Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ your age, nationality, religion, race, occupation and family connections. If I asked you, ‘What kind of a person are you?’, you could list your virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, alliances and enmities, your interests, wishes, needs, passions and beliefs, and all the things you know about yourself but find hard to put into mere words, but everything that you could tell me about yourself is made up of ideas. The sum total of these ideas is you, what you call I, me, myself. There is no little you sitting inside you, adding to and maintaining this sum total of ideas. You are your sum total of ideas, or what I call your meaning structure, because this sum total of ideas has a structure where every part is connected to every other part.

      Your meaning structure is not a static structure but a feedback process in constant movement. Nowadays we are all familiar with feedback processes in objects like refrigerators and heating systems. Many refrigerators freeze and defrost themselves, and many heating systems change themselves with changes in outside temperature. There is no little engineer sitting in your refrigerator or heating system pressing the right buttons as needed. The process processes itself. It is the same with you. Denis Noble, Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University, calls the self ‘an integrative process’.¹² If you happen to speak Japanese or Korean you will have no difficulty in understanding this because, as Denis Noble said, ‘What these languages do is to emphasise the “doing-ness” of things, the processes that occur, that is, the verb rather than the subject who is the possessor of the being-ness or doing-ness.’ If Descartes had been Japanese or Korean he would not have said ‘cogito ergo sum’, ‘I think, therefore I am’, but ‘thinking, therefore being’.¹³

      Thinking of yourself as an active process can be somewhat disturbing, but think about it a bit more. Isn’t that how you experience yourself, with thoughts that come and go, memories bobbing to the surface, along with ideas, images, wishes and needs? The feedback in your process operates all the time as you see the results of what you have done, and you modify what you do next time. The process which is you reflects upon itself and so it can change. If you had been born with a bit of your brain marked ME, a bit that just sits there unchanging, you would have been stuck with you for the rest of your life.

      Feedback processes like those in our refrigerator and heating system and in us, our meaning structure which gives us a sense of being a person, do not operate in a vacuum. These three kinds of processes operate in relation to their environment. Deprive us of our environment, and our sense of being a person begins to disintegrate. Sensory-deprivation experiments, where an individual is deprived of sight, sound, movement, smell and touch, have shown that, under these conditions, people begin to lose the ability to distinguish what is around them from what is inside them, their thoughts and feelings. These become increasingly bizarre. There is no lack of evidence of what happens to babies and children who are deprived of loving care, while all gaolers know that the quickest way to break the toughest man is to put him in solitary confinement for an indefinite period.

      Our meaning structure starts to take shape while we are still in the womb, where babies hear sounds and experience pleasure and pain. A newborn baby looks around at the world with intense interest, and so his meaning structure grows and changes. Our meaning structure grows out of the functioning of our brain, and so, like all living things, its first purpose is to stay alive.

      ‘Staying alive’ for a meaning structure means staying as one coherent whole. The aim of all the functions of the meaning structure is to keep the structure whole and not let it fall apart. If the meaning structure starts to fall apart the sense of being a person will start to dissipate. We experience this whenever we discover that we are mistaken in our judgement. Mislaying our house keys makes us anxious; discovering that the world is not what we thought it was can threaten to annihilate us as a person. Whenever we discover that we have made a serious error of judgement - say, that the person we loved has abandoned or betrayed us, or that being a good person does not protect us from disaster - we feel ourselves to be shattering, crumbling, even disappearing, and with this comes the greatest terror, the fear that we shall be annihilated as a person.

      Our sense of being a person is our meaning structure, and this meaning structure grows out of the functioning of the brain. While we are far from understanding just how brain and mind are linked, our increasing knowledge of how the brain functions shows that there can be no scientific doubt that the brain and mind are one.

       Chapter Two Understanding the Nature of Fear

       Brains and Minds

      The brain is the most complex object known to us. Perhaps there are more complex objects in other parts of the universe but we have yet to encounter them. Over the last fifteen years, how scientists talk about the brain has changed dramatically. Two words have entered their language - neuroscience and neuroscientist. Anyone called a neuroscientist could be a neurologist, a physiologist, a biologist, a chemist, a psychologist, an electrical engineer or even a quantum physicist. People skilled in all these different bodies of knowledge are needed in the attempt to understand this most complex object.

      There has been a subtle but important shift in how neuroscientists talk about the brain. They used to talk in terms of how the brain functions, in vision, hearing and the other senses - that is, in terms of perceiving the world. Now they talk, not in terms of the brain looking at reality, but in terms of how the brain creates a picture of reality. Our brain does not show us reality. It creates a picture of reality, and the kind of picture it creates depends on the kind of experiences we have each had. No two brains ever create exactly the same picture.

      The importance of experience in what individual brains do has led neuroscientists to look more closely at what individuals do. Neuroscientists used to be concerned with simple actions, such as how we distinguish different shades of colour or two different pitches of sound. Now scientists are interested in complex behaviour. They have even ventured to discuss the problem of consciousness, something which up till recently had been banned from scientific discourse because it was ‘subjective’, and scientists should always be ‘objective’. This was why psychologists and psychiatrists studied what people did, not what people thought about what they did and why they did it.

      The study of complex behaviour immediately raises the question of how humans and animals learn. Psychologists have always favoured very mechanical explanations. They described learning in terms of reward and punishment, and assumed that what they saw as a reward or a punishment would pertain for all their subjects, whether human or animal. They thought that for all rats a sweet substance would be a reward, sour a punishment. For all children a gold star would be a reward, being deprived of sweets a punishment. Rewards and punishments were seen as levers which propelled humans and animals in certain ways. It did not occur to these psychologists that a reward was a reward and a punishment a punishment only if the person or animal receiving them thought that this was so. Some children think that gold stars are rubbish, and some children do not like sweets. From his studies of how rats learn, Dr Anthony Dickenson, of Cambridge University, concluded that rats, though they are probably not self-aware, do operate with schemas - that is, ideas about what they want. These desires, said Dr Dickenson, have to be learnt. They are not innate mechanisms in the brain.¹

      One of the excuses which some people use when they do not want to take responsibility for their actions is that they cannot help doing something because they have been ‘conditioned’ to act in this way. Such an excuse has no scientific basis. Whatever we do follows from a wish, a desire, a need, perhaps to possess or to avoid something. We may not be consciously aware of these wishes, needs and desires, СКАЧАТЬ