Inside Ben Carson

So imagine you've had neurological damage and your brain simply cannot recognize your own  left arm as a part of your body.  You're sitting in the doctor's office and you can sees the arm just fine, but the part of the brain that answers the question, "What is this?" is misfiring and it keeps coming back with the response "It's someone else's arm."  You can't consciously understand that the brain is misinterpreting your perceptions, and so you blindly accept that it is, in fact, someone else's arm - it doesn't seem any stranger or odder to you than seeing an arm attached to another person and understanding that as someone else's arm.  When challenged and presented with evidence that it might be you own arm,. you answer the hard question of whose arm is it, whose arm looks just like yours and is holding it out next to you, with the only available logical conclusion you can reach - that it must be your mother's.

It sounds crazy, but it's actually a logical resolution to the mis-wired signals you're getting from the brain.

Paul Waldman presents a similar example in The Week,

So imagine it's 1970 or so, and you're young Ben Carson, sitting in a biology class at Yale University. With your sharp mind and strong study habits, you don't have much problem understanding the material, grasping the copious evidence underlying the theory of evolution, all the fossils going back millions of years, how it all fits together in an endless process that affects everything from a towering redwood down to a microscopic virus. And yet, the whole thing sounds like an attack on the beliefs about the universe you were taught your whole life from your family and your church. How can you resolve this contradiction? 

The resolution came somewhere along the way for Carson: Satan. Evolution is Satan's doing.

Ben Carson famously said, "I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary," meaning El Diablo, the Devil, Satan.  While it's hard for most of us to understand how a brilliant and accomplished neurosurgeon can come to such a superstitious and pre-scientific conclusion, we need to realize that based on the wiring inside Carson's mind, it's a completely logical and apparent resolution.  If you firmly, deeply and unquestioningly believe that "God created everything," and that "Satan tries to turn man from God,"  then evidence that suggests that God didn't create everything (or at least didn't create everything in seven days and in the order suggested by the Bible), then it's only logical to conclude that Satan must be behind that evidence.

It's a different mental model of the world.  It's a different mental map, a different schema.  The Buddha called these maps and models samskara.

Ben Carson isn't stupid, nor is he smart about some things and stupid about others.  He just has a different schema than most other scientists, and to Carson, other scientists' schema must seem as illogical and unintelligible as his does to us.

One of the great conundrums I keep facing living in the Red State American South is how so many people I know can be so smart about some things and yet so dumb about politics.  Understanding samskara helps me see that they're not, in fact, dumb, nor am I being dumb as they accuse me, but we simply have acquired different frames of reference and different mental maps of the world, which leads us to different conclusions.  And each of our conclusions sounds to us as logical and thoughtful as the conclusions of others sound childish and uninformed. 

Blueberry Muffins

Good old-fashioned blueberry muffins this week -- nothing too fancy like last week's blueberry cornbread muffins, which were good fresh out of the oven but started tasting like spoiled sour cream as the week progressed. 

But I have nothing more to say about muffins or baking practice today.  However, I've been thinking about an anecdote I once read by the late Oliver Sachs.  He once wrote about a patient, a woman, who had suffered some sort of neurological accident that left her brain incapable of recognizing a part of her own body, her left arm, as a part of "her."  She was otherwise mentally competent and healthy, but when she looked at her own left arm, the wiring in her brain couldn't connect it to her understanding of what constituted her own body, and instead she processed it as being something "other," just like we don't consider, say, a hat on our head or a chair we're sitting on as "us," even if we're in direct contact with that other thing.  Her response to this inability to process her own left arm as "her" led her to the bizarre conclusion that it was not her own left arm she was looking at but someone else's. 

As Sachs tells it, she was otherwise quite reasonable and sane, and when asked who's arm she thought it was that was next to her, she replied "I don't know."

Upon questioning, she agreed that the left arm did look very similar to her right arm - same general size, skin color, and so on - and from this the patient, her brain still not accepting that it was hers, logically concluded that it must be that of a close relative.

"It's my mother's arm," she said.

"Where's your mother now?" she was asked.  "I don't see her around."

The woman agreed that it was strange, and then said that her mother must be playing some sort of trick on her and was hiding somewhere.

Now, this sounds crazy, that an adult woman, instead of recognizing her own left arm as hers, would come to the bizarre conclusion that her mother was hiding somewhere behind her and holding out an arm to make it appear that the mother's arm was her daughter's. However, as pointed out before, the woman was quite sane and not at all crazy, but given that her brain, because of a tragic misfiring of neurons, wasn't capable of connecting the arm with her sense of self or with the rest of her body, when faced with the irrefutable evidence that it sure looked like her arm, found a "logical" explanation that she was somehow being tricked, even if she couldn't figure out how the trick was working.  She didn't first think there was some trick afoot and then conclude that the arm therefore wasn't hers, and she didn't accept that the arm was hers if she couldn't explain how the trick worked, any more than we believe that a magician really did make his lovely assistant disappear into thin air unless we can work out the mechanisms of the illusion.    

