There's another special by illusionist Darren Brown called Miracle; in it he talks about "now" and that of being in the moment, all while enthusiastically telling you about his giving and the taking of your thoughts. Beyond the random pick-a-word showmanship (and indeed, he is quite the British showman), he soon moves on to the spoken words of evangelicals and their words of "healing," even citing specific phrases from The Bible and causing people to faint from feeling "the spirit;" and people do readily come on stage to give testimony of how they have indeed been "healed." He's not making fun of revivals and preachers when he does this, but rather trying to show the audience that even as an avowed atheist, this "power" comes not from him or from some outside spiritual entity, but from inside each of us, that each of us has the power to "heal" what ails us...a power which comes from our mind. The "miracle" he tells you, is really that everyone of us is just here right now, the result of a random act of just one of over a hundred million sperm from your father managing to make it to one of the million eggs in your mother* and at some specific moment those merged, fertilized, came to term, and gave birth to...you. And that happened with your grandparents, and their parents, and back and back and back, all just to come to this exact moment like a lucky Power Ball selection...you. That, he says, is the true miracle...
It's all beyond comprehension to me, how all the chess pieces from thousands and thousands of years ago have led to me being here, or even me living as long as I have. How did my life take the path that it did and make me the friends that I did and on and on. Come to think of it, how am I even able to ponder such questions? As it turns out, a graphic comic-like explanation of sorts arrived in my hands, a book illustrated by the son of two professors-emeritus who happen to have a lot of street cred (one has published over 500 academic papers) and who specialize in fields such as autism and schizophrenia. And one of their premises is that we may not be thinking at all. What?? For one, our spatial recognition (such as that needed to know that what we're looking at is a face and that the eyes and nose are in the right places and not sideways or upside down) is an area of our brain called the fusiform and is one of the first areas to form in a baby's brain, as in the first hour after birth (double what???). And along with what develops in the brain is our ability to recognize where a thought is coming from, with this caveat: "If enough people within a peer group believe something, it's simply 'the truth.' But if only one person believes it, it's a delusion."
The two parent professors are Uta Firth and Chris Firth and their book is titled
Two Heads (although I think that Two Brains may have proved a more accurate title). But they go on to explain the part of our brain that leads to us hearing and believing things, much as Derren Brown tries to point out there being a belief of an outside force "healing" a person or there being a government conspiracy that babies will grow up to be clones of Charles Manson. Here's how the book tries to explains a portion of it:
People report that a mysterious voice is talking to them, sometimes from inside their own head...from the person's point of view, there's no question that these thoughts must come from outside. But it may in fact be the case that these "voices" are from the person's own brain that have been misidentified as not being from their brain...It's almost impossible to imagine that a rogue thought could come from your own brain -- we have no prior experience of that sensation. And with every attempt to understand and explain what is going on, a delusion becomes more complex. Working through this line of thinking may help to explain how it is that some people can cling so strongly to the most outrageous delusions. Their minds are working as rationally as anyone else's -- it's just that they are burdened with pieces of evidence that other people's minds have no experience of. From there, the two neuro-cognitive scientists ask the deeper question: do we have free will? (partially because some experiments have shown that our brains appear to make decisions milliseconds before we
think we're making that decision...triple what??)
The two then present studies that show our brains learning (and in some cases, temporarily un-learning) prejudice, or as they term it, in-group/out-group. Uta Firth notes that she became part of an exclusive British in-group by being named a "dame;" but because she was not born in England, she can never be called "dame Uta," and being a woman, she can never be knighted, nor can her title be given or presented to her by any member of the Royal family. She adds:
Let me stress -- I am not complaining! I am very proud to have received this honor. Just making a point that for every in-group, there's a fear of not being quite "in" enough. In any group, some people fear being rejected. Or, perhaps worse, being ostracized, cast out of the group. Her specialty for nearly 50 years has been the study of autism and dyslexia (she also notes:
Let me emphasize that the vast, vast majority of people with autism do not have mental superpowers...she cites the film
Rain Man as "groundbreaking but has not entirely dated well.")
It is here that I admit that I have watched a few episodes of
The Extraordinary Attorney Woo on Netflix, a tale of an autistic 27-year old who had memorized nearly all of her father's law books while a child and now struggles to socially make her way in the legal world as a practicing rookie attorney (in the show she passes law school with a nearly perfect score). Korean actress Park Eun Bin told
Soombi:
I made it the main point to get viewers on Woo Young Woo’s side, who talks about an unusual and weird but meaningful and beautiful life. I decided that it was my moral responsibility to exclude references as much as possible and not use real autistic people as a means, in order to emphasize Woo Young Woo’s uniqueness. Woo Young Woo is not a representative or spokesperson for autistic people so I wanted to show her individual traits. The actress has a psychology degree (as well as majoring in media communications).
