Myths of Mind

I must assure you, before you begin, that what follows is not an exegesis on consciousness – a task for which I’m abysmally ill-equipped. I only want to draw your attention to a gripping story I read this month. If prelude to my notes on the book seem like a tail that’s wagging the dog, blame is mine, novice in this art as I am. 

One overarching feature of our species is consciousness. If asked to define it, most of us will flounder. But we know instinctively what is being conscious. We know consciousness is not merely ‘not being unconscious’. Every living organism is conscious in this sense; even single-celled amoebae respond to external stimulus in some way.

Consciousness is being able to think of self as an aware, living entity; the ‘I’ surveying the world. It is the ability to form an opinion on the world and self. It is possessing a theory of mind, which enables us to impute reason as to why people behave in a fashion. It is the capacity to confabulate in our mind’s eye, how others will react to a situation and a facility to knit a yarn around a perception, based on our myriad past experience. 

Woody Allen, as always brilliant, juxtaposes these two differing meanings of consciousness in his hypothetical college course catalogue: 

Introduction to Psychology: the theory of human behavior…Is there a split between mind and body, and, if so, which is better to have?

…Special consideration is given to study of consciousness as opposed to unconsciousness, with many helpful hints on how to remain conscious. 

Consciousness comprises three principal components. First, the knowledge of self. Second, having a mechanism to store and access information that we perceive every moment. Third, a unique ability to subjectively experience the way external world impinges on our sensory organs: the redness of the colour red, the wetness of the damp clothes, the coldness of the cube of ice. This is sentience or the qualia in philosopher’s tongue. 

How does a three-pound lump of jelly, which reacts to all stimuli by just firing a weak electric current, gives humans this unique capability of consciousness? This has confounded thinkers for ages. 

Somehow, we feel, the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a total blank on the nature of this conversion. Neural transmissions just seem like the wrong kind of materials with which to bring consciousness into the world.

                                                                                                                                                                -Colin Mc Ginn

Memory is the most vital component of consciousness. It is the adhesive which glues individual moments of our being into a whole; which we perceive as our life, through which we not only know our past but also prospect on future. Without it, ‘…we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different sensations, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement,’ wrote David Hume. 

Memory enables us to form an image of self and others. A person without memory cannot be said to be conscious. They are barely automatons, living only in the present moment. 

Oliver Sacks, a neurophysician and a popular author, cites the case of Jimmie, an ex-mariner of US Navy, in his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In his meeting with Sacks, Jimmie came across as an intelligent, articulate, and a likeable person. Jimmie told Sacks he was nineteen, the year was 1945, and America had just won the second world war. Jimmie was then forty-nine and the year was 1975. He was discharged from Navy, thirty years back, because of his illness when he was nineteen. He suffered from Korsakov’s syndrome and had lost his memory of last three decades, neither could he form a new memory. His time was frozen. 

Life that is lived consciously, cannot be static. Motion is its essence. ‘He is, as it were,’ wrote Sacks in his notes on Jimmie, ‘isolated in a single moment of being, with a moat or lacuna of forgetting all round him… He is a man without past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment.’ 

If memory is central to the function of our mind, we would expect our brain to be indisputably accurate as it froze each experience in memory and later recalled it at our bidding. We feel the truth of this in our bones. Numerous psychology experiments have shown this to be a myth. 

Human brain has hundred billion neurons, i.e., 10¹¹. World of our subjective experience is illimitable. If brain were to capture this verbatim, it would need a capacity of more than 10⁸⁰ neurons, which is the total number of particles in observable universe. Brain records only salient features of each experience in memory. When we recall these later, brain fills up the blanks with mundane details which are common to most experience and recreates our past. Thus, recall of memory is not retrieval but reweaving. Mostly these recollections are fairly accurate. But there are occasions when mind is led up a garden path by the new stimuli, as it weaves a past that conforms to new perception, but is at variance with the past events. Psychologist have demonstrated that information acquired after an event alters memory of the event. 

Perception of reality does not arise only from the inputs of our sensory organs, but is a mix of these and what we already know, think, feel, believe, and want. Immanuel Kant, a German thinker, wrote in eighteenth century, ‘The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise’. 

 

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes

 

A few days back, I read Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. It had won Man Booker prize in 2011. I had bought the book two years back. It’s a very slim book, a novella really. I put it in the rack where I keep the books ‘to be read next’, but came to it only last week. 

I read the book riveted. I think, I haven’t read a book faster in recent years. 

Tony Webster and two other boys in a clique at school, befriend Adrian Finn, who is their classmate. They are sailing through the years of adolescence in a heady insouciance for the conventional ways of society, a state of affected rebellion against parents, conceited mockery of teachers, disdain for knowledge in every subject and with a smattering of arcane philosophical concepts in their conversation. But Adrian is different. He is sincere, intelligent, and has deep knowledge of subjects he speaks on. 

Tony is now retired. He has had an uneventful career, a single marriage – not unhappy, and a divorce by mutual consent. He is on friendly terms with his ex-wife and discusses with her, seemingly intractable problems, that crop up in his life. He has led a fairly contented life of fulfilling relations and honest dealings with his friends. He knows that he has never hurt anyone knowingly, he has not been unreasonably cruel to a person. 

Then a letter arrives from a lawyer. In the light of new facts, that the letter and his subsequent queries reveal, he is forced to re-examine his past; not only his opinion of his acquaintances, but also of himself. For decades he had knit a story about people and events, from his memory, and believed this to be the truth. But is memory infallible? Does he remember the whole truth? As he peels the onion of his memories, a new past emerges. 

This is a beautifully crafted tale. In a one-hundred-and-fifty-page novel, author has absolutely no freedom to waste a single word. The brevity, the terse narrative, yet wholesome dialogues, skilfully fashioned characters, bespeak author’s prodigal competence; Story is taut, like the stretched muscles of a skilled gymnast. Prose is simple, witty, and effortless to read. Barnes sustains the interest of the reader from the first word to the last. He employs drama ingeniously. Climax, though unexpected, doesn’t stretch your credulity. 

Barnes’ has deftly employed a complex psychological theme to tell a captivating tale. I haven’t read his other books (I have now ordered a couple), but I’m tempted to say this reads like a masterpiece.