The Deception of the Thrush

Sorry, this is a bit of a "downer." Guess I'll go try to make my mind a "complete blank" for a while.

No no no, this is great! Thanks so much for guest-blogging. I'm so glad to see that you contributed something. I'm sure others will be as well. There's a lot of dimensions to what you're saying -- personal, psychological, existential, and philosophical -- and your question is a good one.

I think it's often billed as some wise Chinese proverb, that if a (wo)man can concentrate on one thing for 10 minutes (s)he can conquer the world. Something like that. But maybe it would be better/harder to focus on absolutely nothing for 10 minutes. I think this is an impossible task to accomplish intentionally, but I've done it many times by accident.

When I was an angst-ridden teenager, living in a rural area, I used to do a lot of hunting. I hated to sit still while hunting - the usual way to shoot a deer is to sit quietly in a blind for hours on end waiting for one to come by. But I liked to walk, even though it greatly decreased my chances for success. I found that when walking quietly through the woods hunting, the things I usually stressed myself about were usually forgotten in short order. I can't recall that I was thinking about anything at the time. After I had early success at deer hunting, by age 14 or 15 the novelty of actually killing a deer had pretty much worn off. In fact, I didn't really want to shoot a deer, because, if I did, it would be a lot of work to drag the thing out of the woods and clean it up for the freezer. But I still went hunting, and it cleared my mind. I've had the same experience with fishing - after I got reasonably good at catching fish (as good as one can reasonably get at what is mostly a game of chance), I almost tried not to catch them, because I just wanted to zone out and do something mindless, casting repeatedly out into the water some bait that no fish was likely to take. For awhile, I also did a lot of target shooting, not hunting, just going to the range and trying to hit the bullseye with some heavy duty Dirty Harry style handgun. This is the ultimate mind-clearer, because hitting anything with such a weapon takes an enormous amount of concentration, on breathing, aligning the sights, and smoothly squeezing the trigger and trying not to flinch (the natural reaction to loud noises). I guess that isn't thinking about nothing, but it does make the mind focus on only the most rudimentary thoughts, and that is tremendously therapeutic.

Good stuff Jane. Hope to see you guest blogging again sometime.

I think you are right, Jim. If you "try" to focus on nothing, the "trying" gets in the way. It's more of a "letting go". Thank you for sharing the moments that allowed your mind to do that.

Reading your response, I thought-sure I've done that---retreated to "rudimentary thoughts"----but now I can't remember the circumstances.

I am a "worrier." My family calls me "the worrisome wort." Years ago, my Father would say, "put it on the back burner." My husband would reply with, "she doesn't have a back burner."

I wonder what part of the brain we retreat to when we rest ourselves with rudimentary thoughts? I know that Karin knows, but she wouldn't tell me--probably for fear that I wouldn't write the blog!

Superlative post, Jane.

While the only thing I've ever felt inclined to "hunt" for is the right word, I latch/cling/hold for dear life at times, it seems-on to the anticipatory quietude Jim superbly articulates. That moment when, despite our headlong sensibilities to the otherwise, we wish to make a step go "not beyond" (to butcher Blanchot on the subject) but to avoid the resolved necessity of a ‘full stop’.

What are the politics of a pause, the psychogeography of a "flinch", at its most prescient? Where do our silences, our "nothings" take us, if anywhere at all (although, parenthetically, they would seem by their very construction to take us nowhere)? While neuro- and cognitive/behavioral psychology can point at-locate, even, within a standard deviation, the wherefores of our rests, the whys are often ex post facto: narratives which can only explain outside of the moment they profess to explain. We are left questioning an ineffable instant, a singularity that cannot be expressed, repeated or retracted. Arguably, it is the only 'now' we ever get to experience.

All this to say: thank you, Jane. I'll be listening.

When psychologists wish to wax poetic they often turn to William James, grandfather of the modern behavioral sciences. So, in his Principles of Psychology I found a somewhat worthwhile passage. You can read the whole thing at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin9.htm. Otherwise, I quote a paragraph below. Don't ask me where the term 'brain-fag' came from.

What is that shadowy scheme of the 'form' of an opera, play, or book, which remains in our mind and on which we pass judgment when the actual thing is done? What is our notion of a scientific or philosophical system? Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of relation between terms, which hardly even as verbal images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process.[18] We all of us have this permanent consciousness of whither our thought is going. It is a feeling like any other, a feeling [p. 256] of what thoughts are next to arise, before they have arisen. This field of view of consciousness varies very much in extent, depending largely on the degree of mental freshness or fatigue. When very fresh, our minds carry an immense horizon with them. The present image shoots its perspective far before it, irradiating in advance the regions in which lie the thoughts as yet unborn. Under ordinary conditions the halo of felt relations is much more circumscribed. And in states of extreme brain-fag the horizon is narrowed almost to the passing word, - the associative machinery, however, providing for the next word turning up in orderly sequence, until at last the tired thinker is led to some kind of a conclusion. At certain moments he may find himself doubting whether his thoughts have not come to a full stop; but the vague sense of a plus ultra makes him ever struggle on towards a more definite expression of what it may be; whilst the slowness of his utterance shows how difficult, under such conditions, the labor of thinking must be.

