This species that we currently are, this particular experimental model, has a brain of a certain sort with its particular capacities and tendencies. Countless metaphors have been created to capture aspects or qualities of this brain, from brain as spider web (delicate, minimal, and hypersensitive) to brain as lens (magnifying and intensifying energy to a profound point), from brain as lamp to brain as map, from brain as cookbook to brain as toolbox, and of course brain as computer, calculator, and so on.
For the purposes of this chapter, let's consider it as a high-performance engine in some of its aspects, capacities, and tendencies. It is an unusual and unique engine that we rev up but that also revs itself up and functions on its own, perpetually and for its own reasons. We can send it racing after a calculation and make it do math or balance our checkbook. But it can also send itself racing to create a dream or a nightmare, an obsession or a mania. In this regard, it is also something like a high-strung stallion that we can ride if we are masterful and careful but that can also gallop off on its own.
What are the features of this high-performance engine or high-strung stallion that cause smart people so much distress? One is that mysterious and potentially dangerous state known as mania. Mania can hit anyone—it can be induced by street drugs and by other causes, including the dynamics of one's own racing, needy brain. But here we'll focus on how mania arises from a person's reliance on brain activity to solve her problems, including her existential ones, and the special way that such reliance afflicts smart people.
People who think a lot are more prone to mania than people who do not think a lot. That intelligent, creative, and thoughtful people are the ones more regularly afflicted by mania is beyond question. Research shows a clear linkage between achieving top grades or scoring high on tests and suffering from bipolar disorder (that is, that so-called disorder in which depression and mania cyclically appear), and between other similar measures of mental accomplishment and a racing mind.
There is plenty of evidence to support the contention that mania disproportionately affects smart, creative, thoughtful people. One study involving seven hundred thousand adults and reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry indicated that former straight-A students were four times more likely to be diagnosed bipolar (or manic-depressive) than those who had achieved lower grades.
In another study, individuals who scored the highest on tests for mathematical reasoning were twelve times more prone to bipolar disorder. Similar studies underline the linkage between creativity and mania, and we have hundreds of years of anecdotal evidence to support the contention that smart and creative people often get manic.
The current naming system used to describe so-called mental disorders like manic-depression and bipolar disorder is weak and highly suspect, however. I've discussed this matter of the arbitrary, whole-cloth creation of mental disorders through certain ruses of definition, including the spurious defining of the term mental disorder itself, in Rethinking Depression and elsewhere. Here, let me just repeat a warning to be wary of employing or taking seriously the current mental-disorder naming system. In natural psychology, we completely eschew it.
The current naming system leads to odd and wrong-headed hypotheses, for example, that “because you are bipolar, you are creative” or that “perhaps mania accounts for the higher test scores.” What is true is that the greater the reliance on thinking and the more brain capacity for thinking a person manifests, the greater his or her susceptibility toward a racing brain. If you are inclined to think, why would those thoughts not be inclined to race in certain circumstances?
If, for example, something threatened you or challenged you, why would your brain not race in its quest to deal with that threat or challenge?
What is called mania, in this regard, is simply a racing brain driven by a certain powerful pressure, need, or impulse. Anything that gets in the way of this seemingly forward motion—a physical obstacle, another person's viewpoint, even a delay in the bus arriving—is viewed as a tremendous irritation. Hence the irritability so often associated with mania. This irritation makes perfect sense: if you must get on with whatever your racing brain is proposing—get every wall painted red, capture that song, solve that theorem—then nothing must get in the way.
It is this must that is at the heart of the matter. The must is the foot on the pedal that is driving your racing brain. There is an emergency here, most often an existential emergency as the individual stares at nothingness and is petrified by the view. She must get away from that horrible feeling and, with a kind of strangled laugh that mimics mirth but isn't mirth, she turns to her brain for help. She is frightened and in anguish, and to deal with that, she shouts to her brain, “Get me out of here!” Her brain then takes off, dreaming up every manner of scheme, activity, or desire.
