There’s Someone in My Head, But It’s Not Me

The idea for this article comes from a random morning where for some reason, instead of going through my morning routine mindlessly as usual, I actually decided to think about it.

I reached out to pick up my toothbrush from amongst a handful that belonged to my family, and I could not, for the life of me, remember which one was mine. So I stared at the jar of toothbrushes, marvelling at the fact that I literally plucked mine out every single day without giving it any thought, but the one day I decided to do it consciously (and not out of habit), I couldn’t even recognise my own brush.

I realised that the act of brushing my teeth had become so automatic that it barely even registered in my memory.

If you play any sort of instrument or sports, you’ve probably experienced this phenomenon. Melodies that you could play effortlessly on the guitar with your eyes closed suddenly seem impossible when you try to think about the next note you need to hit.

It is natural for us to want to take credit for everything we do in our lives, from choosing our outfits for the day to parking our cars perfectly to even our purchase choices¹. But, as you shall realise reading further, it is actually our brains, working for the most part behind the scenes in darkness, that determine as much as 95% of our everyday actions without us even being aware of them. What’s more, the brain also then tricks us into believing that those actions were our conscious choice, when really, most of our conscious awareness comes way after the action has already been put into motion.

Let’s take this one step at a time.

The brain, as we know from science class in school, is enclosed inside the skull bones, away from any direct contact with the world, and yet it is responsible for all our perception of our outside world. So how does the brain communicate with the outside? It is via our sensory systems like photoreceptors in our eyes for vision, touch receptors on our skin, and hair cells in our ear for sound.

These signals are relayed to the brain as electrical signals, which then processes them all to make a sensible enough interpretation of the world. The mechanism seems pretty straightforward, until you start trying to make sense of the mechanics of it all.

For starters, we know how light travels way faster than sound right? Even if we assume that over short distances (like across the room), the time lag is not that significant, but our neurons still process visual stimulus and auditory stimulus at different speeds. And I have not even talked about the differing processing spends of even the same stimulus, like dim and bright light. So with all this processing variability, how does the brain know which 2 stimuli, for example, the flash of a gun and the sound of the gunshot, came simultaneously?

As neuroscientist David Eagleman explains in his article ‘Brain Time’², the mechanism by which the brain determines the temporal association (read timeline) of different stimuli it receives is via a process we call temporal binding.

A simple example to help you wrap your head around this concept would be when I touch your hand and foot at the same time. It is logical to think that since the foot is farther from the brain than your hand, the touch stimulus from your foot would take longer to reach your brain than the touch stimulus from your hand. And yet, you perceive the two simultaneously. How is that possible? One explanation is that the brain waits for the slowest sensory input to reach it before it binds them all together to create a coherent picture of what just happened. And in fact, this is exactly what the brain does.

So essentially, our perception of the world is lagging from the real world, and it is the function of the slowest input that determines that time lag.

It seems like an extremely ill-designed programme though, if you consider a situation like spotting a tiger, or putting your hand on a burning stove, where you want to react as quickly as possible, instead of waiting for the brain to create a whole picture of exactly what is happening.

And indeed, for most of our actions, our brain seldom waits for conscious perception to kick in. Most of our actions are taken before us even being aware of them via subcortical pathways (involving brain areas like basal ganglia and cerebellum) which do not come to our conscious awareness (which requires the stimuli to reach the neocortex, or the outside most, ‘thinking’ part of the human brain).

There’s 2 very interesting notes I want to make here.

First, these processes I have described earlier are not inherent when we are born. In fact, they are learnt by interacting with the world. As a kid, our brains are constantly trying to make sense of all the gazillion of sensory inputs it is receiving from the outside world, and in the beginning, brains really have no clue what any of it means.

Slowly however, the brain adapts. Consider a child kicking a Lego piece. The brain receives the touch stimulus from the kicking foot and visual stimulus of the Lego piece moving and the sound it makes on the floor at different times. But the brain reasons that the motor act of kicking must have caused the toy to move, and so it figures that those actions must have happened simultaneously. And with that knowledge, the brain calibrates the various inputs, and adjusts for time lags to make a sensible perception of the Lego piece tumbling on the floor right after it was clicked.

Interestingly, since this is a learned process, it can be unlearned and relearned with new data. Scientists have messed with brains in experiments where they made you press a button that would turn on a light. But they sneaked in a slight delay (around 0.2s) between your pressing the button and the light going on, so your brain would adapt to it. And then after some time, they removed that delay. To their amusement (and understandably the brain’s nightmare of confusion), it felt as if the light was going on even before you pressed the key!²

In fact, this exact defect in temporal binding might be responsible for auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia patients, where they ‘hear’ voices in their heads before they even think about something, possibly because their temporal binding has gone astray.

Second, some of you might be thinking, that if all my actions really do occur before I even know about them, then what is the point of conscious perception at all? And that is a golden question.

Conscious memories of events are not so much for the exact moment as they are for later learning. Consider you are cooking and accidently touch the steel part of the burning hot pan. In that moment, you would want to remove your hand immediately off the pan or you risk getting burnt finger tips. And so your nervous systems reacts by pulling away your hand even before you perceive the hotness on your fingers consciously.

However, the brain, for its survival, also needs to learn exactly what part of the pan to not touch in the future, and for that, it needs a more detailed depiction of the incident, remembering exactly how it felt and what it saw. So it creates this illustration of the incidence that comes to our conscious awareness, although at a slight time delay. But this more detailed, and more accurate image helps us learn for future behaviours, behaviours that then slowly get integrated into our subconscious programmes.

Our subconscious is thus comprised of all our learning right from when we’re born, and possibly even from the womb (the chemicals the mother is exposed to, the kind of music she listens to etc.).

It might be dejecting to know that you’re living your lives on auto-programme, and that the ‘being conscious’ part of it is all a façade, an elaborate trickery of the brain.

But there is also a degree of freedom that comes with it.

Moreover, the fact that our subconscious behaviors are learnt and not hardwired in our systems, means that they can be unlearnt and relearnt, because our brains are wonderfully adaptive machines.

The first step to that process is awareness and acknowledgement of the fact that the world we perceive is not the real world, but what our brain, with its subconscious programmes, perceives of the real world.

So when Pink Floyd say, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me”³, you know it is but your brain, trying to make sense of the world from inside its closed chamber.

References:

• https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-subconscious-mind-of-the-consumer-and-how-to-reach-it
• https://eagleman.com/latest/brain-time/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPxJIS744M0