animals, humans are acutely aware of their own mortality and are terrified of death. But the study of cosmology gives us a sense of timelessness, of being part of something much larger. The fact that your own personal life is finite is less frightening when you know you are part of an evolving universe—an ever−unfolding drama. This is probably the closest a scientist can come to having a religious experience.

The same goes for the study of evolution, for it gives you a sense of time and place, allowing you to see yourself as part of a great journey. And likewise for the brain sciences. In this revolution, we have given up the idea that there is a soul separate from our minds and bodies. Far from being terrifying, this idea is very liberating. If you think you’re something special in this world, engaging in a lofty inspection of the cosmos from a unique vantage point, your annihilation becomes unacceptable. But if you’re really part of the great cosmic dance of Shiva, rather than a mere spectator, then your inevitable death should be seen as a joyous reunion with nature rather than as a tragedy.

Brahman is all. From Brahman come appearances, sensations, desires, deeds. But all these are merely name and form. To know Brahman one must experience the identity between him and the Self, or Brahman dwelling within the lotus of the heart. Only by so doing can man escape from sorrow and death and become one with the subtle essence beyond all knowledge.
—Upanishads, 500 b.c.

Chapter 8
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
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Arthur was suffering from Capgras’ delusion, one of the rarest and most colorful syndromes in neurology. The patient, who is often mentally quite lucid, comes to regard close acquaintances—usually his parents, children, spouse or siblings—as impostors. As Arthur said over and over, “That man looks identical to my father but he really isn’t my father. That woman who claims to be my mother? She’s lying. She looks just like my mom but it isn’t her.” Although such bizarre delusions can crop up in psychotic states, over a third of the documented cases of Capgras’ syndrome have occurred in conjunction with traumatic brain lesions, like the head injury that Arthur suffered in his automobile accident. This suggests to me that the syndrome has an organic basis. But because a majority of Capgras’ patients appear to develop this delusion “spontaneously,” they are usually dispatched to psychiatrists, who tend to favor a Freudian explanation of the disorder.
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A better approach for studying Capgras’ syndrome involves taking a closer look at neuroanatomy, specifically at pathways concerned with visual recognition and emotions in the brain. Recall that the temporal lobes contain regions that specialize in face and object recognition (the what pathway described in Chapter 4). We know this because when specific portions of the what pathway are damaged, patients lose the ability to recognize faces, even those of close friends and relatives—as immortalized by Oliver Sacks in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In a normal brain, these face recognition areas (found on both sides of the brain) relay information to the limbic system, found deep in the middle of the brain, which then helps generate emotional responses to particular faces (Figure 8.1). I may feel love when I see my mother’s face, anger when I see the face of a boss or a sexual rival or deliberate indifference upon seeing the visage of a friend who has betrayed me and has not yet earned my forgiveness. In each instance, when I look at the face,my temporal cortex recognizes the image—mother, boss, friend—and passes on the information to my amygdala (a gateway to the limbic system) to discern the emotional significance of that face. When this activation is then relayed to the rest of my limbic system, I start experiencing the nuances of emotion—love, anger, disappointment—appropriate to that particular face. The actual sequence of events is undoubtedly much more complex, but this caricature captures the gist of it.

After thinking about Arthur’s symptoms, it occurred to me that his strange behavior might have resulted from a disconnection between these two areas (one concerned with recognition and the other with emotions). Maybe Arthur’s face recognition pathway was still completely normal, and that was why he could identify everyone, including his mother and father, but the connections between this “face region” and his amygdala had been selectively damaged. If that were the case, Arthur would recognize his parents but would not experience any emotions when looking at their faces. He would not feel a “warm glow” when looking at his beloved mother, so when he sees her he says to himself, “If this is my mother, why doesn’t her presence make me feel like I’m with my mother?” Perhaps his only escape from this dilemma—the only sensible interpretation he could make given the peculiar disconnection between the two regions of his brain—is to assume that this woman merely resembles Mom. She must be an impostor.
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In the undergraduates, I found that there was a big jolt in the GSR in response to photos of their parents—as expected—but not to photos of strangers. In Arthur, on the other hand, the skin response was uniformly low. There was no increased response to his parents, or at times there would be a tiny blip on the screen after a long delay, as if he were doing a double take. This result provided direct proof that our theory was correct. Clearly Arthur was not responding emotionally to his parents, and this may be what led to the loss of his galvanic skin response. But how could we be sure that Arthur was even seeing the faces?
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We were now sure that Arthur had no problem in recognizing faces and telling them apart. But could his failure to produce a strong galvanic skin response to his parents be part of a more global disturbance in his emotional abilities? How could we be certain that the head injury had not also damaged his limbic system? Maybe he had no emotions, period. This seemed improbable because throughout the months I spent with Arthur, he showed a full range of human emotions. He laughed at my jokes and offered his own funny stories in return. He expressed frustration, fear and anger, and on rare occasions I saw him cry. Whatever the situation, his emotions were appropriate. Arthur’s problem, then, was neither his ability to recognize faces nor his ability to experience emotions; what was lost was his ability to link the two. So far so good, but why is the phenomenon specific to close relatives? Why not call the mailman an impostor, since his, too, is a familiar face? It may be that when any normal person (including Arthur, prior to his accident) encounters someone who is emotionally very close to him— a parent, spouse or sibling—he expects an emotional “glow,” a warm fuzzy feeling, to arise even though it may sometimes be experienced only very dimly. The absence of this glow is therefore surprising and Arthur’s only recourse then is to generate an absurd delusion—to rationalize it or to explain it away. On the other hand, when one sees the mailman, one doesn’t expect a warm glow and consequently there is no incentive for Arthur to generate a delusion to explain his lack of “warm fuzzy” response. A mailman is simply a mailman (unless the relationship has taken an amorous turn).