The point I take from this story is that our understanding of the universe, even while it sounds logical and reasonable to us, is not really as based on logic and reason as we would like to think, but is actually rooted in our schema, the mental maps we've developed over the course of our lives.  These maps work subconsciously in such a way that we're not even aware of their influence on our thinking -- we don't realize how reliant we are on our frame of reference as we encounter new phenomena around us.  A 21st Century, scientifically literate person believes that a magician's tricks are illusions, feats of misdirection and clever mechanisms, and does not conclude that the tricks are "real" even if the explanation can't be figured out.  On the other hand, persons from an earlier, pre-scientific century might first accept that the tricks are real, feats of demons or angels with the irrefutable evidence right before their eyes, unless the mechanics are explained to them.

I think that a lot of the polarized politics of our time are based, in large part, on a population with different mental maps explaining the world around them.  For example, some people, based on their previous experience (or perhaps lack of experience) look at an immigrant and see a threat - to some a threat to take away their jobs, to others a threat of crime.  Based on this presupposition, they listen to a certain news outlet that sensationalizes crimes and statistics to reinforce that view.  Other people looking at the same immigrant see something different, perhaps because they themselves were once immigrants or their parents or grandparents were, or because, listening to other news outlets and other stories and statistics, don't see the immigrant as a threat but those so opposed to immigration as the actual threat.  So, too, the other polarizing issues of our time - big government, abortion, religious expression, guns, etc.  It's all rooted in our schema.

The hard work here is not simply accepting that others may have different views and opinions not because they're "wrong" or "stupid" but because they have different mental maps and models, and therefore accepting and tolerating their different viewpoints.  The hard work is instead recognizing that each and every one of us, even ourselves, are dependant on our own subconscious mental maps and models to inform our experience.  Even though we do not consciously realize that we're relying on these maps and models and our opinions feel "logical" and "correct" to us, we should not assume that our views are any more "right" or "true" than anyone else's just because they conform better with our own schema. 

Living in the Red State, Bible-belt South, I've often had to ask myself the question, "How can someone who is otherwise so intelligent and well-read as him/her also maintain a belief in their mind as ignorant and uninformed as that?"  The specifics about the person and about the ignorant and uninformed beliefs vary from case to case - sometimes it's politics, sometimes it's religion, sometimes it's just plain buffoonery - but the question keeps coming up again and again. 

It usually goes like this: someone is trying to explain something to me, something that I just know is completely and totally incorrect, and I try to set the record straight with "the facts" and find them looking at me in a condescending way that tells me they consider my opinion naive and embarrassingly childlike.  

So the answer to my question may be found by rearranging it to ask myself "How can an intelligent and well-read person like him/her come to consider the reasonable beliefs in my mind as ignorant and uninformed?"  

Are we all blinded by our self-delusion?  Have we all mistaken the mental models we've constructed for the truth?  

Reminder

Our world and our identity, and the way we experience our world and our identity, are all the products of our own samskara, the mental maps, or schema, that we create based on our past experience to understand the perceptions of our consciousness.

That really explains a lot when you think about it. 

"The story of your life is not your life, it is your story." - John Barth

The first time I've heard anyone other than myself use the term "schema" in a Buddhist context was in a recent dharma talk by John Dunne and Al Kaszniak posted on the Upaya Zen Center web site.

According to Dunne and Kaszniak, we conceive of ourselves as agents in a world full of objects, some of which we want, some of which we want to get away from, and some of which we ignore. This subjective agent, this “I,” or “autobiographical self,” is conceived of as a character in a story.

This story needs rules in order to be coherent. Often the rules that govern our stories about ourselves are not even apparent, yet they structure our lives at many levels.  These rules are the "mental maps" of Erich Fromm, the "schema" of the psychologists.

Transformation in contemplative practice is about deliberately transforming ourselves into a different story, ultimately seeing the contingency of any story we tell about ourselves. Through meditation practices, we temporarily suspend any intention, any expectations, hopes, or fears in order to take all stories off line, and give ourselves the freedom to experience life devoid of story. From this freedom, transformation is possible. 

The human nervous system is highly interconnected, made up of networks of cells that generate firing patterns termed “attractor basins.” These firing patterns are thought to contribute to our habitual actions, ways of thinking, and even conceiving of our selves. Although our genes certainly contribute to the structure of these patterns, so do our experiences. 

From a neuroscience and complex systems perspective, when we engage in certain meditation practices, we allow our neural patterns, these “attractor basins,” to come into widespread synchrony across the brain, perhaps signifying a “release” from patterned firing, and from habitual action. When this release occurs, the opportunity may arise for something else to occur, for the nervous system to reconfigure, to transform. So from both the contemplative practice and from the scientific perspective, transformation involves a temporary suspension or freedom, and then a reconfiguration.

CD

Who We Are And Who We Become Depend On Whom We Love

In this "post-Zen" period of my life, in addition to continuing my internal inquiries through the practice of zazen (sitting meditation), my external interests and areas of personal inquiry have expanded beyond study of Buddhist sutras and Zen koans, and into a more scientific exploration of the mind and human nature. This is not at all an abandonment of the former studies; as a matter of fact, my "scientific" studies are informed by all that I have picked up (i.e., what little I've learned) from Buddhism.

