Everyday Schizophrenia: Part 3

Research has suggested the presence of two warring consciousnesses in the human psyche. The right brain with its wordless imagination and the left brain with its control over speech and its affinity for math and logic. These two consciousnesses can have conflicting desires, and this accounts, at least in part, for our own conflicting desires. I emphasize “in part” here because if we go deeper, we find that the mind is fractured into yet finer pieces. There are dozens of voices, each with their own agenda, and they are constantly vying for dominance. At one moment we are guided by lust, which constantly whispers distractions in our ear. At another moment, we are guided by inspiration, which flickers images and ideas before our imagination. We might try to suppress one only to find that it persists despite our will to snuff it out. We might chance the other, only to find that it is not something we can capture like a bird in a cage.

The ancient Greeks had a fantastical but enlightening way of looking at this. As they saw it, when a person got angry, he was possessed by the spirit of anger. When he had a good idea, it did not come from his own mind, but was rather whispered to him by a muse. Although this explanation might seem supernatural, it is in some ways true to our experience. When anger comes, it doesn't seem to come from us. It wells up from some other source. It washes over our consciousness and briefly we are drowned. Similarly, when inspiration touches us, it happens all so instantaneously that it's like someone is telling us something, rather than that we have contrived these ideas on our own.

Ancient Christians had a similar view of human nature. That is, human nature was minimal. Instead, demons and angles were constantly guiding our actions. When we walked by something valuable and beautiful, the demon of envy whispered in our ears that we should take it. This thought was not our own, but rather borne from some external presence. Once again, this is true to our experience. Temptation seems to come from something other than our typical consciousness. What the ancient Christians called demons and angles, though, I would call discreet elements of the psyche. Just as there is a right brain and a left brain, an imagination and a verbal consciousness, there is a lust, a sloth, a pride, a love, a fear, a faith, an inspiration. They are all a part of us, and yet when they interact with our dominant consciousness, they are alien.

These days, psychologists are coming to refer to the mind not as a discreet psychic entity, but more like a boardroom. It is the chatter of several dozen impulses and outlooks, and only after conflict and compromise does it come to a conclusion. At the same time, certain elements dominate certain people. Some people are dominated by their imaginations. Some by their logic. Some, by lust; others, by pride. What dominates you?

Everyday Schizophrenia: Part 2

In the 1950s, neurology was still a young science, and there was no none cure for epilepsy. Since this disease could be life-threatening in some cases, people were willing to undergo experimental surgery in the off-chance that they'd get better. Scientists were also more than willing to remove sections of the patients' brains. Perhaps they really thought they could cure the epilepsy with minimal damage. Perhaps they just wanted to see how removing certain parts of the brain affected human cognition and behavior. There were dozens of such cases, many giving dramatic insight into how the brain worked. (These studies were casually taught in my undergraduate classes, and at the time, nobody questioned their dubious ethical nature, including myself. Today, though, I wonder where these scientists' interests really laid.)

One of these studies involved severing the corpus callosum of several dozen patients. As many of you may already know, the brain is divided into two roughly symmetrical hemispheres. The corpus callosum is the network of neurons which connect the two hemispheres. You can think of it as the telephone wire between the right and left side of your brain. The decision to sever this network wasn't completely unfounded, as earlier studies had shown that it experienced a heavy surge of activity immediately proceeding a seizure. Remarkably, the procedure did work, and patients no longer suffered from epilepsy. At the same time, there were no obvious ill effects. Patients were still able to communicate, they remembered who they were, they lost no points on an IQ test.

It took several months of study to notice that something about these patients actually was different, and although at first glance this difference appeared quiet subtle, its effects were actually quiet profound. The first study to notice weird behavior went something like this: researchers asked the patient to close his eyes, and then they placed a spoon in his left hand and asked him to describe what he felt. He was unable to do so. They then placed it in his right hand and asked the same question. He immediately responded that it was a spoon. It was as though he were aware of what was happening with his right hand, but not his left.