That William James is a bit deep for me - maybe if I read that passage about 16 more times it would penetrate my thick skull.

I think to be "fagged" is to be fatigued/exhausted. So I'm guessing "brain-fag" means mental fatigue/exhaustion. Maybe you all figured that out a long time ago. But always the provocateur, I plan to use that term in mixed company to see what reaction I get. I'll most certainly come off as unrefined, as usual, but I'll chuckle inwardly knowing that I just used some esoteric term coined by a known genius.

Egads--I just wrote this carefully thought-out response (took me 1/2 hour) and somehow I lost it. Any way to retrieve it?

Anyway, I have run out of time this morning, and will have to leave you with a very humble thank-you. I'll try to re-create my response after classes today.

Dang!

Ah, William James. It's been too long since I read him. He has such a command of language. And it seems like, once again, with Jim's help, he may rise to the level of, not merely erudite, but actually "fun at parties". Though I would reckon one might wish to "mix" their company just right.

James, if memory serves, kind of drops his (excellent, in my opinion) interrogations of the "plus ultra" in consciousness, moving from the "Principles" (1890) to his later works, "The Will To Believe" (1897), and, arguably his magnum opus, "Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902). Nevertheless, I think this excerpt (is this from Chapter 9? I can't find it in my copy!) aptly amplifies what we're discussing here. Although, I always crave more from James than what's on the page. "Genius" he was, indeed.

One session explaining applications of percents, followed by a examination of conic sections, and I am finally back!

Wow--I can't believe that my blog has created such an intellectual discussion! Fantastic!

So, if you will, please insert this comment where it belongs in the progression of thoughts.

Friend John, as usual I am in awe of your extensive vocabulary repertoire. I especially like "neurogeography". (Karin, is that what you are studying????)

In response to your earlier comment, John, you are most probably right that our moments of "nothingness" take us nowhere, except we may proceed somewhere with a clearer mind.

Do you think a person spends enough time experiencing the "now"? Finding myself in a pleasant "now" experience, I try to actually return to focus by describing it aloud. For instance, watching my sleeping child years ago, I "froze the frame" in my mind and said "Now, I love you right now," and I remember that moment vividly to this day.

But, I digress. I am wondering, John, if Mr. Gregory's young girl has supposedly reached a "blank-minded" state as she watches the static on TV? What do you think?

In regard to Karin's response, I'm much like Jim when it comes to understanding William James. What I certainly understand is "brain-fag." It comes up often in "self-help" books, and can do nasty things to you--mentally and physically. Been there--done that--don't want to go again.

Oh yes, Karin, if a person enters this period of quietude or rudimentary thoughts, what would an FMRI show? Darkness??

That said, I think it best if I sit back and "listen" to the ensuing conversation of my intellectual superiors.

Thank you, Jane. And, please, your self-imposed inferiority complex needn't stifle your response-impulse. After all, your post got us here.

"Psychogeography" is a term coined, if not by then for the late, lamented Guy-Ernest Debord and is most definitely *not* what Karin is studying. You might look here: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/en/display/314

As for the girl of whom you speak, I find it safest to assume that television can *only* artificially cloud James' theoretical "horizon", in and of itself, as it produces no genuine cognitive "quietude". Funnily, I always choose TV to "relax", and yet, when does it ever "stop" - is it not really a ceaseless medium, producing a sort of neuro-retinal strobe-like perpetual excitation? The static only provides substance for where there is no longer any substance -- it's kind of like trying to describe a hole. How do you put emptiness into words, much less pictures? Dig? That said, does a "now" experience stay a "now" experience if you can put it into words? Or is it inauthentic, kind of a mental "repeat"?

That digression regressed, as it were, I like your frozen frame quite a bit, and here is where I, too, rely upon Karin's expertise. We have entered unto the murky realm of memory and the illusions of a "gap-less" narrative. How much of our memory can we control, as compared to how much we (and James, although he lost faith in it when describing the 'mystical', just as Freud balked at what he termed "the uncanny", allowing that any memory-based image recognition can be short-circuited, given the right environmental stimulus, even, in a famous example, recognition of oneself) presume to have? Where do the 'whats' become 'wheres' in the flow of sodium ions into the axon of a neuron, without which memory, would have nowhere to "go" (if it can be said to "go anywhere")?

It's easy to get 'lost' in all of that, which brings us, fittingly, back to psychogeography. Now, I think I'll go watch some television and "relax".

Yes, "psychogeography" is a marvelous term; John should have it trademarked before someone steals it. It summarizes, in one word, what many in my field unfortunately presume: That any psychological construct that we can dream up can be neatly tucked between some sulci of cortex, just as you can draw up boundaries around a nation.

You might want to follow the William James link and read another paragraph, where he compares thinking to Algebra. Given the activities that you describe doing in between your posts, you might relate to that better.