But to be more specific, since Labor Day weekend, I have started a massive, on-line open course (MOOC) on introductory neurology through Harvard University (MCB80x, The Electrical Properties of the Neuron), while separately reading Erich Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.  These two studies have informed and influenced my other reading, including on the internet, where I came across a very interesting website on Human Molecular Template Theory by American electro-chemical engineer (and surfer) Libb Thims, from which most of the following discussion is derived.

If I understand Thims correctly, and there's every reason in the world to assume that I don't, Human Molecular Template Theory holds that what governs the spontaneity of human behavior can be explained in terms of the processes that govern the spontaneity of chemical reactions. Specifically, beginning at conception and continuing into the early years of life, people construct mental and behavioral templates from their surroundings in such a manner as to emulate those attachment behaviors found to be desirable and negate or deter those attachment behaviors found to be repulsive.  These mental and behavioral templates are based on the impressions made of others but are carried by the individual in a manner similar to the basic protein-enzyme "lock-and-key" chemical models.

Do I need to point out to you that these mental and behavioral templates are basically the same thing I've been discussing as schema or samskara for some time now?  Or the parallels to the herding mentality discussed by Jing Chen?

To a large extent, a person's personality is based upon the "attachment templates" formed by the people, both good or bad, that one meets in life. In psychology, it is known that people emulate behaviors of those they admire, desire, or to whom they are attracted. Hence, by logical extrapolation, it is reasonable to assume that over the course of a person's life, he or she constructs their ego-self from templates based on the specific interactions with the people they encounter.

Human Molecular Template Theory postulates that the basic templating processes occur in the central nervous system, and that the neuro-template structures exist as combinations of programmable, voltage-controlled, neuronal switches that together form the integrated circuits of the mind.

This model is the same as Konrad Lorenz’s "imprinting," in which young infants are instinctively drawn to the attracting regions of the parent, and are henceforth molded and shaped behaviorally off that first template and other templates that follow.  A human being lives in utero for the first 10 lunar months of his or her life, and then spends the first 3 years of life, on average, attached in a maternal-infant bond relationship from which it will develop subsequent templates. Other early templates include paternal-child bonds, sibling-sibling bonds, friendship bonds, distal family bonds, imaginary bonds, or conceptual bonds lived vicariously through books, television, movies, etc.  American bonding researchers Stephen Bank and Michael Kahn maintain that siblings are central molding factor involved in the templating of a person, more so even than that of parental influence. Their view is that "brothers and sisters, whether the relationship has been contentious or calm, satisfying or frustrating, filled with conflict or deeply comforting, can provide the touchstones and templates which mold each other’s lives."

In early youth and into adolescence, these precursory templates will serve as models by which the person will begin to test teenage romantic-sexual templates.  In adult life, a woman may specifically attach to the attracting region of a man’s personality, ambition, wealth, or occupation based on the templates accrued. Likewise, a man may specifically attach to the attracting region of a woman’s body, accomplishment, intelligence, or sense of humor, and in each case be molded off that template.

According to Lewis, Amini, and Lannon’s 2000 General Theory of Love, the wordless ties each of us has to others "determine our mood, stabilize and maintain our health, and change the structure of our brains, so that, in a very real sense, who we are and who we become depend on whom we love."

If your mental map or model depends upon you not understanding something, no matter how well it's explained, it still won't ever make sense. 

Samskara & The Brain

Metabolically the brain is a very expensive organ. Representing only 2 percent of body mass, it uses about 20 percent of energy in humans. Since mental activities are so costly, it is of great evolutionary advantage to have efficient information processing system to reduce the cost of thinking.  For this and other reasons, we have developed mental maps, mental models of both the interior and exterior world, to assist in efficient understanding.  The Buddha called these maps or models samskara.

The problem occurs when the maps or models become so ingrained that we misinterpret the reality around and within ourselves because it doesn't fit the samskara.  

On The Neurology Of Consciouness

Some 2,500 years ago, Shakyamuni Buddha taught that consciousness (vijnana) was a product of our "mental maps" or schema (sanskara), which in turn arise out of our subconscious mind or ignorance (avidya).  This is not mystical thinking or superstition, but his own observations of the working, functioning mind, and in this TED lecture on the neurology of consciousness, although he never once mentions Buddhism, Antonio Damasio shows that science is now reaching the same or similar conclusions.

According to this lecture, there are little modules in the brain stem that produce maps of different aspects of our body. Damasio describes these maps as "exquisitely topographic and exquisitely interconnected in a recursive pattern."  To be sure, these maps are not the "mental maps" (sanskara) of Erich Fromm, but this interconnection between brain stem and body provides the grounding for the self. The proto- or core self is grounded in this very tight interconnection between the brain stem and the body and is experienced in the form of primordial feelings.  The conscious mind cannot exist without this interconnection between brain stem and body.

The cerebral cortex, in turn, provides the great spectacle of our minds, the profusion of images to which we normally pay the most attention.  Just as a conscious mind cannot exist without an interconnection between the brain stem and the body, a conscious mind likewise cannot exist without an interconnection between the cerebral cortex and the brain stem. 

The design of the brain stem throughout the vertebrates is very similar to our own, which suggests that other species also have conscious minds.  However, their experience is not as rich as ours because they don't have a cerebral cortex like that of humans. The difference is in the cortex. Consciousness should not be considered as the great product of the cerebral cortex. The richness of the conscious experience is generated by the cortex, but not the fact that we have a sense of self at all.