A similar study had a patient handle an object with both hands. They then asked him to point to a picture of that object with right hand. He couldn't. They then asked him to point to the picture with his left hand. He laughed and said that of couldn't do that, either, but seemingly off its own accord, his left hand rose and pointed to the correct image. He didn't know how he had done that. The researchers weren't sure, either, but they were getting an idea.

Other weird little inconsistencies were popping up, too. There was one patient who was only sixteen years old. Before the surgery, researchers had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He admitted that he was really conflicted about it. On the one hand, he wanted to be an accountant because he was good at math and enjoyed working with numbers. On the other hand, he wanted to be a race-car driver. He'd just started to learn to drive, and he found it really engaging. After the surgery, though, he stopped saying that he wanted to be a race-car driver. When asked, he always responded that he wanted to be an accountant. Inspired by their previous studies, the researchers asked him not to say what he wanted to be when he grew up, but rather to point to a picture of it. He immediately pointed to a picture of a race-car. With his left hand. When asked why, he couldn't explain his choice.

The most dramatic case happened outside of the laboratory, though. A patient was having a heated argument with his wife, and with his right hand, he tried to hit her. With his left hand, he held his right hand back. In the end, the researchers concluded that all these patients now had two personalities. One controlled their speech and their right hand, while the other operated through images and the left hand. These corresponding to the different hemispheres of the brain. As was shown with the teenager who wanted to be a race-car driver and an accountant, these different personalities already existed in the patients, but before the surgery, they were able to communicate via the corpus callosum, leading to conflicting desires in the patients. In all of us.

Everyday Schizophrenia: Part 1

Just as we look at the body and see a unified whole, we look at the mind and see a single consciousness. Yet just as the body dissolves under close examination, so does consciousness. We can see evidence of this both when reflecting on our own thoughts and when looking at scientific research. But first, a story.

I was sick. It was the first time I'd gotten sick since I was a child, and it was terrible. I could barely walk out of bed. I couldn't concentrate when I was reading. The only book I could handle was a children's book, The Chronicles of Narnia. It should have been embarrassing. I was 25 and all I could manage was a book written for 10-year-olds. As I read it, though, I wasn't embarrassed; I wasn't bored. I was entranced. In my sickened delirium, reading that book was like getting transported to another world. I was there, in Narnia, and when Aslan spoke, I saw every hair of his lion's face.

When I was a kid, it was always like this when I read. I was completely immersed in the book. My intellect didn't hold back from my imagination. As an adult, though, I increasingly read books for information, even when I was reading fiction. I'd key in on style and character and plot, and I didn't really see it—or if I did, it was like looking at a painting rather than walking through a wood. While sick, my intellect was dazed and it couldn't take control of the experience, and so my imagination was free to treat me to a real fantasy. This was nice, but it isn't the point of the story.

At the same time, I was writing. I'd been writing for a long time, and slowly I was losing faith in myself. My style was too academic. It read like a high-school essay or, at best, a textbook. It didn't read like fiction. It didn't have a hint of poetry. I was on verge of giving up, but then I got sick. And when I wrote when I was sick, I had the same experience as reading The Chronicles of Narnia. My intellect couldn't step in with its precise wording, and instead my imagination dominated. It not only created its own images, it guided the story and the characters. It did these things in ways that I never could have contrived, and reading back over them later, I realized this was the best writing I had every done. Even if it was incoherent at points, even if the grammar was uncharacteristically sloppy, my style had finally acquired soul.

Once I was healthy, I started writing with my intellect again. I couldn't help it. My intellect was my words. It was the part of my mind that thought in English. Naturally, it dominated my writing. I hadn't forgotten this flu experience, though, and when I really concentrated, I could still see my imagination constructing its own images and putting its own spin on the story. When I glimpsed these pictures, I could sometimes manage to transcribe them, and when they worked, they became like poetry. They fit better than anything I could have contrived. My imagination was aware of what I was writing, and it was actively making commentary. Unfortunately, I typically didn't notice at all.

