Jargogled Impressions.

Conditioned animals

When our emotional brain 🧠 responds without the aid of prefrontal cortex (the watch tower) we behave like conditioned animals.  Or, to put it bluntly, like a Pavlovian dog. This conditioning is basically a trained response, that has evolved over thousands of years. A typical reptilian brain. And this means we transition to a fight or flight mode pretty easily.  This, in the modern world translates to a quick triggering of anger, which our rational brain is not able to triage and interpret, and can often result in outbursts that is strange and surprising.  

The brain chemistry and physiological psychology is a hot topic.  Also known as neuroscience.  It’s the deliciously tantalizing discipline that aims to understand how our brain functions.  The brain – our control center.  There’s an aspiration in the coolness associated with this discipline which attracts a lot of people across productivity gurus, mindfulness experts, computational geeks, and machine learning researchers.  But it does not just stop there.  It also attracts the layperson looking to beat procrastination or tame anger. The belief is that knowing how something works can help us control it.  There’s always something teleological about our activities.  So is the drive to understand our brain.

Mindfulness 🧘 is the ability to pause and reflect on the emotions we feel.  It borrows for us the time it takes for prefrontal cortex to kick in.  In a sense, it seeks to ensure the brain has developed enough muscle to deter the emotional brain from making split second judgements and reflexive actions.

Our forefathers did not need mindfulness. But they did need religion.

Mindfulness, I have long believed, is a secular form of religion. Meaning, that is aims to provide the utility that religion has long provided to human beings. This belief in a super power may have started as a dogma, but the reason it persisted this long is because it served a particular function. Actually, not a particular but a variety of functions. From a sense of community to a totem for luck, from a shield against uncertainty to a catch all for the unknowable future, from a materialization of discipline to a manifestation of simplicity and austerity. Religion has demonstrated the power of Lindy effect like no other.

So, if mindfulness is its secular avatar, it’s also the upstart that does not have many of the features the incumbent has developed over the thousands of years it has been in the market. The upstart, to borrow startup terminologies, is relying on the innovator’s dilemma to unsettle the big-religion. That is, the inability of the incumbent to serve all the sub/micro/mini cultures that demand something more rational and scientific than religion.

And so, the edginess of neuroscience compounds. So much so, that its well on its way to becoming a religion of its own. Thus, the cycle continues.

Granted its way too early for something like that to happen. But what’s thousands of years in the broader history of the world. I guess the sci-fi book trilogy of The Three Body Problem has spoilt me – I keep thinking about humanity and the world millions of years in the future and what will become of us. Neuroscience may just be getting started on the journey religion took way back in antiquity.

Neuroscience will get us somewhere. Same as religion got us to today. As our realms expand, and our understanding of the world becomes more hazy and more uncertain, I bet this new discipline will fall short of explaining the world around us. Yes, neuroscience deals with the inside not the outside world, but we interpret the outside world through the inside one. And our knowledge and understanding of it will be capped at what our internal system is able to comprehend. Therefore, neuroscience will, to a high degree of confidence, fall short of the expectations of the people of the coming ages.

What will come after it I wonder? Is that something we can even begin to comprehend? I guess we can, similar to how J.C.R Lickliter could imagine the Dream Machine at an age when personal computers were no more than just a pipe dream and internet wasn’t even a dream anyone had dreamt. We humans have the unique capability to conduct nth level of thinking and the hope is that with neuroscience and its applications, our ability will only compound. So, it’s possible, that we would have some understanding of what’s going to come. But today, it’s stuff science fiction writers are trying to dream of. Hari Seldon anyone?

We will condition ourselves slowly as our knowledge grows and our understanding diminishes. Is it possible that we will regress as we do this? Absolutely, there will be pitstops, back tracking, acceleration, and cold storage. But we will march regardless.

If our inability to control our emotions has persisted over the ages, despite religion’s very explicit instructions about it, it’s fair to assume it will continue to be so in the future too. Or maybe, we are changing glacially and maybe, our PFC will come to dominate the functioning of the brain as we evolve and we live out.

There’s this dialogue from Cooper in Interstellar – “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.”.  

In much the same vein, our brain evolved from a bi-cameral state. Julian Jaynes, in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, posits that the upheavals of the bronze age led to mankind needing to use more creativity and introspection than was needed before, which led to the breakdown of this bicameral mind and the subsequent development of consciousness. The very same consciousness we use today through the way our brain functions now. This was the 2^nd millennium BC so about 4000 years ago. What would our brain be in another 4000 years?

Our brain may be on hyper-drive change today due to the information revolution. Its ability to pay attention is dwindling and the brain needs some way to respond. The response will be slow, as is the pace of human evolution, but it will be there. What would that look like?