Damasio describes three levels of the self - the proto-self, the core self, and the autobiographical self.  The first two, the proto-self and the core self, are shared with many other species, coming out of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species.  All sentient beings probably have at least some sense of proto-self, likely as a defense mechanism - it's been said that if you attempt to kill something and it runs away, it's sentient.

Some species additionally have an autobiographical self.  To a certain degree, cetaceans and primates probably have an autobiographical self.  Dogs also appear to have an autobiographical self to a certain degree.

According to Damasio, the autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made.  It's based on the lived past and the anticipated future, or what the Buddha called sanskara.  It is the autobiographical self that results in extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language, and out of these come the instruments of culture -- religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, and technology. 

So if I'm understanding Damasio correctly, the autobiographical self, what can be called the ego-self, is built on the basis of past memories and the mental templates or models that we have developed and use to comprehend the world.  These are the mental maps of Erich Fromm, also called schema or sanskara. Proto- or core consciousness may exist at lower levels of awareness in the brain stem, but the vivid experience of our own selves (vijnana) relies on the cerebral cortex and its mental maps.

Finally, since we are not aware or do not experience the arising of our consciousness (how could we be aware of such a thing? - it would be like "seeing" our own eyes without use of a mirror), sanskara arises subconsciously outside of our knowledge, that is, out of ignorance (avidya).  This process, consciousness arising out of schema, and schema arising out of ignorance, is the first three steps of the Buddha's teaching of dependent co-origination, and is now apparently affirmed by neuroscience.

All Music, Without Exception, Is A Direct Expression of the Buddha-Dharma

Music is not tangible. You can’t eat it or drink it. It doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold.  It doesn’t vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music, even loved it.

"Far from being merely entertainment, music, I would argue, is a part of what makes us human. Its practical value is maybe a little harder to pin down, at least in our present way of thinking, than mathematics or medicine, but many people would agree that a life without music, for a hearing person, is a life significantly diminished." - David Byrne, How Music Works

In the modern age we spend great sums of money to attend concerts, download music files, play instruments, and listen to our favorite artists whether we’re in a subway or salon. Even in Paleolithic times, people invested significant time and effort to create music, as the discovery of flutes carved from animal bones would suggest.  So why does this thingless “thing,” at its core, a mere sequence of sounds, hold such potentially enormous intrinsic value?

Neurological studies suggest that our appreciation and enjoyment of music is deeply dependent on mirror neurons.  When we watch or even just hear someone play an instrument, the neurons associated with the muscles required to play that instrument fire.  Mirror neurons are also highly predictive.  The emotionally resonant rise and fall of a melody, a repetition, a musical build, create expectations based on experience (schema, or sanskara), about where those actions are leading - expectations that will be confirmed or slightly redirected depending upon the composer or performer.  Too much confirmation, when something happens exactly as it did before, causes us to get bored and to tune out.  Little variations keep us alert, as well as serving to draw attention to musical moments that are critical to the narrative.

A research team at Montreal's McGill University found that listening to what might be called “peak emotional moments” in music, that moment when you feel a “chill” of pleasure to a musical passage, causes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, an essential signaling molecule in the brain. When pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum, an ancient part of the brain which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex (and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine).

Interestingly, this neurotransmitter is released not only when the music rises to a peak emotional moment, but also several seconds before, during what might be called the anticipation phase. The idea that reward is partly related to anticipation (or the prediction of a desired outcome) has a long history in neuroscience. After all, making good predictions about the outcome of one’s actions would seem to be essential in the context of survival.  And dopamine neurons, both in humans and other animals, play a role in recording which of our predictions turn out to be correct.

Another portion of the brain, the auditory cortex, is active when we merely imagine a tune, allowing us to experience music even when it’s physically absent, and to invent new compositions or to reimagine how a piece might sound with a different tempo or instrumentation.

These cortical circuits also allow us to make predictions about coming events on the basis of past events. They are thought to accumulate musical information over our lifetime, creating templates (again, schema, or sanskara) of the statistical regularities that are present in the music of our culture and enabling us to understand the music we hear in relation to our stored mental representations of the music we’ve heard before.

So each act of listening to music may be thought of as both recapitulating the past and predicting the future. When we listen to music, brain networks actively engage our stored schemata to create expectations of what happens next. Composers and performers intuitively understand this, and manipulate our schemata to give us what we want — or to surprise us, perhaps even with something better.

The "hooks" that often make listening to pop music so pleasing are created by the musicians inserting something interesting or unexpected (or both) into a song, momentarily confounding our schematic templates, but also leaving us wanting to hear it again, anticipating that rim shot or guitar riff or whatever, and listening with pleasure as dopamine is released in anticipation of the hook.  New templates are created, and we ourselves are altered, even if to a very subtle degree, by the experience.

Little wonder that we enjoy music. 

