‘Just try to keep your eyeballs nice and still,’ the therapist says politely.
I cannot see her because my eyelids are closed. Her voice is soft and I try not to imagine her judging me from across the room. Look at this idiot, can’t even keep his eyeballs still.
I am wearing a tight blue cap on my head with more than a dozen electrodes pressing into my skull. A series of wires, in the colours of the rainbow and running side by side in a flat cord, extend from the base of the cap to a strange box before being sent to a computer – her computer.
‘Try and keep your eyeballs nice and still,’ she coos again. I don’t say anything out loud to her because I am trying to be a model participant, but I do think: how the fuck am I meant to keep my eyes from moving? They’re closed. I think I’m staring straight ahead but, really, I’m not sure. When she reminds me, I get nervous again and my eyes start darting all over the place behind my lids, like they would during vivid dreams.
Also, I wish she’d stop calling them eyeballs. It gives me the shivers.
She can probably see my unease because, at this precise moment, my brain waves are being sent raw to her display and she is, quite literally, getting a glimpse of my machinery. Mentally, I am undressed. Is this how motorbikes feel when you strip them for parts?
It’s not good news that I cannot control my eyes, partly because I like passing tests, but mostly because of the reason we are here at all.
We are going to try to fix my brain. Keep eyes still, fail, move on to overhauling the entire architecture of the mind. Good luck!
For most of my life, my brain has been a distressing combination of desperately misguided optimism and highly specialised deficit-discovery machine. Balancing these two opposing programs meant a continuing invitation to confusion and despair.
The thing that still causes me friction is that I had been writing about trauma and its effects through the generations since 2017 without ever really considering that I might be a sufferer of trauma myself. I didn’t want to be a candidate, but I did need to know what was causing my earth-splitting nervous breakdowns. Was this just garden variety anxiety and depression?
I have a friend who, with his flair for the dramatic, once told me that he kept going to the doctor thinking he had cancer, and each time he was told nothing was wrong he felt like he’d failed an audition on the X Factor.
‘And the doctor was like, “Sorry it’s not cancer this time; better luck next year,”’ he said with mock resignation.
We laughed darkly when he told me this as a joke, but deep down I felt the same ripple of disappointment with each new psychologist and each new GP. Not a single one ever suggested something more powerful was at play. Their answers to my problems seemed so skinny and insubstantial.
After my first book, One Hundred Years of Dirt, was published I joined the writers’ festival circuit which, as I understood it at the time, was a lot like the V8 supercars championship but with more syllables.
That is how I described it to my family who, though they loved me very much, thought it absurd that anybody would pay to listen to me talk about anything. They weren’t wrong, either. But some good did come from the experience.
At the Newcastle Writers’ Festival I was a panelist in a discussion about trauma. We were in the Playhouse Theatre and I was off in my head, scanning the steep-tiered seating for faces in the crowd. Any faces, really. I like to remind myself that this is a real thing with real people in the audience and, for reasons entirely inscrutable, they have chosen to come and hear us speak.
I was sitting beside writer and poet Dr Meera Atkinson, who began reading from her book Traumata.
‘My body is at the ready for flight. I can’t switch my nervous system off. It scans and calculates tirelessly, antennae out for threats,’ Atkinson read aloud. ‘The body remembers.’
She then described the results of a report titled ‘The Neuroscience of Traumatic Memory’ in which the authors Bessel van der Kolk and Ruth Buczynski studied the brains of traumatised people. They found that the thalamus malfunctions, resulting in people remembering sensations and images of the original traumatic event but not in context. ‘Apparently, the brain forms maps of territories marked dangerous and safe. The brain of an abused child can become wired to believe, “I’m a person to whom terrible things happen, and I’d better be on the alert for who’s going to hurt me now.”’
I was still making a catalogue of the people in the room while Dr Atkinson read her passage. It was fun to imagine at least one member of the audience had stumbled into the wrong theatre and I was trying to guess which one. Usually the crowd has a certain look: like they want something profound and brilliant and will eat you if you fail to provide it. There are always some who make notes throughout the session, like all my psychologists did. Ah yes, they seemed to write, this one is a difficult case.
Atkinson continued reading.
This [alarm] can’t be fixed by talking about the event in the past, which is not in the past at all, but in the present, in the very sensations of the now.
In much the same way, I can still remember the shape of the sensation I felt right then on that stage when that line was breathed into the theatre. There was clarity in the air, an electric yearning for calm finally earned.
Trauma. It was trauma. I didn’t just have anxiety and depression, though I did indeed have these things. Nor was my memory as exceptional as I believed it to be. The reason I had great recall, at least some of the time, was not because I was gifted. It was because I had been hurt. My body and mind needed these reminders to ‘protect’ me.
I was not just a boy with painful memories, I was an abused boy with a post-traumatic response that followed me like an unmuzzled dog into adulthood, growling at my heels when the imagery and provocations of those doom-filled childhood moments were triggered again.
Atkinson’s simple explanation of trauma as something that lives – it is not merely remembered, it is reanimated – described what had been happening to me for years now. Those flashbacks of my dad kissing the nineteen-year-old governess, the white-hot fear in my chest on the 1000-square-kilometre cattle station when that seven-year-old boy felt so alone. A world of bones can live in that sense of isolation, can make themselves at home in your desolation. And they rattle and rattle for the rest of your days. Sometimes they clatter so hard they knock you right out of yourself. Dissociation, doctors call it. A phrase I had not yet come across and yet had lived.
‘It’s no accident. Evolution doesn’t allow accidents,’ Dr Roger Gurr tells me later from his office in western Sydney. Gurr is the clinical director of the Youth Early Psychosis program for the Australian government headspace centres. He’s also a trauma specialist who has directed mental health services for a region of Sydney with 1.8 million people.
I’m cheating, somewhat, because Gurr is not my therapist. Our interview is for a piece I am writing about mental health reform in Australia. My interest is deeply personal and I steer the conversation to the things about which I was learning.
He explains that dissociation is when the brain literally rewires itself to help a person, typically a child at onset, avoid the worst of the physical, sexual or emotional threats while they are experiencing them. This then becomes a permanent part of the mind’s hardware as paths between different parts of the brain become fat with habit.
