Imagine a mature, carefully crafted individual brain with connections that are responding to, activated by, strengthened by, and shaped by sequences of specific experiences that no one else has ever had, nor ever will have again. This is the physical basis of an individual’s mind. But now imagine those highly individualized connections being slowly dismantled as the branches of the brain cells shrivel. The person would return to a more childlike state, since he or she would no longer have the requisite framework of the adult mind against which to evaluate ongoing experiences. People and objects would no longer have the highly personalized significance so carefully accumulated over a lifetime. We would see the sad and tragic symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, where the patient is indeed “losing” his or her mind, literally dementia. Yet we can also “lose” our minds—or, rather, let them go—on a more frequent, temporary, and positive basis, in situations where the lure of here-and-now sensation turns us into passive recipients rather than proactive thinkers.
First, though, a word of caution. We need to be careful not to confuse “blowing” or “losing” the mind, as we will be speaking of it here, with what has been called “mindless” crowd behavior, such as was seen in the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies in the twentieth century, where a collective mob identity derived from political and racial ideologies,1 just as a collective identity derives from a religious fundamentalism in the twenty-first.2 In all cases, the overheated and often violent mob is not just blindly emotional, as in road rage or the French crime passionnel (where you “see red” and are not accountable for your actions). Far from being “out of their minds,” the mob will have a very specific narrative, albeit an utterly repugnant one: they know whom they are targeting in order to enact their revered story line. They are not mindless at all.
If the mind is the personalization of the brain through its individual neuronal connectivity, driven by personal experience, then truly losing your mind would occur when those carefully personalized connections are not fully accessible. For example, drugs and alcohol will impair the chemical communication between neuronal connections, while recreational environments filled with rave music or the rapid-fire stimuli of fast-paced sports do not require a complex cognitive infrastructure, as they are primarily “sensational.” Often, the more the raw senses dominate, the greater the pleasure, it seems. The very word “ecstasy” in Greek means “to stand outside” of oneself. It has often intrigued me that we seek out this emotional, unreflective state through diverse pursuits that have one thing in common: an absence of self-consciousness, an abnegation of a sense of self in favor of becoming the passive recipient of incoming senses, indeed of being “abandoned.” So you can lose, or be out of, your mind while still being conscious—hence the importance of distinguishing “mind” and “consciousness.”
What could be going on in the brain when someone remains conscious yet “blows” their mind? The most obvious tools at the brain’s disposal here are the chemical messengers, the neurotransmitters and other modulating chemicals released when neurons are active. One naturally occurring substance in particular is a likely candidate for helping to mediate a sensation-driven experience: the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is the final common conduit for all psychoactive drugs of addiction, regardless of their primary site and mode of action. The dopamine system has also been linked to processes in the brain relating to feelings of pleasure. For over half a century now, brain scientists have been fascinated by the phenomenon of self-stimulation. Classic experiments by the psychologist James Olds revealed that if electrodes were implanted in certain parts of the brain but not others, rats would work at pressing a bar to stimulate these key brain areas to the exclusion of all else, even feeding.3 The brain areas that, when stimulated, presumably caused the rats to feel good were those releasing dopamine. In a shorthand but rather inaccurate way, therefore, dopamine has sometimes been simplistically referred to in the popular press as the “molecule of pleasure.”
When you are highly excited, are aroused, or feel rewarded—or, indeed, if you are taking psychoactive drugs—this single neurotransmitter will play a key part in delivering all these different subjective experiences. In all these cases, dopamine plays a pivotal role by being released like a fountain from the primitive region at the top of the spine (brainstem) outward and upward throughout the brain, where it then changes the responsiveness of neurons in many different areas. But there is one area in particular that is targeted by dopamine and is of special interest to us here, as it is crucial to human cognition: the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex, as its name suggests, sits at the front of the brain behind the forehead. While no one committed brain area is exclusively responsible for making us human, the prefrontal cortex shows huge quantitative differences between our species and other animals. It accounts for 33 percent of the adult human brain but only 17 percent in chimps, our nearest relatives. The prefrontal cortex has more inputs to all the other cortical areas than any other part of the cortex and therefore plays a key role in operational brain cohesion. So if this key area is damaged or underactive, there could be a profound effect on holistic human brain operations.
The classic example of this is the case of one Phineas Gage, who in the mid-nineteenth century was working as a foreman on a railway gang in Vermont.4 His job was to clear any obstacles in the way of the railway track that was being laid across America at the time. One day, as he was pressing down some explosive material with a large rod referred to as a tamping iron, an alarming accident occurred that earned Gage his place in medical history. The explosive went off prematurely and drove the formidable rod through his brain, more specifically through his prefrontal cortex.