Yet Another Post About Sanskara

According to noted translator and practicing Buddhist Bill Porter, who publishes as “Red Pine”:

“The word sanskara is derived from a combination of san (together) and kri (to make). Thus, it means “put together” and refers to those things we have “put together” that have a direct bearing on the way we think and perceive. In the past this term has often been translated as ‘impulse,’ ‘volition,’ ‘predisposition,’ or ‘mental conformation.’ But each of these renderings involves certain limitations and distortions. For example, ‘volition’ suggests a separate will tantamount to a self, and ‘impulse’ implies the lack of any will or self. ‘Predisposition’ comes closer but does not necessarily establish a connection with past actions. And such invented terms as ‘mental conformation’ are simply too bizarre to have much use outside academic circles, very small academic circles. What this term basically refers to is our karmic genome, the repository of all that we have previously intended, whether expressed in the form of words, deeds, or thoughts. Thus, sanskara embraces all the ways we have dealt with what we have experienced in the past and that are available to us as ways to deal with what we find in the present.”

Red Pine therefore translates sanskara as “memory,” and notes that among the meanings for sanskara are “the faculty of memory, mental impression or recollection, impression of the mind of acts done in a former state of existence . . . the reproductive imagination . . .a mental conformation or creation of the mind (such as that of the external world, regarded by it as real, though actually non-existent).”

Sankara can involve anything that might provide us with a prefabricated set of guidelines from the past with which to perceive and deal with the world, both inside and outside, as we experience it in the present. Thus, sanskara supplies the templates that perception applies to sensations and form.

I don’t know of anyone else other than me who has made the connection between sanskara and schemata. I first read about schema about a year ago and realized what they were talking about sounded very similar to sanskara.  Study of this has lead me to other sources on schemata and to Erich Fromm’s “mental maps,” but I’ve not read anyone else use both terms (sanskara and schemata) in the same piece. I’m not bragging; in fact, just the opposite - since it’s only me who seems to have made the obvious connection, maybe I'm missing something and this all will come down on me like a house of cards.  

But as I see it here and now, sanskara is our habitual ways of perceiving and understanding the world and ourselves. To apply just a little schematic theory, we can substitute “pre-conscious” or “subconscious” for “habitual” and realize that these templates are applied without our conscious realization, so there is no volitional element to it.  

Here's a little test for you to experience for yourself how sanskara/schema works - what's going on in these pictures? (I took them today.)

In these days of sensational coverage of the Trayvon Martin murder trial, and the reinforcement of the stereotype that all encounters between men and women, between blacks and whites, are inherently confrontational and potentially violent, it's only natural to assume these are pictures of an altercation, one that may even have left the man wounded, or worse.  Or maybe you thought it was a dramatic re-enactment of such an altercation.

In fact, neither could be further from the truth.  If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, you will see that the couple pictured above are two of the performers from the GloATL dance troupe, which engaged in an outdoor performance today in midtown Atlanta.  The woman at the top of this post, who incidentally is not  standing in traffic although it might appear that way, was also part of the performance.  

Not only was the above encounter not a violent confrontation, although the pictures were carefully selected to suggest otherwise, it wasn't even an artistic recreation of a violent confrontation. In the last picture, the female dancer is laying down next to the male, just outside of the frame, and the sequence of pictures above is in the reverse of the chronological order - this part of the performance started with the two laying down next to each other on the ground, slowly helping each other up, and then gazing into each others eyes. It was actually quite lovely and touching.

But we have a script in our mind, and as soon as we see something that fits the pattern, we use the script to fill in the blanks.  You probably also made the assumption, based on past experiences, that the pictures were shown in the same order as the sequence of events.  This is schemata, what the Buddha called sanskara, what Fromm refers to as our "mental maps."  And while these can be very useful, if not downright essential in understanding the world around us, there's always the danger of mistaking the map for the territory.    

My theory is that schema are applied subconsciously and therefore we aren't aware of how our perceptions are filtered by our own minds.  As the Buddha put it, sanskara arises out of ignorance. But realizing this, we can use our volition and intention in choosing how we act in response to our filtered perceptions. This requires wisdom, and wisdom, in turn, requires knowledge as well as practice in putting this knowledge to use. 

In essence, we might just be consciously creating a new template for ourselves, one of careful and critical self-examination, another but useful schema to be applied to our perception.

GloATL dancers, 10th and Peachtree, July 10, 2013

Childish Thoughts

File under "coincidence:" after composing last night's post, I turned on the television and channel surfed over to an episode of PBS' Nova that documented psychological experiments on children based on a premise very similar to the Sally-and-Anne-cell-phone scenario discussed in last night's post.  Rather than confusing  kids with stories about buying rounds of drinks in a bar, however, the experiment involved placing a ball into one of two paper bags, and then moving the ball from that bag to the other bag while one of the children was away. The child who saw the switch was then asked where the second child would think the ball was when he returned.  

Interestingly, almost all children aged three and under thought that the second child would think the ball was in the new location, even though the second child had no way of knowing that the ball had been moved.  They believed that others would think the ball was where they correctly knew it to be, which is to say, very young children are apparently incapable of anticipating the thoughts and perceptions of others.  It is only after about the age of four that children are apparently capable of creating the mental models necessary to anticipate the perceptions and behaviors of others.  What was amusing was how adamant many of the children were that the second child would look for the ball in the new place, how certain they were that their knowledge and understanding were shared by everybody.  

