Who's in charge--you or your brain?

When you look at this picture, a special area of your brain kicks in to process it. An area tuned just for recognizing faces (or anything that kind of looks like a face). And you don't get a say in this. That face-processing area is so primitive, in fact, that your brain can detect an angry face even before you consciously know it's a face!
And here's the strangest one of all--from neurologist Richard Restak's book Poe's Heart and the Mountain Climber--"After damage to the right inferior parietal cortex... the affected person frequently loses the ability to perceive or respond in any way to things in the opposite (left) visual field. But that doesn't hold for angry faces... Despite the affected person's usual inability to consciously see and describe anything on the blind side, his or her amygdala responds when the experimenter projects an emotional picture to that side--evidence of a split between conscious and unconscious perception."

So there are scenarios in which you might not even be able to see the face, but your brain still reacts to it! This is a life-saving skill, of course, and studies have shown that a neutral or relatively pleasant face doesn't cause the same reaction as, say, a face where the person shows disgust. Seeing another person crinkle up their face in disgust has probably saved a gazillion lives throughout history ("Oh! I think I'll take a pass on that meat...")

And that's just the tip of the iceburg when it comes to your brain responding to things beyond your conscious awareness or control. That's why it surprises me how little the average person knows--or even cares to know--about how their own brain works. Most of us go through life under the illusion that we're in charge of our all of our reactions. And it's just not so.

That's one of the reasons that all four of us on this blog (Eric, Beth, Bert, and I) have tossed our televisions forever. (More on that later)

Beth's recent post about the latest issue of Scientific American Mind reminded me of how the four of us have such a strong interest in the brain, as brain users, not brain scientists. Her post also mentioned the marvels of the new brain scanning technologies like fMRI, and that struck a very personal chord for me that I'll share in this blog, despite my aversion to revealing personal details.

[Sidebar] My interest in the brain began when I had my first grand mal seizure at the age of four. The first in a long series that dominated the rest of the my childhood until inexplicably (but apparently quite common), the frequency of seizures dropped dramatically by the time I was in college. But when I was young, my mother had a very tough choice to make--accept that I would be one of the millions for whom the cause is unknown, or submit to a series of potentially life-threatening procedures to try to find out. Painless and harmless brain scans weren't an option! My seizures were severe and frequent, but usually not life-threatening, so her option (and later mine) was to weigh the odds. She decided to wait it out, knowing that there was a risk my brain "storms" were caused by something that could ultimately kill me, like a brain tumor. I still remember the day as a teenager when my neurologist finally said, "Well, since you made it this far, whatever is causing your seizures probably won't kill you." Fortunately, I am one of the lucky ones who has long "auras" before every seizure, which means I have a minimum of three hours advanced warning. So the chances of my having a seizure while driving, skiing, climbing, or even just standing on a cement floor (which would suck to fall onto) are virtually zero. I can do anything without fear of having a seizure, which is why I'm allowed to have a driver's license (although I've had to do battle with the state of California over this). [/Sidebar]

Enough true confessions. Back to my point:
Everyone should know how their brain really works, because it--not you--is running the show!

I'm making a distinction between the conscious "you" and your brain, of course, but that's because it matters. Remember, while you live in the 21st century, your brain still reacts as though you're in a far more primitive time. You're dealing with a legacy brain.

The more you learn about the brain, the more you learn all the ways in which you're being manipulated by things like ads (especially ads), pop culture, the words and behaviors of those around you, movies and television, peer pressure, political spin, news media, beauty, and ulimately--chemistry. Hormones. Neurotransmitters. What's floating around up there naturally, and how you might alter it with alcohol, food, drugs, sex (or pictures of sex), or even by just sitting in a room with a television turned on!

In our books, we exploit some of this to try to manipulate or "trick" your brain into thinking that what you're trying to learn is as important as where that next mammoth hunt will be. Because remember, while you're thinking, "This is important! I have a test next week!", your brain is thinking, "This is SO not life-threatening." Your brain looks for certain telltale shifts (even subtle ones) in chemistry, and if they aren't there, your brain has a special agent (creb-2) that's working overtime to STOP you from remembering. It's trying to save bandwidth for the really important stuff... and you aren't in charge!

