Authors: Rudolph E. Tanzi
How, then, do you take control of reality making? Some rules of the game apply, as follows:
THE RULES OF REALITY MAKING
You are not your brain.
You create everything about how the world looks and feels.
Perception isn’t passive. You are not simply receiving a fixed, given reality. You are shaping it.
Self-awareness changes perception.
The more aware you are, the more power you have over reality.
Awareness contains the power to transform your world.
At a subtle level, your mind is merged with the creative forces of the universe.
We will explain the rules as we go. But reality making is natural and effortless, while at the same time it is almost beyond belief. The universe goes to the same place to create a star as you go to see a rose in your mind’s eye. Now it’s up to us to show why that incredible statement is true.
You Are Not Your Brain
The first principle in reality making is that you are not your brain. We already saw how crucial this insight is for people suffering from depression (as it is for people suffering from any other mood disorder, like anxiety, which is just as epidemic as depression). When you come down with a bad cold, no matter how much you are suffering, you don’t say, “I am a cold.” You say, “I have a cold.” But linguistics is such that you don’t say, “I have depression.” You say “I am depressed,” which means you identify with that condition. For countless people who are depressed and anxious, “I am” becomes extremely powerful. Mood colors the world. When you identify with being depressed, the world reflects how you feel. When you see a lemon, you don’t think you are yellow, and the same should hold true with depression. In both cases, the mind is using the brain to create yellow, just as it is creating depression. There’s an intimate link at the level of physiology, and if you control the link, you can change anything.
If the brain were in charge of your identity, it would make just as much sense to say “I am a yellow lemon” as it does to say “I am depressed.” How, then, do we know the difference? How is it that you know that you are not a yellow lemon, while a depressed person may identify with his disorder so acutely that he commits suicide? Partly the difference is emotional. Biology comes into play here. The hippocampus is intimately wired to the amygdala, which regulates emotional memories and the fear response. In imaging studies when human subjects were shown a scary face while undergoing an fMRI (the best scan for showing brain activity in real time), the amygdala lit up like a Christmas tree. The fear response pours into the higher brain, which takes a while to realize that scary pictures are no reason to be afraid. Uncontrolled fears, even when they have no realistic cause, can lead to chronic anxiety and depression.
Biological counters can offset this effect. Recent studies suggest that new nerve cells in the hippocampus are able to inhibit the negative emotions evoked in the amygdala. Stress-alleviating activities,
such as doing physical exercise and learning new things, promote the birth of new nerve cells, which, as we’ve seen, promotes neuroplasticity—new synapses and neural circuits. Neuroplasticity can directly regulate mood and prevent depression. Thus the birth of new nerve cells in the adult hippocampus helps overcome neurochemical imbalances that lead to mood disorders like depression.
In neuroscience this idea is novel, but in real life many people have discovered that going for a jog can lift them out of a blue mood. Because a yellow lemon doesn’t trigger emotional responses while depression does, we’ve found an important difference at the level of the brain. Some studies have shown that antidepressants like Prozac may work at least in part by increasing neurogenesis (new nerve cells) in the hippocampus. In support of this idea, mice that are given antidepressants show positive changes in behavior, changes that can be preempted by deliberately blocking neurogenesis in the hippocampus.
The alert reader will point out that we seem to be arguing against ourselves. If Prozac makes you feel better, then what’s wrong with taking a pill to promote desirable effects in the brain? First of all, drugs don’t cure mood disorders—they only alleviate them. Once a patient stops taking an antidepressant or tranquilizer, the underlying disorder returns. Second, all drugs have side effects. Third, the beneficial effects of drugs wear out over time, requiring higher dosages to reach the same benefit. (In time there may be no benefit to reach.) Finally, studies have shown that antidepressants aren’t as effective as their makers claim, and in most common cases of depression, couch therapy can achieve the same benefits. Our culture is addicted to popping pills as silver bullets, but the reality is that talking your way out of your depression is curative, whereas drugs by and large are not.
