me & my brain
an ode to this awesome organ / supercomputer
that i carry around with me in my head
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The brain, the mind, consciousness and I
I don’t want to stretch the popular computer metaphor too far when it comes to the brain, because the brain is a living and breathing organ and a computer is a digital number crunching machine 😎.
But – after skimming some of those clever books about my brain’s biology and neuroscience, I would say that my brain is actually a quantum computer, rather than some ordinary number crunching digital device 🤣
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Most mornings I sit before the sun rises, in silence, watching what arises in my field of awareness – images, sensations, the subtle hum of awakening village around me. I am intimately familiar with this, I have been doing this, in one form or another, for quite some years.
Thats all very interesting and I think I will come back to later later on in this article – the mind, the consciousness, the “I”.
But for now I would rather give my attention – and my admiration – to the physical side of all of that – my brain.
Like most of my body, my brain is something that I take very much for granted and I don’t know quite as much about it as I would actually like to know.
ITS COMPLICATED!
Just check out some of the books I have been skipping through lately!
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Some raw and fascinating facts about the brain.
Because they are really mind-boggling.
The human brain is, by any measure, one of the most complex structures we know.
It contains approximately 86 billion specialized nerve cells, so called neurons. Each of those neurons can form up to 10,000 synaptic connections with its neighbors, which in sum create somewhere in the range of 100 trillion active synaptic connections at any given moment.
To give a comparison to that staggering number: the observable universe contains an estimated 200 billion galaxies.
The complexity packed inside our skull exceeds the visible structure of the cosmos by orders of magnitude.
This wonder-organ in our head weighs about 1.4 kilograms. This is roughly 2% of your body mass. And yet it consumes nearly 20% of all the metabolic energy of my body – running, always running, at approximately 20 watts of bio-electricity.
This is just enough to power a dim light bulb. The most complex known structure in the universe operates on the energy budget of the dime light on my nightstand ; O
The brain matter is 60% fat — the fattiest organ in the body. It is also largely water. It has the consistency of soft tofu.
If I handle it roughly, I will die, or worse, I will become something akin to a vegetable.
(Sorry my dear veggie friends, nothing personal!) 🥒🥦
I also read that my brain itself has no pain receptors. The organ that processes every every heartbreak, every bleeding toe, every headache – it can not feel a thing when touched directly.
Neurosurgeons can operate on an awake brain. The patient feels nothing where the scalpel cuts into the brain matter.
Uff!!!
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What my brain does when I think I am doing nothing
According to neuro-scientific research and advanced brain-scan technology:
When I am not actively focused on a task – when I stare out the window, when I let the mind wander, when I allow myself to daydream – a network of brain regions lights up that goes quiet the moment I return to a goal-oriented task.
Neuroscientists call this the Default Mode Network.
It is responsible for self-reflective thinking, autobiographical memories, imagining the future, thoughts that represent our sense of personal self.
For most people, the activity of Default Mode Network is mostly subconscious, it is not happening on the level of awareness. It is like the infrastructure of the self, the story that we think we are.
Experienced practitioners of contemplative meditation techniques know from the inside, that the “resting” mind is anything but idle.
Vipassana meditation, in its early stages, teaches you to watch this firing of the synapses in the brain in real time – observing the ceaseless production of thoughts, memories, anticipations, judgments.
And you learn over time NOT to identify with it.
What a meditator discovers – and I sense what neuroscience is beginning to discover as well – is that the default mode of the brain is not the baseline reality, is not our Self.
It is simply a particular mode of processing, habitual and powerful, but it is not the end of the story.
It can also be transcended.
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My speedy brain
Neuroscientists have found out that neural signals travel at wildly varying speeds – from 0.5 meters per second in the slowest fibers, to over 120 meters per second in specially coated pathways.
My brain processes visual information in as little as 13 milliseconds. But my conscious awareness of seeing something lags hundreds of milliseconds behind the actual neural event.