Although the most common delusion among Capgras’ patients is the assertion that a parent is an impostor, even more bizarre examples can be found in the older medical literature. Indeed, in a case on record the patient was convinced that his stepfather was a robot, proceeded to decapitate him and opened his skull to look for microchips. Perhaps in this patient, the dissociation from emotions was so extreme that he was forced into an even more absurd delusion than Arthur’s: that his stepfather was not even a human being, but was a mindless android!

About a year ago, when I gave a lecture on Arthur at the Veterans Administration Hospital in La Jolla, a neurology resident raised an astute objection to my theory. What about people who are born with a disease in which their amygdalas (the gateway to the limbic system) calcify and atrophy or those who lose their amygdalas (we each have two of them) completely in surgery or through an accident? Such people do exist, but they do not develop Capgras’ syndrome, even though their GSRs are flat to all emotionally evocative stimuli. Likewise, patients with damage to their frontal lobes (which receive and process information from the limbic system for making elaborate future plans) also often lack a GSR. Yet they, too, do not display Capgras’ syndrome. Why not? The answer may be that these patients experience a general blunting of all their emotional responses and therefore do not have a baseline for comparison. Like a purebred Vulcan or Data on Star Trek, one could legitimately argue, they don’t even know what an emotion is, whereas Capgras’ patients like Arthur enjoy a normal emotional life in all other respects. This idea teaches us an important principle about brain function, namely, that all our perceptions—indeed, maybe all aspects of our minds—are governed by comparisons and not by absolute values. This appears to be true whether you are talking about something as obvious as judging the brightness of print in a newspaper or something as subtle as detecting a blip in your internal emotional landscape. This is a far−reaching conclusion, and it also helps illustrate the power of our approach—indeed of the whole discipline that now goes by the name cognitive neuroscience. You can discover important general principles about how the brain works and begin to address deep philosophical questions by doing relatively simple experiments on the right patients. We started with a bizarre condition, proposed an outlandish theory, tested it in the lab and—in meeting objections to it—learned more about how the healthy brain actually works.

Taking these speculations even further, consider the extraordinary disorder called Cotard’s syndrome, in which a patient will assert that he is dead, claiming to smell rotten flesh or worms crawling all over his skin. Again, most people, even neurologists, would jump to the conclusion that the patient was insane. But that wouldn’t explain why the delusion takes this highly specific form. I would argue instead that Cotard’s is simply an exaggerated form of Capgras’ syndrome and probably has a similar origin. In Capgras’, the face recognition area alone is disconnected from the amygdala, whereas in Cotard’s perhaps all the sensory areas are disconnected from the limbic system, leading to a complete lack of emotional contact with the world. Here is another instance in which an outlandish brain disorder that most people regard as a psychiatric problem can be explained in terms of known brain circuitry. And once again, these ideas can be tested in the laboratory. I would predict that Cotard’s syndrome patients will have a complete loss of GSR for all external stimuli—not just faces—and this leaves them stranded on an island of emotional desolation, as close as anyone can come to experiencing death.

Arthur seemed to enjoy his visits to our laboratory. His parents were pleased that there was a logical explanation for his predicament, that he wasn’t just “crazy.” I never revealed the details to Arthur because I wasn’t sure how he’d react. Arthur’s father was an intelligent man, and at one point, when Arthur wasn’t around, he asked me, “If your theory is correct, doctor—if the information doesn’t get to his amygdala—then how do you explain how he has no problems recognizing us over the phone? Does that make sense to you?”

“Well,” I replied, “there is a separate pathway from the auditory cortex, the hearing area of the temporal lobes, to the amygdala. One possibility is that this hearing route has not been affected by the accident— only the visual centers have been disconnected from Arthur’s amygdala.” This conversation got me wondering about the other well−known functions of the amygdala and the visual centers that project to it. In particular, scientists recording cell responses in the amygdala found that, in addition to responding to facial expression and emotions, the cells also respond to the direction of eye gaze. For instance, one cell might fire if another person is looking directly at you, whereas a neighboring cell will fire only if that person’s gaze is averted by a fraction of an inch. Still other cells fire when the gaze is way off  to the left or the right. This phenomenon is not surprising, given the important role that gaze direction plays in primate social communications — the averted gaze of guilt, shame or embarrassment; the intense, direct gaze of a lover or the threatening stare of an enemy. We tend to forget that emotions, even though they are privately experienced, often involve interactions with other people and that one way we interact is through eye contact. Given the links among gaze direction, familiarity and emotions, I wondered whether Arthur’s ability to judge the direction of gaze, say, by looking at photographs of faces, would be impaired.

To find out, I prepared a series of images, each showing the same model looking either directly at the camera lens or at a point an inch or two to the right or left of the lens. Arthur’s task was simply to let us know whether the model was looking straight at him or not. Whereas you or I can detect tiny shifts in gaze with uncanny accuracy, Arthur was hopeless at the task. Only when the model’s eyes were looking way off to one side was he able to discern correctly that she wasn’t looking at him.
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As we continued testing Arthur, we noticed that he had certain other quirks and eccentricities. For instance, Arthur sometimes seemed to have a general problem with visual categories. All of us make mental taxonomies or groupings of events and objects: Ducks and geese are birds but rabbits are not. Our brains set up these categories even without formal education in zoology, presumably to facilitate memory storage and to enhance our ability to access these memories at a moment’s notice. Arthur, on the other hand, often made remarks hinting that he was confused about categories. For example, he had an almost obsessive preoccupation with Jews and Catholics, and he tended to label a disproportionate number of recently encountered people as Jews.

