Adrian's Writing

Welcome to a series of articles I wrote exploring my mind and reality. They're very much an exploration; I pretty much wrote down my thoughts as I went along. As such, they could be a load of bunk but I think they hang together pretty well. They are based on sound evidence. Just as I've done with my other articles on scientific subjects, I've tried to either talk about evidence that's general regarded as sound or evidence that's controversial but was put forward by highly experienced senior scientists, often with Nobel Prizes to their name. That way, a reader can be confident that if I come up with a fact or discovery, it isn't just half-baked junk. Then again, my own conclusions are just my own, so I wouldn't bet your house on them. :)

That's enough pre-article waffle, on with the story...

Part 1: In which I realise I'm separate to my brain.

An odd thing happened to me a few years ago. I was reading the book ‘Endurance’ out loud to my parents (It’s a gripping account of Shackleton’s expedition to the Antarctic and their perilous efforts to survive and return from that inhospitable continent, I warmly recommend it). I'd got about ten pages into it when my mind began to drift on to other subjects. I got more and more lost in these other thoughts until I reached a certain point where I suddenly became aware that I wasn’t consciously directing my reading out loud at all. It was as though I was observing myself (from inside my head) reading out loud. It was a very strange sensation. As I realised this, I ‘snapped back in’ and I was, once again, consciously in the act of reading out loud.

It was a weird and memorable experience. What had happened? Was it a strange mental delusion? Had I gone mad for a second? I don’t think so. What seemed to have happened was that there was a moment when my conscious mind was no longer ‘locked in’ to my functioning brain. I was no longer controlling my actions directly but leaving my brain to do them for me. Such a situation would be similar to sleep-walking. In that state, the conscious mind is not present but the brain and the body can still carry out complex tasks; walking, eating etc. Conversation is even possible with a sleep-walking person. A friend of mine recently reported that her young son walked through the house one night, into her bedroom and began talking to her. She realised that he was asleep because the tone of his voice was much flatter and less alive than normal. He was also clumsier and less aware of what he was doing. She firmly ordered him to return to bed and off he sheepishly went.

The difference in my case was that I hadn’t fallen asleep. I was very much wide-awake but, nevertheless, I had disconnected from my functioning brain and body, giving me a brief but very memorable experience of viewing myself reading out loud as though from a distance.

But this creates a weird possibility; if my ‘self’ can go off and think about other things entirely and leave my brain and body to read a book out loud - a pretty complicated task - does my ‘self’ have to be involved at all? Could my brain do everything by itself? Could I drift off and think about sky-diving with Playboy centre-folds for an entire week and leave my brain and body to get on with my life without me? Could I then drift back from my fantasy week, ‘lock back’ into my brain and find I’d done another week of work, arranged a holiday with friends and caught a cold?

Alternatively, could I perhaps maintain that brief period when I realised that my brain was reading out loud without me, that time when my mind was ‘separate’? Maybe I could learn how to delay ‘locking back in’ to my brain? If I could do that, then I could just sit back and watch my brain do everything while I metaphorically sipped a cold drink and, for example, tried to solve cryptic crossword clues.

Hopefully, that isn't the case, not because it would be fun to try but because if it was true, my mind, my ‘self’ would be superfluous. If my brain could do everything by itself, my conscious ‘self’ would be little more than a spiritual parasite, a trespasser, skulking in the cranium of my body, watching my brain do all the work while it either watched powerlessly or suffered the pathetic delusion that it was actually in control.

It’s a scary thought. It reminds me of an evening when I was playing a computer game with a friend. We both had characters on screen and we were busily operating them with our controllers. I was merrily key-pressing away when I got the feeling that my character was behaving a little oddly. I did a double check and realised that for the last ten seconds I had been looking at the wrong character. Somehow, I had watched the wrong figure on the screen but been fairly happy that I was controlling its behaviour. This event left me with two lingering thoughts; one - I was probably rubbish at console games and two - my mind could easily be fooled into thinking it was in control of something that it didn’t actually control at all.

