If my life has anything like a purpose, I think it's to improve
my flow. I mean that in the water sense, the Buddhist sense,
and the hip-hop
sense. I've found that flow can be obtained by focusing
one's attention on anything absorbing and repetitive. People
seek out flow with varying degrees of success is socializing
and being alone, in novelty and in familiarity, in comfort
and in danger. This last one might feel out of place, since
the threat of emergency is very stressful and unpleasant,
but emergencies themselves are often elating.
Flow has a characteristic look in the MRI pictures. It's
when the brain's activities align and synchronize, harmonize,
agree. It's like counterpoint or bebop or James Brown. Cognitive
dissonance is a term of art among brain scientists that means
exactly what it sounds like it means: the grating clash of
two or more incompatible ideas or needs or interests in the
mind. In a state of flow, the mind's different component systems
interlock their activities to produce an apparently seamless
whole. Buddhists and other practioners of meditation talk
about feeling at one with the entire universe in these moments.
I think a more accurate description would be feeling at one
with as much of the universe as you have modeled in your brain
at that moment. All the brain's ideas of what the world is
like are compiled from memories of the body's state, so we
have a natural tendency to confuse body state data originating
inside from outside. All your direct visual experience, for
example, is the changes to state of cells in your retinas
when they get whacked by a visible-light photon.
Everything you see or hear or touch is a signal originating
from inside the body. The brain's job is try to reconstruct
all these signals into a guess as to what the world is going
to do next, and how best to respond. When you have an upset
stomach, the entire universe seems to be a hostile, uncongenial
environment. The outside world is the same, but your body
has become a less congenial environment for your brain. When
you flow, the world doesn't become any more beautiful or meaningful,
but you experience it as such because in the universe of your
body, everything is groovy.
William
James thought the brain was like a radio, receiving frequencies
from the cosmic supernatural broadcast system. I don't think
that's true, but the brain is like a radio in that it requires
fine tuning. A better metaphor would be a violin or guitar.
The instant you finish tuning any stringed instrument, it
immediately begins sliding out of tune. Mandolin players have
a saying: You spend half your life tuning, and the other half
wishing you were in tune. There are only a few very particular
ratios of the strings' lengths and tensions that will be in
tune; there are many many ratios that are out of tune. If
you leave a piano or guitar alone in a room, it decays steadily
to equilibrium. First it gets more and more horribly out of
tune. Then strings relax, snap, corrode. The wood cracks and
splits and is eventually eaten by bugs, microbes and fungus.
Your brain is much the same way, only much less rugged. The
slightest interruption of the brain's copious oxygen or sugar
supplies will knock you out in a matter of seconds and kill
you in a few minutes. Something of the kind will inescapably
befall all of us at some point or another.
Erwin Schrodinger described life as a way of temporarily
evading every macroscopic physical system's one-way glide
from less-probable disequilibrium states to more-probable
equilibrium. The physicists call this idea the Second Law
of Thermodynamics, an unfortunate and off-putting name for
one of their most significant discoveries. The collective
entropy of any system with more than a handful of particles
in it always rises over time. Brian Greene and other physicists
say that what we perceive as time passing is in fact the conversion
of low-entropy energy to high-entropy energy as eggs splatter
(but don't unsplatter), waves break (but don't unbreak.)
The human brain is the most thermodynamically complex, and
therefore most improbable, physical object in the known universe.
When you're awake, your brain is abuzz with intricate concatenations
of systems of systems of systems of billions upon billions
of neurons, firing and resting and rewiring in vast synchronized
waves. The brain is orderly, but not the way a crystal is
orderly. It's chaotic, but not the way a weather system is
chaotic. At any given moment, its jillions of constituent
particles and tiny delicately fluctuating electromagnetic
fields are poised as far away from thermodynamic equilibrium
as any other physical system that we know of.
Flow is the least likely state of the brain. In a state of
flow, the brain and body systems are all in tune, rhythmically
synchronized, responsive to changes, all systems operating
at peak capacity.