This propensity reminded me of another rare syndrome called Fregoli, in which a patient keeps seeing the same person everywhere. In walking down the street, nearly every woman’s face might look like his mother’s or every young man might resemble his brother. (I would predict that instead of having severed connections from face recognition areas to the amygdala, the Fregoli patient may have an excess of such connections. Every face would be imbued with familiarity and “glow,” causing him to see the same face over and over again.) Might such Fregoli−like confusion occur in otherwise normal brains? Could this be a basis for forming racist stereotypes? Racism is so often directed at a single physical type (Blacks, Asians, Whites and so forth). Perhaps a single unpleasant episode with one member of a visual category sets up a limbic connection that is inappropriately generalized to include all members of that class and is notoriously impervious to “intellectual correction” based on information stored in higher brain centers. Indeed one’s intellectual views may be colored (no pun intended) by this emotional knee−jerk reaction; hence the notorious tenacity of racism.

We began our journey with Arthur trying to explain his strange delusions about impostors and uncovered some new insights into how memories are stored and retrieved in the human brain. His story offers insights into how each of us constructs narratives about our life and the people who inhabit it. In a sense your life—your autobiography—is a long sequence of highly personal episodic memories about your first kiss, prom night, wedding, birth of a child, fishing trips and so on. But it is also much more than that. Clearly, there is a personal identity, a sense of a unified “self” that runs like a golden thread through the whole fabric of our existence. The Scottish philosopher David Hume drew an analogy between the human personality and a river—the water in the river is ever−changing and yet the river itself remains constant. What would happen, he asked, if a person were to dip his foot into a river and then dip it in again after half an hour – would it be the same river or a different one? If you think this is a silly semantic riddle, you’re right, for the answer depends on your definition of “same” and “river.”

But silly or not, one point is clear. For Arthur, given his difficulty with linking successive episodic memories, there may indeed be two rivers! To be sure, this tendency to make copies of events and objects was most pronounced when he encountered faces—Arthur did not often duplicate objects. Yet there were occasions when he would run his fingers through his hair and call it a “wig,” partly because his scalp felt unfamiliar as a result of scars from the neurosurgery he had undergone. On rare occasions, Arthur even duplicated countries, claiming at one point that there were two Panamas (he had recently visited that country during a family reunion).

Most remarkable of all, Arthur sometimes duplicated himself! The first time this happened, I was showing Arthur pictures of himself from a family photo album and I pointed to a snapshot of him taken two years before the accident.

“Whose picture is this?” I asked.

“That’s another Arthur,” he replied. “He looks just like me but it isn’t me.” I couldn’t believe my ears. Arthur may have detected my surprise since he then reinforced his point by saying, “You see? He has a mustache. I don’t.”

This delusion, however, did not occur when Arthur looked at himself in a mirror. Perhaps he was sensible enough to realize that the face in the mirror could not be anyone else’s. But Arthur’s tendency to “duplicate” himself—to regard himself as a distinct person from a former Arthur — also sometimes emerged spontaneously during conversation. To my surprise, he once volunteered, “Yes, my parents sent a check, but they sent it to the other Arthur.”

Arthur’s most serious problem, however, was his inability to make emotional contact with people who matter to him most—his parents— and this caused him great anguish. I can imagine a voice inside his head saying, “The reason I don’t experience warmth must be because I’m not the real Arthur.” One day Arthur turned to his mother and said, “Mom, if the real Arthur ever returns, do you promise that you will still treat me as a friend and love me?” How can a sane human being who is perfectly intelligent in other respects come to regard himself as two people? There seems to be something inherently contradictory about splitting the Self, which by its very nature is unitary. If I started to regard myself as several people, which one would I plan for? Which one is the “real” me? This is a real and painful dilemma for Arthur.

Philosophers have argued for centuries that if there is any one thing about our existence that is completely beyond question, it is the simple fact that “I” exist as a single human being who endures in space and time. But even this basic axiomatic foundation of human existence is called into question by Arthur.

Chapter 9
God and the Limbic System

Imagine you had a machine, a helmet of sorts that you could simply put on your head and stimulate any small region of your brain without causing permanent damage. What would you use the device for?

This is not science fiction. Such a device, called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, already exists and is relatively easy to construct. When applied to the scalp, it shoots a rapidly fluctuating and extremely powerful magnetic field onto a small patch of brain tissue, thereby activating it and providing hints about its function. For example, if you were to stimulate certain parts of your motor cortex, different muscles would contract. Your finger might twitch or you’d feel a sudden involuntary, puppetlike shrugging of one shoulder.

So, if you had access to this device, what part of your brain would you stimulate? If you happened to be familiar with reports from the early days of neurosurgery about the septum — a cluster of cells located near the front of the thalamus in the middle of your brain—you might be tempted to apply the magnet there. Patients “zapped” in this region claim to experience intense pleasure, “like a thousand orgasms rolled into one.” If you were blind from birth and the visual areas in your brain had not degenerated, you might stimulate bits of your own visual cortex to find out what people mean by color or “seeing.” Or, given the well−known clinical observation that the left frontal lobe seems to be involved in feeling “good,” maybe you’d want to stimulate a region over your left eye to see whether you could induce a natural high.

When the Canadian psychologist Dr. Michael Persinger got hold of a similar device a few years ago, he chose instead to stimulate parts of his temporal lobes. And he found to his amazement that he experienced God for the first time in his life.
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If religious beliefs are merely the combined result of wishful thinking and a longing for immortality, how do you explain the flights of intense religious ecstasy experienced by patients with temporal lobe seizures or their claim that God speaks directly to them? Many a patient has told me of a “divine light that illuminates all things,” or of an “ultimate truth that lies completely beyond the reach of ordinary minds who are too immersed in the hustle and bustle of daily life to notice the beauty and grandeur of it all.” Of course, they might simply be suffering from hallucinations and delusions of the kind that a schizophrenic might experience, but if that’s the case, why do such hallucinations occur mainly when the temporal lobes are involved? Even more puzzling, why do they take this particular form? Why don’t these patients hallucinate pigs or donkeys?
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The limbic system gets its input from all sensory systems—vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell. The latter sense is in fact directly wired to the limbic system, going straight to the amygdala (an almond−shaped structure that serves as a gateway into the limbic system). This is hardly surprising given that in lower mammals, smell is intimately linked with emotion, territorial behavior, aggression and sexuality.

