An interesting look of the importance of the messy “background noise” in our brains.
It’s interesting that neuroscience is starting to catch up with Buddhist descriptions of the mind and the self as a metastable construct - something that drifts into being and can drift out of being a moment later, rather than something fixed and definite.
Speaking as someone whose brain is composed almost entirely of background noise, I found this article strangely comforting
Oh, and a nice tangent on why it is that psychedelics are so useful for treating depression and addiction.
Put simply, this discovery could be a game-changer for theories of consciousness. It flips the old models on their heads. In most theories, consciousness is “mission control” perturbed by background noises. But consciousness functions more like an eddy in a river in this new model. Just as whirling patterns emerge from turbulent waters, our stream of conscious thoughts and feelings arise from the torrent of spontaneous brain fluctuations.
Our “metastable minds” are emergent properties of lower frequency fluctuations that conjoin into “nested hierarchies” with higher frequency fluctuations. Neuroscientists call this process “cross-frequency coupling.” It works a lot like syncopation in music. At the lowest frequencies, the drums lay down a beat. In-between these beats, the bass plays a rhythm, and in-between the notes of that rhythm, the guitar plays a melody. The song is a sound-wave made of sound-waves.
Hmm, still seems wedded to that get-out idea that in some still-unexplained way the brain generates consciousness, though. The still-step-too-far for most orthodox scientists is the older - and currently recovering - idea that consciousness is primary, and generates physical reality, including nervous systems. Good to see that the guardians of current orthodoxy are getting edged in that direction - uncomfortably - as the paradigm shift in cutting-edge theoretical thinking continues to evolve - with physics of all things leadiing the way!
Yes, the scientific community is still groping its way towards the more nuanced view of consciousness that has been described in Hindu and Buddhist thinking (for example) for millennia. It’s not surprising though, as if we keep studying the brain, all we can uncover are the effects of brain activity!
I do think that what we know as our everyday “thoughts” do come from brain activity in much the way this article discusses. Qualities that we consider fundamental to a sense of self too. These are, as the article describes, transient emergent properties.
But as the great thinkers of Hindu and Buddhist traditions have been pointing out forever - I am not my thoughts. I am not my emotions or feelings. I am not my sense of self. Beneath all these surface things lies a much deeper reality which, in their view, is synonymous with consciousness and has nothing to do with brain activity.
Baby steps RG! Eventually, after much painstaking error we will eventually come back to what we knew all along!
Indeed! I’m not any of those things; not even RhG in any permanent way, though this body-personality will leave its mark on what I really am, as all the previous persons have. What I really am, it seems is this immortal soul currently running RhG’s body - and his awkward bloody personality! And if you don’t like that old name - soul - for who we really are, you can opt for Tom Campbell’s carefully scientifically neutral ‘Individuated Unit of Consciousness’. The IUOC’s, which are conceived as little semi-autonomous buds of Big Mind, created by it specifically to assist it in its pursuit of its Great Purpose. Very comforting ideas in this bleak time we’re going through.
Obvious, though, that the manifested brain in this - allegedly - virtual holodeck of a reality does have a lot of influence on how our IUOC operates in this world. There is an evolved rule-set, by which the ‘physical’ brain operates, and that governs what our souls can and cannot do in this virtual reality. Interesting puzzle to pick at: just how it all works together…
Hadn’t heard of IUoC before ≤scribbles a post-it≥. Or previous me did but neglected to retain the data somewhere up the chain.
Have partaken of Mahasi retreats, essentially 16 hour days of silence and your cushion, and ‘you’ definitely find out a lot. A boot camp for the brain (which personally I’d liken to a badly trained puppy). Difficult to keep the practice going in daily life but any watchfulness, or mindfulness if you prefer, is helpful prophylaxis against ruinous emotional conditioning.
There is some very interesting stuff in Rick Hansen, for example:
I can but recommend Muz Murray: https://www.facebook.com/MantraMuz check out his website (see Facebook), if interested #endocannabinoids#Chakra#Mantra Man = “thought” -tra = “protection” #Sanskrit