Any of a thousand thousand different things can interrupt
your flow: you get hungry, thirsty, your feet start hurting,
a mosquito bites you, it gets too hot or too cold, there's
a bad smell, you get into a fight or an accident. Keeping
your bodily environment stable requires constant effort: fending
off the predation of insects and microbes, keeping the temperature
within a narrow range, maintaining a steady supply of food
and water and social connection. We have the most complicated
brains of any organism we know of, but we're also the highest-maintenance,
most gas-guzzling organism. Information-processing in the
brain costs energy just like it does in a computer or a cell
phone. I was alarmed to learn that when you're just sitting
in a chair daydreaming, your three-pound brain is consuming
a fifth of your body's total metabolic output. It's like that
moment when I learned that (tiny X) percent of the world's
people consume (humungous Y) percent of its natural resources.
The brain demands engagement and entertainment, whether it's
good for it or not. Try it: you probably literally can not
stop yourself from thinking. Buddhist monks devote their entire
lives to trying. It's hard. Unless you're asleep, and even
then the brain is doing something the entire time, it just
doesn't record most of it in memory. It's like having your
computer rendering hi-res 3D animation twenty-four hours a
day, whether it's being displayed on the monitor or not.
Maybe we evolved the big brain in the first place to find
fruit and evade sabertooth tigers, but recently we've mostly
needed it to compete with each other. The oversize human brain
got that way through an arms race very much like the one between
the US and USSR. No nuclear scientist in the forties would
have wanted many tens of thousands of intercontinental ballistic
missiles poised to launch at a moment's notice all over the
world, and yet, here we are. So it is with the cortex. Jared
Diamond compares it to bird-of-paradise tails. Every other
mammal gives birth often and easily, and their babies walk
and function in days or weeks. Human babies have an enormously
long gestation period, and even so are born early in their
natal development. Human childhood has extended in exact proportion
to our overall lifespan. In the stone age, people rarely made
it past thirty-five. A hundred years ago, it wasn't uncommon
to literally die of exhaustion at fifty. Now we expect to
live to seventy or eighty. Meanwhile, among Americans at least,
dependence on our parents has extended to the grand old age
of eighteen, and the adolescent break has pushed past thirty.
The big brain is expensive to own, and expensive to maintain.
But we can't afford to cut corners; we're all stuck with each
other, and people are going to need to be high-functioning
emotionally. Setting up the big brain to flow takes much learning,
much time, much social input, many years of nurturing and
support. As the world gets more crowded, the demands placed
on the brain's finite processing power are only going to grow.
We're going to be increasingly forced into each others' company.
The challenge this poses to our primate selves, with our strict
monkeysphere limit of a hundred and fifty other humans, is
just going to continue to get harder. Like Rachel says in
Mad Men, we're going to have to get better at doing business
with people who hate us. It's hard to flow under these conditions,
and we're going to need a lot of new emotional technology.
I offer this tool for our collective toolbox: the monkeysphere
limit is one of the universal absolutes of human nature, like
the range of our hearing and vision. Tolerance of foreigners
will never come naturally or easily to anyone. It will need
to be taught, patiently and slowly, starting with young kids.
Hostility towards outsiders served humanity well for most
of our evolutionary history, and while our environment has
been undergoing some abrupt changes, our physiology will be
a long time catching up. Being among foreigners and strangers
causes anxiety. It should; why should you trust them? We need
to name that anxiety, validate it, and then let it go.
I would also recommend that we commit ourselves to unilateral
rhetorical disarmament. If we expect Al Qaeda et al to give
up their claims to a monopoly on moral truth, we need to relinquish
our claim to it first. This is going to be difficult for us.
We have a lot invested in our imagined moral superiority to
the rest of the world. Really what we are is: lucky. And who's
to say we're as lucky as we've convinced ourselves we are?
Americans are by far the wealthiest people who have ever existed,
but I don't see much evidence that we're the happiest.
There's an understandable anxiety that to admit our mistakes
will weaken us, render us more vulnerable to the likes of
Osama. I believe the opposite to be true. Like the Zen masters
say, force is the weapon of the weak. Imagine how badass we'd
be if we could really just admit that we're not any more or
less venal than any other humans who have ever existed. Think
of how much of our energy and attention that would free up
to work on our flow.
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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