The limbic system’s output, as Papez realized, is geared mainly toward the experience and expression of emotions. The experience of emotions is mediated by back−and−forth connections with the frontal lobes, and much of the richness of your inner emotional life probably depends on these interactions. The outward expression of these emotions, on the other hand, requires the participation of a small cluster of densely packed cells called the hypothalamus, a control center with three major outputs of its own. First, hypothalamic nuclei end hormonal and neural signals to the pituitary gland, which is often described as the “conductor” of the endocrine orchestra. Hormones released through this system influence almost every part of the human body, a biological tour de force we shall consider in the analysis of mind−body interactions (Chapter 11). Second, the hypothalamus sends commands to the autonomic nervous system, which controls various vegetative or bodily functions, including the production of tears, saliva and sweat and the control of blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, respiration, bladder function, defecation and so on. The hypothalamus can be regarded, then, as the “brain” of this archaic, ancillary nervous system. The third output drives actual behaviors, often remembered by the mnemonic the “four F’s”— fighting, fleeing, feeding and sexual behavior. In short, the hypothalamus is the body’s “survival center,” preparing the body for dire emergencies or, sometimes, for the passing on of its genes.

Much of our knowledge about the functions of the limbic system comes from patients who have epileptic seizures originating in this part of the brain. When you hear the word “epilepsy,” you usually think of someone having fits or a seizure—the powerful involuntary contraction of all muscles of the body—and falling to the ground. Indeed, these symptoms characterize the most well−known form of epilepsy, called a grand mal seizure. Such seizures usually arise because a tiny cluster of neurons somewhere in the brain is misbehaving, firing chaotically until activity spreads like wildfire to engulf the entire brain. But seizures can also be “focal”; that is, they can remain confined largely to a single small patch of the brain. If such focal seizures are mainly in the motor cortex, the result is a sequential march of muscle twitching—or the so−called jacksonian seizures. But if they happen to be in the limbic system, then the most striking symptoms are emotional. Patients say that their “feelings are on fire,” ranging from intense ecstasy to profound despair, a sense of impending doom or even fits of extreme rage and terror. Women sometimes experience orgasms during seizures, although for some obscure reason men never do. But most remarkable of all are those patients who have deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communion with God. Everything around them is imbued with cosmic significance. They may say, “I finally understand what it’s all about. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life. Suddenly it all makes sense.” Or, “Finally I have insight into the true nature of the cosmos.” I find it ironic that this sense of enlightenment, this absolute conviction that Truth is revealed at last, should derive from limbic structures concerned with emotions rather than from the thinking, rational parts of the brain that take so much pride in their ability to discern truth and falsehood.
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Once, when Paul was reminiscing about his flashbacks, I interjected, “Paul, do you believe in God?”

He looked puzzled. “But what else is there?” he said.

But why do patients like Paul have religious experiences? I can think of four possibilities. One is that God really does visit these people. If that is true, so be it. Who are we to question God’s infinite wisdom?

Unfortunately, this can be neither proved nor ruled out on empirical grounds. The second possibility is that because these patients experience all sorts of odd, inexplicable emotions, as if a cauldron had boiled over, perhaps their only recourse is to seek ablution in the calm waters of religious tranquility. Or the emotional hodgepodge may be misinterpreted as mystical messages from another world. I find the latter explanation unlikely for two reasons. First, there are other neurological and psychiatric disorders such as frontal lobe syndrome, schizophrenia, manic depressive illness or just depression in which the emotions are disturbed, but one rarely sees religious preoccupations in such patients to the same degree. Even though schizophrenics may occasionally talk about God, the feelings are usually fleeting; they don’t have the same intense fervor or the obsessive and stereotyped quality that one sees in temporal lobe epileptics. Hence emotional changes alone cannot provide a complete explanation for religious preoccupation.

The third explanation invokes connections between sensory centers (vision and hearing) and the amygdala, that part of the limbic system specialized in recognizing the emotional significance of events in the external world. Obviously, not every person or event you encounter throughout a typical day sets off alarm bells; that would be maladaptive and you’d soon go mad. To cope with the world’s uncertainties, you need a way of gauging the salience of events before you relay a message to the rest of the limbic system and to the hypothalamus telling them to assist you in fighting or fleeing. But consider what might happen if spurious signals stemming from limbic seizure activity were to travel these pathways. You’d get the sort of kindling I described earlier. These “salience” pathways would become strengthened, increasing communication between brain structures. Sensory brain areas that see people and events and hear voices and noises would become more closely linked to emotional centers. The result? Every object and event—not just salient ones—would become imbued with deep significance, so that the patient would see “the universe in a grain of sand” and “hold[s] infinity in the palm of his hand.” He would float on an ocean of religious ecstasy, carried by a universal tide to the shores of Nirvana.

The fourth hypothesis is even more speculative. Could it be that human beings have actually evolved specialized neural circuitry for the sole purpose of mediating religious experience? The human belief in the supernatural is so widespread in all societies all over the world that it’s tempting to ask whether the propensity for such beliefs might have a biological basis. If so, you’d have to answer a key question: What sorts of Darwinian selection pressures could lead to such a mechanism? And if there is such a mechanism, is there a gene or set of genes concerned mainly with religiosity and spiritual leanings—a gene that atheists might lack or have learned to circumvent (just kidding!)?
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So we now have several competing hypotheses of why temporal lobe epileptics have such experiences. Even though all these theories invoke the same neural structures, they postulate very different mechanisms and it would be nice to find a way to distinguish among them. One of the ideas—the notion that kindling has indiscriminately strengthened all connections from the temporal cortex to the amygdala—can be addressed directly by studying the patient’s galvanic skin response. Ordinarily an object is recognized by the visual areas of the temporal lobes. Its emotional salience—is it a friendly face or a fierce lion?—is signaled by the amygdala and transmitted to the limbic system so that you become emotionally aroused and start sweating.