That could be what's happening right now, as I write this essay. I could be thinking ‘hey, I’m working away pretty well here’ when in fact my brain’s doing it all and my ‘self’ is just along for the ride? Am I just like an eight year old on a passenger jet who’s invited up to the cockpit, popped into the pilot’s chair and told he’s piloting the plane when in fact the whole thing’s on automatic? I may be sitting at this desk, thinking that I’ve just willed myself to move my hand but in fact all that happened is my brain did it and I just got the feeling that I willed it to happen.

There is one possible way to check if this is true, to sort out once and for all whether ‘I’m’ actually controlling my body or ‘I’m’ just a deluded passenger in my own brain. The idea is as follows: If I am a deluded passenger - i.e. thinking that I’m creating my actions when in fact my brain’s doing it all - then there’ll be a gap between my brain starting an action and my conscious mind thinking of doing that action. This is because, if I were a passenger, then I wouldn’t be making those actions happen and I’d always be a step behind knowing what’s going on. My mind, my ‘self’, me, would be like the Colonel in the TV series M.A.S.H. who issues Radar an order after Radar’s gone off and done something without being told. The Colonel loudly tells the fast disappearing Radar what to do so he, the Colonel, can still feel that he’s in charge. If this is what’s going on in my head then the sequence would be: brain starts an action, followed by a time delay followed by the mind foolishly declaring that it’s started that action.

Alternatively, if 'me', my mind, is really in charge, then there won’t be a gap between my brain’s action and my conscious decision or, even better, my mind’s conscious decision will come first. That situation would be like a real army in which a Colonel really does give an order and his underlings obey.
Which one is going in my head? Is it that my brain acts, followed by a delay, then me, my mind, foolishly thinks it’s gives the order? Or is it that myself, my mind, gives an order to my brain which then carries out the action? Is my mind a M.A.S.H. Colonel or a real Colonel?

Fortunately, in the 1970's, someone carried out a series of experiments to answer this question. In those experiments, Benjamin Libet asked subjects to carry out a simple act, such as pressing a button. In addition, he set up a visual timer and asked the subjects to make a mental note of when they decided to press the button. So far, so simple; the subjects would make a mental note of their moment of decision and then press the button.

The only thing was, Libet had also set up an EEG (electroencephalogram) on the subjects’ heads that could measure the transmission of signals in their brain. The EEG readings showed that the area of the subjects’ brain involved in button pressing (the secondary motor cortex) became active about a third of a second before the subjects mentally decided to push the button. The subjects' brains were already on with the job before the subjects even thought they'd decided to do it.

If Libet’s experiments are correct (and no one’s refuted them so far), we’re all M.A.S.H. Colonels. Our brains are doing things by themselves and, at least some of the time, our minds are delusional fools along for the ride. Oh dear.

In the next article, I'll try and rescue something from this very depressing situation...

Part 2: In which I find out I'm not just a ghost in my head.

In the last article, I described how, one day, I was reading a book out loud. While I did that, my mind drifted off. I then became aware that my brain and body were reading away by themselves. It was a very strange feeling. It seemed that my brain could do complex tasks (like reading out loud) without me being involved. The experience threw up some strange questions; did I have to be involved at all? Was I, my self, actually doing nothing at all? Was my brain doing everything while I just got the deluded idea I was in charge?

In the second part of the previous article on this unnerving subject, I looked for an experiment that might prove this idea one way or another. I found the Libet experiment which seemed to confirm my biggest fear; I wasn’t in charge at all. I just thought I made decisions but my brain was already doing the process before I’d even decided to do it!

I therefore seemed to have the following setup (if Libet’s tests were correct):
My mind, my self, is trapped inside my brain. It is a powerless observer! I've spent my whole life thinking I was in charge but actually I'm not! What a dope! I'm like John Cusack at the end of ‘Being John Malkovich’ when he’s forced to spend an entire lifetime powerlessly observing his former love from inside her daughter’s mind.

Is there any way out of this situation? Well, maybe it's worth thinking about the brain and the mind. How are they related? I can only come up with two possibilities; either my mind (my consciousness, my self) is a product of my brain’s functioning or it's a separate entity that influences the neurons in my brain. Which one is it?

Is it that my brain creates my mind? Or that my mind affects my brain?

