Drifting

You're on a train, staring out the window at power lines, green planes and sky. Your mind wanders. You think of things that happened years ago, people still important in your life. You recall an exchange, you relive the feel of it; embarrassment, adoration, indifference, adventure, but context-dependent and with a specific, complex taste; you're watching rows of hedges, trees and sheep flash by, but in your mind's eye you see streets, places, a room where years ago someone close to you slept. The room most likely remains but you know nothing of the persons living there now; they never enter your mind in any way, why should they? Your friend lives elsewhere now, lives where the train is heading. For three hundred and thirty two seconds your brain attracts around those memories - the room, the bathroom, food and conversations you had there, films you watched - then stops, and you snap out of it, reach for your bottled water, and reconnect with your surroundings; with the people moving or sitting still around you. You don't know why your mind drifted to those particular memories, or what made it stop suddenly - or rather, you DO know, about quasi-stable patterns of brain activity, maintained by dopamine and obvious given your destination - but why that PARTICULAR chain of thoughts and memories, and why the sudden stop? You imagine the dyanmics of your brain, imagine a brain-shaped animation of swirling electrical potential, action potentials, ever-changing, save for brief periods where stable configurations are reached that attract the swirling mass around a recognizable shape, a place, a thought, a memory, before loosing interest and drifting off. You look around again, search the environment for stability, attraction, dopamine. The woman next to you in black, with the clean features, the headphones, the short hair and the eyebrows. The landscape outside, darker now; houses, horses, a town. There's nothing there to keep you, and your mind begins to drift again. It makes you sad, restless, and you put the music back on.

27 January 2010

Dear readers, I'm acutely aware that my blog has stagnated. I blame FriendFeed and Facebook, where people actually INTERACT with my links and loose thoughts, but the real reason is simply contentment: life is going well at the moment, all things considered, and so I have nothing to say, no tensions to sublimate or at least whine about. Fear not though, I intend to create NEW TENSIONS by having an ABSOLUTELY ALCOHOL-FREE FEBRUARY!

In the meantime, here is the original version of a column I wrote, which, after some peculiar mangling by the editors, was recently published in the local student paper. Readers of this blog will find the text annoyingly simplistic, or at least old hat; I post it here simply to stress that I would never - ever - make such use of question- and exclamation-marks.

The most important thing in life
Christopher Harris

What fascinates me most about the brain is its motivation, the fact that it wants and desires. I'm also acutely aware of the limits of my own free will: eat less, exercise more, study more, be more social, dare to do this, stop doing that; it's like a never-ending struggle with my own will, and I know I'm not the only one frustrated by this experience, especially now, with new year's resolutions failing left and right. So what's going on?

In the middle of your brain you have half a million neurons that release dopamine into your frontal lobes. These neurons form the core of your brain's reward system, which generates your motivation. Rewards, like food, drink, play, sex and addictive drugs, raise dopamine concentrations in your brain, as do learned rewards like money. Unexpected rewards are particularly effective, and dopamine builds up in anticipation of uncertain rewards, making everyone at the bus stop stare at the bend where the bus will appear. Low dopamine concentrations on the other hand make you distracted and disinterested.



Different behaviours are produced by different groups of neurons in the frontal lobes. These neuronal groups run on dopamine, and so the behaviour you feel most motivated to perform at any given moment is that of the group that generates the most dopamine. Eating sweets is easy: with a few simple muscle movements it activates your dopamine neurons through your taste buds. Studying for a distant exam is hard: it requires your full attention and activates your dopamine neurons only indirectly, through your prefrontal cortex, which simultaneously has to inhibit more immediate urges like surfing the web, going out or watching a film. You may have heard of Phineas Gage, who destroyed his prefrontal cortex in an accident and lost his impulse control and his ability to follow plans for the future.

New year's resolutions fail because we make them considering only the wonderful goal, which by itself produces plenty of dopamine, especially when it's new and feels like a fresh start. We don't realize how hard it will be for our prefrontal cortices to provide the new neuronal groups with enough dopamine to make us runregularly, or read in the library, or go to the gym, or in any way compete with the entrenched neuronal groups that have us sit on the couch, or over-eat, or smoke. On a normal day, the further away a goal is, the less attractive it seems, because the further away a reward is, the less dopamine it generates. So the trick to keeping new year's resolutions: be nice to your prefrontal cortex.

There's more to motivation of course, the reward system is enormously complex. This is how I like to think about it though, and it's worked so far. It helped me quit smoking, knowing that the urge was strong because dopamine neurons are covered in nicotine receptors, but that the brain would 'forget' this in a few months and the urge would go away. It helps me understand all kinds of thoughts, habits, excitements and hang-ups. It helps me understand my own brain. Check in next week for another bit of this story, and join the dopamine fan page on Facebook for references and more information.

See you February.

Me reading iPlant fiction

Having finally aquired a decent microphone I decided to do a reading of the first two chapters of my novel-in-writing, creatively named iPlant. Wish I didn't sound so morose but if you go back and change things every time it doesn't sound right you never get anything uploaded. My hope is that I'll be able to record chapter three without actually doing any writing; have it be a bit more like storytelling and then simply cut away everything I don't want before finally converting it back to text. We'll see. Anyway, here's chapter one and two.

The upsides of not thinking ahead

Sometimes I pick up ideas at the fringes, in the early to late morning hours of a night extended well beyond sunrise; ideas I normally wouldn't consider devoting energy to. It takes a special kind of mindset to pursue what is often a red herring; a freak spike in attention with no credentials other than it's momentary appeal. Takes a certain kind of cocktail. Takes a tetra pack.




I pick one up, make a cup of coffee and run with it for a while, make it walk on it's own you know. Some blog posts are fringe creations, like the translation of that Hendrik Brors article and the announcement of the iPlant seminar and whatnot. Just impulses at the time, but by the time I wake up the next day I've made enough postings and commitments about the them and and there they are staring me in my sleepy face saying "now what?"




Watch that George Carlin video by the way, you will not regret it.




Anyway. Cory Doctorow says if you wanna be a writer you need to learn to write a lot, not just when you feel inspired; and to not go back and delete paragraphs just because they don't appeal to you on a second reading. Let them stand for a few days at least, give them a third reading at a later date, trust quantity and know that a year from now you won't be able to tell the difference between text that impressed you at the time of writing and text that didn't. Probably applies to blogging too.









Wonder if I can get £2.500 at vcashpoint for distributing iPlant merchandise for free 'in my local community' to 'raise awareness about neuroscience'? Best send off an application quick before I start thinking critically about it.