Which brings us back, once again, to Erich Fromm, who argued that we adults are often unaware that all our concepts and beliefs rest upon commonly accepted frames of reference, and when confronted with a fundamentally different view of life, we tend to judge it as "crazy," or "irrational," or even "childish."  Yet it is we ourselves that are being "childish" when we cannot grasp that others may have a different understanding than us, a different view, a different mental model, a different samskara.      

   

Monkey Minds

"Picture two friends, Sally and Anne, having a drink in a bar. While Sally is in the bathroom, Anne decides to buy another round, but she notices that Sally has left her phone on the table. So no one can steal it, Anne puts the phone into her friend's bag before heading to the bar. When Sally returns, where will she expect to see her phone?  

If you said she would look at the table where she left it, congratulations! You have a theory of mind – the ability to understand that another person may have knowledge, ideas and beliefs that differ from your own, or from reality.  

If that sounds like nothing out of the ordinary, perhaps it's because we usually take it for granted. Yet it involves doing something no other animal can do to the same extent." (Kirsten Weir, writing in New Scientist)

Can we ever know someone else's intentions, or truly understand their thinking?

The answer, I believe, is both "yes" and "no."  As Weir points out in the New Scientist article, we humans and certain other primates are gifted with a singular ability to understand the thought processes of other individuals.  We see, or even anticipate, the behavior of others, imagine ourselves in that same position, and then reach conclusions of how the other will behave based on how we expect that we would react.      

A bunch of monkeys are watching a small clearing in the woods.  One monkey walks into the clearing, seeing a banana laying on the open ground. The other monkeys watch as their brother picks it up, and is suddenly engulfed in a giant net as he triggers the trap that had been set.  Mirror neurons firing like mad, they all howl in distress, imagining themselves in the same predicament as their ensnared colleague.

Our observations of human society and behaviors are far more complex, but of the same nature.  When we see someone scratch their nose, we imagine they must have had an itch; when we see someone steal a steak from a supermarket, we make all sorts of assumptions about that person's level of hunger, relative wealth or poverty, and moral upbringing.

By and large, we are correct - this is how we function as a culture and as a society.  We may never truly "know" what others are thinking, but we can get a pretty good idea, at least enough to support the myriad and complex interactions of human society.

On the other hand, those assumptions are merely that - assumptions, mental models, the "mental maps" of Erich Fromm, the schema of the linguists, the samskara of the Buddhists.   These maps and models are formed from our own experience and filtered through our own individual perceptions and prejudices, and are subject to fallacies and misunderstandings.  I think that a lot of human conflict is based on a failure to resolve differing sets of samskara. 

Case in point:  my now former teacher is also quite an accomplished artist, and several months ago the Zen Center's Board of Directors suggested that he display several of his pieces in the reception area and elsewhere around the Center before he took them to an upcoming show to let the sangha get a better idea of his talent and even possibly sell a few pieces and earn some money.  Sensei complied, and because of the limited space available, some of the pieces were even displayed in the meditation hall.  

One evening, a friend of mine accompanied me to the Center, and seeing the artwork, came to appreciate Sensei even more, perceiving his intuition, his sensitivity, and his talent from the artwork displayed.   She thought more highly of him as a spiritual teacher for her experience of his art.

However, another person came to the Center, saw the same artwork, and considered it the height of egotistic arrogance for Sensei to display his artwork at the Center.  The fellow concluded (incorrectly) that Sensei decided unilaterally to display the pieces, and wrote a scathing email (copying me for some reason) that he had never before seen or heard of such egocentricity and arrogance displayed by a so-called spiritual teacher, and noting that no other artists were included in the display, that Sensei couldn't even bear the slightest bit of competition.

Same initial behavior, same setting - two completely different perceptions and reactions.

My conclusion, and the point of this whole post, is that we can understand what other people are thinking and feeling to some extent, but that our perception of those thoughts and feelings are filtered through our own mental models and maps and are subject to error.  We can use them as a guide, but should be cautious of relying on them too heavily.

Yesterday, I noted that my perceptions of my former teacher are now different than they were in the past, and anticipated that they will probably be different again in the future.  It would be a fallacy to assume that I'm "right" now, but was "wrong" in the past and will be likewise incorrect in the future, but it is also a fallacy to deny my perceptions in the here and now.  Hence, I've taken the steps I've taken whilst trying to minimize the amount of hurt and pain that others may experience and to avoid behaving in ways that others might misperceive (although there will always be some inevitable misperception).

By the way, remember that monkey caught in the net?  It turns out the trapper was merely a zoologist, and kindly let the monkey go again after the experiment (with the banana for good measure).

On Empathy

Robashin, or "parental mind," is literally "the mind of an old woman" in Japanese.  In the Tenzo Kyokun (Instructions for the Cook), Dogen mentions three minds: kishin (joyful mind), roshin (parental mind), and daishin (magnanimous mind). He said, “Roshin is the mind or attitude of a parent. In the same way that a parent cares for an only child, keep the Three Treasures in your mind.”

We should all develop roshin, not only for the three treasures (buddha, dharma, sangha) but for all sentient beings.  Probably the non-sentient, too.  Roshin evokes a response stronger than mere sympathy, producing something that we might come to all "empathy."  The difference here is that while mere sympathy might cause us to regret the circumstances of others, empathy compels us to take action.