Well, of the two, I’m guessing that the second one is correct. I’m basing this assumption on the experience that started this whole investigation; me being aware of my body and brain reading a book out loud without ‘me’ being involved. This idea - that the mind is non physical and separate from the brain - is called Dualism. Rene Descartes was a Dualist (He’s a very famous writer and philosopher from the early 1600’s). He thought the mind influenced the body. To quote from Wikipedia:

“Descartes in his Passions of the Soul and The Description of the Human Body suggested that the body works like a machine, that it has the material properties of extension and motion, and that it follows the laws of nature. The mind (or soul), on the other hand, was described as a nonmaterial entity that lacks extension and motion, and does not follow the laws of nature. Descartes argued that only humans have minds, and that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland.”

But is there any evidence to back up this dualist idea (apart from me having a strange book reading experience)? If my mind is influencing my brain, how could I be sure?

One problem is that if my mind only influences my brain and does nothing else, it wouldn’t seem much different from my mind just being a construct of my brain. It would be like someone holding a lever all the time. If they never let go of the lever, how can you tell they’re separate from that lever and not just a strange lump on the end of it?

If my mind could influence other things apart from my brain, then that would show that my mind was separate from my brain. If that was the case, then my mind would clearly be an independent entity that chose to influence my brain. I was choosing to grasp a lever, not being just a fancy extra bit of that lever.

It’s time to hunt for an experiment, something like the Libet experiment on free will but this time, an experiment that tested whether peoples’ minds can influence something outside of their brains. Now, I’m already getting visions of David Cronenberg’s ‘Scanners’ here, or maybe even ‘The Fury’ with Kirk Douglas but that’s way over the top. All that’s needed is evidence that people have enough strength of mind to affect small scale events, like the firing of nerve cells. If there is evidence of that, then that would be hugely significant news (but probably wouldn’t make a good movie).

Fortunately, there is such an experiment. Hooray! (No embarrassing dead end yet! Nice) The work concerned was done by Professor Robert Jahn of Princeton University. Back in the ancient times of Space Invaders and huge car phones, Professor Jahn had a graduate student who wanted to investigate whether the mind could affect physical events. The student set up an electronic random number generator and attempted to influence the numbers it produced. The student showed Jahn his results. They were intriguing. Jahn was Dean of Engineering at that time (he was a genuine rocket scientist) but decided to dedicate to some time to reproduce the experiments. The results were the same and showed that there was a reproducible effect. A person could affect the random number generator in a positive or negative way (the choice declared at the beginning of the tests). The effect was consistent, universal and beyond chance.

Jahn set up a research unit to study the phenomenon with Brenda Dunne. The unit was called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research group or P.E.A.R. They found that each individual could affect the RNG unit. They didn’t have to be physically close to it. People could also affect other random events. A ball cascade was set up and the researchers found that subjects could affect this too. The effect wasn’t huge but it was reproducible, consistent and beyond chance.

Woah. That is a very exciting result. If it is correct (and Jahn spent decades carefully assembling the evidence) then the answer seems pretty clear. Our minds are functionally separate to our brains and are able to influence them. Our minds can influence other things but only to a very small degree (so no chance of re-enacting scenes from the Exorcist quite yet).

So, therefore, the reason why we’re so rubbish when doing Libet’s experiment is that our minds can influence our brains... but not very well. We’re not deluded about having free will (phew!) but we are deluded that we are completely in charge of our brains. We are grasping the lever, we’re not just ‘lever decoration’ but we often can’t move it all the way.

But what does this say about our minds, our selves, life, death, free will and the ability to scare the living daylights out of priests by levitating?

On to the next article...

Part 3: In which I get an idea of how I influence my brain.

So far in this series of articles about consciousness (i.e. articles 1 and 2), I’ve reached the following conclusion:

Our minds are separate from our brains and can influence them.

This is a fascinating conclusion, although Rene Descartes came up with it over three hundred years ago so it’s actually no big deal. Fortunately, thanks to the progress of science, we’ve now got ways of actually proving that this is the case. We can use electroencephalograms (E.E.G’s) and electronic random number generators (R.N.G’s) to test what the mind and brain can do. Based on what’s been uncovered so far, our minds can do the following:

Our minds can influence the functioning of our brains (thank heck for that!)

Our minds can also influence the behaviour of certain random number generators (oooh, spooky!)