Some people might think that this is something special. This is my muse, and not everyone has a muse. Talking to people, though, I don't think this is the case. We all have this, and most of us commune with it every night, just before we fall asleep. Perhaps you've noticed this recently. There's a period just as you're drifting off when you're still awake, but your imagination is taking over. It begins to reel images before your mind, not unlike a movie. It will probably even be telling a story, though sometimes the story is incoherent. The strange thing is, you have no control of it. You, the voice in your mind. You, the consciousness you identify yourself as. You are not created these images. You are not the only one in your head.

And this is the point. You are not the only one in your head. You have at least the two consciousnesses which communicate in very different languages. One is a consciousness of words. One is a consciousness of images. They are aware of each other, as evidenced by how imagination constructed images relevant to my intellect's story. This awareness is imperfect, though. It's only an awareness of activity, and it is not necessarily an awareness of existence. When a cold front comes into town, we are aware of the change of temperature, but we don't necessarily feel the breeze. We can feel ourselves shivering, but we don't know why it's happening.

I are We

An excerpt from “Into the Night”:

It's like I'm in the seventh grade again. It was a year dominated by a dense, school-issued microbiology textbook. I spent my almost every evening laying belly-down in bed, flipping through obtuse images of ribosomes and mitochondria. It was my first struggle to comprehend something that I could not see, and it led to an obsession. Lysosomes, cytoplasms, DNA. I knew there was some fundamental truth waiting behind the curtain of unfamiliar terms. Even when I was in school and should have been learning about David Copperfield and two-plus-two-equals-four, I instead stared blankly out the window and thought about cell walls, instead. TV, once such a great pleasure, became a dull escape. The only thing that could distract me from this obsession was a walk through the woods. The sight of a lizard still excited me, as did peeking under rocks and watching the insects scurry away in dizzied alarm.

Incidentally, it was during one of these retreats that I found the truth I had been looking for. Chasing a rabbit through the underbrush, I scraped my arm against a wall of briar. A moment later, the rabbit had disappeared, and I was left alone in those woods, bleeding from three deep, parallel lines. It wasn't terribly painful, sure, but as I watched the blood seep out of my skin, tears pooled in my eyes, regardless. It was in that moment that I realized this blood wasn't really my own. It was thousands of tiny lives, just like the cells I had been studying. I could see them clearly in my mind's eye, a tide of crimson bodies, pulsing to the rhythm of their own nuclei. And as they left my skin, emerging into a bright, unwelcoming world, they were rapidly dying of exposure.

This was the realization that my mind seemed so keen on ignoring. My blood, my skin, my teeth, my tongue—they were all alive in their own right. They ate, drank, reproduced, and interacted. They had their own DNA, their own volition, their own need to survive. At the same time, they had learned to collaborate. They had joined forces like the people of a nation, and in helping each other, they helped themselves survive.

But if my body was a trillion independent lives, then what was I? For the longest time I had identified myself with a face in a mirror. But now, everything was them. Even my thoughts were just the whispers of several trillion neurons. And this left me wondering, maybe there was no 'I' at all. Maybe there was only 'we.' 'I' was just an avatar, an identity created to simplify the complexities of our true nature: not as an individual, but as a society of cells.

The point is simple. When you look at me, you see Timothy, a man in his late 20s with black hair and hazel eyes. You do not see trillions of cells working in independent tandem. At our level of perception, this is only natural. We literally cannot see what I am made of. That does not, however, change my underlying nature. What are the implications of being not an individual, but instead a pluralistic society of liver cells, blood cells, neurons, and more? Does this change my responsibility to myself? When I engage in behavior that unnecessarily damages my member cells, such as smoking or drinking Coca Cola, am I breaking a sort of microbial Social Contract?