The word “empathy” is only a century old and derives from the German einfühlung (“feeling into).”   Writing in The New Yorker, Paul Bloom notes that despite the recent coinage of the term, people have been interested in the moral implications of feeling the circumstances of others for a long time. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith observed that sensory experience alone could not spur us toward empathetic engagement with others: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.” For Smith, what made us moral beings was the imaginative capacity to “place ourselves in his situation . . . and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”

In this sense, empathy is an instinctive mirroring of others’ experience. Neurological research has shown that some of the same neural systems ("mirror neurons") that are active when we are in pain become engaged when we observe the suffering of others. 

So empathy is triggered not by sensory input, but by the creations and formations of the mind.  We see the suffering of others, and then our mind creates a mental model of what that suffering may be like.  Adam Smith noted how “persons of delicate fibres” who notice a beggar’s sores and ulcers “are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies.”  These mental models are what the Buddha called samskara, what linguists refer to as schema, and which has been discussed extensively in this blog.

Samskara, in the Buddha's Chain of Dependent Origination, is the substrate that gives rise to consciousness.  Although it arises in the subconscious mind and we are not aware of their creation, consciousness arises once we engage those mental models.  To the Buddha, consciousness arises whenever a sensation encounters a sense organ.  For example, visual consciousness arises when a sight encounters the eyes, and aural consciousness arises when sound encounters the ear.  Mental consciousness arises when a thought, especially one born from the subconscious, encounters the mind.

To take Adam Smith's example a step further, we see the afflictions of a beggar or the infirmed, our minds then create a mental model of what those afflictions must be like, and mind consciousness arises as we become aware of that thought.  Concretely, our awareness of the mental model manifests itself as the itching or unease experienced by the observer.

This arising of consciousness as samskara bubbles up from our subconscious is a continuous process, and is what comprises that curious phenomenon of consciousness as "self awareness."  It is nothing short of the cause of our total and complete conscious experience - our sensations, our memories, our thoughts, and our imagination.  The process never stops, just as out own self awareness is always present.  It must be exhausting, and it's little wonder that we periodically need to give it a rest and go to sleep, and let our minds drift off into unconsciousness.

Self-consciousness can give rise to egocentricity and all of the troubles and problems resulting from an egocentric attitude.  But as noted in the opening, it can also give rise to empathy, and empathy can give rise to compassion, which is empathy put into action.

These of course are just my own philosophical noodlings, thoughts that have arisen in my mind during and following meditation.  I would be interested in hearing what others have to say about these concepts.

Flashing Lights and Spinning Wheels

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.” – David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men 

Zen Buddhists put great emphasis on living in the present moment. "Be here now." Yet, can we exist anywhere but the present? The past is gone and the future has not yet happened, so where else could we be? 

Perhaps we should not be so certain, notes Jan Westerhoff in The New Scientist (February 20, 2013).  Sensory information reaches us at different speeds, yet appears unified as one moment. Nerve signals need time to be transmitted and time to be processed by the brain. And there are events – such as a light flashing, or someone snapping their fingers – that take less time to occur than our system needs to process them. By the time we become aware of the flash or the finger-snap, it is already history.

According to Westerhoff, our experience of the world resembles a television broadcast with a time lag; conscious perception is not "live". This on its own might not be too much cause for concern, but in the same way the TV time lag makes last-minute censorship possible, our brain, rather than showing us what happened a moment ago, sometimes constructs a present that has never actually happened.

Evidence for this can be found in the "flash-lag" illusion. In one version, a screen displays a rotating disc with an arrow on it, pointing outwards. Next to the disc is a spot of light that is programmed to flash at the exact moment the spinning arrow passes it. Yet this is not what we perceive. Instead, the flash lags behind, apparently occurring after the arrow has passed.

The explanation is that our brain is interpolating events from the past, retroactively assembling a story of what happened.  The perception of what is happening at the moment of the flash is determined by what happens to the disc after the flash.  This seems paradoxical, but other tests have confirmed that what is perceived to have occurred at a certain time can be influenced by what happens later.

All of this is slightly worrying if we hold on to the common-sense view that our selves are placed in the present. If the moment in time we are supposed to be inhabiting turns out to be a mere construction, the same is likely to be true of the self existing in that present.

Interesting point, but I don't think a moving dial and a flash of light is enough to convince anyone that the self does not exist.  However, this interpolation of events from the past, the story that we've retroactively assembled, is yet another example of samskara, the schema formed by our subconscious.  The Buddha taught that consciousness comes into being when we perceive the arising of schemata, and as consciousness is one of the essential element of a "self," the self is just another retroactively assembled story as subject to misinterpretation as the location of the arrow when the light flashes.

The neuroscientists who are conducting the time-lag and other psychophysical experiments would be better advised to investigate their own subjective experience of time and the self than to watch others look at flashing lights and spinning wheels.

Music's In the Ear of the Beholder

Writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik notes, "Of all the amazing things the mind does, the most amazing may be that it can take sound and turn it into meaning.  The rest of the double leaps the mind makes looks almost easy by comparison: we like pictures of babies at picnics in sunlight because, after all, in the world we like sunny days and chubby babies.  The stories we tell in literature are like the lies we tell in life.  But music is simply a set of physical vibrations that reach our eardrums; from those vibrations we make the emotional map of our lives" (Music To Your Ears, January 28, 2013). 