This conclusion is pretty ground-shaking and it throws up all sort of questions such as: If our minds, our selves, are separate from our bodies, what happens when we die? How can our minds influence our brains and R.N.G’s? What are our minds? What are they made of? What are our bodies like if our minds aren’t affecting them? Can we affect other peoples’ minds? They’re all interesting questions and I don’t have a clue for most of them but, with a little bit of investigation, we might be able to come up with some answers. The first question I’ll try and answer is:

‘how can our minds influence our brains, R.N.G’s and ball cascades?’

The logical first step to answering that question is to find out what those three things have in common. if our minds can affect all of them, then it stands to reason that they share some important property. What do they have in common?
Let’s start with the brain. Our brains are made of of lots and lots of neurons. Let’s look at an illustration of a neuron, thanks to those wonderful folks at Wikipedia. If you click on it, you can see the picture full size:

Neurons work by sending electrical signal to each other. The electrons fly along the neuron’s axon arm until they reach the connection between that axon and the next neuron; called the synapse. At the synapse, special ions travel across the gap and trigger receptors on the next neuron. This event triggers signals in that neuron. They fly off down the axon of that neuron and so on.

The electron flow within the axons takes place in the axon’s microtubulin (shown in the diagram). These tubes are very narrow (about 25 nanometres in diameter). They’re so narrow that quantum effects can occur inside them. What this means is that the space is so small, the inherent uncertainty of the fundamental particles that makes up our universe start to kick in... ‘What? (I hear you say) 'Our universe is inherently uncertain? That’s rubbish! My chair and table and lawnmower don’t disappear and reappear at will!’ Well, no. You’d be right if you said that. At the level of chairs and tables, things are pretty solid and reliable. The thing is though that when you go down to the smallest scales, the scales of electrons and photons of light, things get a lot more murky. A bunch of scientists in the first half of the twentieth century discovered that the basic building blocks of matter weren’t little billiard balls. These fundamental objects were more like ghosts. You couldn’t be sure whether they were a particle or a wave until you measured them. When you measured them, the very act of measuring them made them a particle or a wave. Your measurement didn’t discover what they already were. Your measurement forced them to be one or the other. Until you or someone else observed them, they would existing in a state of fundamental uncertainty, not being one thing or another.

This ghost-like fuzziness is going on inside those microtubulin tubes inside the neurons of our brains. As a result, we can deduce that the flow of signals in our brains are influenced by inherently random events. The actions of our brains are inherently fuzzy.

By interestingly coincidence, the random number generator in Professor Jahn’s experiment was also inherently random; so was the ball cascade. Jahn did experiment with using a device that wasn’t inherently random (it came up with a random number by doing deterministic actions and so was a pseudo-random number generator). Jahn found that his subjects’ minds couldn’t influence that device. Their minds could only influence devices that were inherently random.

There therefore seems to be a common property of all the objects that our minds can influence. The behaviour of all of them is influenced by inherently random events. Logically, this must therefore be what our minds are influencing. Our minds can affect an object whose behaviour is influenced by inherently random events (such as a ball cascade, true random number generator and a brain). We can influence these objects' fuzzy side in one direction or another. We can only do it by a tiny amount, but we can do it. Our minds can alter reality. To quote from the beginning of that classic TV series ‘Monkey’:

Tathakata Buddha, the Father Buddha said, ‘with our thoughts we make the world’

If reality wasn’t inherently fuzzy and was deterministic - i.e. just like a clock or a load of billiard balls bouncing around - then our minds probably couldn’t do anything. If that was the case, we’d watch powerlessly while everything chugged along in its clockwork way from now until the end of time. Fortunately, reality isn’t like that; it’s constructed from particles that are fuzzy, ghostlike entities until we set them into some form through observation. It’s that uncertainty that gives us a foothold. We can push that inherent randomness in a particular direction. We can will things to happen or keep happening or not happen at all. Heady stuff.

That’s enough for this installment. Next time, I’ll try to answer one of the other questions posed in this article. I’ve no idea which one or what the answer is but, hopefully, something will come up.

Ta ta for now!

Part 4: In which I find out how our minds affect reality.