As the brain shifts, reality follows. Depressed people live not just in a sad mood but in a sad world. Sunshine is tinged with gray; colors lack luminosity. But those who have no mood disorder imbue
the world with livelier qualities. A stoplight is red because the brain makes it red, although red-green color-blind people see the same stoplight as gray. Sugar is sweet because the brain makes it sweet, but for those who have lost their taste buds through injury or disease, sugar has no sweetness. Subtler qualities are at work, too. You add emotion to sugar’s taste if it reminds you that you may be prediabetic; you add emotion to a stoplight if the sight evokes bad memories of a car accident in your past. The personal cannot be separated from the “facts” of daily life. Facts are personal, in fact. The radical part is that nothing escapes the process of reality making.
Every quality in the outside world exists because you create it. Your brain is not the creator but a translational tool. The real creator is mind.
It will take more to convince you that you are creating all of reality. We understand. Doubt arises from a widespread lack of knowledge about how the mind interacts with the world “out there.”
Everything depends on the nervous system that is having the experience. Since humans don’t have wings, we have no idea of a hummingbird’s experience. Looking out an airplane window isn’t the same thing as flying. A bird swoops and dives, balances in midair, keeps an eye out in all directions, and so on. A hummingbird’s brain coordinates a wing speed of up to eighty beats per second and a heart rate of more than a thousand beats per minute. Humans cannot penetrate such an experience—in essence, a hummingbird is a vibrating gyroscope balanced in the middle of a whirling tornado of wings. You only have to consult a table of bird world records to be astonished. The smallest bird, the bee hummingbird of Cuba, weighs 1.8 grams, just over half the weight of a penny. Yet it has the same basic physiology as the world’s largest bird, the African ostrich, which weighs around 350 pounds.
In order to explore reality, the nervous system must keep up with the new experience, monitor it, and control the rest of the body. The nervous systems of birds explore experience on the far horizon
of flying. Water birds, for example, are designed to dive. Emperor penguins have been measured to dive to a depth of 1,584 feet. The fastest dive ever measured belongs to peregrine falcons studied in Germany—depending on the angle they took, the falcons reached a speed between 160 and 215 miles per hour. Birds’ physical structure has adapted to push these boundaries. Their nervous systems are the key, not their wings or hearts. Thus a bird’s brain has created the reality of flight.
This argument can be taken much further with the human brain, because our minds have free will, while a bird’s awareness (so far as we can enter it) operates purely by instinct. For humans, a huge leap in reality making is possible.
But first, a note about something that Deepak is especially passionate about. It isn’t correct to say that the brain “creates” a thought, an experience, or a perception, just as it isn’t correct to say that a radio creates Mozart. The brain’s role, like the transistors in a radio, is to provide a physical structure for delivering thought, as a radio allows you to hear music. When you see a rose, smell its luxurious scent, and stroke its velvety petals, all kinds of correlations happen in your brain. They are visible on an fMRI as they occur. But your brain isn’t seeing, smelling, or touching the rose. Those are experiences, and only you can have an experience. This fact is essential; it makes you more than your brain.
To show the difference: in the 1930s, a pioneering brain surgeon named Wilder Penfield stimulated the area of the brain known as the motor cortex. He found that applying a tiny electrical charge to the motor cortex caused muscles to move. (Later research expanded on this finding extensively. Charges applied to memory centers can make people see vivid memories; doing the same to emotional centers can trigger spontaneous outbursts of feeling.) Penfield realized, however, that the distinction between mind and brain was crucial. Because brain tissue cannot feel physical pain, open-brain surgery can be performed with the patient awake.
Penfield would stimulate a local area of the motor cortex, causing the patient’s arm to fly up. When he asked what had happened, the patient would say, “My arm moved.” Then Penfield would ask the patient to raise an arm. When he asked what happened, the patient would say, “I moved my arm.” In this simple direct way, Penfield showed something that everyone is aware of instinctively. There’s a huge difference between having your arm move and moving it yourself. The difference lays bare the mysterious gap between mind and brain. Wanting to move your arm is an action of the mind; involuntary movement is an action triggered in the brain—they are not the same.
