The Divided Mind
What is it like to be you? And by you, I am referring to the reader. This is one of the most important questions that I grapple with, but in my opinion, everyone should! If you do not get the enormity of this question, please stop reading this and stare at yourself in the mirror for a couple of minutes, repeating this question multiple times and watch as you feel disoriented. Another exercise made famous by Douglas Harding would be to look at your feet, hands, elbows, fingers, and after that, to look for your head. Instead of where your head is supposed to be, you will notice a screen where the world is presented. Meaning the world is present where your head is supposed to be. The implication for this exercise is that it shows you that without an aid of a picture, mirror or other reflective objects, you can never actually see your head. You are not the head, but honestly, the world presented to you.
Another way to think of this is that electrochemical events occur at each of the trillion synapses in your brain when you are reading this, but you are not aware of this. You are, however, if I point to, aware of the feeling of how your toe feels. How does your toe feel at this very moment? Is the air around you warm or cool? Now that I have brought these questions to your attention, you cannot but be aware of these feelings.
Most of your thoughts are now driven towards how your toe feels or the air around you. This is what I would like to call awareness or better-termed semi-awareness. Had I not pointed towards it, you would not have been aware of it; however, now that I have, you cannot escape thinking about it.
A lot of things are in a state of semi-awareness, for instance, breathing. Are you breathing in or out? Once the lamplight of attention is paid to them, they remain at the center of your awareness. There are, however, things you cannot become aware of, for instance, digestion. Though I have spoken to monks who have claimed that they can control things like heartbeat, digestion and can become aware of them but for this conversation, we will assume you have not mastered such an ability.
Then there are things which you are paying attention to. Recall the toe and breathing example; you were specifically paying attention to them. You are paying attention to what is written here; in fact, I would claim experience for you would change from paying attention to sensations its ever-changing contents (attention to semi-attention and vice-versa), passing through various stages of wakefulness and sleep and from the cradle to the grave.
So far, I have claimed that you are already paying attention to certain things, can start paying attention to other things, and can never pay attention or become aware of some things. But what is happening at the level of the brain or, better yet, at the background, things which are not aware of?
Our brain is divided into two hemispheres. This is an uncontroversial idea. However, our two hemispheres play different roles in how the world is presented is controversial. But I will go forward with the idea that our hemispheres present the world as we experience it in a different light. So, for example, if you are reading this in a room, you can grasp that you are in a room in its entirety is the result of the right hemisphere, which grasps things as a whole. But, on the other hand, you can grasp things like chairs, sheets, clothes, or particular items in your room due to the left hemisphere.
When I say the ‘right hemisphere does this’ or ‘the left hemisphere does that,’ the reader should note that in any one particular human brain, at any one specific time, both the hemispheres will be actively involved. Unless one hemisphere has been destroyed or removed, both signs of activity will be found. Both hemispheres are involved in almost all mental processes, and indeed in all mental states: information is constantly conveyed between the hemispheres.
It may be transmitted in either direction several times a second. What activity shows up on a scan is a function of where the threshold is set: if the point were set low enough, one would see the action just about everywhere in the brain all the time. But, at the level of experience, the world we know is synthesized from the work of the two cerebral hemispheres, each hemisphere having its way of understanding the world — its own ‘take’ on it. This synthesis is unlikely to be symmetrical.
Then there is the question of individual difference in hemisphere dominance and laterality. I will speak throughout ‘the right hemisphere’ and ‘the left hemisphere’ as though these concepts were universally applicable. That cannot be the case. The terms represent generalizations.
These two hemispheres are connected by the corpus callosum, a C-shaped nerve fiber. The corpus callosum contains an estimated 300–800 million fibers connecting topologically similar areas in either hemisphere. Yet only 2 percent of cortical neurons are bound by this tract. What is more, the primary purpose of many of these connections is actually to inhibit — in other words, to stop the other hemisphere from interfering.
If you are scratching your head, it means that in a straightforward term that the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere don’t talk to each other (if you are a professional cognitive scientist, neurologist, surgeon or anyone who has read ample literature on this topic, do note that this an oversimplification and does not invoke libel per se).
The reason for diving into lateralization was to make this next point related to a person named Phineas Gage. Who survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven entirely through his head, destroying much of his brain’s left frontal lobe, and for that injury’s reported effects on his personality and behavior over the remaining 12 years of his life — effects sufficiently profound that friends saw him (for a time at least) as “no longer Gage.”
This points to something in which when a person has access to only a partial hemisphere, their personality can completely alter. It would not be far-fetched that the right frontal lobe would have overtaken activities performed by the left frontal lobe of Phineas Gage. But how those activities are performed would impact the personality of the person in question.
But here is the idea which I have a hard time wrapping my brain around: it is not like the brain would have conjured up a new personality for Phineas Gage when a part of his left frontal lobe was destroyed. The right frontal lobe would have always had access to these sets of behaviors or personalities per se. But after the left frontal lobe was destroyed, the personality of the right frontal lobe came into the driver’s seat.
Another point to note that the brain is divided into four lobes, but only the destruction of one of the hemispheres’ lobes caused such a drastic change. This is painting a very quasi-Freudian picture of the mind.
But here is what I need to bring to attention by causing harm to alter one area of the brain. You can potentially bring other personalities into awareness that you were unaware of. My controversial argument here is that your brain helps string multiple personalities together, but only one personality becomes dominant enough to claim the center of awareness.
We experience this stringing of multiple personalities daily. Take, for instance, our thoughts. Every one of us (except robots) has thoughts. But what is it exactly to have a thought? Well, almost everything you experience is a thought. Human activity, from the most constructive, like finding a cure for a pandemic like Covid-19, to the most destructive, like weaponizing a pandemic, is the product of what human beings like ourselves think. But within our minds, we live under a type of tyranny.
We usually think that we are authoring these thoughts but borrowing from the Buddhist traditions, the self is also a construct of thought. Anyone who has ever tried meditating will know the moment you want to concentrate on your breathing; you will meet your mind. It is the most rambling, chaotic, needling, insulting, insufferable person you will ever meet. It is like having a maniac for a roommate in your head that will not shut up. Yet you do not control it.
So what is the source of this thought? Putting my controversial argument forward, I would say a person/personality inside your head exists in a quasi-Freudian way without ever taking complete control of your awareness and thoughts. Still, the thoughts do get the attention. This could explain things like multiple personality disorders where a single person has multiple personalities. Somehow, those personalities in the unconscious (forgive me for writing this) have also taken the reigns. So when incidents like the one which Phineas Gage was unfortunate enough to encounter occur, the part of the brain that takes over also brings with it its set of personalities that becomes the center of our awareness or the way we look at the world. Until such a similar incident can occur, it remains inaccessible to awareness.
So, in summary, you are living with multiple people inside your head who all have different characteristics, points of view, opinions, thought processes, personalities, defects, strengths, sexuality, beliefs, desires, goals, to name a few. Yet, most of them never take center stage.