It’s time for part 4 in my strange odyssey to understand my own mind. So far, spurred on by my initial odd experience of being separate from my body, I’ve come to an odd conclusion; my mind, my self is separate from my brain and influences it. My mind (and yours and that guy who lives down the road) function this way. Not only that but our minds can influence any process that has an inherently random base. It could be a random number generator or a ball cascade. As long as it has an inherently random component, we can influence it. The signalling of the neurons in our brain, due to their structure, are also susceptible to true random behaviour. This is because the channels that they travel down are narrow enough for quantum effects to occur.

Yup, the word ‘quantum’ has appeared (again). Now, a lot of people think quantum physics is either barmy, incomprehensible or probably both. It is very weird. Not only is it weird but it leaves scientists with some very thorny questions. Just to repeat from the last article, when you go down to the smallest scales - the scales of electrons and photons of light - things get murky. A bunch of scientists in the first half of the twentieth century discovered that the basic building blocks of matter weren’t little billiard balls. These objects were more like ghosts. You couldn’t be sure whether they were a particle or a wave until you measured them. When you measured them, the very act of measuring them made them a particle or a wave. Your measurement didn’t discover what they already were. Your measurement forced them to be one or the other. Until you or someone else observed them, they would existing in a state of fundamental uncertainty, not being one thing or another.

One very thorny question that quantum research gave us was; ‘if a system is fundamentally undecided until it is measured, how big can this system get?’ Erwin Schrodinger took this idea to a logical extreme. He devised a thought experiment. To quote the Wikipedia entry:

A cat, along with a flask containing a poison and a radioactive source, is placed in a sealed box [shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence]. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.

Schrodinger was saying, effectively, ‘this whole undecided state thing is all very well with a photon but logically, through cause and effect, you could end up with a full size mammal in this ghostly state. That’s ridiculous!’

It does sound ridiculous. To perhaps make this clearer, here's another experiment (a real one, not just a thought one) that highlights this odd situation. It’s the double slit experiment. You shine a light on two vertical slits a certain distant apart. On the far side of the two slits is a surface on which you can observe the results. What’ll you see is an interference pattern. The photons of light, which can act as waves, are spreading out as they pass through the slits. The far screen therefore will show the alternating peaks and troughs of brightness as these light waves hit it. So far, so neat but what happens if you reduce the brightness of the light? What happens if you reduce the brightness of the light down to one photon?

If one photon leaves the lamp, heading for the two slits, what’s it going to do? It has to go through one slit or the other just like all its previous wavy photon friends. But it can’t decide to do anything. According to quantum theory, the photon has to goes through both slits. It does this by being a strange, ghostly quantum superposition of two possibilities. This situation only changes if the presence of the photon is measured at one of the slits. If this happens, the measurement forces the photon to have gone through one slit or the other. If no measurement is taken, the photon continues to go through both slits in its strange super-position of states.

The key thing then is that the photon is made 'real' when it's measured. When it's measured, the weird quantum multiple states ghostliness goes away and you get a solid physical object. It’s simply the act of measurement that decides which slit the photon went through. This answer keeps physicists happy. Nothing to do with our minds, it's just the act of measurement.

But what is measurement? If you measure the temperature of a room with a thermometer, all you’re doing is choosing something that will be affected by the thing you want to measure. The heat expands the mercury in the thermometer and it rises up to a certain level. Fundamentally, all measurement is just is one thing causing another. If the researcher puts a detector in the path of the photon, he’s just added something who’s state will be affected by the photon. But if that's all that's happening, we're still stuck with the Schrodinger’s Cat situation. The only difference is that instead of a cat, they’ve stuck a detector in the way of the photon. According to Schrodinger’s impeccable logic, all that should happen, according to quantum physics, is that their detector would also end up in a super-position of states; both reading that the photon was present and not reading it was present at the same time. A scientist could add a device to measure the detector too but nothing fundamentally would change. That device would end up in a super-position of states too. Ultimately, everything would end up in a super-position of states.

This quandary puzzled one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century; John Von Neumann. He followed the logical path described above. He understood that just saying that measurement collapses the wave function is a fallacy since any measurement simply extends the system; it doesn’t change its nature. Von Neumann concluded that the mind collapses the wave function since that is the only thing that is outside the system. This is known as the Von Neumann/Wigner interpretation.