So, if you do indeed have free will and can and do make your own decisions, how do you view someone with autism, or dementia, or someone wildly kicking and flailing as they enter the latter stages of Huntington's disease? I mention those three neurological traits because it is often not the person's own doing but rather something due to an errant molecule. Jumping back to Derren Brown's "miracle" of each of us winning the genetic lottery just to be here, neurologist
Sara Manning Peskin described it this way in her book,
A Molecule Away From Madness:
At your beginning, a tadpole-shaped cell found the opaque edges of a human egg and burrowed inside. The fertilized egg --now an embryo-- cinched itself and dived into two. Two cells become four, four become eight, and so on until something astounding happened: instead of remaining identical, each cell took on a different role. Some cells were shipped off to the frontier to skin. Others began manufacturing hormones that could make you sleepy, hungry, or nervous. Still others became muscle cells that could manipulate the bones in your growing skeleton. The organ that defines your personality --the one that makes you, you-- started off in the embryo as a sheet of cells roughly the size of a pencil tip. Over just a few days in early development, the sheet rolled up into the shape of a long tube. One end of the structure stretched to form your spinal cord, while the other blossomed into the very brain you are using to read this page today. Just above your eyes, you developed neurons that help you control impulses. Neurons on the sides of your brain learned to interpret language and music. Toward the top of your head, neurons became specialists in arithmetic and judgment. Underneath, a set of neurons sorted out visual information couriered from the back of your eyeballs. Voilà. You became the owner of the most complex machine known to humankind. Your brain has more that eighty-six billion neurons -- more that the brain of any other animals on earth. It is larger in size that the brain of any other primate, and it holds more data than the most cutting-edge smartphone. Parts of our brains are so complex that they do not even develop fully until we reach our mid-twenties. And yet. Our brains have an Achilles' heel. The very molecules that make our brains work can also co-opt our personalities and destroy our ability to think. Our temperament, memories, and relationship to reality can all be lost to molecules that are billions of times smaller than our brains.
But let's say that we are ==or at least think that we are-- in control of our own thoughts. How much do you listen when your "gut feeling" tells you to not go that direction, or not to meet that person or not to buy that container of ice cream; what about when it tells you to leave a relationship, or to stop smoking or drinking? Or when it tells you that one person or group is more valued than another (ask yourself, given an Afghan refugee family and an Ukrainian refugee family, which would you be more inclined to help?) Would this inner thought change if the people weren't white, or thin, or physically and mentally "normal," or successful, or of the political party or view we support; would their religion enter the picture? Our "brains" have to sort all of this out and make judgements and decisions all the time. So if that's the case, what if we could change our thoughts and view war differently and mimic John Lennon singing, "all we are saying is give peace a chance." That was the idea behind the current Designing Peace exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through September 4th). Said the related
article in the magazine:
“Much of the debate on peace is muddied by misperceptions about both the nature of violence and how to create peace,” writes Steve Killelea, the founder of the Institute for Economics and Peace in his 2021 book Peace in the Age of Chaos. “This is partly because most politicians do not understand peace. They do understand aggressive responses to threats that are popular with their citizens and often confuse these with peace.” Is that an errant molecule or a conscious decision on their part...on our part?
Wrote neurologist Peskin on her decision to enter such a difficult field: "Try to picture who you want to be sitting on the examination table when you open the door to the clinic room," the teacher advised. As my list grew, I realized that I was drawn to patients who suffered ailments that changed the mind. Every condition I wrote down had a tendency to alter a victim's personality, requiring that doctors navigate not only the technical details of the illness but also the social implications of identity loss. Looking at my list, the connection to molecular science was also clear. All the conditions I had included were either treatable using precision medicine, or were under research using molecular tools. Neurologists who see patients with these conditions must address both the macro --the person and his social environment-- and the micro -- the molecule that causes the illness in the first place.
In today's topsy-turvy world where heated wars clash with heated tempers and heated oceans and forests, it was refreshing to hear Anne Lamott reflect on what she's learned over 60 years of living and writing. In part of her
TED talk, she offered this as one of her "lessons" learned:
While fixing and saving and trying to rescue is futile, radical self-care is quantum, and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere like a little fresh air. It's a huge gift to the world. When people respond by saying, "Well, isn't she full of herself," just smile obliquely like Mona Lisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. Being full of affection for one's goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying self is home. It's where world peace begins. Hope. Let's face it, despite all the unknowing, there's hope. And as neuroscientists Uta and Chris Firth put it:
Of all the research we've done, we remain delighted by the finding that people should cooperate if they want to get the best results, and that the ultimate expression of cooperation is to come together in groups that reflect the diversity of the world. Yes, this means diversity of gender, culture, family history, education, and so on -- but we're really talking about diversity of how our minds work (which is of course shaped by all those other things)...we like to think we've opened up one or two doors that shed new light on how the brain works, but behind each door, there's an enormous space scattered with new doors just waiting to be opened.
*Said this from The Cleveland Clinic on how many eggs a human female has: At birth, there are approximately 1 million eggs; and by the time of puberty, only about 300,000 remain. Of these, only 300 to 400 will be ovulated during a woman's reproductive lifetime. Fertility can drop as a woman ages due to decreasing number and quality of the remaining eggs.
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