Unconscious Archives - Page 18 of 19

The Gift of Existential Discontent

April 14, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

Spring in New Mexico brings longer, brighter days, but those days seem to be carried in on incessant, howling, nasty winds. Two years ago, I was out for a walk on one of those very windy spring days. It was so windy that each step I took was an effort, and effort seemed to accurately describe my entire existence at that point. Abruptly, I thought, If this is how it’s going to be, I’m not interested.

Unhappiness and dissatisfaction are associated with a release of cortisol by the brain. Cortisol makes us want to do something to change how we’re feeling. A low level of cortisol—indicating a low level of discontent—triggers us to do something we know will make us feel better. Immediately! Whether that response is eating something sweet, going for a run, or surfing the internet, it’s automatic. No conscious thought is involved.

Cortisol also makes us pay attention. But more than a little cortisol has to be released before we actually sit up and pay conscious attention to our discontent. Otherwise the stimulus-response of cortisol and self-soothing behavior just runs in the background—at least until we start to notice all the weight we’ve gained or the time we’ve lost.

The amount of existential discontent I experienced that day did not feel good at all. I definitely wanted to do something about it! But I knew there was no easy response or quick fix. I couldn’t just go home and lose myself in a good book or have a glass of wine or play with my cat and expect to forget about it.

If this is how it’s going to be, I’m not interested was the impulse—the inciting incident, you could say—that eventually launched Farther to Go! I didn’t just want to feel better; I wanted to be better. I had a variety of tools to work with, processes and techniques I’d used before, but I quickly recognized none would do the trick this time. So I began carving out a path, hacking through my own wilderness, to find a way to be better.

I was kind of excited about my discoveries (if you know me, feel free to laugh here) and shared them with anyone who would listen. After a few months I began getting together twice a month with several other women. The members of the group changed, and as a result of my ongoing explorations, so did our focus. It was a few months before I found my way to learning about how the brain works and the revelation that underlies Farther to Go!

Trying to understand and change behavior without taking the brain into account is like trying to bake a cake without understanding that baking involves chemical reactions.

Two years ago, I had a general idea of what cortisol was, and since I had been a substance abuse counselor, I knew a little about serotonin and dopamine. But I had no idea how fortunate I was on that windy spring day to experience enough existential discontent that the amount of cortisol my brain released made it impossible to ignore.

Mindfulness vs. Habits: Game On?

April 3, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

According to the respective press they receive, habits are bad, and mindfulness is good. We ought to be as mindful as we can, as much of the time as we can, and do what we do as thoughtfully and mindfully as possible. This is a nice idea, but it doesn’t actually jibe with the way the brain works—or with the world in which most of us live.

Mindfulness, the conscious direction of attention or awareness, is a generally a positive thing. Certainly, most of us could use more mindfulness in our lives. Mindfulness training helps us pay attention to our own thoughts, feelings, and experience without judgment. It helps us focus on the present moment, on what we are taking in through our senses.

A few of the benefits claimed for mindfulness are:

Decreased stress levels
Decreased ruminative thinking
Decreased cell damage
Bolstering of the immune system
Increased longevity
Improved concentration

This is unquestionably great stuff.

However, when it comes to habits, mindfulness both helps and harms. It is beneficial in terms of helping us focus our attention on our behavior, specifically on those habits we want to start or change. Since habitual behavior, by its nature, is unconscious, in order to change it, we have to become conscious of it.

On the other hand, being too mindful—yes, apparently there are scientific measures for this—can get in the way of forming new habits, both bad and good. The formation of habits involves implicit learning, learning that is not consciously acquired. We have to let the unconscious part of our brain do its thing if we want to create and strengthen good habits. Too much mindfulness can impede that process.

In two studies of adult participants presented at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, people who scored high on a gauge of mindfulness (and were less distracted) performed poorly on sequenced learning tasks, which involve implicit learning—in this case, pattern detection. People who scored low on the gauge of mindfulness (and were more distracted) had quicker reaction times and performed much better on the same tests.

The very fact of paying too much attention or being too aware of stimuli coming up in these tests might actually inhibit implicit learning. That suggests that mindfulness may help prevent formation of automatic habits—which is done through implicit learning—because a mindful person is aware of what they are doing. –Chelsea Stillman

This sounds like good news for dealing with bad habits. The problem is that when we think of habits, those are the only ones we tend to think of: the ones we wish we didn’t have. But habits are a device the brain uses to conserve precious energy. In general, habits are not only useful, they’re essential. In fact, the more good habits we create, the more conscious attention we have available for other mental activity, such as mindfulness.

So, no, habits are not always bad. And yes, you can have too much of a good thing, in this case mindfulness.

The State of a Mind

March 27, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Mind Games no.171 — (Photo credit: dek dav)

State of mind—the state of our cognitive processes—is a kind of framework within which we operate any time we’re awake. Some basic states of mind are:

Distracted
Mindful
Focused
Autopilot
Flow
Wandering/Daydreaming
Meditative
Ruminative
Reflective
Anxious

There are more states that could be added to this list, but these 10 cover a pretty wide swath of the territory. Obviously our minds are important to us. Where would we be without them? They are running at one speed or another, in one direction or another, all day long. And yet I doubt we pay much attention to the state our mind is in from one moment to the next.

When I started writing this post, I was somewhat distracted, but now I’m more focused. Focused seems like a more appropriate state of mind for composing a post on states of mind—or on anything, really. Anxious or meditative wouldn’t help get the post written, nor would daydreaming or being on autopilot. Some reflection would be helpful; in fact, I’m going to slip into a reflective state of mind in a minute. Rumination, on the other hand, would just slow the whole process down.

