Picture Logic

A clue to how the mind works

Free Will and Its Base

I have written a few posts on the idea of Free Will and the growing knowledge of what really goes on in the brain when we ‘decide’ to do something. To sum up: there is one part of the brain that signals to another part of the brain to get ready to do something. This second area of the brain is the part that is in charge of organizing the muscles to act: it draws on remembered templates of sequences of muscle actions involved in doing things that we have done before and done often enough so that the pattern has been noted and stored in memory.

When the internal ‘need’ or ‘urge’ or as I like to think of it, ‘pressure’ builds up to a threshold point, the second area of the brain begins to send out the commands to the muscles to start doing the action. Shortly after these commands go out, the part of the brain that we identify with our conscious self, becomes aware that this is going on, and has a very-brief interval of time during which it can block the action. In other words, our ‘free will’ is really only the ability to say ‘no’ to an action urged and initiated in other parts of the brain; it is nothing but a ‘free won’t’ as Ed Yong called it.

All this has been shown by scientific study. There is a great deal more to learn from such studies. Leaps forward in the discipline of mental studies come when instruments are developed that give us views into the brain and what is going on in there while people think and decide and act. As the instruments become more sensitive and more precise, we will gain more knowledge.

There is also another path to learn about all this, which comes from self-study and introspection. This is the path long followed in India and East Asia. The results have been hidden as esoteric lore, for the model of education in those parts has been to withhold knowledge within the tradition of a particular school, and different schools do not share what they know. The results have also been considered poetically, which is not an invalid way to consider the nature of the world (it is the basis of all of what we call philosophy after all) but it uses terms so different from those that science uses in the Western world that it is often difficult to share knowledge between the two camps, even when the schools of the mystics of Asia have been persuaded to open their books and tell what they have learned.

Still, self-study is something each and every one of us can pursue. It is indeed part of being human, part of growing up, and a vital part of moral education.

The Trigger

So in this vein I watch myself at times to see how it is that I decide things. Mostly (out of habit and training, I suppose) I watch myself in the morning, after waking part-way, but before rising. This is a time when my mind is looking inward, and I am more self-aware; my decisions seem to be slowed down, so I can follow them with a bit more ease.

This morning I glimpsed something I never had before. It was a picture of the consequence of not acting. I was feeling a ‘pressure’ to turn over or adjust my position. I have two wisdom teeth that are impacting over the years, on the right side of my jaw. Lying on my right side with my head on the pillow adds pressure to these impacted wisdom teeth, and that hurts a little. More, I have the notion that such pressure increases the impaction (this may or may not be true, but it is the idea that I hold, so it’s valid within my own set of delusions).

So there I was, having turned onto my right side with my head on the pillow. It was resting on my cheek with a slight pressure on those wisdom teeth — not much, just a small pressure. I was aware that I should turn over or rest the upper part of my head on my palm so as to raise my cheek off the pillow, but at the same time I do like to lie on my right side, and the pressure, I deemed (or rather, my rational self, that part of me I identify as ‘me’ deemed) that the pressure was so light that it couldn’t harm me. So I lay there a few moments longer when, all of a sudden, I glimpsed a flash of a picture, or a combination picture and proposed experience, of the me at the dentist’s office having those wisdom teeth pulled, which I fear will be very painful and damaging in other ways, and which I would avoid if I can manage it.

Immediately upon receiving this picture, I rolled over onto my left side. I had to do it; the pressure had passed the threshold point, and I watched myself, and allowed myself, to carry through with the action.

I rolled over onto my left.

What I saw then was that it was the picture that had triggered the action. It was very quick and forceful, very much like flipping a switch or pulling a trigger of a gun.

Weariness and Strength

There is one other aspect to this process that occurred to me as I lay (on my left side) and considered what I had done and how I had decided to do it. It is the notion that the brain works with glucose as its fuel, and when that fuel runs low, the brain has a lowered resistance — a lower ability to say ‘no.’ Saying ‘no’ burns glucose — it works the brain, as a muscle is worked, just as it feels subjectively, and glucose is burned, down, maybe, to a point that we can no longer say ‘no.’ Then we are ‘helpless’ against the urges of those other parts of us, that act on these picture triggers.

If we then carry on with the metaphor of the physical muscle, we should be able to train up our resistance, our ‘will power’ by exercising it. The more we say ‘no’ and the longer we can hold out saying ‘no,’ the stronger our brains will get. Either our ‘will power’ will be trained to work more efficiently using less glucose, or the sources and supplies of glucose will be trained up to greater quantities.

(Here I am using glucose as a sort of shorthand to refer to all those resources we use up in saying ‘no’ — it might be glucose alone, at least glucose is the prime suspect now in the researches I have seen; but it might also be something else entirely, a neurotransmitter for instance, or some electrical activity; it might also be something else working along with glucose. I don’t think we know enough as yet to say with much certainty. But it seems likely, if we accept materialism, that something physical is going on in our brains when we exert ‘will power’ because it feels that way, and we do get ‘tired out’ or intoxicated by liquor, a depressant, so that we have a lower ability to say ‘no.’)

This training should deal both with long term goals to be carried out over many days weeks or months, as well as short term, and immediate actions, such as whether or not to roll over in bed. We should take every opportunity to say ‘no’ or at least to say ‘not yet’ and then lengthen the duration of the period our ‘not yet’ holds true.

Logic

The other implication that I gleaned from this experience is the idea that our ‘subconscious selves’ (those parts of ourselves that make decisions and that are not part of the logical, verbal, prefrontal left cortex) do not act illogically, but on another sort of logic, something I’ve long thought of as ‘dream logic.’ The picture of me in the dentist’s chair was proposed as associated with going on lying on my right side — or as the consequence of going on lying on my right side. This is a logical connection.

But it can also work, I imagine, by mere association, for that is the way we train ourselves to so many things. It is the way our base fears spring up, for example, from childhood traumas. We learn that some places or actions immediately gave rise to, or took place alongside, severe pain. The connection might not be logical or even true; it might have been something else in the situation that led to the pain. But we have it in our heads — we have ‘learned’ it — that it was A that led to the pain, and not Aa, that small part of A that was the logical, actual cause.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, April 26, 2008)