All of the characteristic symptoms that we see in mania—including seemingly high spirits, heightened sexual appetite, high arousal levels, high energy levels, sweating, pacing, sleeplessness and, at its severest, when the train has run off the rails, hallucinations, delusions of grandeur, suspiciousness, aggression, and wild, self-defeating plans and schemes—make perfect sense when viewed from the perspective that a powerful need has supercharged a brain already inclined to generate thoughts. This thought machine has been revved up in the service of nothing less than the direst existential hunger, lack, or fear imaginable. All the rest follows.
To switch metaphors, the stallion has been spooked and will crash through even the sturdiest fence in his wild, panicked flight.
The driving impulse may not be limited pain; it may not be pain at all. You may be working on a novel or a scientific theory that excites you and you can't wait to get on with it. Still, that excited pursuit, even though in pursuit of something positive and valuable, has caused your mind to move from a lower gear to a higher gear, dramatically revving up the engine that is your brain, and now that engine is whining and straining. A dangerous dynamic is now at play: are you driving the engine, or is the engine driving you?
Yes, you are still in the saddle and clutching the reins, but the powerful stallion may throw you at any second.
What can be done about this racing? Natural psychology has many answers having to do with the art and practice of making meaning. However, the short answer is increased self-awareness and the courage to see one's nature. It is the individual exposing this situation to himself and for himself, announcing that he must wrest control of his mind and his life, and practicing the techniques conventionally called mindfulness techniques, that amount to the short answer.
What we are actually talking about as a prospective solution or possible aid is not only conventional mindfulness, in which a person learns how to better deal with the contents of his or her mind, but a new awareness of the limits of thinking, the pressures of thinking on the organism, and the many other built-in challenges that come with having an experimental brain faced with outsized challenges. Let's call this new awareness brain awareness to distinguish it from mindfulness. The main tactic a person can use to deal with the problems flowing from having this particular experimental brain is brain awareness.
If a given individual won't do this work or at this split second can't do this work because her mania just can't be mediated by her own efforts in the state in which she finds herself, then she may indeed be forced to resort to the unfortunate conventional solution of psychiatric medicine. She may need lithium, anticonvulsants, calcium channel blockers, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, or some other chemical used to supposedly treat mania and with the power (though only sometimes, and always with a physical and emotional cost) to do that work for her.
In the end, it is the brain-aware manic individual herself who ultimately must accomplish the odd and seemingly impossible task of saying, if only in a whisper, “I know that I've set my own brain racing, but that racing isn't really a very good answer; no, creating mania isn't the answer.” Perhaps our next brain model will come with an off switch and we will be able to shut the machine down as wanted, but for now, the only off switch we have is smart inner conversation.
In natural psychology's view of what is going on, where it is completely understandable and plausible how this wild ride came to be, we ask the individual—demand of him if we love him—that he examine his reasons for racing and not feel so free to race. It is not a race that can be won, a truth the brain-aware manic knows somewhere in his being and a truth that brings with it additional sadness even at the height of the racing, as the manic races but knows that he can't outrace existential distress.
Indeed, it is that very sadness that the manic is fleeing as fast as she can, even as she is racing right toward it. It is like the Sufi tale of the disciple who flees his town because he believes that Death is coming for him there, and he races right to the place where Death is waiting. That is exactly where the manic also arrives—at depression.
Mania is completely understandable as a natural result of setting a brain racing in support of the huge tasks, like making meaning, that human beings face. If, for example, a creative person experiences creating as a meaning opportunity and is pressured to race in the service of her creative efforts, she may usually be able to mediate that mania. But sometimes that pressure may overwhelm her. There is no simple off switch that she can throw—which makes this risk all the more real and dangerous.
There is, however, an off switch that people do try to throw. They try to white-knuckle calmness. They don't really feel calm, but they do everything in their power to act calm and be calm—maybe using alcohol to help, maybe using mindfulness to help, maybe using constant activity to help. This is why we don't see more frankly manic people. Smart people everywhere are doing their best not to be manic, hanging on to the reins of their racing brain as one might hang on to the reins of a wild stallion.