Trauma is the thing that happens to us. Sometimes just once, as in a major accident, or repeatedly as is often the case with complex PTSD. The response we form to this moment or moments, however, is ongoing. The body becomes thick with the weeds of it.
‘Because a lot of the [onset of] trauma happens by three, a person cannot give you a language story about what happened to them,’ Gurr says. ‘The evidence is that your brain just moves all your resources to recognising the threat, running away, fighting or, worst case, playing dead and disassociating. You don’t need language for any of that, so people don’t lay down any language memory.’
No language, no story that makes sense.
It helps now to know what happened back then, right in the fleshy middle of my head. It started with the amygdala, a nub of the brain about the size of a walnut. (I didn’t know how big a walnut was when I first read about this but struggled to find other foodstuffs of equivalent size. The amygdala is bigger than a grape, for instance, but smaller than a peach. Perhaps a touch smaller than a golf ball. Honestly, you’ll probably have to look it up.)
Amygdalae are so old, evolutionarily speaking, that almost every animal that has lived on this earth has one. Given this, it won’t be a surprise to learn this little structure in the brain is our most primitive. It’s not here to help us read Proust, in other words.
‘The amygdala controls the different parts of the cortex that need to be involved in fight or flight,’ Gurr says. ‘And so people with trauma have superhighways between the amygdala and those bits of the brain. So if the amygdala decides you are going to have to freeze and play dead, it switches to stimulating the parts of the cortex that deal with anaesthesia for pain and other things to help you survive that situation.’
When you begin to understand the processes that happen in the background, the illusion of control fades away. The point is not that we are incapable of being aware of these system mechanics, but that we almost never are aware, even when we think we are paying attention.
I find, even as I sit at my laptop in my apartment in Sydney, that the words I am writing seem to come from somewhere in my mind, though it is never a place I truly have access to. Sure, it’s a useful illusion to think that I can pause and conjure the right phrases, but if I really interrogate that thought, they too seem to spring from some place totally ineffable. There is always a layer beyond which I cannot penetrate.
Try it with your own thoughts, right now. Can you pin them down?
It’s not magic; it’s just the circuitry in the brain doing what it has evolved to do. And so it was with the responses to my trauma. I never decided what to do in that moment I watched my family slip away from me, but my brain did. It kept the worst moments as warning signs for later – the amygdala determines which memories are ‘emotionally significant’, which allows them to become particularly stable and vivid – and deleted the rest. These memories are like high-resolution photos of some distant galaxy, all shiny detail in a vast field of black. To endure the rest of those weeks, the end-to-end pain of it all, my mind shut down. I left myself so often throughout the ordeal that, in sum, the events feel like they happened to somebody else.
That’s the trauma survival plan.
And it worked that first day, so the brain tried it again. And again and again.
By the time a traumatised child reaches adolescence, these responses are well-worn pathways, like the smooth grooves in the concrete steps of ancient cathedrals.
And then the brain has a resources meeting with itself.
Here’s the kicker: despite youthful protestations, we are not born knowing everything. We are born with a series of baseline equations in our heads. If X, then Y. If hot, hands burn. If aggressive, probably dangerous. If cute, needs protection. As children grow, information based on their experience is plugged into these equations so that they can populate a map of how the world works for them. Everyone is different, to a really fantastical degree, which is why we are born with the directions and not the destination.
The problem is, early on, our brains don’t exactly know what information will be useful and what information is misleading or redundant.
When we mutate into teenagers, our brains stop growing indiscriminately and begin a process of culling. Your 1.3-kilogram skull-bound nerve centre was Marie Kondo-ing itself before Netflix ever commissioned the special, and this is significant for the traumatised mind and its coping mechanisms.
‘The problem comes because the child’s brain gets changed to help it in the toxic environment until puberty and then actually the brain changes, because it is programmed to change,’ Gurr says. ‘Now the brain is going to stop growing and it is going to be pruned for efficiency . . . and that can actually exacerbate the problems.’
In short, the brain ignores the neural connections that are of least use and preserves those that have been of great service so that they can be enlisted for the grand expanse of the rest of our lives. Playing dead, disassociation, the surging adrenaline and panic that once accompanied those terrifying childhood experiences come with us into adulthood, even if those toxic environments are left behind.
Remember those memories stored as warning signs we discussed earlier? This is where they come back into play. When a person later encounters particular triggers for their trauma the body’s emergency system is activated. For some people, it might be a smell or sound – the cologne and voice of an attacker – or something visual, like the stylings of a living room. In my case it was a set of circumstances; men I love platonically shifting their affections.
When we talk about not having a language for our trauma, this is what we mean. The cues are subtle and they are picked up in the subconscious. It’s not like a person smells a specific perfume and thinks to themselves: That’s right, this is the precise smell of the man who attacked me and even though I have no reason to believe the person wearing this cologne that I am smelling right now will harm me, I had better launch into an uncontrollable panic.
Your brain thinks it is doing you a favour.
This was what I had come to unlearn, at the ripe age of thirty-two, at the hospital-white clinic in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. This neurofeedback clinic was more calming than the first one I’d tried just a few weeks earlier, which did not look at all like the brain-science future I had imagined.
That one was in a low-rise brick house in Sydney’s west, filled with dark-panelled secondhand furniture; the therapist sat behind a large desk next to some cabinets. There was also an occasional chair to the side of the desk, upholstered in mustard-brown-yellow fabric that was the colour despair would be if the person viewing it had synaesthesia.
I did not like that clinic, not because it wasn’t any good but because I desperately needed to believe this process would work, and part of that charade, if that’s what it all was, clung quite heavily to the decor. I wanted it to be more . . . space-like. Some things just need to be a certain way, psychologically.
For example, I want my aircraft pilots to have important sounding names, like Chesley Sullenberger III, who landed that Airbus A320 on a river and kept all 155 people alive. Once you know his name, you realise there was no other way that incident could have unfolded.
Now imagine the pilot’s name was Darren.
I don’t want the world to be this way, it just is – for me, at least. This is one of a suite of shortcuts my brain uses to tell itself – and me – that things will be OK without expending too much energy, without really knowing if things are going to be alright.
Like when your parents tell you there is nothing to be afraid of in the dark when, statistically speaking, the same frightening world you experienced during the day still exists at night, except this time the lights are out.