You and your brain, it seems, are not "of a mind". You often want one thing while your brain is leading you to something else. Like another beer. Like that piece of cheesecake. Like that terribly attractive but oh-so-wrong-for-you potential mate.

Anxiety is another place where this becomes a huge issue. People have been found suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome from merely watching the images of the twin towers falling. And we all suffer from at least one form of irrational fear (or at least mild anxiety) that we consciously don't want, but can't seem to shake.

But learning about the brain can offer hope there too. In the Restak book I mentioned earlier, he talks about some promising studies that have shown ways to reduce anxiety not by trying to get you to forget, say, a bad experience, but by using techniques that can cause you to transform or "reappraise" the experience. He mentions an experiment carried out on "normal" volunteers who where given a shock to the wrist after seeing a yellow square on a screen. Naturally, the subjects became tense when they saw the yellow square. But the experimenter gave them instructions to think of "soothing images drawn from nature at the instant they saw the yellow square. In other words, the volunteers were encouraged to reappraise the situation: focus on a soothing image, rather than the fact that the square preceeded a shock."

What was really interesting about the study is that they were able to prove that the subject's "physiological arousal" (heart rate, etc.) was reduced when the did the reappraisal, and more significantly--the brain scans showed that their brain's fear response was reduced! They showed more "thought" activity in the prefrontal cortex, which corresponds to a dampening of the amygdala (the primitive part that reacts to things it perceives as threatening).

I'm going to Japan on business later this week. The moment I learned of the trip, I should have been excited. But I instantly felt my body tense up. Because the last (and only) time I was in Japan was just over ten years ago, and I woke up on my first morning in Tokyo to the sounds of screaming, terror, sirens, and I was alone there. I looked out my window and saw a scene from a sci-fi/horror movie--people in something like space suits, surrounded by ambulances and, well, you probably guessed that my first morning there involved a WMD--the sarin gas attack on the subway just below the hotel.

But I wanted to go on this new trip, so I pulled out Restak's book where I had dog-eared the part about reappraisal, and that's what I've been doing. I focused on the cherry blossoms that are in bloom right NOW in Tokyo, and the way the breeze felt on my skin as I sat in a park across from the hotel the night before the disaster. I thought of the beautiful garden at the Zen center in Rochester where my friends got married, and focused on the magical places in Kyoto I'm planning to visit at the end of the trip. And it's working!

Fortunately, this is a fabulous time to learn about your brain because of the resources springing up from recent interest in what some are calling "recreational neuroscience". But I don't think it's just for recreation. I think it can mean the difference between a happy, alive, mindful, awake, passionate life and... one that isn't. And there are some great references including the Scientific American Mind magazine and books like the super cool (if not always practical) Mind Hacks (you can link to the book from that blog).

If you're a marketer, a programmer, a designer, or a... human, you owe it to yourself to learn what your brain is doing so you can make conscious choices whether to be manipulated. In a movie, you decide to be a willing co-conspirator to "suspend disbelief" and fall into the story. But what happens when the network news is trying to suck you in with the "if it bleeds it leads" approach? What about advertising? Political messages? Culture? Peer pressure? Family pressure? Finding our how your brain works is in many ways the key to taking back your life.

An earlier edition of Scientific American Mind, Volume 14, number 1, has an article on Television Addiction that I wish everyone on the planet would read. You can still be in charge and have television, but it's extremely difficult. Personally, I didn't feel up to the challenge, and it wasn't worth what it does to your brain and body, so I dumped mine (as did the others here). If you haven't tried it, it's like 1,000 pounds of stress and weight being lifted off your shoulders. You'll most likely lose weight, and more importantly--you'll more likely read more, get more done, spend more time with other hobbies and, oh yeah, have more sex. : )

(Yes, that part about sex was manipulative, after all--isn't that what advertisers say or at least hint about virtually everything? But in the case of TV, it's true! Trust me on this one ; )