Religious Interpretations of the Heredity of Soul

An ethnographer in New Guinea wrote a striking story of the heredity of soul. He first lived with the Gebusi in the 1970s, when they were still a stone-age tribe of hunter-gatherers, and over the years, he grew close to quiet a few of them. When he returned to their tribe in the 1990s, he was saddened to find that most of his friends had died. After a few weeks there, though, he became acquainted with their sons, who were so like their fathers in appearance and manner that they were almost the same person. While people in the U.S. might inherit their parents' bodies and personalities, our environment still shapes us in radically different ways. The Gebusi, however, had been living in an unchanged environment for countless generations. It was like they were reliving the same lives again and again.

I wonder if this is where the Hindu notion of reincarnation really comes from. The soul was not spirit, but rather an immortal expression of personality, born from blood and culture. Eventually, religion would formalize this notion and use it to reinforce class and caste, but initially, reincarnation was simply an observation of the human condition, of the heredity of soul. They saw heredity not just as genetics, though, but also as habit. The way a parent conducted himself would be passed on to his children in the form of karma. If he was slovenly, then his children would learn to be slovenly themselves. If he was angry, then his children would grow to be angry, too.

In the West, a common misconception about karma is that it's a type of cosmic scorecard, tallying our 'good deeds' the way Christian angles might. In fact, karma is not about good deeds. It's about habit. Good karma is essentially good habits, such as seeing the best in your neighbors or going on a morning job. Bad karma is bad habits, such as venting your wrath on bystanders when you really feel angry about something else. Our habits are passed on to our children through modeled behavior. Those habits which make our lives miserable will make our children's lives miserable, too, because by the time they're adults, they will have fallen into the same cycle.

We aren't a dead species, though. We can still change. Over the course of generations, children can extract ourselves from the karma of their parents. I see this in myself and in many of my friends. Each of us has something about our parents which we detest, and we make it a life goal to unwork that habit from our own behavior. Other bad karma will linger, though. We will not become perfect in a single generation. Instead, it will be our own children's task to unravel the bad karma that's left behind. This is the evolution of family. It's no longer about genes and bodies. It's about culture.

This same perspective can be applied to Christianity, and heaven and hell cease to be spiritual realms but instead become the poles of Earth's potential. Lead a good productive life and you'll make the world a more heavenly place. Lead a squanderous life and you'll make the world a more hellish place. In either case, what you make of the world you pass onto your children, to your genetic soul. In the U.S., previous generations worked hard, built railroads, developed industry and agriculture, and by the time they passed the country on to their children, they had made America an easier place for people to live. They made it a vision of their heaven.

Of course, it has now come to light that this vision has problems, and our generation is left with the task of re-envisioning heaven and finding a way to make it work sustainably and humanely. Its easy for us today to grumble about how selfish or foolish prior generations were, but it's worth asking if perhaps what they did, they did in good faith. They wanted to make a better world. They wrote the first draft of heaven. Our job is to revise.

Some of you may know that I'm a religious voyeur. I enjoy waking up early on Sunday morning and going to religious services that I don't believe in. In the U.S., I've noticed a trend. Most the people in attendance are not white. They come from poorer backgrounds, but by their clothes and their haircuts, it's obvious that they're pulling themselves up. Religion is a vehicle by which they can assume the values of the dominant culture, structure their lives by these rules, and slowly gain wealth and status within it, which they can pass onto their children. Don't steal, don't lie, don't cheat on your spouse. These rules create stability and trust. They suppress the id so that a person can thrive in a society ruled by the super-ego.

The Heredity of Soul

My father never beat his children. He never criticized us behind our backs. He did, however, have a temper. It struck almost every time I visited him, and he had no control over it—or perhaps he simply never tried to exert control. Whatever the case, once the tremors started, the volcano invariably erupted. By the time the cinders died away, he was surrounded by miles upon miles of ash. The family did our best not to take this personally, but at the same time, we stopped visiting the scorched lands around him. We kept our distance; child, wife, and brother. His anger ruined his ties to us. Before I was even a teenager, I saw this. I saw that anger could destroy people, and I vowed that I wouldn't let myself become like that. For years, I held to this promise, too. I held to it so well, in fact, that by the time I graduated from high school, I was convinced that I couldn't get angry. I believed that I was beyond it.