Still, give me the soothing platitudes, please. That desire is insulation against the world.
Usually when I walk into a therapist’s office it is in a moment of deep personal crisis, an episode of trauma that has fired buckshot into every important element of my life so that I am not simply nervous but scarcely able to speak. This time I was visiting a neurofeedback clinic, though, so it was more exciting than anxiety-inducing. I am fascinated by the human brain, which, as far as we know, is the most complicated thing to ever exist in the universe. It has been noted that the brain is the universe’s way of trying to understand itself. In my case, I was hoping it could help me by sorting itself out, with a little nudge here and there.
Broadly speaking, there are four types of waves – Delta, Theta, Alpha and Beta – produced by the electric hum of our brains. In a perfect world, these are in balance and help us perform at our peak. Delta waves, for example, are common in the final stages of sleep and almost exclusively present in the brain during the so-called ‘deep sleep’ stage. Too much Delta while awake, however, can overload the mind, making it difficult to concentrate or perform daily activities consciously. It’s a similar story for Theta waves, a feature of daydreaming. Alpha frequencies characterise the resting state of the brain and, finally, Beta is a ‘fast-wave’ produced during consciousness or when our attention is focused on a task.
These waves are just building blocks, of course, and the combination of patterns in different regions, too much or too little, can create all manner of internal noise. There is no one perfect set-up, but it is usually obvious if parts of the brain or its output are dysregulated. It is these out-of-whack murmurs that are picked up by the electrical sensors during neurofeedback.
In many trauma brains, for example, the feedback through the sensors is chaotic and severely out of balance, as various portions of the hardware work overtime to surveil the environment for threats.
Our work, then, is to find the frequencies that are out of order, wherever in the brain they may be, and teach the brain to push them back within a normal range.
There is no quick zap. Ideally, I will have forty sessions over the course of a year as the therapist prods and nudges the electrical signals in my head. All I have to do is turn up, very much a bit-player in this exercise.
The endpoint of neurofeedback, we hope, is that the therapist will have to manipulate the brainwaves less and less and guide the behaviour of the ‘bad’ ones less often, until eventually the brain just accepts this new way of doing business and carries on without any external help.
One of the games I’ll play, the therapist tells me, is Pac-Man. ‘Play’ seems a generous assessment. I’m about to be attached to her computer via the electrodes on my skull. There is no other game controller. Nothing for my hands to do. In fact, I try to keep them still like my eyeballs in case the movement ruins my chance of victory.
All I have to do is watch.
‘It’ll take a bit of getting used to because he’ll only move when the brain is doing what we want it to,’ she says. ‘You’ll think that you can make Pac-Man move yourself, but you can’t. It’s something your brain has to figure out. It’ll start to realise what makes the Pac-Man go and then do more of that, because you both want to see the Pac-Man go.’
Both. Both of us. Me and my brain.
How easily the therapist and I slipped into the language of the two selves: the part of me that believes itself to be in control versus the operations-centre in my head that actually is.
The therapist dabs little dollops of ten20 conductive cream onto both my earlobes and a little patch of my scalp, right by the double crown in my hairline that makes a cyclone of my follicles. The cream is cold and contains within it the frisson of new adventure. What might the scan uncover, I wonder. Long forgotten ATM PINs? The vestigial background hum of the Neighbours opening credits? The precise frequency of my own happiness?
The little electrodes are attached, and we begin.
There are less frustrating ways to spend fifteen minutes. You could untangle tinsel for the Christmas tree, for example. Or attempt to teach a bunch of third-graders how to do quadratic equations. In each case, you would have more agency in the exercise.
With Pac-Man, I had none.
We started out fine, I guess, but very quickly the scenario devolved into one where the off-brand yellow dude froze repeatedly and turned black. The therapist was right, there was nothing I could do about it. I tried different tactics, like focusing my attention as specifically as I could on the little yellow monster.
Didn’t work.
So then I tried not paying attention to him at all, as if I were hoping to catch the reflection of a shy ghost in a mirror. This seemed to work very briefly before Pac-Man entered his longest, most sustained freeze yet.
I tried looking at him but not thinking about him, and vice versa. Blinking really fast did nothing to change the score, nor sneezing (accidental), nor the repeated internal monologue barking at Pac-Man to ‘move, goddamn it, you yellow fucking fuck’ (deliberate).
During one session I experienced an unbidden erection, which I felt for sure would have derailed any progress made by the munching yellow circle, but this, instead, coincided with the most prolonged stretch of unobstructed movement.
Every time Pac-Man ate one of the little pills, the computer beeped loudly, an auditory cue that quickly became a symbol of success. Both my brain and I wanted to hear the beeps. We wanted to hear Britney Spears’s hit single ‘Toxic’ and we wanted to hear our fathers say they loved us and, above all in these sessions, we wanted to hear the beeps.
But again, and I cannot stress this enough, I was just a spectator in this mission.
For the first time in my existence the usual order of things was exposed totally for me to see. I was conscious that my consciousness was not enough to fix the machinery of my brain, which was calling the shots and, frankly, being a bit of a dick about it.
Sit with that understanding for just a minute, please.
We spend our waking hours operating under the very convincing assumption that we are the masters of our own domain. We are not. You may think you have palmed off the boring, repetitive work of existence (like breathing or operating your arms) to the brain so that you can focus on more important things (like asking someone out or doing your job), but in reality it is the other way around.
Your brain has given you a modicum of control, much of it illusory anyhow, to keep you from messing things up. Most of the time, you are neither needed nor wanted.
Neurofeedback, then, is a way of turning up to a debate against yourself and making sure you lose.
This is what the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, did, after a fashion. Over a period of nine years, the French thinker engaged in a program of ‘systematic doubt’, which involved ‘uprooting from my mind any errors which might previously have slipped into it’. It was his own dreams that led him to the conclusion that even the existence of the world itself can be called into question. It makes sense when you really stop and consider the limited physical range of the brain. Unless you’ve had cranial surgery, that lump of grey flesh has never – not for a single moment in your entire life – seen the outside world. And yet, from that realm of total darkness behind your face, it has told you what the universe looks, feels, tastes, sounds and smells like.
If you suspect your brain has been lying to you, as Descartes did, good luck proving it wrong.
