Whatever we call it—mind, character, soul—we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that “animates” us.
A lot of mind, though, is turning out to be brain. A memory is a particular pattern of cellular changes on particular spots in our heads. A mood is a compound of neurotransmitters. Too much acetylcholine, not enough serotonin, and you’ve got a depression.
So, what’s left of mind?
It’s a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is “stale, flat and unprofitable”; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought. That leaves a lot of mind room. Something is interpreting the clatter of neurological activity.
But is this interpreter necessarily metaphysical and unembodied? Isn’t it probably a number—an enormous number—of brain functions working in parallel? If the entire network of simultaneous tiny actions that constitute a thought were identified and mapped, then “mind” might be visible.
The interpreter is convinced it’s unmappable and invisible. “I’m your mind,” it claims. “You can’t parse me into dendrites and synapses.”
It’s full of claims and reasons. “You’re a little depressed because of all the stress at work,” it says. (It never says, “You’re a little depressed because your serotonin level has dropped”)
Sometimes its interpretations are not credible, as when you cut your finger and it starts yelling, “You’re gonna die!” Sometimes its claims are unlikely, as when it says, “Twenty-five chocolate chip cookies would be the perfect dinner.”
Often, then, it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. And when you decide it’s wrong, who or what is making that decision? A second, superior interpreter?
Why stop at two? That’s the problem with this model. It’s endless. Each interpreter needs a boss to report to.
But something about this model describes the essence of our experience of consciousness. There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don’t feel the same. They must reflect quite different aspects of brain function.
The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read each other’s work. One needs data, the other needs an overview; they influence each other. They get dialogues going.
INTERPRETER ONE: Pain in the left foot, back of heel.
INTERPRETER TWO: I believe that’s because the shoe is too tight.
INTERPRETER ONE: Checked that. Took off the shoe. Foot still hurts.
INTERPRETER TWO: Did you look at it?
INTERPRETER ONE: Looking. It’s red.
INTERPRETER TWO: No blood?
INTERPRETER ONE: Nope.
INTERPRETER TWO: Forget about it.
INTERPRETER ONE: Okay.
A minute later, though, there’s another report.
INTERPRETER ONE: Pain in the left foot, back of heel.
INTERPRETER TWO: I know that already.
INTERPRETER ONE: Still hurts. Now it’s puffed up.
INTERPRETER TWO: It’s just a blister. Forget about it.
INTERPRETER ONE: Okay.
Two minutes later.
INTERPRETER TWO: Don’t pick it!
INTERPRETER ONE: It’ll feel better if I pop it.
INTERPRETER TWO: That’s what you think. Leave it alone.
INTERPRETER ONE: Okay. Still hurts, though.
Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
An exemplary piece of confusion:
INTERPRETER ONE: There’s a tiger in the corner.
INTERPRETER TWO: No, that’s not a tiger—that’s a bureau.
INTERPRETER ONE: It’s a tiger, it’s a tiger!
INTERPRETER TWO: Don’t be ridiculous. Let’s go look at it.
Then all the dendrites and neurons and serotonin levels and interpreters collect themselves and trot over to the corner.
If you are not crazy, the second interpreter’s assertion, that this is a bureau, will be acceptable to the first inter-prêter. If you are crazy, the first interpreter’s viewpoint, the tiger theory, will prevail.
The trouble here is that the first interpreter actually sees a tiger. The messages sent between neurons are incorrect somehow. The chemicals triggered are the wrong chemicals, or the impulses are going to the wrong connections. Apparently, this happens often, but the second interpreter jumps in to straighten things out.
Think of being in a train, next to another train, in a station. When the other train starts moving, you are convinced that your train is moving. The rattle of the other train feels like the rattle of your train, and you see your train leaving that other train behind. It can take a while—maybe even half a minute—before the second interpreter sorts through the first interpreter’s claim of movement and corrects it. That’s because it’s hard to counteract the validity of sensory impressions. We are designed to believe in them.
The train situation is not the same as an optical illusion. An optical illusion does contain two realities. It’s not that the vase is wrong and the faces are right; both are right, and the brain moves between two existing patterns that it recognizes as different. Although you can make yourself dizzy going from vase to faces and back again, you can’t undermine your sense of reality in quite such a visceral way as you can with the train.
Sometimes, when you’ve realized that your train is not really moving, you can spend another half a minute suspended between two realms of consciousness: the one that knows you aren’t moving and the one that feels you are. You can flit back and forth between these perceptions and experience a sort of mental vertigo. And if you do this, you are treading on the ground of craziness—a place where false impressions have all the hallmarks of reality.
Freud said psychotics were unanalyzable because they couldn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality (tiger vs. bureau), and analysis works on precisely that distinction. The patient must lay out the often fantastic assertions of the first interpreter and scrutinize them with the second. The hope is that the second interpreter has, or will learn to have, the wit and insight to disprove some of the ridiculous claims the first interpreter has made over the years.
You can see why doubting one’s own craziness is considered a good sign: It’s a sort of flailing response by the second interpreter. What’s happening? the second interpreter is saying. He tells me it’s a tiger but I’m not convinced; maybe there’s something wrong with me. Enough doubt is in there to give “reality” a toehold.
No doubt, no analysis. Somebody who comes in chatting about tigers is going to be offered Thorazine, not the couch.
At that moment, when the doctor suggests Thorazine, what’s happening to that doctor’s mental map of mental illness? Earlier in the day, the doctor had a map divided into superego, ego, and id, with all kinds of squiggly, perhaps broken, lines running among those three areas. The doctor was treating something he or she calls a psyche or mind. All of a sudden the doctor is preparing to treat a brain. This brain doesn’t have a psychelike arrangement, or if it does, that’s not where its problem is. This brain has problems that are chemical and electrical.
“It’s the reality-testing function,” says the doctor. “This brain is bollixed up about reality and I can’t analyze it. Those other brains—minds—weren’t.”
Something’s wrong here. You can’t call a piece of fruit an apple when you want to eat it and a dandelion when you don’t want to eat it. It’s the same sort of fruit no matter what your intentions toward it. And how strong is the case for a categorical distinction between brains that know reality and brains that don’t? Is a non-reality-recognizing brain truly as different from a reality-recognizing brain as a foot, say, is from a brain? This seems unlikely. Recognizing the agreed-upon version of reality is only one of billions of brain jobs.
If the biochemists were able to demonstrate the physical workings of neuroses (phobias, or difficulties getting pleasure from life), if they could pinpoint the chemicals and impulses and interbrain conversations and information exchanges that constitute these feelings, would the psychoanalysts pack up their ids and egos and retire from the field?
They have partially retired from the field. Depression, manic-depression, schizophrenia: All that stuff they always had trouble treating they now treat chemically. Take two Lithium and don’t call me in the morning because there’s nothing to say; it’s innate.
Some cooperative efforts—the sort the brain makes—would be useful here.
For nearly a century the psychoanalysts have been writing op-ed pieces about the workings of a country they’ve never traveled to, a place that, like China, has been off-limits. Suddenly, the country has opened its borders and is crawling with foreign correspondents; neurobiologists are filing ten stories a week, filled with new data. These two groups of writers, however, don’t seem to read each other’s work.
That’s because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.