by David Brooks
She would like to write a short memoir. She’d like to master some new art form, to do something difficult and achieve some competence. She’d like to be a member of a circle of girlfriends who could come together every year to laugh and drink and share. She would like to find some way to teach the young. She’d like to learn the names of the trees so that when she walked through a forest she would know what she was seeing. She’d like to strip away the bullshit and find out whether or not she believed in God.
Mindfulness
In the first months of retirement, she had an urge to reconnect with old friends. She had not kept in touch with anyone from the Academy, and almost all of her friends from college had fallen away as well. But Facebook allowed her to remedy all that, and within weeks she was happily exchanging e-mails with friends from decades gone by.
Renewing these old friendships gave her pleasure beyond all reckoning. These contacts aroused parts of her own nature that had lain dormant. She discovered that one of her old college roommates, a southern woman named Missy, lived not twenty-five miles away from her, and one day they arranged to have lunch. Erica and Missy had lived together in their junior year, and though they shared a room, they had not grown particularly close. Erica was frantically busy in those days, and Missy, a premed student, had spent all her time in the library.
Missy was still thin and tiny. Her hair had gone gray, but her skin was still smooth. She’d become an eye surgeon, had a family, recovered from a double mastectomy, and had retired a few years ahead of Erica.
During lunch Missy excitedly described the passion that had transformed her life over the past few years: mindfulness meditation. Erica felt her stomach drop, expecting to hear stories of yogis, spiritual retreats at ashrams in India, and Missy resplendently getting in touch with her inner core—the normal New Age rigmarole. Missy had been the hardened scientist at school, and now she’d apparently gone to mush. But Missy talked about her meditations the way she used to talk about her homework assignments, with the same cool rigor.
“I sit cross-legged and upright on the floor,” Missy was saying. “At first I concentrate on my breathing, anticipating the exhaling and inhaling, and then feeling my body fulfilling my anticipations. I feel my nostrils open and close, and my chest rise and fall. Then I center my thoughts on a word or phrase. I don’t repeat it over and over again, I just keep it in the front of my mind, and if I find my thoughts wandering, I bring them back. Some people pick ‘Jesus’ or ‘God’ or ‘Buddha’ or ‘Adonai,’ but I just picked ‘Diving within.’
“Then I watch to see what feelings and perceptions and images flow into my brain, letting the experience unfold naturally. It’s like sitting still as various thoughts emerge into consciousness. Often in the beginning, I lose focus. I find myself thinking about my chores or the e-mails I have to answer. That’s when I repeat my phrase. After a little while, most of the time, the outside world begins to fade back into the shadows. I don’t even have to repeat the phrase anymore. I don’t know how to describe it. I begin to be aware of awareness.
“My identity, my ‘I-ness’ fades away and I enter the sensations and feelings that are bubbling up from down below. The object is to welcome them nonjudgmentally, without interpreting them. Just welcome them as friends. Welcome them with a smile. One of my teachers compares it to watching clouds drift into a valley. These puffs of awareness float by, and they are replaced by other puffs and other mental states. It’s like having access to processes that are there all along, but are usually unseen.
“I’m not doing a good job of putting it into words, because the whole point is that it is beneath words. When I try to describe it, it seems so stale and conceptual. But when I’m in that state there is no narrator. There’s no interpreter. There are no words. I’m not really aware of time. I’m not telling myself a story about myself—the play-byplay announcer is gone. It’s all sensations happening. Does that make any sense?”
Apparently Missy had found a way to directly perceive Level 1.
“When I come out of the state, I’m changed. I see the world differently. Daniel Siegel says it’s like you’ve been walking through a forest at night, shining a flashlight to light your way. Suddenly you turn off the flashlight. You lose the bright beam of light on the narrow spot. But gradually your eyes start to adjust to the darkness, and you can suddenly see the whole scene.
“I used to assume that my emotions were me. But now I sort of observe them rising and floating through me. You realize that things you thought were your identity are really just experiences. They are sensations that flow through you. You begin to see that your ordinary ways of perceiving are only a few vantage points among many. There are other ways of seeing. You develop what the Buddhists call ‘beginner’s mind.’ You see the world as a baby sees it, aware of everything all at once, without conscious selection and interpretation.”
Missy said all this briskly over a salad, spearing her asparagus. Her description of mindfulness meditation suggested that in fact it is possible, with the right training, to peer beneath the waterline of consciousness, into the hidden kingdom. The normal conscious mind might see only colors in a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, but perhaps it was possible to widen the view and suddenly be able to see the rest of the actual world.
In fact, neuroscientists—who are generally a hardheaded lot—have profound respect for these sorts of meditative practices. They’ve hosted the Dalai Lama at their conferences, and some of them make their way to monasteries in Tibet precisely because there is an overlap between the findings of the science and the practices of the monks.