Descartes’s process of conjured doubt did, however, lead the seventeenth century philosopher to his most famous deduction: cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. After excluding everything else that could be a lie, he – whatever he was – was the only thing left that must be real, Descartes reasoned. He expanded on this later by imagining some ‘malicious demon’ with infinite power that had corrupted everything about the world. This demon could trick Descartes by turning every last road and shop, every other human and even his own hands and feet into an illusion. The mountains could be faked, the rivers too. And so might the sky and the earth beneath those sham feet, the sound of music (both the film and the sensation, I suppose) and the touch of one on another. It might all be the demon’s trickery. All of it, except us.
Put it this way: if you can be aware that the demon has deceived you, then you are real. I am thinking, therefore I exist. Crucially, Descartes didn’t see any need for the body in this equation. It could be illusory, too. He was only certain of his thoughts; that it felt like something to be him, the little driver behind his eyes.
We are all instinctive dualists – the Cartesian model proposed by our man Descartes – and remain so because we cannot today explain where our consciousness comes from.
During the worst of my successive mental breakdowns, beginning in 2014, I would catch myself in the mirror and not recognise the man staring back at me. Sure, he had my body, but if Descartes taught me anything, this was of little comfort. I moved and studied the way the reflection moved with me – of me but not quite me. Who indeed was running the show?
It wasn’t until my life became disjointed by the whiplash of coming in and out of nervous breakdowns that I began to catch the details usually hidden from us by our own minds; not everything you think you saw, not everything you think you felt or heard or witnessed ever happened.
Months of being fed objectively unbelievable lies by my brain, which were so powerfully spun that I believed them anyway (such is the root of mental illness), were followed by patches of stunning clarity. The latter forced me to confront the mastery of the mind when it comes to deception. My brain – and yours – has everything it needs to completely upend our realities.
There are some who interpret Descartes’s nine-year doubt spiral as a prolonged episode of mental illness, while others, quite generously, call it a sort of philosophical awakening. To butcher that old idiom, you don’t have to be mad to start questioning the nature of your own reality, but it certainly helps.
Whatever it is we imagine we are – our mind or thoughts or spirit – we do tend to agree that this intangible entity sits just behind our face; like a little tractor driver in his climate-controlled cabin. When we imagine ourselves steering the good ship Me or You, it is never from behind the knee, for example. Nor do we picture our spirit hovering behind our groins, although I confess to believing this to be partly true during high school.
This is instinct.
Evidence of rudimentary ‘surgeries’ that tapped into the human skull can be found as far back as 7000 BC – thousands of craniums punctured with clean holes, some of which showed signs of healing. It’s called ‘trepanning’ which, I’ll admit, makes the procedure sound more fun than it is. Trepanation, in this manner, seems to have been conducted to treat head wounds or signs of neurological trauma, and the holes have been discovered in various locations around the skull, supporting this theory.
The plot thickened after researchers discovered a total of twelve skulls from a handful of different sites all within a fifty-kilometre radius of each other in the Rostov-on-Don region in southern Russia. These skulls were extremely rare because they all contained trepanation holes high and at the back of the cranium (at the obelion, keen students), which is a point of extremely high blood flow.
Boring a hole in that location is, in other words, considerably dangerous. It would have led to almost certain death. These specimens showed no signs of brain injury or disease – though such conditions do not always leave traces on the skull – so it raises the question: what, precisely, were our ancestors looking for in those holes?
It’s possible, researchers say, they were looking for our selves. Or themselves.
Ritualistic trepanation may have been a way to release the bad ‘energy’ of mental illness, a term that would not be invented for another few thousand years. They drilled holes in the head because the basic intuition of our forebears was that we could be found in there, for better or worse.
Trepanation is our ancestors’ attempt at neurofeedback. Our understanding has not come a long way since.
While in many ways I am writing this book from the comfort of having at least figured out the basic outline of what is happening in the gears of my mind, I still haven’t ‘fixed’ the underlying issues.
True, I am at a point of stability I haven’t felt in over a decade; but part of that, I know, is that I am in between trigger points. The sense of abandonment that sinks into me like sharp stones when I form close attachments to male figures in my life – friends, mostly – comes and goes depending on the imprecise alchemy of how I form those attachments. Currently, I have no such relationships that are so overpowering that the feared retreat of a man I have come to love would bring me undone. But I have had five or six of them over the past years and I’ve no idea if there will be more, or when. Worse, I’ve no idea whether my handling of that trauma response – which flicks on inside myself like a doomsday switch – has improved.
I want to improve it.
The very idea that consciousness – and with it, notions of free will – is so nebulous and vanishingly weak in comparison to the more assertive unconscious operation of our brains has run up against my studied instincts of optimism.
But does any of this self-aware searching actually matter? Does it re-code an ounce of my brain or overthrow the dictator in my own skull? So far I have not been able to regain control. My awareness, like the area covered by a sweeping searchlight, has extended only so far as to reveal the approximate volume of the stuff about which I am conscious but not actually in control of. I am aware of the extent of the operation of myself that runs far beneath the surface of my understanding but it is not mine to command.
One of the most common types of dream is the one where you know you need to run to escape some fast approaching danger but your legs won’t move. You sense the total urgency of the moment, you beg your legs to work but you remain stuck. Or, somehow worse, you may manage a single, painstakingly slow step before having to focus all your might and attention on the next leg. All the while the thing that threatens you bears down.
We hate this dream because it severs our minds from our bodies. Yet, in our waking state, few of us comprehend just how detached our minds are from our brains.
This mental blockage was on – or in, I suppose – my own mind when I flew to New York in March 2020 to have what turned out to be a brain-bending chat with the philosopher David Chalmers in his office at New York University.
Chalmers has been described as a ‘rock star’ of the field, and his appearance, when he arrives at his office on a rainy Tuesday in early March, does nothing to dissuade me of this. His once long, flowing grey hair has been restrained somewhat to a shaggy crop of silver that stops before his neck. He’s dressed almost entirely in black and grey and he has an easy smile.
If a wizard from some magical realm who speaks only in riddles was transported to modern New York and had to try and blend in, he would look and act a lot like David Chalmers.
