What we are dreaming of |
| Imagination - maybe this ability most convincingly differentiates a human brain of 100 billion neurons from an insect brain of one million neurons. We can imagine, how it would feel if we would do something else, something that we actually are not doing. An insect brain probably never is able to enjoy this luxurious state; in every second of an insect's life, it has to invest 100% of its narrow resources into the one and only reality. A bee is always humming "Now, now, now, now, now, now,...". |
| We humans are humming different tunes. While we are doing one thing, we know that we should better do another, and we dream of doing a third thing. We are always living in compromises. And only very rarely we are sure of doing the right thing, at the same time enjoying doing it. Most of our time, we suffer. We feel obliged to do our duty. We constantly feel torn apart between our intentions and the actual necessities. |
| While we imagine, we call into being a would-be reality, letting occur in our head the imagined event realistically enough to get a glimpse of its potentially rewarding (or disappointing) consequences. Our brain sets up this fictive scenery and still stays connected to the real world (hopefully). It goes through several thought processes without acting them out, and keeps the results in short term memory. By this strategy, we switch between different programs and draw comparisons, and finally we choose the most promising strategy. Maybe our brain should be seen as several brains in one brain. We don't have just this single channel "Now" like insects may know it. We have many channels in parallel, and we make our choices between them. It has been proposed that pre-consciously, several serial thought processes are running in parallel, only one of them, at the end, entering our 'main line' awareness (Calvin 1987). |
| Ontogenetically, our first accomplishment is the discovery of the "ego-channel": we recognize as a baby that a certain set of sensory inputs remains always the same, against a background of changes. At the same time, we learn about the "mother-channel", another constant factor in our emerging world. We learn our first lessons. And as we grow up, we discover that multiple roads are leading to reward, and that most of them are crucially dependent on our relatives. Relatives explain to us, what we should do, and what we shouldn't. We meet our first choices: Going for a forbidden reward? Or doing what we have been told, in hope for compensation? |
| Amazingly, most of us keep doing, what we've been told to do, even if we don't enjoy it, and refrain from doing what we would like to, even if nobody is in sight to punish us. Only in our imagination, we dream of the forbidden things. But are they, still? Forbidden? Who makes us stick to our rules, even if the supervisors are gone? Why don't we keep on comparing our options, choosing intrepidly the more promising, and leaving aside the more boring ones? Something inside us won't let us go. As if the avenger has nested inside our head, always watching out, always ready to strike. We gotta get rid of him, for an easier living, shouldn't we? |
| Psychoanalysis teaches us how we internalize the rules of our childhood. Human beings tend to be educated and to have manners. We hold in high esteem the manners of our fellow-men, and so do our fellow-men with us. All those things that we are doing unintendedly, they have a reason long forgotten to ourselves. There is no further need to remember all these reasons, as long as our social life is running smoothly. Sometimes, however, if things are not running as smoothly as they should, it may be helpful to dig deeper into the layers of our inner world, to bring back into consciousness the alternatives we once had. The analyst may succeed in reviving our imagination of long forgotten decisions, and he may encourage us to make another choice, this time to our better. |
| An insect will never suffer from problems like these... |
| More... ...and still more. |
| 4/05 < MB 5/05 > 6/05 |
| W.H. Calvin (1987) The brain as a Darwin Machine. Nature 330: 33-34 |