Authors: Rudolph E. Tanzi
W
e cannot fully explore the brain without addressing its deepest mystery. You are immersed in it every second of your life. Imagine that you are on vacation gazing at the Grand Canyon. Photons of sunlight glancing off the cliffs make contact with your retina and stream into your brain. There the visual cortex is activated through chemical and electrical activity, which comes down to electrons bumping into other electrons. But you aren’t aware of this stormy, minuscule process. Instead, you see vibrant color and form; the awe-inspiring chasm appears before you, and you hear the whistling wind rush out of the canyon and feel the hot desert sun on your skin.
Something almost indescribable is happening here, because not a single quality of this experience is present in your brain. The Grand Canyon glows a brilliant red, but no matter how hard you search, you won’t find a spot of red in your neurons. The same holds true for the other four senses. Feeling the wind in your face, you won’t find a breeze in your brain, and its temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit won’t change, whether you are in the Sahara or in the Arctic. Electrons bump into electrons, that’s all. Since electrons don’t see, touch, hear, taste, and smell, your brain doesn’t either.
As mysteries go, this one is a stumper. Your consciousness of the world around you can’t be explained if you insist upon a materialistic model. Yet the model based on electrical and chemical reactions, which are materialistic, is exactly what the field of neuroscience keeps pursuing. A flood of new data piles up about the brain’s physical operation, creating tremendous excitement. It would help if we knew, with complete certainty, how the mind-brain connection produces the world we see, hear, and touch.
Once when Deepak was giving a talk on the subject of higher consciousness, a skeptical questioner stood up in the audience. “I’m a scientist,” he introduced himself, “and this is all smoke and mirrors. Where is God? You can’t produce any evidence that he exists. Enlightenment is probably just self-delusion. You have no proof that supernatural things are real.” Without pausing to consider, Deepak replied, “You have no proof that
natural
things are real.” Which is true. Mountains, trees, and clouds look real enough, but without having the slightest idea how the five senses arose from electrons bumping into electrons, there is no proof that the physical world matches our mental representation of it.
Is a tree hard? Not to the termites boring into it. Is the sky blue? Not to the multitudes of creatures that are color blind. Research has discovered a peculiar trait in crows; they recognize individual human faces and will react when that same face reappears a few days or even weeks later. But a trait that seems so human must have a very different use in the bird world, one we can only imagine, since our nervous systems are tuned only to our reality, not a bird’s.
Every one of the five senses can be twisted to deliver a completely different picture of the world. If by
picture
we mean the sight, sound, smell, taste, and texture of things, a troubling conclusion looms. Apart from the very unreliable picture running inside the brain, we have no proof that reality is anything like what we see.
Einstein put it another way when he said that the most incredible thing isn’t the existence of the universe but our awareness of
its existence. Here is an everyday miracle, and the more you delve into it, the more wondrous it becomes. Consciousness deserves to be called
the
hard problem, a phrase popularized by David Chalmers, a specialist in the philosophy of mind.
We feel that the hard problem becomes much easier when we give consciousness a primary role instead of making it secondary to the brain. We’ve already shown that you—meaning your mind—are the user of the brain. If you are telling your brain what to do, it isn’t a huge leap to say that the mind comes first and the brain second. We’ve also called you a reality maker. It would close the circle if you are not just reshaping your brain at every moment, not just causing chemicals to fire in the brain, but are actively creating everything in the brain. This is a more radical role for the mind, but far-seeing cognitive scientists and philosophers have taken such a position—it turns out to have many surprising advantages.
The hard problem is abstract, but none of us can afford to leave it to professional thinkers. The best and the worst of what will happen to you today—and everything in between—is the fruit of your awareness. You spend every day adding to the same project, one that lasts a lifetime. Let’s call this project “building a self.” Everyone has the right to feel unique, but the input for building your self consists of the positive and negative messages that register in your awareness, beginning with things that are painful and things that are pleasurable. The building blocks of the self are made of “mind stuff,” so it’s not true to say that you
have
consciousness, the way you have a kidney or an epidermis; you
are
consciousness. A fully formed human adult is like a walking universe of thoughts, desires, drives, fears, and preferences accumulated over the years.
The good news is that your brain, which registers and stores all your experiences, gives clear signals of what needs to be changed whenever there is imbalance, dis-ease, and a breakdown in the smooth partnership of mind and body. We can divide the most telltale signals into positive and negative categories.
Building a Self
How many of the following apply to you today?
POSITIVE SIGNALS
Inner calm and contentment
Curiosity
Sense of openness
Feeling of safety
Purposefulness, dedication
Feeling of being accepted and loved
Freshness, physical and mental
Self-confidence
Sense of worth
Alert self-awareness
Absence of stress
Engagement, commitment
NEGATIVE SIGNALS
Inner conflict
Boredom
Fatigue, physical or mental
Depression or anxiety
Anger, hostility, critical attitude toward self and others
Confusion about your purpose
Feeling of unsafeness, insecurity
Hypervigilance, alertness to constant threats
Stress
Sense of low self-worth
Confusion, doubt
Apathy
No matter what stage of life you find yourself in, all the way back to very early childhood, your brain is sending these signals, playing
them off against each other without stopping and so contributing to your development of self.