But if the kindling has strengthened all the connections within these pathways, then everything becomes salient. No matter what you look at—a nondescript stranger, a chair or a table—it should activate the limbic system strongly and make you perspire. So unlike you and me, who should display a heightened GSR response only for our moms, dads, spouses or lions, or even a loud thud or bang, the patient with temporal lobe epilepsy should show an increased galvanic skin response to everything under the sun.

To test this possibility, I contacted two of my colleagues who specialize in the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy—Dr. Vincent Iragui and Dr. Evelyn Tecoma. Given the highly controversial nature of the whole concept of “temporal lobe personality” (not everyone agrees that these personality traits are seen more frequently in epileptics), they were quite intrigued by my ideas. A few days later, they recruited two of their patients who manifested obvious “symptoms” of this syndrome—hyper−graphia, spiritual leanings and an obsessive need to talk about their feelings and about religious and metaphysical topics. Would they want to volunteer in a research study?

Both were eager to participate. In what may turn out to be the very first scientific experiment ever done on religion directly, I sat them in comfortable chairs and attached harmless electrodes to their hands. Once settled in front of a computer screen, they were shown random samples of several types of words and images—for example, words for ordinary inanimate objects (a shoe, vase, table and the like), familiar faces (parents, siblings), unfamiliar faces, sexually arousing words and pictures (erotic magazine pinups), four−letter words involving sex, extreme violence and horror (an alligator eating a person alive, a man setting himself afire) and religious words and icons (such as the word “God”).

If you and I were to undergo this exercise, we would show huge GSR responses to the scenes of violence and to the sexually explicit words and pictures, a fairly large response to familiar faces and usually nothing at all to other categories (unless you have a shoe fetish, in which case you’d respond to one).

What about the patients? The kindling hypothesis would predict a uniform high response to all categories. But to our amazement what we found in the two patients tested was a heightened response mainly to religious words and icons. Their responses to the other categories, including the sexual words and images, which ordinarily evoke a powerful response, was strangely diminished compared to what is seen in normal individuals.
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I want to emphasize that not every temporal lobe epilepsy patient becomes religious. There are many parallel neural connections between the temporal cortex and the amygdala. Depending on which particular ones are involved, some patients may have their personalities skewed in other directions, becoming obsessed with writing, drawing, arguing philosophy or, rarely, being preoccupied with sex. It’s likely that their GSR responses would shoot upward in response to these stimuli rather than to religious icons, a possibility that is being studied in our laboratory and others.
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Darwin believed that his principle of natural selection could account not only for the emergence of morphological traits like fingers or noses, but also for the structure of the brain and therefore our mental capacities. In other words, natural selection could explain our talents for music, art, literature and other human intellectual achievements. Wallace disagreed. He conceded that Darwin’s principle might explain fingers and toes and maybe even some simple mental traits, but that certain quintessentially human abilities like mathematical and musical talent could not possibly have arisen through the blind workings of chance.

Why not? According to Wallace, as the human brain evolved, it encountered a new and equally powerful force called culture. Once culture, language and writing emerged, he argued, human evolution became Lamarckian—that is, you could pass on the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime to your offspring. These progeny will be much wiser than the offspring of illiterates not because your genes have changed but simply because this knowledge—in the form of culture—has been transferred from your brain to your child’s brain. In this way, the brain is symbiotic with culture; the two are as interdependent as the naked hermit crab and its shell or the nucleated cell and its mitochondria. For Wallace, culture propels human evolution, making us absolutely unique in the animal kingdom. Isn’t it extraordinary, he said, that we are the only animal in which the mind is vastly more important than any bodily organ, assuming a tremendous significance because of what we call “culture.” Moreover, our brain actually helps us avoid the need for further specialization. Most organisms evolve to become more and more specialized as they take up new environmental niches, be it a longer neck for the giraffe or sonar for the bat. Humans, on the other hand, have evolved an organ, a brain, that gives us the capacity to evade specialization. We can colonize the Arctic without evolving a fur coat over millions of years like the polar bear because we can go kill one, take its coat and drape it on ourselves. And then we can give it to our children and grandchildren.

Wallace’s second argument against “blind chance giving rise to the talents of a Mozart” involves what might be called potential intelligence (a phrase used by Richard Gregory). Say, you take a barely literate young tribesman from a contemporary aboriginal society (or even use a time machine to garner a Cro−Magnon man) and give him a modern public school education in Rio or New York or Tokyo. He will, of course, be no different from any other child reared in those cities. According to Wallace, this means that the aborigine or Cro−Magnon possesses a potential intelligence that vastly exceeds anything that he might need for coping with his natural environment. This kind of potential intelligence can be contrasted with kinetic intelligence, which is realized through formal education. But why the devil did this potential intelligence evolve? It couldn’t have arisen for learning Latin in English schools. It couldn’t have evolved for learning the calculus, even though almost anyone who tries hard enough can master it. What was the selection pressure for the emergence of these latent abilities? Natural selection can only explain the emergence of actual abilities that are expressed by the organism—never potential ones. When they are useful and promote survival, they are passed on to the next generation. But what to make of a gene for latent mathematical ability? What benefit does that confer on a nonliterate person? It seems like overkill.

Wallace wrote, “The lowest savages with the least copious vocabularies [have] the capacity of uttering a variety of distinct articulate sounds and of applying them to an almost infinite amount of modulation and inflection [which] is not in any way inferior to that of the higher [European] races. An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its possessor.” And the argument holds, with even greater force, for other esoteric human abilities such as mathematics or musical talent. There’s the rub. An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its possessor, but we know that evolution has no foresight! Here is an instance in which evolution appears to have foreknowledge. How is this possible?