This means, that I am always, in a precise neurological sense, living slightly in the past. 🙃🙂
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Neuroplasticity
The brain reshapes itself in response to experience. New synaptic connections form. Old ones are pruned.
Gray matter density changes in regions associated with practiced skills.
The hippocampus of a taxi driver in NYCity – who must memorize thousands of street routes – is measurably larger than those of the general population.
Eight weeks of mindfulness meditation produces measurable changes in the thickness of my prefrontal cortex.😇
It is an astonishing discovery that my brain rewires itself around what I repeatedly do, think, and feel. There is no fixed hardware running a permanently installed software.
In reality there is a process that is continuously, quietly, rewriting itself.
This has profound spiritual implications, but this may be a great topic for another day.
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The Brain & The Mind
Here we arrive at the territory I find most attractive.
And here we arrive at the edge of scientific understanding: the relationship between brain and mind.
The brain is matter – cells, chemicals, electrical impulses.
The mind is experience – thoughts, images, meanings, the felt sense of being.
We often speak of them as if they are the same. In my understanding and experience they are not the same.
The brain can be studied, measured, imaged, mapped out. Neuroscience is doing that with increasing precision and depth.
The mind cannot be found under a microscope. It has no weight, no location in space.
Mind is mysterious, it appears as a field of experience – intimate and immediate .
Neuroscience can correlate mental states with brain activity. Certain patterns of firing accompany certain thoughts, emotions, or perceptions.
But correlation is not identity.
The deeper question remains unresolved:
How does subjective experience arise from physical processes?
Or, perhaps more provocatively: does it?
Some traditions – ancient and modern – suggest that we have to turn the equation around.
What if the brain is not the producer of consciousness, but its instrument?
A receiver, a filter, a translator of a more fundamental field of awareness.
From this perspective, the brain is less like a generator and more like a radio – tuning, shaping, and expressing something that is not confined to it.
For many neuroscientists this is unacceptable psychobabble ; )
For me it is also completely intuitive and also experienced reality.
For me, my mind is a non-local field that can be tuned into and localized with the help of my brain.
And on deeper “inspection” – in advanced stages of Vipassana meditation – brain, mind and the fluid, expansive nature of consciousness itself appear as one and the same “thing”.
Don’t ask me please to explain this in my limited English language!
Rudolf Steiner, whose work I have studied closely for while, proposed that the brain is an instrument of consciousness, not its source.
That thinking – true thinking, the active engagement of cognition – is not produced by the brain but is met by it, the way a piano does not produce music but makes a particular music possible.
In this view, the brain is a receiver and transducer, not the transmitter.
I have been sitting in meditation for quite a while already, experienced states of consciousness through years of practice and sometimes also through the careful use of molecules that lift the neurological floor – psilocybin, DMT, ketamine.
I have had experienced States in which the sense of a fixed self dissolved entirely.
States in which clear perception continued — lucidly, even vividly — without the usual sense of a “me” as the perceiver.
States that felt less like the brain generating something and more like the brain stepping aside so that something could come through.
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I don’t want to make a claim here to know the truth about what reality is.
And how the mind is creating my personal reality thru the channel of my brain and body.
And how it is all arising from the substrate of everything that we call consciousness per se.
And that the “I” is the never changing center of IT ALL – that has no center – the “empty center.”
All of that is definitely beyond my pay-grade and my linguistic ability to express it adequately.
But just for myself- I know it to be true.
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An Ode to my brain, shortly
I do not know, finally, whether my brain produces me or whether I use my brain to perceive my Self. The question may be really the wrong one. Or just unnecessary.
Perhaps there is no “I” that is separable from the processes of which it is composed, and no brain that is separable from the field of awareness in which it arises.
What I know is this:
The brain is the most extraordinary physical object I have ever encountered.
Not because I know what it is.
But because it is the only instrument through which I can even ask this question.
Hallelujah!
Hail to the brain!
The mind, the brain and the rest
