Brain States
The first time I encountered the idea of brain states was 50 years ago. I bought a copy of Betty Edwards' wonderful book 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". She purported to be able to teach me how to draw with her book and it worked. She had a method.
At the start of a drawing session one would just draw something meaningless - like the wrinkles on your palm or crumpled paper. If one did that for a while then your brain state would change. I tried and it worked. Once the change occurred it became easy to draw what I saw pretty accurately.
Edwards had an explanation for that that looked at the fact that our brains have 2 largely mirror symmetric hemispheres. Her idea was that the left hemisphere was adapted to seeing the world in terms of symbols - people had to understand all sorts of symbolic information to survive. And symbolically an eye was presented as an almond shape with concentric circles in it. That works if you are in a jungle looking for things that have faces. It doesn't work if you want to draw a representation of those faces on paper.
Edward's method worked by forcing the brain to deal with non-symbolic information. The left brain that was processing symbolic information eventually gives up and turns control over to the right brain.
That was a shift in brain states. In one state it is easy to draw and in another it's very hard.
Changing brain states isn't always a matter of doing a practice for a while.
All sorts of drugs make it easy to shift brain states. I was amazed how a tiny amount of LSD changed my brain state.
But sports hooligans who get excited by the big game are also experiencing shifts in their brain state. Shame faced, they say it seemed reasonable at the time when hauled into court.
The amazing thing is that the brainstate of the whole brain can be so radically shifted by teensy amounts of chemicals like LSD or adrenalin.
I haven't taken LSD for 50 years now. Never had a desire to. I'd learned what it had to teach. Truth be told - I never did it for fun - I did it as an exploration. Also in a way as job-training for a position as a drug crisis worker manning a phone help line for people having bad trips. The idea was that I could help people more easily if I had an inkling of what they were experiencing. I knew that the tripping brainstate depended very much on 'set and setting'. Set was a person's set of expectations of the experience.
The setting was the environment where the experience was happening. Drug crisis work was largely trying to change a person's set and setting about their experience. We were not medics.
I recently read an article about a condition called Chronic Traumatic Encephylopathy (CTE). It happens to people who get repeated blows to the head. It was first studied in athletes like football and hockey players or boxers. It comes on long after the initiating concussion. It has all sorts of bad symptoms ranging from severe depression to suicidal thoughts to outbursts of irrational violence.
Until now CTE could only be diagnosed post-humously by examining slices of the brain under a microscope.
I read about this in a CBC article (@https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cte-diagnosis-research-9.7228387)
about a veteran who had suffered very many concussions from bomb blasts and cannon shots. He's participating in research that is trying to detect CTE in living people. He was like: I don't want to be inflicting violent outbursts on my loved ones.
I gotta say that probably the population of people affected by CTE is way bigger than athletes and soldiers. I think of women who absorb decades of domestic violence. I think of a kid who gets beaten by bullies at recess whose teacher dismisses his black eye as 'boys will be boys'
And we can't ignore the abuse that has been dumped on first nations kids for generations.
I'm in a society where we see irrational acts of violence in the news everyday that result in mass shootings that have no real explanation. What good does killing a bunch of kids at a school and then dying in a shootout do? It's irrational. Hmmm
I wonder how many people who do mass shootings had multiple concussions when they were young?
I wonder what percentage of suicides had multiple concussions?
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.