My Junior year of college, though, something happened. I was walking home from school, and along the way, I had to cross M.L.K., an insanely busy road at that hour. Sometimes, I had to wait on my side for five or six minutes before I could cross. This time, however, ten minutes passed. And then fifteen. I started pacing up and down the length of the road. My breathing was forced. My thoughts were interrupted by static, the buzz slowly mounting into a roar. This was a feeling I'd had many times before, but it wasn't until that moment that I recognized what it was: this was anger. Maybe I never yelled. Maybe I never cursed others. But I was angry. I'd just been pretending like it wasn't there.

This marked a turning point for me. Up until then, I'd been struggling to find out “who I am.” A lot of teenagers go through this, and I can't say my search was any different. I watched movies and read books, and afterwords I'd admire certain characters and want to be like them. Other times, I'd model myself after people that I actually knew. In either case, it was problematic. I could try to act like them, sure, but I could never fully embody these other personalities. Always, in some moment of weakness or neglect, I'd revert to my old ways.

When I recognized that I was getting angry like my father, it was the first time I glimpsed an aspect of the fundamental me. This wasn't a characteristic that I had tried to cultivate. In fact, it was one that I actively suppressed. But it was there, and it was all the more undeniable for it ability to withstand suffocation. After that, I found more of these traits. There was my intellectual curiosity and it's corresponding argumentativeness. There was my sensitivity to other people's opinions which drove me between periods of extroversion and wounded isolation. There was even the way I looked, the way I carried myself, the way I gesticulated or charmed others. All of these things I could trace back to my father and mother.

I could look at my brother and sisters and see the same thing. Each of us was different, but there was obvious heredity at work. Aspects of our parents were sliced, diced, and stewed together in novel ways, each of us a strange alchemy of body and personality. This isn't unusual. When I meet the parents of my friends, I see the same process at work. People tend to get offended when I point this out, perhaps because so many of us have tried so hard to distance ourselves from our roots. It's not an ugly thing, though. It means that there is something deep inside us which is real, which is immutable, which is us. I've come to call this soul.

It is our blood and our upbringing. It is the union of sperm and egg, as well as the soft impressions left on a young mind. Nature and nurture. There is no conflict here. Both are given to us by our parents. Both were given to them by their parents. This is the heredity of soul. It is a chain that can be traced back through generations. I have seen a daguerreotype of my great-great-grandfather, and staring back at me are my nose and my brow. I have heard my grandmother tell stories of her father, and I see in his actions the same choices that I would make, whether I would be proud of them or not.

This is the first time I've been known as Timothy. This is not the first time I've lived.

The Ambient Unconscious

When I was in high school, I thought that I was a genius. This isn't just to say that I made good grades or impressed my teachers. After all, there were a lot of other students that did these things, and nobody would call them geniuses. They were simply good at what they did: memorizing texts and following rules. No, as I saw it, my gift was different. It was a capacity for original thought. It was the potential to change the world. Yes, this was a big claim. At the time, though, I had proof. I could even point to the exact day when I came to this realization.

I'd just purchased a history of Western philosophy. It was my first serious text. Before that, I'd been an avid reader of fantasy and sci-fi, but that was the sum of my literacy. Even so, I considered myself a 'thinker,' and when my uncle recommended that I read a history on philosophy, I committed myself to the task. At first, I'd just wanted to prove that I could tackle difficult ideas, but as I read the book, I realized that its ideas weren't difficult at all. In fact, they were quiet familiar. I'd thought them all before. Plato, Kant, Hume: I'd never heard their names, but I'd come to their conclusions on my own.

This is why I thought I was a genius. What took Western civilization generations to devise, I had independently realized in just fifteen years. You can only guess at how this bolstered my self-image. At the time, I thought that I would take the banner of enlightenment and carry it to new realms. I would help society grow. It was my gift and my obligation. It was my genius, and for years I believed in it. Of course, it's easy for me to now look back and laugh. I'm twenty-eight and have not proven myself to possess any of this potential. I was just a regular kid with a thick book and big head. Still, this begs a question. How did an otherwise unremarkable fifteen-year-old boy come to the same conclusions as men like Socrates before he'd even heard their names?