This is exhausting work, and sometimes these people are unequal to it, just as one might be able to hold on to the reins of a wild stallion for a while but for only so long. At some point, that powerful animal rips the reins right out of a wrangler's hands. Nevertheless, smart people are for the most part built pretty well to hang on to calmness and to avoid full-blown mania—at the cost, however, of a tremendous amount of energy expended to maintain their white-knuckled calmness.
Even as they hang on, they are enticed by that mania. Consider the following analogy. If you live in a castle and pillagers periodically roar through your kingdom, bandits roam the countryside, and wild animals lurk in the underbrush, you know that you are safer inside the walls than outside. But what if you know or suspect that somewhere out there are psychedelic parties, wild river rides, strange never-before-seen sights, and all the excitement and meaning that is so patently lacking here in the castle?
The pressure is bound to mount and you rationalize that it is probably safe to go outside given how serene the countryside looks, how rarely bandit sightings and wild animal attacks are reported, and how wondrous the sights and sounds to be found out there are. The dangers aren't apparent and the payoffs feel enormous. Sooner or later, a person is going to get castle fever as he stands on the ramparts and gazes over that lovely landscape that looks so serene. He is bound to stare so hard that he will begin to see mirages of meaning out there.
Smart people tend not to realize the extent to which both their forced calmness and their mini-manic activities are more ways of defending themselves against letting their mind roar away in mania than affirmative lifestyle choices. They are unnaturally calm or constantly busy not so much because they love calmness or love keeping busy but because they do not want to permit the indulgence of mania. They are making an honorable effort to keep their racing mind in their own control—at the expense of what may prove to be unhappy lifestyle choices and huge expenditures of energy.
As a result, most smart people prevent themselves from launching into full-blown mania. They do something else instead: they so assiduously guard against this wild ride that they live becalmed, in a forced state of calm that is very much like a straightjacket. Many smart people are living a forced calm life so as to help themselves deal with what would prove a manic way of life if they dared to let themselves go. They intuitively know just how dangerous and powerful the engine of their mind is, and for safety reasons, they tread very carefully through life.
You would think that a person would need to experience full-blown mania at least once in his life in order to recognize it as something that he does not want to experience ever again. Nor is it that children watch cautionary videos about mania in school, as soldiers are made to watch cautionary videos about venereal disease, and are taught to avoid it. Nor does anyone around them warn them about it. So why is this threat perceived as so very dangerous when it is neither taught, talked about in casual conversation, or personally experienced?
The likely answer is that intimations of the dangers of mania come with the original endowment that makes a smart person who he is. He is probably built right from the start to be one of those people who recognizes himself in that crazy manic man on the street, who sees as part of his future the manic episodes of a Beethoven or a Byron, the one brushing aside waiting piano students because music is dying to come out, the other racing across Britain on a rampage of sexual encounters with married women and young boys. Somehow he knows that he has that in him—that knowledge is a feature of his original personality.
If you have been endowed by nature with a brain that can race, it makes some sense to suppose that you have also been born with intimations of the dangers of allowing that brain to race. And it may perhaps also be the case that some numbers of smart people are born without this built-in understanding of how dangerous mania can be—and therefore are less effective in protecting themselves against its onslaughts or actually invite it into their life. Just as a given person can look down at the edge of a thousand-foot drop and experience no vertigo when, one might guess, nature should have built her to back away, so a given smart person may be built without a sufficient sense of the dangers of full-blown mania.
A smart person therefore faces two different but related threats, the threat of painful, white-knuckled calmness that feels like self-created boredom and a prison sentence, and the threat of uncontrolled mania that is painful in the experiencing and that is likely to culminate in despair as she realizes that her manic efforts did not change the facts of her existence. Forced calmness or uncontrolled mania? Of course, neither is the right answer—and we will provide a best possible answer when, in our final chapters, we paint a picture of how the principles and practices of natural psychology can help.