There have been several arguments against this idea. Schrodinger used his famous cat scenario as a way to criticise the Neumann/Wigner theory. The thing is though, using a cat showed that Schrodinger thought cats weren't conscious. If cats are conscious, the cat would observe the result of the radioactive event so it would never end up in a superposition of states, hence no ludicrous situation. If living things have conscious minds and they can affect the quantum world and collapse the wave-function, the Schrodinger's cat paradox disappears.

Not content with this, physicists came up with another theory to avoid the Neumann/Wigner consciousness theory. This new theory decided that every time a photon quantum superposition breaks down into one of two states, an entire other universe is created in which the other state occurred. That way, both possible events occur. This is is the many-worlds hypothesis. Personally, I think that is the most bonkers idea anyone could ever come up with. I'm therefore going to accept Von Neumann's theory as true. It fits the facts, no one's refuted it in forty years of analysis and he was one of the most brilliant minds we've had in the last century; that's good enough for me.

If Von Neumann's conclusion is true, then it would mean that without minds, there would be no physical reality. It would just be a great mass of undecided quantum fog, a huge version of Schrodinger’s box in which the cat sits, both alive and dead. The quote from the last consciousness article - ‘with our thoughts we make the world’ - becomes even more relevant. Without our minds, there wouldn’t be a world. There would just be a near infinite superposition of possible states. Everything would be anything and nothing.

Weird.

Part 5: In which I come up with a strange theory of how our reality is created.

Time. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? It obviously goes by, but at the same time we can’t get a grip on it. We have a past and a future but neither is perceivable by us. We can conjure up the past with memories and predict the future but the former is a vague, uncertain fog and the latter is just an abstract idea. It would be tempting to think that there was no past and future, there is only the ‘now’ and everything else is just a by product of us thinking about it; but if that’s true, what is ‘now’?

Hmm, that’s going nowhere. One thing I think we can safely say is that there is no way of perceiving the future, just as there’s no way of perceiving anything with our minds that we can’t directly observe with our physical senses. Or is there?

In the previous consciousness articles (first bit, second bit, third bit and fourth bit), I reported that Professor Robert Jahn of Princeton University and his colleagues carried out an extensive series of experiments centred around random event generators. They also carried out other related experiments that were just as strange and fascinating. The P.E.A.R. team (Prince Engineering Anomalies Research) found that a subject could influence a random number generator in the past and the future. If a true random number generator was left alone at a specified point in time, a subject could influence that device from another point in time. For example, a subject could be asked to influence the device in twelve hours time. The team would then arrange to leave the device alone at that specified period of time. Afterwards, they would check the device. They found its readout behaved as if the subject had influenced it at the time of operation.

Now, this does sound highly dubious. What would have stopped the subject simply waiting for the allocated time and then influencing the device? The thing is, the effect also worked in the past. A subject could also influence the device at an arranged time twelve hours in the past. As long as the device was left unaffected during that period (keep in mind the scientists couldn’t check it, as that would have influenced the device), the reading was the same as if the subject had effected it at the time of operation. In this scenario, the student couldn’t cheat because the moment had already gone, although, in some ways, it hadn’t...

So far in these articles, I’ve put together the idea that our minds are separate from our brains and influence them. Our minds can also influence other objects whose behaviour is affected by truly random behaviour. They seem to be able to create order from chaos at the most basic level of reality; the quantum world. In this ghostly realm, our act of observing photons and electrons forces them into a particular state because our minds affect them. The eminent scientist John Von Neumann realised that this was the only logical answer to the riddles of quantum physics. Our minds are the only thing outside the quantum setup and so must be deciding the quantum outcomes.

If that is the case, perhaps our minds are not only free of our physical brains but the whole four-dimension world of physical reality (three dimensions and time). If that's true, it would explain why our minds could affect events in the past and the future. Our brains might be locked into the relentless conveyer belt that is time but our minds, as separate non-physical entities, aren’t.

Let’s draw a diagram.

As you can see, it’s got three dimensions; time, length and height. This means that people or figures present in it will be flat images. It does though mean that with time as an axis, we can show these figures moving through time. I’ve stuck some frames from Edward Muybridge’s famous ‘horse galloping’ sequence. Muybridge was a pioneer of film and animation. He set up a series of cameras to automatically take still shots of a horse galloping along. By doing this, he could demonstrate that a horse’s feet did all leave the ground at a single point in the gallop, something many people regarded as impossible.