The riddles are not deliberate, it’s just that he specialises in what has become known as the ‘hard problem’ – a term he coined in 1995 – of consciousness. Which is: where the fuck does consciousness come from? The easy problem, by inference, is not really easy as much as it is knowable. How the brain processes data (like visual inputs and sound) and which areas approximately run which parts of the body or thought, are things we have figured out and are still working on.
But answering any of those ‘easy’ bits will still tell us nothing about why it feels like something to be us.
‘The point of this book,’ I explained to Chalmers, ‘is, I guess, I’m trying to take control of some of this stuff now and yet I wonder how useful that might actually be. Because I feel like life got better once I became more aware of what was going on. And I think that helps, but I’m not sure whether that in itself is a solution.’
Chalmers was curious.
‘You acquired a theory of yourself,’ he said. ‘That’s quite interesting. A lot of people think that the only way we really access our minds is by theories and models of ourselves. The same way we model other people.’
There is a school of thought – illusionism – that maintains consciousness itself will never be explained because it is not real. It’s just a story our brains spin to cover the biomechanical systems that underpin everything we do. Chalmers is not totally convinced of this, but conceded it is something that should be taken ‘seriously, philosophically’.
‘People have done various things to soften us up about the idea that introspection is not that reliable in many ways,’ Chalmers said. ‘We’ve been wrong about our consciousness. Typically, we might think we have a fully detailed visual field experience of the world, like a picture, but vision scientists themselves have told us that is not so. We only really get details of what we’re attending to. Everything else is just big blobs. But somehow introspection makes us think that we’re conscious of more than we are.’
In the now classic split-brain experiments conducted by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga in the late 1950s and early 1960s, people whose corpus callosum had already been severed to treat otherwise incurable epilepsy were drafted to study what happens when the left and right hemispheres of a brain can no longer talk to each other. The corpus callosum is a bundle of nerve fibres that acts as an enormous information interchange between the two halves that typically process different kinds of information, like visual cues and language.
In some versions of the experiments, patients were shown mood-altering commands such as ‘smile’ and ‘laugh’ written on cards that could only be seen through the left eye. Such visual cues like these, viewed from the left, are processed in the right hemisphere of the brain. This is a crucial point to understand because the right hemisphere has some basic language abilities – it appears to do OK at recognising the names of things, like ‘pencil’, but falls apart when the words are verbs, commands or contain more complicated grammar – but not quite enough to fill in the gaps, at least in the first year or so after a person’s brain is cut in two.
When subjects were shown the words ‘smile’ and ‘laugh’ through their left eyes, they did in fact smile and laugh. But here’s the mind-boggling fact: they could not explain why they did. As far as their right brain, which processed the signal, was concerned, it followed the command. But the complex language centre in the left brain was completely in the dark.
When asked why they just smiled or laughed immediately after being shown the written commands in their left eye, the subjects concocted a story that bore no resemblance to reality. It was a case of the left brain improvising on the fly to find a coherent narrative in the absence of all the information.
In another experimental set-up, a seated person was shown a written command through only their left eye to stand up. Researchers wanted to see whether the command registered at all and, if it did, whether the person could tell them about it. Remember, the signal would be processed in the right brain where language skills are inferior to the left hemisphere. Would the right side follow the command and leave the left hemisphere to concoct a story?
So it was.
The person in the experiment stood up. The instruction registered somewhere in their brain even though they had no conscious awareness of that happening. And they followed the instruction.
The person had no idea why they did this. When asked to give a possible explanation, their brain improvised a narrative that simply wasn’t true.
‘I needed to stretch,’ the subject said.
Chalmers knows this experiment, of course.
‘You know, the brain is very good at fooling itself,’ he offered when I mentioned it.
Given all of this – the subject stands without knowing they have been told to, the Pac-Man moves without my direct input, we have braked in the traffic jam before we knew we needed to – what is the point of being conscious at all?
‘Well, it’s one of the big questions,’ Chalmers said. ‘What role does it actually play? No one has really found an essential role for anything you might want consciousness to do. It’s very unclear why you need it.’
This isn’t just some theoretical fox-hunt. These are very real questions with very real implications. Chalmers himself is a mathematician by training and neuroscientists have spent the last few decades trying in earnest to answer this same question.
And then there is me, this kid who grew up with a brain that has both rescued and tortured him. I long to know what might have been different; how things might still be different if the knot between brain and mind can be untangled just a little.
I mentioned some of this to an acquaintance when they asked what I was working on and they chirped in response: ‘Oh, so you’re writing a self-help book?’
After extinguishing my cigarette in the ashtray at the bar, I gathered myself in response. ‘Look at me!’ I cast my arms across my body, like a used car salesman revealing a 1995 panel van for sale. ‘I am not a self-help kind of guy.’
Yes, sure, I was trying to help myself, but I don’t really have any answers. Have you ever paid $400 to go to a seminar with a positive life coach only for them to yell at the crowd: ‘I’ve no idea what I am doing!’
Of course not.
(I’ve seen those self-help gurus and personal advertisements for the power of light-filled thinking or mindfulness. Smiling like their teeth are on fire, their lips having fled in opposite directions to freedom. I’d have to lose at least twenty kilograms just to be even faintly believable in the role and, besides, I never quite believed that they believed it. The stereotypical self-help success story strikes me as someone who is barely outpacing their own troubles, having decided they cannot be brought down if they just keep smiling and running and hula-hooping or whatever it is that they do now.)
My next session of neurofeedback is a wellspring of positivity. I’m shown a series of pictures on screen that reveal themselves square by square with a satisfying beep as each image begins to take shape. My brain wants the whole image. It is a greedy hedonist for the cute animal photos and landscapes.
There is a cheetah mum with five cubs lined up in a neat row behind her, their lithe frames stood atop the gentle rising curve of a tree on an open savannah. There is a photograph of three labradors – a chocolate, a yellow and a black one – side by side, grinning stupidly as if they were waiting for the encore at a community theatre production of Cats. There are photographs of regal elephants, tiny kittens, flamingoes, a grizzly bear on the top of a grassy knoll. There are snow-covered chalets and vistas of open fields, prairies and meadows, ravines and rainforests. It is as if all the motivational posters from the internet decided to hold a convention, at which I was the sole guest in attendance. They were beautiful and funny and I watched them slowly appear over half an hour, while the sensors on my earlobes and scalp sent signals back to the therapist’s computer.