The sound of music against the vibrating membrane of the eardrum is instantly organized by the brain not just into a stream of passing information but into an "auditory scene," a kind of dimensional space in which sounds are instantly separated, streamed, and regimented.  As it turns out, Gopnik notes, the ear is a lot like what the Gestalt psychologists had found out years before about the eye - that it is a piece of the mind.  The ear creates aural figures and aural backgrounds the way the eye makes figures and ground.

We store musical information in our head and manipulate it and play around with it.  There seems to be two "systems" in the brain that respond to music. One is called veridical and responds to the pleasant sounds of the songs we already know. The other has been labeled sequential and anticipates the next note or harmonic move in an unfamiliar phrase of music. The sequential system is stimulated when music follows the logic of the notes or surprises us in some way that isn't merely arbitrary.

This has two interesting implications to me.  First, that music that we experience is not really created by the performer so much as by the listener, who decodes all of  the aural information entering the ears, synthesizes it, and reconstructs it as something called "music."  Two person's experience of the same musical passage may be completely different, depending on how their individual minds process it.  This is why some people can, say, love metal but hate opera, and vice versa.  

Second, this ability to create music in our mind is obviously based on our own individual experiences, which is why some foreign musics can sound so unfamiliar and, well, non-musical at first.  But as we start to develop some familiarity with new musics, we develop sets of mental templates of where notes should go, where they stop and start, and how the various lines are supposed to fit together.  This helps explain some of the camaraderie among devotees of particular genres of music - people who's minds can create enjoyable music out of the complexity of orchestral proceedings or the simplicity of a strummed guitar have similar templates and likely similar past experiences, and are probably more likely to be compatible on a social or personal level than those with different sets of templates.

These mental templates, acquired during our lifetime of experience, are of course samskara, our mental formations, the "mental maps" of Erich Fromm.  The Buddha recognized samskara as one of the aggregates that constituted the ego-self, as well as the necessary condition for the arising of ego-consciousness.  As it turns out, they also are why we humans can hear and appreciate music while all other animals seem to regard our precious and beloved music as mere noise, with the possible exception of whales, whose music sounds so strange and foreign to our human ear-minds, as human and cetacean samskara must be quite different (if the latter even exists at all).

I have often asserted that all music, without exception, is a direct expression of the buddha-dharma.  With this new understanding, this statement now seems more true than ever.

Mental Maps

"The poetic observation often attributed to French writer Anaïs Nin that 'we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are' is precisely what scientists now confirm experimentally: For human beings there is no unfiltered reality.  We are creatures of the mind who interpret experience through a largely unconscious mental map made up of the big ideas orienting our lives.  Philosopher Erich Fromm called it our 'frame of orientation,' through which we see what we expect to see. So, while we often hear that 'seeing is believing,' actually believing is seeing."

So writes noted environmentalist Frances Moore Lappé in her book, Eco-Mind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want.  She is, of course, referring to our subconscious schema, what the Buddha called samskara.   The Buddha taught that the products of samskara include human consciousness itself, and that samskara arises out of ignorance, that is, without our knowing it.  

In his book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm states, "Man's capacity for self-awareness, reason, and imagination - new qualities that go beyond the capacity for instrumental thinking of even the cleverest animals - requires a picture of the world and of his place in it that is structured and has inner cohesion.  Man needs a map of his natural and social world, without which he would be confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently.  He would have no way of orienting himself and for finding for himself a fixed point that permits him to organize all the impressions that impinge upon him." 

Thus stated, Fromm illuminates the difficult-to-understand link in the Buddha's Chain of Dependent Origination between samskara, often translated as "mental formations," and consciousness.  The mental formations of samskara include this structured and cohesive map of our natural and social worlds, and this conceptual map not only describes the contours and topography of the external world, but by conceiving that such a thing as an external world can exist, it thereby assumes an internal world that stands in opposition to that which is external.  As Lappé explains, our frame of orientation shapes not only how we perceive our place in the universe but also our own nature.  Thus, our mental map, samskara, give rise to self awareness, to human consciousness.

Fromm illustrates how samskara arises without our knowing it by discussing those individuals who "disclaim having any such overall picture and believe that he responds to the various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as his judgement guides him.  But it can be easily demonstrated that he takes his own philosophy for granted, because to him it is only common sense, and he is unaware that all his concepts rest upon a commonly accepted frame of reference.  When such a person is confronted with a fundamentally different total view of life he judges it as 'crazy' or 'irrational' or 'childish,' while he considers himself as being only logical."   Even bright people clung to an earth-as-the-center-of-the-universe worldview for 150 years after Copernicus showed that, no, the earth is not at the center, we revolve around the sun.

Once we see through a certain lens, it's hard to perceive things differently, be they the most mundane matters of the most momentous.  "I first grasped the huge import of this trait," Lappé writes, "when, as a college senior, I was assigned Thomas Kuhn's classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  In it, Kuhn shows how difficult it is for humans to shed a reigning mental map."  

The hard fact of human existence is that if our mental frame is flawed, we'll fail no matter how hard and sincerely we struggle.