The girlfriend of an old friend of mine (or, perhaps more accurately, given his nature, "the person into whom he was inserting his penis on a regular basis,") once expressed her dislike for me by spluttering to him, "He's always saying, 'I wanted to do this or that, but I couldn't because of my brain.'"
She probably took me more seriously than I took myself, but she did have a point. I've long felt subject to the unpredictable tides of the neurochemical sea behind my eyeballs. My mood and anxiety level often have little to do with my surroundings or my situation in life. I can be enjoying a bracing near-panic attack at my desk in the midst of job success, prosperity, good health and a shiny new bicycle. It hardly ever works the other way...I'm never cheerful in the face of total adversity; the most I can muster is a kind of neurotic Zen-style indifference that I pay for later with bouts of obsessive anxiety and cheap wine.
Some people are firm believers in psychology: for them, it is always the mind, rather than the neurons, that determines their outlook on life and dictates their response to adversity. I believe, in turn, that many of those folks enjoy nice, relatively stable neurochemistries, and can thus easily make that claim. I also believe that some of those psychological evangelists (see, Phil, Dr.) are, in private, raging balls of cortisol-driven excess. Yet another portion of those folks are idealists who desperately want to believe that they can overcome their depressions and manias with a thorough application of Proper Thinking, and attribute their plunges into chemical canyons to a failure of will. I suspect that everyone else making that claim is secretly and happily medicated.
Mind is a process, not a thing, and that process is driven by the physicality of the neurological medium. Medical case histories by the thousands bear this out: alter or destroy the brain, and you alter or destroy the mind.
To wit: one Phineas P. Gage, who in 1848 received a tamping iron thro' the head. A tamping iron (for those unfamiliar with mid-19th century railroad construction techniques), is a metal rod 3 feet seven inches long, 1 1/4 inches in diameter at the base, tapering to a point about 1/4 in diameter at the tip. To remove rocks that were in the path of construction, holes were drilled at their base and filled with gunpowder. A fuse was added, and then sand was packed in on top using the tamping iron. Gage apparently struck an errant spark, and the tamping iron blew ninety feet through the air, after first passing through his skull.
According to a local Vermont newspaper account of the incident, "The iron entered on the side of his face, shattering the upper jaw, and passing back of the left eye, and out the top of the head." It destroyed significant portions of the ventromedial areas of his prefrontal cortex.
After the accident, Gage sat up, signed off his timesheet, and walked home to wait for a doctor. His primary care physician, Dr. Harlow, subsequently reported that
"He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom)… capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned… Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew his as shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation."
Basically, a three-foot iron rod through the brain turned Mr. Gage into something of a jackass.
Where did the nice Mr. Gage go? Was he, somehow, trapped inside, unable to express himself? Was the reception of his soul's transmissions now crippled by the faulty radio of his brain?
Nope. The nice Mr. Gage was his brain. The asshole Mr. Gage was, now, his broken brain.
Prior to becoming King Of The Worrrld, James Cameron directed The Abyss, which was sort of like Close Encounters of the Third Kind only underwater and without Steven Spielberg. The plot involves the deep-sea recovery of a sunken nuclear submarine and the subsequent encounter with an intelligent aquatic species, but the plot isn't the important bit. The important bit is a certain sound effect. At the beginning of the movie, an underwater UFO causes the submarine's systems to fail, and it bounces off a cliff face and begins its long, slow fall to the ocean floor. All during this scene, as the camera flits from the sweat-beaded faces of the crew to exterior shots of the ship plunging inexorably downwards, there was this sound. It was an engine-genre sound, thrumming, declining in pitch, and it represented death for everyone aboard. It chilled me: it was the sound of certain, but not rapid, doom, a steady and unstoppable decline to crushing pressure and cessation of life.
I've "heard" other sounds that seem to have significance byond mere perception and, sensibly, they are probably just another irrational tic from my quirked-out brain. Sometimes, though, when it seems like who I am has ground to a halt, and I'm staring stupidly at the wall or the monitor, I can hear that sound, descending, falling, into black, cold, crushing silence.
If I had any real confidence in my own rationality--as opposed to the bluster that most people assume makes up for the empty tautology that forms the foundation of their entire intellectual life--I'd be able to dismiss this peculiar pseudo-audio phenomenon. But I don't, not really, and I can't.
It's possible that while I developed from an itty-bitty zygote into the trillion-celled ambulatory sack of water and proteins I am today, a few key processes were interrupted or altered, so that the uptake of this or that neurotransmitter is too inhibited or augmented to allow me the relative stability enjoyed by so many other folks. It's possible that the psychological evangelists are right, and that there are unexamined conflicts deep within my personality process that express themselves in tight bursts of anxiety or sloping depressions and upright manias. It's even remotely possible that, in some n-dimension, the perfect expression of my self, my soul, gazes sadly out into this world through the thickly blurred lens of my ill-made cortex, forever thwarted until the next go 'round.
At the moment I haven't got the wit to argue the merits of any of those possibilities...but the effect, whatever its cause, is the same.
Pleh.