Novelist Vladimir Nabokov was in awe at the ‘marvel of consciousness’; when asked in an interview for Saturday Review in 1976 what surprised him most in life, that’s what he gave as his answer. He called it ‘that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being’. Part of me expected to see such a vista in the neurofeedback program, a clue that something deeper was at work.
Sorting illusion from genuine advancements of the self prove difficult.
A week before I flew to New York to meet David Chalmers, a group of scientists published a stunning paper in the scientific journal Neuron in which they reported reanimating anaesthetised macaques near instantly with a tiny jolt of electricity deep inside their brains.
The monkeys went from being deeply, wholly sedated to waking up, looking around the room and reaching out within seconds of having their central lateral thalamus and the buried layers of their cerebral cortex stimulated. As the electrical stimulus stopped, the monkeys fell back into that total state of anaesthesia.
I was thinking about this exact study later in the year when I underwent surgery, the first time I had experienced general anaesthetic as an adult. Apart from my horror at the process of going under itself, one of the last things I remember thinking is how mad I’d be if anyone dared stimulate my central lateral thalamus.
The Neuron study is a mind-blowing development, though it is difficult to know what it means. The paper’s co-author Michelle Redinbaugh from the University of Wisconsin told the website Inverse that the networking between these parts of the brain may indeed operate as the ‘engine of consciousness’.
When I discussed it with Chalmers, he said he felt the discovery might be scientifically incremental.
‘Who’s to say about these creatures that wake up. Is it also possible that it’s a wakeful state, not a conscious state?’ he asked.
Chalmers said we can be conscious during sleep – while we dream, for example.
This raises another possibility for the evolution of consciousness: that we needed it for language, to tell ourselves and other people stories about how we are feeling, doing and creating.
The writer Cormac McCarthy, who has taken a special interest in such matters, wrote in Nautilus magazine that language is almost like a virus and infiltrated our species with a ruthless efficiency that natural selection couldn’t hope to achieve. It simply arrived and commandeered the parts of the human brain that were the least busy.
His thesis, backed by scientific minds like those of evolutionary biologist David Krakauer, is that our unconscious was perfectly happy running the show for two million odd years before language showed up. That would explain why it still talks to us today in pictures and broad concepts – not words – and why we often have no idea what the hell is going on back there.
The subconscious is like an artist’s inspiration, which might encourage the painting of a particular scene without any specific directive. Of course, like the subjects in the split-brain experiments, we can come up with a story later but it is just that, a story.
Language arrived well after our brains were built. We were not prepared for it and, in many ways, the subconscious has refused to adapt. ‘The picture-story mode of presentation favored by the unconscious has the appeal of its simple utility. A picture can be recalled in its entirety whereas an essay cannot,’ McCarthy says.
Take the condition known as trypophobia. While technically not a phobia, it is real – I have it – and it is born of a fear or disgust of closely packed holes. I can’t tell you why these images make me recoil in horror, though researchers believe it is because of our ancient past. In the animal and plant kingdom, species with actual holes like this in their foliage or patterned on to their skin could be fatally poisonous. Before words could name the things, our unconscious mind had to find a way to keep us safe.
It did so using patterns.
McCarthy goes on to say that the facts of the world come to us as just that, facts, and that it is we who have to put them into narrative form. ‘The simple understanding that one thing can be another thing is at the root of all things of our doing.’
Language, he means to say, is the engine that propels abstract thinking, which in turn is the driver of human ingenuity. Were it not for language, our internal world would have remained a very small and unimaginative thing.
In addition to unlocking creativity, the simple existence of language – spoken or otherwise – gave humanity a way to carry success, and memories of failure, through the generations. Language is the ability to ‘save’ your progress while playing a video game, rather than starting at the very beginning after each death.
I think this was patently a brilliant move for our collective success at civilisation – we established crops and then cities, harnessed forces to achieve heavier-than-air flight, put a man on the moon (but not a woman) and cured entire diseases – but it left something of a disjoint within ourselves.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett, something of an ideological nemesis to Chalmers, agrees with Cormac McCarthy’s theory of the language super boost. He concurs that language hit us in the blink of an eye, too fast for Darwinian evolution to have orchestrated the change, and our brains have been trying to catch up ever since.
But it is this language that has played the role of out-of-body DNA, something that can be mutated and adapted at will to fit the world around us as it changes by our own hand. A useful discovery, certainly, but I wonder what happens when this precise grammatical and syntactical scaffold meets the amorphous nature of our subterranean mind.
It strikes me that this cognitive two-step was at least partly to blame for the apparent success, and then the stunting of, my therapeutic pursuit to get better. Putting what happened to me into a clear narrative provided an awareness not previously available to me about what had gone wrong. I used the front part of my brain for that, where higher order thinking is established. But after a certain point all my talk, that constant push for meaning from language, runs up against the ancient mode of the unconscious that has been using its preferred method of insight since well before the existence of words.
Just think about it.
The mere fact that I am here now, writing these words, is the result of some ancestor tens of thousands of years ago finding a way to express in more detail beyond rudimentary grunts how he or she was feeling and then passing on the discovery. That allowed people to communicate and collaborate with one another in a manner so intricate and finely tuned that our species broke the bumbling and painfully slow cycle of Darwinian evolution. It was a jailbreak that secured not just our survival, but our emergence as the dominant species.
Lot of pressure not to fuck it up, if you ask me.
It’s a simple and well-established point. We tell stories of ourselves and about others and we do it because by now it has become a cultural imperative, the sinew that keeps our social species together, even if we no longer think of it that way. Our survival against the elements and the other animals depended on teamwork, and our teamwork became blazingly sharp when we learned to speak.
Language is the crack of light that fell across the darkness of our minds.
It did not, however, fall evenly.
There is a stream of trauma treatment called narrative exposure therapy where we coax people by themselves or in groups to give voice to one or more moments in their lives where they suffered greatly. The narrative slowly builds to include other events, even positive ones, so the person can establish their hurt as a single point on a very large canvas. Maybe it’s many points, though the effect is the same.
In their book Narrative Exposure Therapy, authors Maggie Schauer, Frank Neuner and Thomas Elbert write:
Trauma destroys the human kernel that resides in moments or acts that occur in a social context: communication, speech, autobiographical remembrance, dignity, peace and freedom.