So, what your quietude/rudimentary thoughts would look like if I popped you into the scanner. Hmm. Here's the deal with fMRI. To make your data mean anything, you have to look at changes -- how does the signal increase/decrease from A to B. If you look at A or B alone, you're just going to see signal everywhere, because blood flow is happening everywhere and blood flow helps drive the signal. So, actually, your "quietude" is often the baseline condition and when you're looking at a functional image in, say, Time magazine or something, you're seeing only that activity which is different from that which occurred in the "resting state." All we use is an elaboration on the basic ANOVA (you know ANOVA, right? Think t-test for >2 groups and usually >1 factor) So we're asking, what parts of the brain are receiving significantly different amounts of blood flow in conditions A and B? What shows up in the glossy picture is the significant differences. But that tells you absolutely nothing about what doesn't show up -- that is, the commonalities. Anything that's common between the two states is cancelled out. And there surely has to be an awful lot in common -- not just because some of the same mental processes are going on, but because, there's got to be at least some level of blood flow pulsing through all these parts of the brain.
If I could show you my raw images, you would see that I even get functional activity in the eyeballs, probably just because of fluid swishing around.

So, there'd be a challenge in imaging the "nothingness" because we'd have to pick out something to compare it against. If we were to compare Jim concentrating on aiming a gun (state A) vs Jim staring out the window in reverie, state B(I don't know if Jim ever stares out the window in reverie, but let's say he does, maybe in a state of brain-fag), then we would probably see a decrease in the hemodynamic response in the oh-so-popular dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, seat of working memory and goal-directed activity, and gem of the popular media. And yes, I could imagine a general, nearly global decrease in many areas. The amygdala would settle down, and the various sensory processing streams would have less to process, if Jim is attending with less intensity. I would be willing to wager that the hippocampus or other regions of the medial temporal lobe might increase in activity, if Jim starts ruminating on the meaning of life, or whatever.

So, there you go. I have to go work on things now.

Good morning! Seems this blog exchanged entered my dreams last night, hmmmmm.

"Blank mind","rudimentary thoughts","quietude","brain-fag","moments of nothingness","rest and relaxation","the only now we experience","a *now* experience","reverie"---If I plot the course of my thinking on a (t,p) system where t=time and p=phrase, the graph, I fear, has taken an odd curve and is moving farther away from the origin: "blank mind".

We seem to be in agreement that absolute "mental nothingness" cannot be willfully summoned----or no? Is it that one could ease mental anguish by willfully focusing on things like breathing, or listening *only* to the surrounding sounds with no intellectual involvement. Is this the only "blank mind" we can accomplish at will? (Now I'm definitely back to the self-help books.)

Karin and John, I want to check your suggested web-sites, and I must teach a couple of classes today, as well as grade papers this evening--but I'll be back.

Besides being a landmark diagnostic tool, the fMRI serves, at least this conversation, as a wonderful metaphor, i.e. to "make your data mean anything, you have to look at changes" - there must a comparative foundation, a foundation of difference upon which to make a generative (forward moving, if you will) conclusion. What is being defined by what it is *not*, aiming is only aiming vis. reverie or, more correctly, not reverie.

Hence, our little "pauses", our "nows", our "quietude", our "nothingness", as Karin mentioned, is an activity with which there can be no correlate. It is "off the map", sotospeak. To return to my original comments above, I wonder, then, if these little "nothings" are actually the gaps, lacks, lags, whatever, that shock us back into our "plus ultra", the status quo of our processing streams, business-as-usual for the old dorsolateral prefrontal and so on. In this way, we move, we act, we "be" more out of an incapacity to "not" then a drive "to" - seems like "our moments of 'nothingness'" do get us somewhere after all, Jane.

"To be, or not to be ...." Since we are incapable of "not to be" (short of self-destruction), WE BE.

As for my Mom, her deliberate attempt to make her mind "a complete blank," must have been an attempt to focus on something rudimentary and not "enter in" to the anxious thoughts that would inevitably present themselves. (I guess.)

You guys lost me about the time Karin started talking about my hippopotamus, which I'm most certain is not something I own.

Yeah, sorry Jim, to speak of your hippocampus in vain. Hope it's not offended. :-)

Love it!

I am interested in the *nothingness* issue, as well as the references to James. I have recently been diagnosed (by an ND)with brain-fag (he actually used the 'newer' terminology, brain fog). He prescribed scull cap and pipric acid. My psychologist previously diagnosed my condition as depressive rumination, suggesting a Buddhist meditation technique to put my mind in touch with my body by denoting/labelling all seen/felt/heard on the mind's screen. The objective - to be an observer, to 'solve/deal with'issues as necessary, but always return to the home object (say, breath or rise and fall of the abdomen). While googling potential therapy (and dedescriptions)for this condition, I came across your strand...as Arte would say, vellly interesting ... indeed! When I have finished my research, I will get back to you when I have more time to report and to give you my take on the interestesting issues spawned by mother/grandmother and the *do you care, enough to share* hook. As a retired, but not retiring engineer, I surely do, and will get back to you.