It’s now clear that the visions and transcendent experiences that religious ecstatics have long described are not just fantasies. They are not just the misfirings caused by an epileptic seizure. Instead, humans seem to be equipped to experience the sacred, to have elevated moments when they transcend the normal boundaries of perceptions.
Andrew Newberg found that when Tibetan monks or Catholic nuns enter a period of deep meditation or prayer, their parietal lobes, the region of the brain that helps define the boundaries of our bodies, becomes less active. They experience a sensation of infinite space. Subsequent research found that Pentecostal worshipers undergo a different, though no less remarkable, brain transformation when they are speaking in tongues. Pentecostals do not have a sense of losing themselves in the universe. Their parietal lobes do not go dark. On the other hand, they do experience a decrease in memory functions and an increase in emotional and sensory activation. As Newberg writes, “In the Pentecostal tradition, the goal is to be transformed by the experience. Rather than making old beliefs stronger, the individual is opening the mind in order to make new experiences more real.” The different religious practices produce different brain states, each of which are consistent with the different theologies.
Brain scans don’t settle whether God exists or not, because they don’t tell you who designed these structures. They don’t solve the great mystery, which is the mystery of consciousness—how emotion reshapes the matter in the brain and how the matter in the brain creates spirit and emotion. But they do show that people who become expert at meditation and prayer rewire their brains. It is possible, by shifting attention inward, to peer deep into the traffic of the unconscious, achieving an integration of conscious and unconscious processes, which some people call wisdom.
Missy glanced up from her salad from time to time, just to make sure Erica wasn’t looking at her as if she were nuts. She was matter-of-fact, but also made clear how much these experiences meant to her. She kept apologizing for the inadequacies of her descriptions, her inability to really put into words what it felt like to perceive things holistically instead of deductively, and the feeling of expanded awareness. She wasn’t sipping on some organic carrot shake while she was talking about all this. She hadn’t gone all Yoko Ono. She was a surgeon, who still practiced part-time, who drove a gas-guzzling SUV and drank white wine with lunch. It’s just that she h
ad found a scientifically plausible way to access a deeper level of cognition.
Toward the end of lunch she asked Erica if she would like to come to her next session and try out this mindfulness-meditation stuff. Erica heard her mouth saying, “No thanks, it’s not really for me.” She didn’t know why she answered this way. The idea of peering directly inside herself filled her with a deep aversion. All her life she had been looking outward and trying to observe the world. Hers had been a life of motion, not tranquility. The fact is she was afraid of looking directly inside. It was a pool of dark water she did not want to plunge into. If she was going to live more vividly, she’d have to find another way.
The Second Education
Over the next several months, Erica became something of a culture vulture—diving into the world of the arts with a voracious hunger and her characteristic drive. She read some books on the history of Western painting. She bought some poetry anthologies and found herself reading them in bed before she drifted off to sleep. She bought a CD course in classical music and listened to it while driving in her car. She began going to museums again with friends.
Like most people, life had given her one sort of education. She had gone to school. She had taken such and such management courses, worked her way through various jobs, and learned such and such skills. She had come to possess a certain professional expertise.
But now she was beginning her second education. This education was an emotional one, about how and what to feel. This second education did not work like the first one. In the first education, the information to be mastered walked through the front door and announced itself by light of day. It was direct. There were teachers to describe the material to be covered, and then everybody worked through it.
In the second education, there was no set curriculum or set of skills to be covered. Erica just wandered around looking for things she enjoyed. Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure. The information came to her indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards, and through the vents of her mind.
Erica read Sense and Sensibility, The Good Soldier, or Anna Karenina and she would find herself moving with the characters, imitating their states of mind, and discovering new emotional flavors. The novels, poems, paintings, and symphonies she consumed never applied directly to her life. Nobody was writing poems about retired CEOs. But what mattered most were the emotional sensations portrayed in them.
In his book Culture Counts, the philosopher Roger Scruton writes that “the reader of Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ learns how to animate the natural world with pure hopes of his own; the spectator of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ learns of the pride of corporations, and the benign sadness of civic life; the listener to Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain.”
Even at her age, Erica was learning to perceive in new ways. Just as living in New York or China or Africa gives you a perspective from which to see the world, so, too, spending time in the world of a novelist inculcates its own preconscious viewpoint.
Through trial and error, Erica discovered her tastes. She thought she loved the Impressionists, but now they left her strangely unmoved. Maybe their stuff was too familiar. On the other hand, she became enraptured by the color schemes of the Florentine Renaissance and Rembrandt’s homely, knowing faces. Each of them tuned her mind, the instrument with a million strings. She had some moments of pure pleasure, when she could feel her heart beating faster and a quiver in her stomach—standing in front of a painting, or discovering a new installation or poem. There was a time, reading Anthony Trollope of all people, when she could feel the emotions of the story in her own body, and was alive to the sensations produced there. “Mine is no callous shell,” Walt Whitman wrote about his body, and Erica was beginning to appreciate what he meant.