Trauma isolates the survivor, alienates life, and indeed freezes the flow of one’s personal biography.
I like this theoretical approach and I think it has a lot of value, though I do not believe it alone is the answer.
Take my own story, for example.
It helped, oh how it helped, to assemble the fragments of my life into a thing with explanatory power. I spent the better part of a decade doing this, picking through the membrane that held my life together and identifying the way events and moments were connected. Most of it was like hacking through weeds, if I’m honest, but if you’ve been slack on the upkeep you have to move through the weeds to find the path.
And then the progress stopped. It wasn’t for lack of trying; it’s just an intractable reality when you come up against the two parts of ourselves. Introspection can lead us to the wall, and we may perhaps imagine what lies beyond it, but we do not easily control the unconscious, if at all.
How damaging to be the creature that invented language, lost to the fear network.
Consciousness is the slow drip of a leak from a dam wall, hoarding the total reservoir of our brain’s processes behind it in a lake. We cannot see the lake, though we know it exists and every drop of awareness that has ever been visited upon us has sprung from that vast body of water.
Around the year 627, the Venerable Bede wrote The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, an account of Northumbria’s King Edwin seeking advice from his counsellors on conversion to Christianity. One of his men compares the life of a single human being to a sparrow that has flown in one window of the king’s banquet hall and out another:
While [the sparrow] is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.
Consciousness, I think, is the span of flight that sparrow enjoys in that warm banquet hall. What happens beyond either window is a mystery immune to our best guesses.
Our observable universe is the same. It has a diameter of almost 100 billion light years, though we do not believe it simply stops at some distant border. We cannot see beyond this range (46.5 billion light years in any direction) because the universe is not old enough for that distant light to have had the time to travel to our eyes.
There is more out there: beyond the banquet hall, in the lake, in the universe, in our minds.
That is what makes the neurofeedback program so counterintuitive and so necessary. It takes me where talk and narrative therapy never could because it bypasses the reasoning brain and goes straight for the subconscious wiring. As Dr Gurr says, if you don’t lay down a language memory of a traumatic event, the help must come from elsewhere.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett is among the most influential proponents who wonder whether our conscious mind is just another form of a ‘user illusion’ – like a desktop screen on your computer. Take the icons on your computer screen. They are each governed by lines of code and complex systems that form a set of instructions. The graphical user interface, created by Apple, was a breakthrough because it meant ordinary users didn’t need to know the code to make the computer work, as long as these intricate functions could be represented by simple graphics, or icons. That’s the illusion.
In much the same way, Dennett proposes, our conscious mind is a simplified projection of the brain that gives us the suggestion of control. In reality, he says, we know nothing of, nor do we need to know, how the code works.
Subconsciousness is subterranean, like one of those naked mole rats. If you want to bring that stuff to the surface you’re going to need to put a nice coat on it so it doesn’t scare the kids.
When I graduate from the Pac-Man game in my neurofeedback sessions I am allowed to watch a movie. The premise is similar. If my brain behaves itself, the movie plays as it should. If my brain waves enter territory classified as out of bounds, the screen becomes gradually shaded with an opaque filter, like somebody has rubbed toothpaste on it.
I can choose my movies from a cupboard, which doesn’t look like it has been updated since video stores went broke. This isn’t a bad thing. Life was a lot simpler when we had to go to a shopfront to get a movie. In the local video store in my home town of Boonah, sometimes all the copies of the one film I wanted had already been booked out on a Friday night, but this competitive spirit made me feel alive, animated with thoughts of delayed gratification and revenge.
I’m not saying this is a good thing, but where has that energy been redirected now, I wonder.
Without giving it much thought, I choose The Matrix: Reloaded from the sad cupboard because I wanted to feel like I was sixteen again, in the van with my friend’s dad and my mates on the way to a midnight screening in the nearest town with a big cinema. What a funny thread that has connected my life in that moment to the one I am living now, trying to take the themes of the film seriously instead of just turning up for the fighting bits.
There’s something eerie about the experience of being hooked up to electrodes on my scalp and ears as the Oracle tells Neo he ‘didn’t come here to make the choice’.
‘You’ve already made it. You’re here to try to understand why you made it,’ she says.
Well, damn. Isn’t that the very definition of the work we do on ourselves? We are trying to understand how the swallow came to be in that banquet hall and where it might have gone.
Leo Tolstoy’s diary entry for 25 January 1851 is remarkably short and glorious:
I’ve fallen in love or imagine I have; went to a party and lost my head. Bought a horse which I don’t need at all.
We should very much like to know why it is we bought the horse.
This kind of thinking accords with the deterministic view of the universe, which sees our minds as just one more element in a physical system governed by the absolute laws of physics. Our brains, though living tissue, are ultimately only collections of atomic particles. The same particles make the sun, the other stars, planets and gases. That is all there is, a constituency of bric-a-brac.
If we had the God-like power to know absolutely everything about absolutely every particle in the universe, none of what happens at any given moment would be a surprise because there could only be one way for each interaction to unfold. And those interactions would be specifically limited by the collision of particles that came before it, and the collision that came before that and so on, stretching right back to the time of the Big Bang.
In a game of pool, the billiard balls follow these laws of physics. Even with our inferior knowledge of the practical forces and velocity and angles involved, we have a fairly good idea of where certain shots can take us. With even more intel (and, let’s face it, coordination) it would cease to be a game at all.
Most everything would be predetermined.
Our brains are pool tables, after a fashion, and the connections and synaptic responses are ultimately carried out by electrons and cells made of other particles. My decision right now to drink from the water bottle on my desk was made possible by an earlier decision to fill it up from the jug in the fridge but it was also set up by my decision to move back to Sydney late in 2019. These two apparent decisions could only have followed the countless tiny moments that came before them. And that medley of little decisions traces back even further, to my childhood and into my parents’ lives and back through human history, the birth of the solar system and eventually to the Big Bang itself.
It’s all just particles smashing into other particles and following the rules.
That’s determinism, a concept that raises legitimate questions about free will, the notion that we ‘could have done otherwise’ at any given juncture. I know this stuff sounds like the pointless distraction of sophomoric personalities, but most scientists agree we are just bags of cells buffeted by the forces of the world around us.