As you can see from the photo, the man on the horse gallops lengthways, but also through time, heading into the future (the top right of the picture). Keep in mind that he wouldn’t see it this way. He’d see it the way we all see reality, a constantly changing ‘present’, but we are seeing him differently. He’s like all physical things; travelling forward constantly into the future, whether he likes it or not.

If Jahn’s research is correct, our minds, unlike our brains and bodies, aren’t fixed to this conveyer belt, this constant 'heading into the future'. They can affect anything that’s fundamentally random in the plain of space and time. As shown in the second diagram, our minds can 'reach out' to any point on that plain and effect any pools of inherent randomness that might exist, like the inner state of a random number generator machine. We can turn those pools into 'decided' reality by influencing or observing them. Our minds can focus on any point in time where things are undecided and turn that pool of ghostly quantum-ness into a hard, physical reality.

If this is true, it has a very odd consequence. It would mean that our minds make space-time, that great big four-dimensional fabric that our physical bodies crawl through like fleas through a carpet. Our minds turn pools of not-space-time into space-time. We weave the carpet into being.

If that is true, then the quantum world would be fundamentally different from space-time. Until the quantum world is woven into the carpet of space-time by our minds, it is free from space-time's influence, like floating strands of wool. Once our minds grab a portion of the ghostly quantum world and weave it into the carpet of space-time as observed matter, it's forced to be part of space-time like all other parts of our concrete, physical reality.

This would explain why physicists are having such a nightmare time unifying quantum physics with Einstein's space-time, as neatly explained in this New Scientist article. They've worked out that a universal time is needed to explain the behaviour of quantum physical events but a flexible, relative time is needed for Einstein's space-time. Time in Einstein's space-time is part of the 'fabric' of space and subject to the influence of mass and energy. In many ways, time in Einstein's space time isn't really time at all, it's more like another dimension, like length or height. Since time can't be both universal and relative, the physicists are stumped.

The strange influence of our non-physical minds solves this mismatch. We weave those free-floating ghostly quantum particles into the twisting carpet of space-time by observing them, locking them into place. Once they're woven in, they've lost True Quantum Time and are stuck with Space Time, a rather boring dimension that's no more exciting than 'width' in the badly pinned down carpet of space-time. Tut, our minds, talk about killjoys...

Ironically, by viewing reality only through our physical bodies, we don't even know this. We think that boring old 'space-time' time is the only time, even though it's just one dimension of space-time, the 'reality carpet' that our minds have collectively woven into place. If our minds separated from our physical bodies, we might then perceive the much more interesting True Quantum Time. We could then let it tick by while we looked down upon our physical bodies as they crawled through reality with its four concrete dimensions of length, height, width and time.

What a weird idea!

Part 6: In which I look for proof that I can affect my brain.

Today, being a Sunday and a break from updating the novel, I drifted back to an earlier question about this whole consciousness thing; is there a way of experiencing my mind’s control over my brain? As I mentioned in my first consciousness article, I had experienced my brain doing a fairly complex task - reading a book out loud - without my conscious involvement. Fascinated by this event, I read further on the subject and studied the famous experiments of Benjamin Libet. His experiments showed that our conscious belief in deciding our actions could be a delusion, we could have no control at all but simply believe we do, a cover-up partly orchestrated by our own brains!

Fortunately, as Libet himself pointed out, that depressing conclusion may not be justified. We may not control our brains’ actions all the time but we may be able to suppress certain actions or initiate actions that our brains wouldn’t automatically carry out by themselves. If that’s true, I wondered, are there some situations which we can use to test that idea?

There is one such possible situation; that of the optical illusion.



The pictures above show two famous optical illusions. The one on the left is known as the Necker cube. The one on the right is known as Rubin’s vase. In both cases, there are two possible ways for our minds to perceive those objects. In the case of the cube, it can either been seen to have a front face forward and down to the left, or a front face forward and up to the right. Both of these possibilities are equally reasonable. It’s up to the individual which way they want to view them. The same is true of the vase; do you want to see it as a vase or two faces in profile?