Society guides the building of a self, but each person creates a distinct
I
within the framework. How this is done is complex and little understood. We are expected to create ourselves instinctively. We feel our way through thousands of situations, and the net result is a jury-rigged construct. We took two or three decades to build it and yet none of us really knows how we arrived at the self we inhabit. The whole process needs to be improved. Since everything that creates a self happens in consciousness, you now have a personal reason to solve the hard problem. Some thorny arguments lie ahead, but the end result will be a leap in your well-being.
Ghosts Inside the Atom
From the time of Sir Isaac Newton, physics has been based on the commonsense belief that the physical world is solid and stable. Therefore, reality starts “out there.” It’s a given. Einstein called this belief his religion. Once when he was walking at twilight with another great quantum physicist, Niels Bohr, the two were talking about the problem of reality. It hadn’t been a problem for science until the quantum era, at which point the tiny solid objects known as atoms and molecules began to vanish. They turned into whirling clouds of energy, and even those clouds were elusive. Particles like photons and electrons didn’t have a fixed place in space, for example, but instead obeyed laws of probability.
Quantum mechanics holds that nothing is fixed or certain. There is an infinitesimal chance, for example, that gravity won’t cause an apple to fall from a tree but will make it move sideways or upward instead, although such anomalies apply not to apples—the chance of an apple not falling is almost infinitely remote—but to subatomic particles. Their behavior is so strange that it gave rise to an aphorism from Werner Heisenberg, the creator of the Uncertainty Principle: “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
To the end of his life, Einstein was uneasy with such strangeness. One particular disagreement had to do with the observer. Quantum physics says that elementary particles exist as invisible waves extending in all directions until an observer looks at them. Then and only then does the particle assume a place in time and space. When he was out walking with Bohr, who was trying to convince him that quantum theory matched reality, Einstein pointed to the moon and said, “Do you really think the moon isn’t there if you aren’t looking at it?”
As the history of science turned out, Einstein was on the losing side of the argument. As Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain in their insightful book,
Quantum Enigma
, “Physicists in 1923 [were] finally forced to accept a wave-particle duality: A photon, an electron, an atom, a molecule—in principle any object—can be either compact or widely spread-out. You can choose which of these contradictory features to demonstrate.” This sounds technical, but the punch line isn’t: “The physical reality of an object depends on how you choose to look at it. Physics had encountered consciousness but did not realize it.”
The fact that the physical world isn’t a given has been validated over and over. This fact has huge importance for your brain. Everything that makes the moon real to you—its white radiance, the shadows that play across its surface, its waxing and waning, its orbit around the Earth—happens via your brain. Every aspect of reality is born “in here” as an experience. Even science, objective as it tries to be, is an activity taking place in consciousness.
On an everyday basis, physicists ignore their earthshaking discoveries about the quantum realm. They drive cars, not clouds of energy, to work. Once their cars are parked, they stay put. They don’t fly off into invisible waves. Likewise, a brain surgeon cutting into gray matter accepts that the brain under his scalpel is solid and firmly placed in time and space. So when we want to go deeper than the brain, we must journey to an invisible realm where the five senses are left behind. We would have no urgent reason to take the
journey if reality was a given, but it’s not, with a vengeance. We will heed the words of Sir John Eccles, a famous British neurologist who declared, “I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound—nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.”
You might feel a kind of existential queasiness trying to imagine what
is
out there if not color, sound, and texture. Reducing colors to vibrations of light won’t solve anything. Vibrations measure light waves, but they say nothing about the experience of seeing color. Measurements are reductions of experience, not a substitute for them. Science rejects the subjective world, where experiences occur, because it is fickle, changeable, and not measurable. If person A loves Picasso’s paintings and person B hates them, those are two opposite experiences, but you can’t assign a number value to them. Brain scans don’t help, either, since the same areas in the visual cortex will be active.
Where does solid ground lie when everything shifts and changes? You can’t live in a world that rests on slippery illusion. As we see it, the way out is to realize that science is fooled by its own reality illusion. By rejecting subjective experiences like love, beauty, and truth, and substituting objective data—facts that are supposed to be more reliable—science gives the impression that vibrations are the same as colors and that electrons bouncing off electrons in the brain are the equivalent of thinking. Neither is true. The reality illusion needs to be dissolved, and that can only be done by discarding some outworn assumptions
SWEEPING AWAY THE REALITY ILLUSION
OLD BELIEFS THAT NEED TO GO
• The belief that the brain creates consciousness. In reality, it’s the other way around.
• The belief that the material world is solid and reliable. In reality, the physical world is ever-shifting and elusive.
• The belief that sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell match the world “out there.” In reality, all sensations are produced in consciousness.
• The belief that the physical world is the same for all living things. In reality, the physical world we experience only mirrors our human nervous system.
• The belief that science deals in empirical facts. In reality, science organizes and gives mathematical expression to experiences in consciousness.
• The belief that life should be lived by common sense and reason. In reality, we should feel our way through life utilizing as much awareness as we can.
Now we are diving into the thorny arguments we promised you, but the reassuring physical world vanished over a hundred years ago when quantum reality took over. It baffles physicists, as it does everyone else, to see the moon and stars vanish. With a mournful sense of finality, like a priest presiding over a casket, the French theoretical physicist Bernard d’Espagnat intones, “The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.”