Wallace wrestled mightily with this paradox. How can improvement in esoteric mathematical skills—in latent form—affect the survival of one race that has this latent ability and the extinction of another that doesn’t ? “It is a somewhat curious fact,” he wrote, “that when all modern writers admit the great antiquity of man, most of them maintain the very recent development of intellect, and will hardly contemplate the possibility of men, equal in mental capacity to ourselves, having existed in prehistoric times.” But we know they did. Both the Neanderthal and Cro−Magnon cranial capacities were actually larger than ours, and it’s not inconceivable that their latent potential intelligence may have been equal to or even greater than that of Homo sapiens. So how is it possible that these astonishing, latent abilities emerged in the prehistoric brain but have only been realized in the last one thousand years? Wallace’s answer: It was done by God! “Some higher intelligence must have directed the process by which the human nature was developed.” Thus human grace is an earthly expression of “divine grace.”

This is where Wallace parted company with Darwin, who resolutely maintained that natural selection was the prime force in evolution and could account for the emergence of even the most esoteric mental traits, without the helping hand of a Supreme Being. How would a modern biologist resolve Wallace’s paradox? She would probably argue that esoteric and “advanced” human traits like musical and mathematical ability are specific manifestations of what is usually called “general intelligence”—itself the culmination of a “runaway” brain that exploded in size and complexity within the last three million years. General intelligence evolved, the argument goes, so that one can communicate, hunt game, hoard food in granaries, engage in elaborate social rituals and do the myriad things that humans enjoy and that help them survive. But once this intelligence was in place, you could use it for all sorts of other things, like the calculus, music and the design of scientific instruments to extend the reach of our senses. By way of analogy, consider the human hand: Even though it evolved its amazing versatility for grasping at tree branches, it can now be used to count, write poetry, rock the cradle, wield a scepter and make shadow puppets.

But with respect to the mind, this argument doesn’t make much sense to me. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but the idea that the ability to spear antelope was then somehow used for the calculus is a bit dubious. I’d like to suggest another explanation, one that takes us back not only to the savant syndrome that I mentioned earlier but also to the more general question of the sporadic emergence of talent and genius in the normal population.
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These examples show that specialized esoteric talents do not emerge spontaneously from general intelligence, for if that were true, how can an “idiot” display them? Nor do we have to invoke the extreme pathological example of savants to make this point, for there is an element of this syndrome in every talented person or indeed in every genius. “Genius,” contrary to popular misconception, is not synonymous with superhuman intelligence. Most of the geniuses whom I have had the privilege of knowing are more like idiot savants than they would care to admit—extraordinarily talented in a few domains but quite ordinary in other respects.
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Chapter 10
The Woman Who Died Laughing
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I find great irony in the fact that every time someone smiles at you she is in fact producing a half threat by flashing her canines. When Darwin published On the Origin of Species he delicately hinted in his last chapter that we too may have evolved from apelike ancestors. The English statesman Benjamin Disraeli was outraged by this and at a meeting held in Oxford he asked a famous rhetorical question: “Is man a beast or an angel?” To answer this, he need only have looked at his wife’s canines as she smiled at him, and he’d have realized that in this simple universal human gesture of friendliness lies concealed a grim reminder of our savage past.

As Darwin himself concluded in The Descent of Man:
But we are not here concerned with hopes and fears, only with truth. We must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which he feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest creature, with his Godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Chapter 11
“You Forgot to Deliver the Twin”
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So what causes pseudocyesis? Cultural factors undoubtedly play a major role and may explain the decline of pseudocyesis from an incidence of one in two hundred in the late 1700s to about one in ten thousand pregnancies today. In the past, many women felt extreme social pressure to have a baby, and when they felt they were pregnant, there was no ultrasound to disprove the diagnosis. No one could say with certainty, “Look here, there’s no fetus.” Conversely, pregnant women today submit to round after round of evaluations leaving little room for ambiguity; confronting the patient with physical evidence of an ultrasound is usually sufficient to dispel the delusion and associated physical changes.

The influence of culture on the incidence of pseudocyesis cannot be denied, but what causes the actual physical changes? According to the few studies carried out on this curious affliction of mind and body, the abdominal swelling itself is usually caused by a combination of five factors: an accumulation of intestinal gas, a lowering of the diaphragm, a pushing forward of the pelvic portion of the spine, a dramatic growth of the greater omentum—a pendulous apron of fat that hangs loose in front of the intestines—and in rare cases an actual uterine enlargement. The hypothalamus—a part of the brain that regulates endocrine secretions— may also go awry, producing profound hormonal shifts that mimic nearly all the signs of pregnancy. Furthermore, it’s a two−way street: The body’s effects on the mind are just as profound as those of the mind on the body, giving rise to complex feedback loops involved in generating and maintaining false pregnancy. For instance, the abdominal distension produced by gas and the woman’s “pregnant body posture” might be explained, in part, by classic operant conditioning. When Mary, who wants to be pregnant, sees her abdomen enlarge and feels her diaphragm fall, she learns unconsciously that the lower it falls, the more pregnant she looks. Likewise, a combination of air swallowing (aerophagia) and autonomic constriction of the gastrointestinal sphincters that would increase gas retention could also probably be learned unconsciously. In this manner, Mary’s “baby” and its “missing twin” are literally conjured out of thin air through a process of
unconscious learning.
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Pseudocyesis is dramatic. But is it an isolated, exceptional example of mind−body medicine? I think not. Other stories come to mind, including one I first heard in medical school. A friend said, “Did you know that according to Lewis Thomas you can hypnotize someone and eliminate their warts?”

“Rubbish,” I scoffed.

“No, it’s true,” she said. “There are documented cases. You get hypnotized and the warts disappear in a few days or sometimes overnight.”