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During my reflection, I realized that I engage in a lot of activities that require my mind to be focused. I find many of these activities enjoyable, but whether or not I enjoy being focused, focus and concentration use more energy than some other states of mind do. Being on autopilot is much easier, as is daydreaming and being in flow. It’s no accident that autopilot is the default state of mind; it consumes a pretty insignificant amount of energy.

Mindful and meditative states of mind, while unarguably and demonstrably beneficial, can’t be maintained indefinitely, which means they fall toward the high energy-using end of the spectrum.

Our states of mind come and go, ebb and flow, throughout any given day. Occasionally they do so by our bidding, but more often they shift on their own. We are not in charge of our brain, says Michael Gazzaniga, and this is simply more evidence of that.

If we were to pay attention to our state of mind to try to identify what it is, we might discover whether or not it’s a good match for what we’re trying to do in the moment. If it isn’t, maybe we could do that thing later, when our state of mind is a better match. Or maybe we could take a few minutes and change not our mind, but our state of mind. Simply recognizing that we are always operating within one state of mind or another—as is everyone else—might help to eliminate some of our inner and interpersonal conflict.

Creative Thinking = Making Connections

March 17, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

Q: Do you have to get out of the box in order to think outside the box?*

Popular wisdom has it that in order to think creatively—think outside the box, that is—we need to trick ourselves. Or at least we need to apply some special technique or exercise to get our stodgy old brains to see things from a different perspective.

For the most part, this is a counterproductive waste of time.

If we want to be creative or think creatively, we don’t need to manipulate or play games with our brains. We just need to get out of their way and let them do what they already know how to do.

The problem is that we identify with the slow, energy-sucking conscious part of our brain and not with the quick, energy-efficient unconscious part that sees patterns and makes connections outside of our awareness. Most of the action in terms of problem-solving, insight, and creative thinking actually takes place in the unconscious, which then serves up its ideas to our consciousness. It’s an amazingly wonderful arrangement that’s already in place.

The best thing we can do to help this process along is exactly the opposite of what’s usually recommended. Don’t change routines. Don’t take a new route to work. Don’t try a change of scene. Don’t go to a different café or coffee shop. Don’t try to think about things in a different way.

In terms of freeing our minds for creativity and creative insights, the more aspects of our lives we can turn into routines, the better. The less attention we have to put on things that don’t really matter, the more attention our brains can devote to problem-solving and idea-generating.

This is from an article by painter Robert Genn:

Choreographer Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit describes her morning routine of rising early and going through the same morning rituals; same coffee, same bun. She puts on the same leotards, goes down the same elevator to the same street corner, puts her same arm up in the air and gets into the first cab that comes along.

By the time she gets to the studio she has made no significant decisions. Stepping out onto the dance floor, her dancers await. It’s eight in the morning and her first decision is yet to come. It will be a creative one.

Genn has some suggestions for streamlining routine activities, such as:

Simplify morning rituals.

Keep regular habits by day and week.
Work in a space unsullied by impedimenta.
Use a day-timer—plan your work; work your plan.
Always ask—”Is this action necessary?”
Be businesslike—discourage time-wasters and interlopers.
Be efficient and mindful of wasted motion in your space.
As far as possible, get stuff delivered and taken away.
Be modern—pay bills, bank, book flights, etc., online.

Genn and Tharp have to be creative almost every day. They aren’t trying to get out of the box. They recognize that the box helps them be creative. It keeps them out of their brain’s way.

I’ve experienced the benefits of getting out of my brain’s way over and over and over again. My unconscious has connected some dots that didn’t even seem to exist in the same domains. I don’t take credit for those insights and ideas. My conscious brain didn’t come up with them. But I take credit for maintaining routines and practices that free my brain do its thing. I take credit for loosening the reins.

*A: You can’t actually get outside the box, so there’s no point in trying to think outside it.

Data’s Cat

February 27, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. –Muriel Rukeyser

There is a world of atoms (the physical world or so-called objective reality). But that’s not the world we inhabit. It isn’t even possible for us to inhabit that world—at least not directly.

Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain. –Chris Frith, Professor in Neuropsychology, University College London

And…

Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what’s in front of you. –David Eagleman, Incognito

The world we actually inhabit is made up of the stories we construct about the objects, events, and people in the physical world. Our stories are based on our impressions and perceptions of what’s out there. The problem is that we treat our impressions and perceptions—and the stories based on them—as if they are real and true.

The world of atoms constantly impacts us. And as it does, we are constantly interpreting, explaining, and assigning meaning to what happens. From moment-to-moment, we’re not aware of how much we don’t know, how much we’re missing, and how much high-speed processing our unconscious brain is doing to generate our impressions and perceptions.

We’re not robots or androids, nor would most of us choose to be. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Lieutenant Commander Data was an android who inhabited the physical world and not the world of stories. He was superior to humans in a number of different ways. He didn’t make the kinds of mistakes people often make. Yet after spending time with humans, he opted to have an “emotion chip” installed so he could be more like us. He got a pet, an orange cat named Spot (who had no spots). There’s no logical reason to have a cat when you live on board a spaceship. Data’s cat signaled his entrance into the very human world of stories.

All of us, both individually and collectively, are driven to create and tell stories about our experience and then to believe that our stories represent reality. It’s how we make sense of life. The consequences can be amazing, amusing, or devastating. But whether our stories are good or bad, as long as we don’t recognize them for what they are, we’re imprisoned by them.

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