I have gotten good ideas from Robert Ornstein, especially his books
- "The Healing Brain" by Ornstein and Sobel
- "Multimind"
- "The Roots of the Self"
He recently wrote a book called “MindReal” that repeats in detail a comment he made in “Multimind”. He said that our minds are built from the cellular level up to note things along 4 variables:
- Recency – did it just happen?
- Vividness – Is it exciting? Colorful? ‘Real’?
- Comparison – Was it bigger, smaller, faster, slower than usual?
- Significance – What did it ‘mean’? Was it ‘good’? ‘Bad’?
For a while, I was focused on ideas from Deepak Chopra and Bill Bryson. It seemed funny to me that a Hindu physician transplanted to the US and an American transplanted for years to London could occupy places of spiritual importance in my mind at the same time, but they did. Chopra has gotten to me deeply in several books and Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” – a discussion of the rise and content of modern science by an excellent writer who is not himself a scientist - got my attention with two comments.
Bryson starts off the 500 page book saying he suspects his reader had more trouble getting here than the reader knows. Not only did all one’s ancestors have to live long enough to reproduce, but all one’s trillions of atoms had to arrange themselves in this particular layout to make the body. Chopra’s Book of Secrets was one of those works that grows on you over time. Even when it has been put aside, thoughts and questions arise in the mind from it.
One of his secrets is “The world is in you. You are not in the world.” What? The sun, the Milky Way, gold mines, corn fields, great rivers are in me? I don’t think so. But he meant the same thing “MindReal” means: that all we can know, think and experience consciously is in our mind. Books, pictures, memories, sensations – all in the mind. Our ability to know what is on our mind, the famous five basic senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch and additional ones such as body awareness and awareness of our thoughts and feelings.
We learned in psychophysics class that a telephone wire seen at the right distance is too small for continuous perception of a solid black line. But our minds assume it is continuous and show it to us that way, filling in parts that can’t really be perceived with our visual equipment. In “This is Your Brain on Music”, the author says that a fundamental tone has overtones that are integer multiples of itself. So, a tone of 100 hertz has overtones of 200, 300, etc. But if the ear is presented with a series of just the overtones, the mind will supply the fundamental. “It” “knows” that if the 200 was the base, the overtones would be 400, 600, etc. So, it supplies what must be missing.
“MindReal” makes clear that we only have a virtual reality to work with and we seem to be constructed to find and eat food, to avoid predators, to mate and to survive. Using theory and making poetry and cooking advanced menus are our human efforts on top of the basics. We are using hunting/gathering equipment to paint with. No wonder, we have trouble understanding ourselves and others.