Now on the face of it this sounds very silly, but if it’s true, it would have far−reaching implications for modern science. A wart is essentially a tumor (a benign cancer) produced by the papilloma virus. If that can be eliminated by hypnotic suggestion, why not cancer of the cervix, which is also produced by the papilloma virus (albeit a different strain)? I am not claiming that this will work—perhaps nerve pathways influenced by hypnosis reach the skin but not the lining of the cervix—but unless we do the relevant experiment, we will never know.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that warts can be eliminated by hypnosis, the question arises, How can a person simply “think away” a tumor? There are at least two possibilities. One involves the autonomic nervous system—the pathways of nerves that help control blood pressure, sweating, heart rate, urine output, erections and other physiological phenomena not under direct control of conscious thought. These nerves form specialized circuits that service distinct functions in various body segments. Thus some nerves control hair standing on end, others cause sweating and some generate the local constriction of blood vessels. Is it possible that the mind, acting through the autonomic nervous system, could literally asphyxiate the wart by constricting blood vessels in its immediate vicinity, making it shrivel up and wither away? This explanation implies an unexpected degree of precise control by the autonomic nervous system and also implies that the hypnotic suggestion can be “understood” by the autonomic nervous system and transferred to the region of the wart.

The second possibility is that the hypnotic suggestion somehow kick starts the immune system, thereby eliminating the virus. But this would not explain at least one recorded case involving a hypnotized person whose warts vanished on just one side of his body. Why or how the immune system could selectively eliminate warts on one side over another is a mystery that invites further flights of speculation. A more common example of mind−body interaction involves the interplay between the immune system and perceptual cues from the world around us. Over three decades ago, medical students were often told that an asthmatic attack could be provoked not only by inhaling pollen from a rose but sometimes by merely seeing a rose, even a plastic rose, prompting a so−called conditioned allergic response. In other words, exposure to a real rose and pollen sets up a “learned” association in the brain between the mere visual appearance of a rose and bronchial constriction. How exactly does this conditioning work? How does the message get from the brain’s visual areas all the way down to the mast cells lining the bronchi of the lungs? What are the actual pathways involved? Despite three decades of mind−body medicine, we still have no clear answers.
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Chapter 12
Do Martians See Red?
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The central mystery of the cosmos, as far as I’m concerned, is the following: Why are there always two parallel descriptions of the universe—the first−person account (“I see red”) and the third−person account (“He says that he sees red when certain pathways in his brain encounter a wavelength of six hundred nanometers”)?

How can these two accounts be so utterly different yet complementary? Why isn’t there only a third−person account, for according to the objective worldview of the physicist and neuroscientist, that’s the only one that really exists? (Scientists who hold this view are called behaviorists.) Indeed, in their scheme of “objective science,” the need for a first−person account doesn’t even arise—implying that consciousness simply doesn’t exist. But we all know perfectly well that can’t be right. I’m reminded of the old quip about the behaviorist who, just having made passionate love, looks at his lover and says, “Obviously that was good for you, dear, but was it good for me?” This need to reconcile the first−person and third−person accounts of the universe (the “I” view versus the “he” or “it” view) is the single most important unsolved problem in science. Dissolve this barrier, say the Indian mystics and sages, and you will see that the separation between self and nonself is an illusion—that you are really One with the cosmos.

Philosophers call this conundrum the riddle of qualia or subjective sensation. How can the flux of ions and electrical currents in little specks of jelly—the neurons in my brain—generate the whole subjective world of sensations like red, warmth, cold or pain? By what magic is matter transmuted into the invisible fabric of feelings and sensations? This problem is so puzzling that not everyone agrees it is even a problem.
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As a second example, imagine a species of Amazonian electric fish that is very intelligent, in fact, as intelligent and sophisticated as you or I. But it has something we lack—namely, the ability to sense electrical fields using special organs in its skin. Like the superscientist in the previous example, you can study the neurophysiology of this fish and figure out how the electrical organs on the sides of its body transduce electrical current, how this information is conveyed to the brain, what part of the brain analyzes this information and how the fish uses this information to dodge predators, find prey and so on. If the fish could talk, however, it would say, “Fine, but you’ll never know what it feels like to sense electricity.”

These examples clearly state the problem of why qualia are thought to be essentially private. They also illustrate why the problem of qualia is not necessarily a scientific problem. Recall that your scientific description is complete. It’s just that the your account is incomplete epistemologically because the actual experience of electric fields or redness is something you never will know. For you, it will forever remain a “third−person” account.

For centuries philosophers have assumed that this gap between brain and mind poses a deep epistemological problem—a barrier that simply cannot be crossed. But is this really true? I agree that the barrier hasn’t yet been crossed, but does it follow that it can never be crossed? I’d like to argue that there is in fact no such barrier, no great vertical divide in nature between mind and matter, substance and spirit. Indeed, I believe that this barrier is only apparent and that it arises as a result of language. This sort of obstacle emerges when there is any translation from one language to another.

How does this idea apply to the brain and the study of consciousness? I submit that we are dealing here with two mutually unintelligible languages. One is the language of nerve impulses—the spatial and temporal patterns of neuronal activity that allow us to see red, for example. The second language, the one that allows us to communicate what we are seeing to others, is a natural spoken tongue like English or German or Japanese—rarefied, compressed waves of air traveling between you and the listener. Both are languages in the strict technical sense, that is, they are information−rich messages that are intended to convey meaning, across synapses between different brain parts in one case and across the air between two people in the other.

The problem is that I can tell you, the color−blind superscientist, about my qualia (my experience of seeing red) only by using a spoken language. But the ineffable “experience” itself is lost in the translation. The actual “redness” of red will remain forever unavailable to you.

But what if I were to skip spoken language as a medium of communication and instead hook a cable of neural pathways (taken from tissue culture or from another person) from the color−processing areas in my brain directly into the color−processing regions of your brain (remember that your brain has the machinery to see color even though your eyes cannot discriminate wavelengths because they have no color receptors)? The cable allows the color information to go straight from my brain to neurons in your brain without intermediate translation. This is a farfetched scenario, but there is nothing logically impossible about it.