In my weaker moments, I wonder whether my search for a better brain even stands a chance. I mean, it’s a strange place to begin with.
Just moments ago I awoke from a mid-afternoon nap and a single urge ascended into me. I say ascended because it really did feel like it had wafted up on a gentle breeze from somewhere deep in my subconscious.
That urge was this: play Delta Goodrem’s 2003 hit ‘Innocent Eyes’.
Now, I’m no Delta super fan and, if I had to guess, the last time I heard that song was five years ago. Before I had my nap I had not been speaking about her or anything connected with her and yet, when I awoke, there it was.
This thought, totally unbidden, had arrived and I was powerless against it. Try as I might to examine how it came to be, I am left with zero clues. Somewhere, in the latticework of my brain, a memory of this song broke free and drifted to the surface like a bubble of air in an aquarium.
And there it was.
So I’m writing this now, having just listened to ‘Innocent Eyes’, and I’m further plagued by the sense that each sentence here has itself come unbidden into my mind. There has been no instruction, for example, where I choose each specific word in the precise order I intend to write it. They just come and I, the stenographer, write them into the hansard of this book.
Becoming disillusioned with the idea that I might change my circumstances through sheer will is not a useful state of being, however. That’s one reason why scientists and philosophers alike don’t hammer us over the head with such observations. Sure, this thing may be true but knowing so does not help us in any practical way.
It is enough, I think, to know that we are not the sole authors of our lives.
This was Baruch Spinoza’s revolutionary insight in the seventeenth century.
‘Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; and this opinion depends on this alone, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined,’ he wrote in Ethics, published the year he died.
This, therefore, is their idea of liberty, that they should know no causes of their actions. For when they say that human actions depend on the will, these are words of which they have no idea.
For none of them know what is will and how it moves the body; those who boast otherwise and feign dwellings and habitations of the soul, provoke either laughter or disgust.
Ouch.
It all sounds so defeatist, though I promise it is not.
Spinoza, a lens grinder who was excommunicated for his bold ideas, had a certain genius that turned the bald facts of life into something more profound. It is important to grasp what he has to say.
The philosophical solution to the riddle of whether we have free will begins with the notion of conatus, a sort of existential endeavour by which certain things ‘persist in their own being’. This most obviously applies to all living organisms which have, to varying degrees, the desire to continue existing. Such things, unlike a grain of sand or a rock, have a strong urge to avoid danger and heal themselves when injured.
So far, so not rocket science.
In Spinoza’s view, such things can possess more and more conatus until they become God-like, though never reaching or surpassing this ‘God’ in its endeavours. The key to reaching the higher chambers of conatus is the quest to understand and take as much charge as physical laws will allow over the condition in which we find ourselves.
Truth, therefore, is an act of personal enrichment. If we travel through the valley of disenchantment and remove the helpful illusions of our own existence (like free will), we can emerge on the other side to see the world as God would, enlivened by the complexity of its moving pieces.
It is not so odd that Spinoza, a man who sought to prove the existence of God, was branded a heretic, though I find no less solace in the idea that this God is not one of a religious bent. Perhaps this God is simply an essence of an already very strange universe, a cosmic emergence similar to consciousness that arrives from its constituent parts. Maybe God is just beauty, as we find it.
However we might understand it, Spinoza charts a course to freedom.
‘If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still it can be found,’ he wrote. ‘And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard. For if salvation were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.’
This is the kind of salvation with which I can get on board. Long before I read Spinoza, my guiding personal philosophy was one of curiosity. Ignorance should not, in itself, be punished. We are born ignorant and we grow according to our different capacities and access to resources. Being curious, however, is truly valuable. That it is ever invoked, to explain the world or ourselves, is the engine room of awe. And, as per Spinoza, it is the only way to truly be free.
I reminded myself of this during what unexpectedly became my final neurofeedback session, rudely interrupted as my appointments were by the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu in 1918.
Was I getting anywhere with this therapy? Something was beginning to happen, though I’m not sure what.
Early on in my sessions, the therapist told me I would need to have about fourteen visits before I noticed any change at all and forty for the progress to be coded more permanently into my brain. We only got to six.
In the second last session before it was decided that rubbing a conductive gel on my ears and scalp constituted a public health risk, I left the centre feeling a little woozy. By the time I returned home I was beyond exhausted. Moving from the front door to the lounge felt like an uncommon effort. To an outsider, it might have looked as if I was a rhinoceros that had been tranquillised from a low-flying helicopter as part of a park relocation project. My movements were slow and awkward and when I finally hit the couch I didn’t move again for three hours.
The sleep came heavy and total, as it did for those anaesthetised macaques I’d read about in Neuron. What whisker-thin marionette strings had been pulled in my mind, I wondered.
Perhaps it is too easy to say, as I want to, that it seemed fitting my quest for understanding my own mind had ground to a halt. Perhaps it is too easy to suggest that this was some kind of polite reminder that I was not going to be the one to crack the enigma code within us all. How presumptuous, even, to try.
I do know this, however.
My consciousness harbours an echo of some audible horror that happened a long time ago. Eventually, if we are lucky, the sound and fury fade away. Oh, I work at it. The work is sometimes all there is.
It does not elude me that my existence is in many respects an act of diminishment. Quiet the echo, quiet the source; quiet as salvation.
Per Spinoza, though, I need not write QED at the bottom of the equation. Asking is enough.
And it is true to say that I understand volumes more about my selves than I ever thought possible. I know that there are moments when my brain tells my body and me that we are under attack and I know those moments look a lot like abandonment. I know why I simultaneously crave and then burn acceptance. I know that sabotage is sometimes a revolutionary act but that, equally, it can hold a system in place against the imperative of change.
And then there is this.
When you try to catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror – to see yourself spontaneously as others might – you always fail. It is impossible to capture that living frame as God or others might see it. There is only the blur of motion and light and a face looking back at you that knows the trick you tried to play.
Even on camera there is nothing that can show a person what it is to view themselves from the outside.
Our cognitive machinery is like this, too. We snatch curtains and covers in vain attempts to draw the outline of the self, the real self, and we see only the edge of shadows as the covers shift back into place. We interrogate ourselves and find only echoes.
In the end, these games we play in the mirror or in our minds reveal themselves for what they are. There is only you, looking back at yourself and asking for forgiveness.