Optical illusions like this could be a great way to test our mind’s control over our brain. Our brain, being a physical device that deals with the outside world and adopts various mechanisms to cope with that world deal, is a pretty impressive thing. It can do all sorts of complicated tasks by processing incoming information from our senses, attaching value and priorities to what it’s perceived and performing appropriate actions. I experienced an example of that when I became aware of myself reading out loud without being involved in the process. My brain scanned the page, turned the words into objects of internal meaning and then read them out loud. Amazing! Particularly since I wasn’t involved at all. For all my brain cared, I could have been on Venus.

Perhaps a good metaphor for his situation is our brains being a huge beast, a powerful animal marching along, responding and reacting, staying alive using mechanisms it knows work, at least most of the time. Our minds, by comparison, would be a person sitting astride that beast, holding the reins. if the beast that is our brain is well trained, our minds might not need to do much at all. They could loll around in the saddle and read a book.

But if these metaphorical beasts aren’t well trained, or trained in the wrong way, our riders would have a hell of a time trying to affect the animal’s behaviour. If the beast saw a prey animal, he’d charge after it and there’d be little we could do about it. If he saw something that scared him, it would again be hard to stop him running away. A weak rider would be almost indistinguishable from no rider at all.

But what if the beast was faced with a fork in the road and both paths looked equally reasonable? In that situation, even a weak rider would have a great chance to steer the beast in a wiser direction. He or she could nudge the beast, enough to push in the direction the rider wanted.

That’s where these optical illusions come in. They have created ambiguity, the presence of two, equally probably perceptive choices. When we look at the optical illusions shown earlier, our ability to flip what we see between the two possible choices demonstrates that we can affect our brains. If we were just brains, or minds with no influence on our brains, we would only see one choice. Our brain would choose what it thought was the best option and stick with that. Fortunately, because we’re a mind influencing a brain, we can change that perception.

With all that in mind, I was dead keen to prove to myself I could flip the vase to two faces, or the cube to sit up rather than down, and I could! Hooray! I had proven to myself that my mind was able to decide which interpretation was chosen by my brain.

This idea, that optical illusions can show consciousness at work, is an idea that’s been investigated by several scientists, in particular Efstratios Manousakis. They have been studying subjects’ brains when those subjects were looking at optical illusions. As far as I can work out, some of these scientists suspect that in the brain, both possible perceptions (e.g. faces or vase) exist in a quantum superposition which then collapses into one or the other. This collapse gives us the ‘flip’, the change of perception where we see the faces rather than the vase.

The conclusions of these scientists do differ from mine. They are very certain that consciousness is a by product of the brain’s functioning. By comparison, this whole series of articles is exploring the idea that the mind is separate from the brain. As a result, my interpretation of the quantum superposition of multiple perceptive states is different, and a little simpler. As far as I can tell, the scientists are probably right in that both perceptions exist as quantum superpositions in the brain but I don’t think consciousness or mind is created when the superposition collapses to a single choice. Instead, our conscious minds collapse the wave function to a particular choice, just as our minds collapse the superpositions of a photon or electron when they observe it. For more on that, see Step 3 in this series of articles.

The thing is, how much influence can we have on our brains? The pictures shown earlier are very ambiguous, with the two choices being pretty much equal. What if the illusion favours one choice more strongly, even though the other is possible? Here’s such an example:

It’s taken from scienceblogs.com, a very useful site. To read the article it appears in, click here.

It’s a more advanced illusion than the vase and the cube. As the animation runs, the dancer spins around. It is possible to perceive her spinning clockwise or anti-clockwise. When I looked at her, she always span clockwise! I was deflated. I couldn’t make my brain perceive her spinning anti-clockwise. For me, my metaphorical beast had charged off down the left hand fork in the road and no amount of tugging on the reins could pull it over to the right fork.

Finally after a lot of effort, I found a way to make her spin either way. The trick was to look partly away and imagine her spinning in the direction I wanted her to go in. After a bit, my peripheral vision showed her spinning that way too. I then gradually move my eyes to look at her directly and she was spinning in that direction. Sweet!

That’s about it for optical illusions, at least for now. The current big unanswered question I’d like to answer is; ‘if our conscious minds are non-physical and influence our physical brains, what happens when we fall asleep?’ Hopefully, I’ll have something to write about that soon.

Adios for now!

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