Earlier when I said “red,” it didn’t make any sense to you because the mere use of the word “red” already involves a translation. But if you skip the translation and use a cable, so that the nerve impulses themselves go directly to the color area, then perhaps you’ll say, “Oh, my God, I see exactly what you mean. I’m having this wonderful new experience.”

This scenario demolishes the philosophers’ argument that there is an insurmountable logical barrier to understanding qualia. In principle, you can experience another creature’s qualia, even the electric fish’s. If you could find out what the electroceptive part of the fish brain is doing and if you could somehow graft it onto the relevant parts of your brain with all the proper associated connections, then you would start experiencing the fish’s electrical qualia. Now, we could get into a philosophical debate over whether you need to be a fish to experience it or whether as a human being you could experience it, but the debate is not relevant to my argument. The logical point I am making here pertains only to the electrical qualia—not to the whole experience of being a fish.

The key idea here is that the qualia problem is not unique to the mind−body problem. It is no different in kind from problems that arise from any translation, and thus there is no need to invoke a great division in nature between the world of qualia and the material world. There is only one world with lots of translation barriers. If you can overcome them, the problems vanish.
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Now you might ask, “Does any of this yield clues as to where in the brain qualia might be?” It is surprising that many people think that the seat of consciousness is the frontal lobes, because nothing dramatic happens to qualia and consciousness per se if you damage the frontal lobes— even though the patient’s personality can be profoundly altered (and he may have difficulty switching attention). I would suggest instead that most of the action is in the temporal lobes because lesions and hyperactivity in these structures are what most often produce striking disturbances in consciousness. For instance, you need the amygdala and other parts of the temporal lobes for seeing the significance of things, and surely this is a vital part of conscious experience. Without this structure you are a zombie (like the fellow in the famous Chinese room thought experiment proposed by the philosopher John Searle) capable only of giving a single correct output in response to a demand, but with no ability to sense the meaning of what you are doing or saying.

Everyone would agree that qualia and consciousness are not associated with the early stages of perceptual processing as at the level of the retina. Nor are they associated with the final stages of planning motor acts when behavior is actually carried out. They are associated, instead, with the intermediate stages of processing—a stage where stable perceptual representations are created (yellow, dog, monkey) and that have meaning (the infinite implications and possibilities for action from which you can choose the best one). This happens mainly in the temporal lobe and associated limbic structures, and, in this sense, the temporal lobes are the interface between perception and action.

The evidence for this comes from neurology; brain lesions that produce the most profound disturbances in consciousness are those that generate temporal lobe seizures, whereas lesions in other parts of the brain only produce minor disturbances in consciousness. When surgeons electrically stimulate the temporal lobes of epileptics, the patients have vivid conscious experiences. Stimulating the amygdala is the surest way to “replay” a full experience, such as an autobiographical memory or a vivid hallucination. Temporal lobe seizures are often associated not only with alterations in consciousness in the sense of personal identity, personal destiny and personality, but also with vivid qualia—hallucinations such as smells and sounds. If these are mere memories, as some claim, why would the person say, “I literally feel like I’m reliving it”? These seizures are characterized by the vividness of the qualia they produce. The smells, pains, tastes and emotional feelings—all generated in the temporal lobes—suggest that this brain region is intimately involved in qualia and conscious awareness.

Another reason for choosing the temporal lobes—especially the left one—is that this is where much of language is represented. If I see an apple, temporal lobe activity allows me to apprehend all its implications almost simultaneously. Recognition of it as a fruit of a certain type occurs in the inferotemporal cortex, the amygdala gauges the apple’s significance for my well−being and Wernicke’s and other areas alert me to all the nuances of meaning that the mental image—including the word “apple”—evokes; I can eat the apple, I can smell it; I can bake a pie, remove its pith, plant its seeds; use it to “keep the doctor away,” tempt Eve and on and on. If one enumerates all of the attributes that we usually associate with the words “consciousness” and “awareness,” each of them, you will notice, has a correlate in temporal lobe seizures, including vivid visual and auditory hallucinations, “out of body” experiences and an absolute sense of omnipotence or omniscience. Any one of this long list of disturbances in conscious experience can occur individually when other parts of the brain are damaged (for instance, disturbances of body image and attention in parietal lobe syndrome), but it’s only when the temporal lobes are involved that they occur simultaneously or in different combinations; that again suggests that these structures play a central role in human consciousness.

Until now we have discussed what philosophers call the “qualia” problem—the essential privacy and noncommunicability of mental states—and I’ve tried to transform it from a philosophical problem into a scientific one. But in addition to qualia (the “raw feel” of sensations), we also have to consider the self—the “I” inside you who actually experiences these qualia. Qualia and self are really two sides of the same coin; obviously there is no such thing as free−floating qualia not experienced by anyone and it’s hard to imagine a self devoid of all qualia.

But what exactly is the self? Unfortunately, the word “self” is like the word “happiness” or “love”; we all know what it is and know that it’s real, but it’s very hard to define it or even to pinpoint its characteristics. As with quicksilver, the more you try to grasp it the more it tends to slip away.
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If you doubt the reality of the social self, ask yourself the following question: Imagine that there is some act you’ve committed about which you are extremely embarrassed (love letters and Polaroid photographs from an illicit affair). Assume further that you now have a fatal illness and will be dead in two months. If you know that people rummaging through your belongings will discover your secrets, will you do your utmost to cover your tracks? If the answer is yes, the question arises, Why bother? After all, you know you won’t be around, so what does it matter what people think of you after you’re gone? This simple thought experiment suggests that the idea of the social self and its reputation is not just an abstract yarn. On the contrary, it is so deeply ingrained in us that we want to protect it even after death. Many a scientist has spent his entire life yearning obsessively for posthumous fame—sacrificing everything else just to leave a tiny scratchmark on the edifice.

So here is the greatest irony of all: that the self that almost by definition is entirely private is to a significant extent a social construct—a story you make up for others.