After this terrible event and the reason why the story is now so famous there were, amazingly, no obvious or immediate signs of problems with either Phineas’s senses or his movement. Only as the weeks turned to months did it emerge that he had more subtle cognitive problems, such as excessively reckless behavior—not a good trait in someone working with explosives. Surprising though it now seems, Phineas seemed sufficiently unimpaired to return to work, but he had become unbearable as a team player. He was proving to be not only reckless but also, in the words of his physician, Dr. Harlow, “exceedingly capricious and childish… [and] particularly obstinate; he will not yield to restraint when it conflicts with his desires.”5 The accident that befell Gage was a living example of a parallel association between an underactive prefrontal cortex and childhood.
In biology a well-known mantra is that “ontogeny” reflects “phylogeny”—individual brain development reflects evolution—so the human prefrontal cortex becomes fully mature and functional only in the late teenage years and early twenties.6 The years immediately preceding this maturation are what we know as adolescence, which is typified by intensively social behavior, a desire for novelty, and attention seeking, as well as tendencies toward risk taking, emotional instability, and impulsivity. Relationships take on a greater significance, and seeking out fun and exciting experiences becomes a high priority. There is also the likelihood of pervasive negative moods and a feeling of boredom, which may drive the teenager to search for stimuli offering more thrills. Research suggests that adolescents show greater sensitivity to the reinforcing properties of pleasurable stimuli. This may be related to the fact that dopamine production hits a lifetime peak during adolescence.7 In addition, the teenage years see an increase in the production of another powerful hormone, oxytocin, which enhances feelings of well-being; this may be another factor driving typical adolescent behavior.8
Imaging studies of the adolescent brain commonly reveal widespread activity unrelated to any specific task.9 Such generalized activity decreases as adulthood is reached, implying that the maturing prefrontal cortex becomes better able to coordinate activity and communication across the brain, producing a more organized collection of networks resulting in more efficient processing. As the adolescent brain matures into that of the adult, there is a shift into a more integrated network activity pattern, connecting more distant brain areas; the result is long-range synchronous activity across the brain, enabling improved communication between all the different regions, as the prefrontal cortex is fully operative and thus able to coordinate activity in diverse brain regions.
The subsequent onset of more restrained, inhibitory adult behavior could be due to the fact that the more evolutionarily primitive brain regions (in particular the ventral striatum, which releases dopamine) are fully operational much earlier than the evolutionarily newer ones, such as the sophisticated prefrontal cortex. So teenagers will be more inclined toward risk taking and reward seeking because their prefrontal cortex cannot yet adequately inhibit the brain’s more primitive areas.10
Adolescents are not the only group who are characterized by an underactive prefrontal cortex and fit this living-for-the-moment profile. Schizophrenia, for example, is the result of a chemical imbalance, and in particular a functionally disproportionate level of dopamine. As a result, the schizophrenic individual’s world shifts from the cognitive toward raw sensations driven from the outside.11 Like children, those suffering from schizophrenia are easily baffled by proverbs such as “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Both children and schizophrenics take the world literally, so both might attempt to explain the proverb by saying, “If you live in a glass house, and someone throws a stone at it, your house will break.” To them, the external world is a vibrant place that can easily implode on and crush the fragile firewall of the vulnerable inner world.
Yet another, completely different group of those with an unusually underactive prefrontal cortex are those who have a high body mass index (BMI)12 who are heavy relative to their height. Interestingly, we now know from a recent study using a gambling task that obese people can tend to take more risks.13
What could possibly be the common factor between these very different outward states, gambling, eating, schizophrenia, and indeed childhood that have in common an underfunctioning prefrontal cortex?
Anyone who eats knows the consequences of eating too much, and anyone who gambles is always aware of the possible outcome. But the thrill of the moment, be it the sensation of the taste of the food or the excitement of the roll of the dice, trumps the consequences of one’s actions in that moment. That is, the brain is operating in small assembly mode, very much like the way it operates while dreaming. The press of the senses, the here-and-now environment, is unusually paramount, as it is for the schizophrenic and for the child. So here are three very different states or activities, overeating, gambling, and schizophrenia, all characterized by an emphasis on external stimulation and an underactive prefrontal cortex: the small assembly mode of consciousness, which we saw just now, could be described as a here-and-now state driven by sensation and, among other things, high levels of dopamine.
