This is your brain having an idea, or not

I finally had a chance to read through the entire excerpt of Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson that I posted about a couple of days ago. In the excerpt, Johnson describes getting a functional MRI to see if he could see an idea forming in his brain. The fMRI experiment would measure and compare periods of time when he's not thinking, time when he's reading something, and time when he’s ruminating – when an idea might form.

A number of things jumped out at me. One was when he was trying not to think: “you stuff your brain into a physical situation that should by all rights overwhelm it, and you tell it explicitly not to think of anything, and yet still it churns away in spite of everything…here my brain was riffing away...” This reminded me of my own brain sometime in the middle of last night when I woke up and couldn’t shut my thinking off for a good two hours (I checked).

Also interesting were the brain scans of his two rumination periods, which showed two distinct patterns. In the first, Johnson has a panic at realizing he has to perform, to come up with some interesting hunch or idea: “For forty seconds of this $2 million machine's time, I think of absolutely nothing worthwhile. I think about trying to think about something. If there is a cognitive version of flailing, this is what I do for the first scan.” For the second rumination period he’s prepared; he “writes” in his mind a description of the experience he’s having inside the machine.

The scan of Johnson’s cognitive “flailing” shows scattered activity across his brain: “my brain looks cluttered.” The second, where he’s focused on "writing," shows high activity in one part of the brain while all other areas had almost none: “It was the overall orchestration, the clarity of the pattern, that stood out, the lack of mental clutter.” I’ve experienced both of these states – the mental flailing and the intense focus. I suppose it’s not surprising that fMRIs would show clear pictures of it.

Once I wrote some narration for an animation of sleep neurochemistry for a company that makes an insomnia drug. After that I used to picture my little neurons over-firing when I’d lie awake at night. Maybe now when I’m struggling with a scattered brain I’ll picture it – as well as what it looks like in the bliss of focused functioning.

This is your brain if you are the Dalai Lama

See also the interesting research being done in a collaboration between the Dalai Lama and some top psychologists and neuroscientists on how medidation changes brain chemistry to reduce stress and promote positive moods.

7:32:30 PM      trackback [] 

Migration

Nice poems today at Poetry Daily:

Migration

Are you hiding in a book? I want to read it.
Like Pieter de Hooch's love of the half-open shutter,
you sip your glass of water in the shadow of your bangs,
in the shadow of your book, a judgment
against the fact that every decade is arrogant.
You are so clean you daydream of sheets,
telling no one. Your hands are two magic birds:
one for granting great geographical knowledge and one
for plunging in and out of streams
to stymie your enemies. If these wings come together
in the form of prayer, a nest, or a cup of air,
certain houses and neighborhoods will explode.
Let them come together in the small of my back.

- John Poch

And now I have to run off to a meeting...

12:53:00 PM      trackback []