The Dancing Scouts
Erica’s experience with art is a microcosm of all the different kinds of perception we have seen in this story. Seeing and hearing were thick, creative processes, not just a passive taking in.
When you listen to a piece of music, for example, sound waves travel through the air at 1,100 feet per second and collide with your eardrums, setting off a chain of vibrations through the tiny bones of the ear, against the membrane of the cochlea; producing tiny electrical charges that reverberate all across the brain. Maybe you don’t know anything about music in the formal sense, but all your life—from the time when you were nursing in rhythm with your mother—you have been unconsciously constructing working models of how music works. You have been learning how to detect timed patterns and anticipate what will come next.
Listening to music involves making a series of sophisticated calculations about the future. If the last few notes have had pattern Y, then the next few notes will probably have pattern Z. As Jonah Lehrer writes in his book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, “While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music. From the three-minute pop song to the five-hour Wagner opera, the creations of our culture teach us to expect certain musical patterns, which over time are wired into our brain.”
When the music conforms to our anticipations, we feel a soothing drip of pleasure. Some scientists believe that the more fluently a person can process a piece of information, the more pleasure it produces. When a song or a story or an argument achieves limerence with the internal models of the brain, then that synchronicity produces a warm swelling of happiness.
But the mind also exists in a state of tension between familiarity and novelty. The brain has evolved to detect constant change, and delights in comprehending the unexpected. So we’re drawn to music that flirts with our expectations and then gently plays jokes on them. As Daniel Levitin observes in This Is Your Brain on Music, the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow” arrest our attention with the jarring octave-gap between them, then the rest of the song eases us into a more conventional, soothing groove. In his book Emotion and Meaning in Music, Leonard Meyer showed how Beethoven would establish a clear rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then manipulate it, never quite repeating it. Life is change, and the happy life is a series of gentle, stimulating, melodic changes.
Perceiving a painting follows a similar process. First the mind creates the painting. That is to say, each eye makes a series of fast, complex saccades across the surface of the picture, which then get blended and re-created inside the cortex, producing a single image. There are parts of each view the mind cannot see, because of the blindspot in the middle of each eye where the optic nerve connects to the retina. The brain fills in the holes based on its own predictions. Simultaneously, the mind imposes its concepts upon the painting. For example, it imposes color. Depending on lighting and other factors, there are huge fluctuations in the wavelength energy of light bouncing off a painting, and yet the mind uses internal models to give the impression that the color on the surface is remaining constant. If the mind couldn’t assign constant color to things, the world would be in chaotic flux and it would be hard to deduce any useful information from the environment.
How it creates this illusion of constant color is not well understood, but it seems to involve ratios. Imagine a green surface surrounded by yellows and blues and purples. The brain understands there is a constant ratio between the wavelengths bouncing off green and the wavelengths bouncing off yellow. It can assign constant qualities to each even amidst changing conditions. As Chris Frith of the University College, London, has written, “Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality.”
As it is creating the painting, the mind is also evaluating it. A wide body of research has found that there are certain tastes that most people share. As Denis Dutton argues in The Art Instinct, people everywhere gravitate to a similar sort of painting—landscapes with open spa
ces, water, roads, animals, and a few people. A cottage industry has grown up to investigate this preference. Evolutionary psychologists argue that people everywhere prefer paintings of landscapes that correspond to the African savanna, where humanity emerged. People generally don’t like looking at dense vegetation, which is forbidding, or spare desert, which has no food. They like lush open grasses, with thickets of trees and bushes, a water source, diversity of vegetation including flowering and fruiting plants and an unimpeded view of the horizon in at least one direction. Some critics have noted that Kenyans prefer pictures of the Hudson River School to pictures of their own native landscape. That’s because, the critics argue, the landscape near the Hudson River in New York state more closely resembles the African savanna back in the Pleistocene era than does the present, and much drier, Kenya.
More broadly, people like fractals, patterns that recur at greater levels of magnification. Nature is full of fractals: mountain ranges with peaks that gently echo one another, the leaves and branches on trees, a copse of aspens, rivers with their tributaries. People like the fractals that are gently flowing but not too complicated. Scientists even have a way to measure fractal density. Michael Gazzaniga illustrates the process in this example: Imagine that you were asked to draw a tree on a piece of paper. If you left the paper entirely blank, that would have a D (fractal density) of 1. If you drew a tree with so many branches the paper was entirely black, that would have a D of 2. Humans generally prefer patterns with a fractal density of 1.3—some complexity, but not too much.
Erica didn’t have to think about fractals as she was looking at Vermeers or van Eycks or Botticellis. That’s the point; her action was unconscious. She just stood there savoring the pleasure.
Creativity
After a while, Erica decided to create her own art. She tried photography and watercolors, but she found that she was unengaged and untalented. Then one day she found a beautiful piece of wood, and she fashioned it into a small cutting board. Having it around the house and using it every day gave her immense satisfaction, and for the next few years, as long as her hands could perform the tasks, she made simple household items out of wood.