The distinction may sound finicky, but in the end it will be hugely important. For now, just remember that you are not your brain. The mind that gives orders to the brain is the only true creator, just as Mozart is the true creator of the music played on a radio. Instead of passively accepting anything in the world “out there,” first claim your role as creator, which is active. Here is the true beginning of learning to make reality.
Creativity is based on making things new. Pablo Picasso often placed two eyes on the same side of a face, which bears no resemblance to nature (unless we are talking about flatfish like flounders and halibut, whose tiny fry are born with eyes on either side of their heads, only to have both eyes migrate to one side as they mature). Some people would accuse Picasso of making a mistake. There’s a joke about a first-grade teacher taking her class to a modern art museum. Standing in front of an abstract painting, she says, “That’s supposed to be a horse.” From the back of the group a little boy pipes up, “Then why isn’t it?”
But abstract painting makes “mistakes” in order to create something new. Picasso is seeing the human face in a new way. Because perception is endlessly adaptable, if you give Picasso a chance, you allow your own seeing to be distorted, compared to the ordinary way of looking at faces. A disturbed emotion arises, and all at once,
you may laugh or tremble nervously or find his abstract style beautiful. The new way excites you; you become part of it. The brain is designed to allow everyone to make things new. If the brain were a computer, it would store information, sort it in different ways, and make lightning-fast calculations.
Creativity goes beyond that. It turns the raw material of life into an entirely new picture, one never seen before. If you have Hamburger Helper for dinner five nights in a row, you can get bored, complain, and wonder why life doesn’t change. Or you can make something new. Right now you are assembling your world like a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece is under your control.
MAKING IT NEW
HOW TO TRANSFORM YOUR PERCEPTIONS
Take responsibility for your own experience.
Be skeptical of fixed reactions, both yours and anyone else’s.
Confront old conditioning. It leads to unconscious behavior.
Be aware of your emotions and where they come from.
Examine your core beliefs. Hold them up to the light, and discard beliefs that make you stuck.
Ask yourself what part of reality you are rejecting. Freely consult the viewpoint of the people around you. Respect what they see in the situation.
Practice empathy so that you can experience the world through someone else’s eyes.
These points all center on self-awareness. When you do anything—eat breakfast, make love, think about the universe, write a pop song—your mind can be in only one of three states: unconscious, aware, and self-aware. When you are unconscious, your
mind is passively receiving the constant stream of input from the outside world, with minimal reactions and no creativity. When you are aware, you pay attention to this stream of input. You select, decide, sort, process, and so on, making choices about what to accept and what to reject. When you are self-aware, you loop back on what you are doing, asking
How is this for me?
At any given moment, all three states coexist. We have no idea if that’s true for a creature like the hummingbird. As its heart races at over a thousand beats per minute, is the bird thinking,
I’m tired
? That question comes out of self-awareness. Is it thinking,
My heart beats really, really fast
? That’s a statement of simple awareness. We suppose, without knowing the truth, that a hummingbird isn’t self-aware, and it may not even be aware. Its entire life could be spent unconsciously.
Unconscious, Aware, Self-aware
Human beings exist in all three states, and which one predominates at any given moment is up to you. Super brain depends on reducing our unconscious moments while increasing both awareness and self-awareness. Consider the fourth item in the previous list:
Be aware of your emotions and where they come from
. The first part is about awareness, the second about self-awareness.
I am angry
is an aware thought, while flying off the handle is unconscious. That’s why we give latitude to someone who goes off into a rage, for example, at the scene of a car accident. We don’t take what they say seriously until their rage is over and they calm down. Some legal systems forgive unconsciousness, allowing leniency for so-called crimes of passion. If you find your wife in bed with another man and react by strangling him on the spot, you are acting unconsciously, without full awareness.