If so, then another example of this brain state could also include dreaming, already noted as an example of a shallow, childlike consciousness of the small assembly mode. In fact, a review of imaging studies by Thien Thanh Dang-Vu and colleagues in Liège, Belgium, highlights how dreaming leads to inactivation of the prefrontal cortex.14 When this key area is underperforming, there is a corresponding drop in holistic coordinated brain operations. Nothing “means” anything, it just is what it is, the small assembly mode of consciousness, where what you see is what you get, and you get it immediately.
Normally, when you are fully awake and accessing your personalized neuronal connections—that is, when you are using your mind—you understand the world in your own special way. For example, the American flag with its stars and stripes may have a profound meaning for a U.S. Army veteran, who carries a highly personalized and extensive network of associations that involve a myriad of events and experiences and incorporate certain abstract values. But for a young child raised in Papua New Guinea, it may be merely a piece of colored cloth with a strange pattern. Your neuronal connectivity, therefore, gives you the ability to appreciate symbolism, to see one thing as standing for something else that could never be guessed from the sensory features of the object alone.
Sometimes we make inappropriate or excessive associations that overinterpret an experience or object, discerning a hidden meaning that to most others would seem neither realistic nor accurate, or even a little crazy. Seeing faces in cloud formations or attributing luck to an object may be everyday examples of such idiosyncratic associations. Similarly, the pairing of two otherwise unrelated events may seem to some to be a silly superstition, but to others it may be a deeply significant sign or portent. Not only do your neuronal connections allow you to imbue objects, events, people, and their actions, with your own personalized “meaning,” but they also enable you to understand the world as you live in it. The very act of making these associations, of being aware of a meaning beyond face value, can be regarded as understanding. In all cases the person, object, or event is read against your particular neuronal network associations, a conceptual framework that is constantly evolving and expanding as you develop. The more extensive the associations, the larger the conceptual framework in which you could embed the new arrival of the moment and the more deeply you can be said to understand it.
This mind can be distinguished from consciousness, as is evident with dementia patients. Moreover, the various diverse states in which you can “let yourself go” can give clues as to what might be happening in the brain when the mind is not fully operational but you are simply the passive recipient of the senses. We’ve seen that various extreme states of overeating, gambling, and schizophrenia place an emphasis on stimulation comparable to childhood, and that where the prefrontal cortex underfunctions, most recreational pursuits are also associated with the transmitter dopamine mediating feelings of pleasure. These literally sensational experiences might be characterized by the small assembly correlate of consciousness, a correlate that characterizes non-human animals and the dreaming adult brain, where thought plays less of a role. But how does a thought differ from a raw feeling?
Remember from Chapter 1 the comment “Thinking is movement confined to the brain”? We saw that any thought, be it a hope, a memory, a logical argument, a business plan, or a grievance, has a fixed sequence of cause and effect: a beginning, a middle, and an end. You end up in a different place from where you started. So in physical brain terms, perhaps the basis of thoughts are connections between relevant neurons or neuronal groups. Thinking, that superlative talent of the adult human brain, requires enough neuronal circuitry to take a series of steps and to make connections, along with a correspondingly longer time frame. Meanwhile, emotions can be characterized by their focus on feeling something right now and only now. Conscious thought extends beyond the immediacy of the moment and is not readily trumped by any new here-and-now stimulation.
While information processing is just that, the appropriate response to an incoming stimulus, understanding, in contrast, requires that the stimulus be embedded in a conceptual framework. We’ve seen that a conceptual framework of the type required for understanding can be interpreted, in brain terms, as the growth of the connections between brain cells that are formed postnatally and are subsequently driven, shaped, and strengthened by individual experience. Hence every individual human will have a uniquely personalized brain, as well as a mind that is constantly evaluating the current world in terms of existing associations while simultaneously being updated by it.15 “Knowledge” would be the embedding of a fact or action within a conceptual framework so that it makes sense, that is, can be understood. “Wisdom” requires still more widespread connectivity, whereby the associations made are drawn from an ever wider range of experience and/or individual memories that enable the assignment of more generalized values.
As we explore how twenty-first-century technologies drive Mind Change, we will encounter a number of recurring themes, including narrative, a personal life story, and the mind as a real physical entity (namely, the unique configuration of neuronal connections in each individual brain). Table 8.1 summarizes, in an extremely simplified way, how we could think of this mind in relation to the subjective conscious state, as well as various features in the physical brain that we can use as a frame of reference when we come to consider how digital technologies could be impacting not just the generic human brain but individual minds, beliefs, and states of consciousness. We have come a long way from the pink plastic model, but the journey is really only now just beginning.