The answer came to me three years after I bought that book. At the time, I was in college and reading 'Beyond Good and Evil.' Once again, I was matching each of Nietzsche's thoughts with one of my one, reaffirming my genius. At least, it seemed that way until I watched 'Batman Returns.' Of all things, Hollywood brought me to my senses. It happened while Batman was gearing up for the final conflict with the Penguin. Already, he'd shown himself to be outside of society's rules. He was a vigilante. He did what needed to be done, even if it went beyond good and evil. In other words, Batman was Nietzsche. Batman embodied the values of 'Beyond Good and Evil,' and by watching this movie, I was effectively taking an introductory course on the text. No wonder these ideas were familiar. I'd seen them when first I watched 'Batman Returns' as a twelve-year-old.

After that, I saw this happening again and again. Rousseau was in 'Requiem for a Dream.' Maugham was in 'The X-Men.' Popular culture had integrated the ideas of Western philosophy, and as we consumed its media, we came to the same conclusions as its thinkers. In time, their philosophies appeared like common sense. So, when I read a history of Western thought, of course the ideas were familiar to me. I'd learned about Locke and Hobbes through 'Law and Order,' about Socrates through 'The Dead Poet's Society,' about Nietzsche through 'Batman.'

As you might expect, this shattered my self-image. It took months to pick up the pieces. So, I wasn't a genius, after all. I was just like the other students in school, memorizing texts and following rules. It just happened that my text was more subtle, my rules less explicit. When I looked at the remains of these personal philosophies, I saw history and media staring back at me. Only after I swept away most the debris did I find a few shards that were my own, that were truly original. These, I held close to myself. These, I cultivated and refashioned, developing metaphors and stories so that I could convey them to others.

When I actually shared these ideas with my friends, though, something strange happened. They weren't confused. They didn't get riled up and contrary. No, my friends simply nodded knowingly. They had made the same conclusions themselves; they just hadn't put them into words yet. It was no different from how I immediately understood the philosophies within 'Beyond Good and Evil.' I had been primed. My friends had been primed. Still, this didn't make sense to me. I was sharing my most original philosophies. These ideas weren't in books or movies. How then had so many people also come to these realizations?

It took me a while, but slowly I began to see: what media accomplishes through implicit communication, people are doing organically, as well. We do not need to describe an idea in words to convey it to others. Rather, ideas spread just as readily through our actions and assumptions, and this is happening on a massive scale. Whole philosophies are forming just beneath our conscious, and although we are vaguely aware of them, we cannot yet talk about them. We can only skirt around them, hinting at their existence and tracing a vague outline. When I tell a friend one of my ideas and he nods, all that's happened is that I've pointed to something that he's long seen in his periphery. It is not my originality or genius that sees these things. It's just my obsession with looking sideways.

I've heard other people talk about this phenomenon, referring to it as the collective unconscious. These are the ideas which we have all begun to think, but which we are not yet fully aware of. It's a fitting label, though a bit of a misnomer, as well. When Jung originally coined it, he was referring to unconscious traits that all people are born with, such as an image of the ideal woman (anima) or a fear of death. In contrast, what I'm describing now are ideas which are actively evolving through conversation, art, and deed. They are not inborn archetypes. To avoid confusion, they need a different name, such as the 'ambient unconscious.' It's not the prettiest phrase, but ambient at least emphasizes the origin of these ideas: they are drawn from our surroundings, rather than from our genetics or soul.

I decided to start 'What I've Heard' with this essay because it highlights that the ideas to follow are not my own. Rather, they have evolved through conversation with friends, through images on flickr and facebook, through Catholic ritual and Buddhist meditation. All I am is the mixing pot. All my thoughts are is alchemy.