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Below is a piece drawn from a conversation with Steven Johnson about his book Mind Wide Open. I've uploaded the entire interview for those who want to hear more:
23:55 | listen: RealAudio · mp3
From that first moment humans realized we were thinking for ourselves, we were probably also trying to figure out why exactly we were thinking what we were thinking. This curiosity about our own thought processes has led to all sorts of guesses about what was going on inside the brain. The problem was... for most of history... that’s where this process stopped... at guessing. But science is slowly opening up the black box and allowing us to really get a good look at how our brain does what it does. So, if we can know what’s going on behind the scenes when we’re happy or sad or scared... how might that change the way we view life? Science writer Steven Johnson had just that question and decided to use his own brain to find out. The result is the new book “Mind Wide Open: Your brain and the neuroscience of everyday life.” He was kind enough to open his home and his head for The Health Show’s Greg Dahlmann.
(originally aired February 19, 2004)
6:31 | listen: RealAudio · mp3
It’s one of those questions we ask all the time without really thinking about it: What’s up? How’s it going? How are you? We almost never want people to actually tell us. But when I arrived at Steven Johnson’s house in Brooklyn recently... I really did want him to answer the question: What’s on your mind?
{SJ: what’s on your mind} :10
“(laughs) Well, what’s on mind is that this book is about to come out and I’m frantically trying to remember what was in it (laughs).”
Steven Johnson traveled around the nation doing research for this book... but the sights he saw were all inside his head. And the snapshots he’s collected in Mind Wide Open aren’t like anything you’d grab with a point-and-shoot. Johnson was able to record his brain’s landmarks using technologies such as neuro-feedback and magnetic resonance imaging. He says this sight-seeing tour of his head led to a lot of self awareness at first.
{SJ: self awareness} :26
“But then you get past that... and then you have sort of more of a nuanced kind of sense of what’s going on in your brain and you start to recognize patterns of behavior, patterns of emotional responses to things that you were aware of in a sort of background way, but they have a new intensity to them. One of the metaphors I use in the book is that you hear it less as a symphony and more like a series of individual instruments.”
Johnson says one of the first things that came into greater relief was a skill called mind sight. Humans are hardwired with the ability to look at another person’s face and make a good guess as to what she’s thinking or feeling. This skill is not uniformly distributed in the population... some people are very good at it and others turn out to be less so. In fact, autism is marked by what’s sometimes called mind blindness. After having learned all this... and tested his own ability... Steven Johnson says his conversations with other people took on a new dimension.
{SJ: mind reading} :25
“I’ve started dividing the world up into people who are particularly good mind readers and people who are not. And it suddenly explained a lot of things to people a lot things to me about people... that’s why my conversations with that person are always so good, that’s why I always feel locked in when talking to him. And then, that’s why that person always tells jokes that always kind of tell jokes that fall flat when he’s sitting at the dinner table party.”
The conversations newly illuminated by neuroscience for Steven Johnson weren’t only external, though. Many of them were between different components of his own brain.
Johnson writes a lot of about his fears in Mind Wide Open... specifically the dread he feels whenever the wind starts gusting against a window. This unease is left over from the time a large window collapsed during a storm, almost hitting his wife. Johnson says the persistence of this fear was a bit troubling until he started exploring how we process fear. It turns out there’s a part of the brain called the amygdala that’s responsible for tagging moments of trauma and setting them aside from our other memories. At first, this could seem like a liability. Why would you want to carry around memories of an awful event? But it serves an important survival purpose. By tagging intense memories, the brain is helping us detect similar dangers in the future... whether it’s the rattle right before a snake bites.... or the sound of wind gusting before the window blows in. Steven Johnson says after understanding that... he was able to look at his fear differently.
{SJ: amygdala} :45
“I can’t make the feeling go away, I can’t stop the feeling of adrenaline coursing through my body and feeling on edge. But because I know the story behind that fear, because I can contextualize it, it’s less debilitating. You don’t feel the sense of your body being held hostage. You’re able to say, ‘OK, look, my body has just released a drug because it’s organized this way, my brain is organized this way to respond to a certain at type of event. And I’m going to be under the influences of that drug for next five minutes or so and then it’ll go away. And knowing all that makes the whole experience easier to live through. (GD: It’s sort of like you and your amygdala have come to an agreement.) (laughs) Yeah, we’re getting along much better now.”
His relationship with the amygdala mediated... Steven Johnson was able to focus on some of the curiosities of his brain. In that pursuit he was lucky enough to indulge in one of the ultimate geek fantasies: getting a picture taken of his brain in action. Of course, you can’t use just any camera for that. You need a two-million dollar functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. Columbia University has just such a device and a researcher there was kind enough to run a few experiments with Johnson. They figured it’d be fun to take pictures of his brain while he was trying to write. During the first run-through... Johnson got writer’s block and the resulting scan revealed that areas all over his brain were active as he scrambled to come up with something. But the second time through... he was able to compose a few sentences... and that scan showed a brain that was largely quiet... except for a few well defined areas.
{SJ: focus} :30
“It shows you, really, that some of your best moments are not about your brain going into overdrive, it’s about your brain shutting down. When you’re focused, you’re often not having a lot of activity, you’re actually having very focused activity in very small parts of your brain. So, the old slogan about only using 10% of your brain is actually, actually exactly the wrong way around. It’s a good thing that you only use 10% of your brain. If you used a 100%, it’d be noise.”
But as we use neuroscience to pull the curtain back on fundamental human qualities such as creativity and love... don’t we also risk over-thinking these things... or simply taking away the romance of them? Steven Johnson says understanding the swirl of chemicals in his brain that contribute to the feeling he has for his children hasn’t made him love them any less. If anything, he says it’s made him appreciate that feeling even more. And Johnson figures we’ll always be developing models to explain why the brain does what it does... whether they’re Freudian or spiritual or whatever. So, why not put neuroscience on the table?
{SJ: a model} :25
“There’s so much knowledge that has come out. Brain science has advanced so much in the last 20 years, partially because of imaging technologies, partially because of a newfound interest in emotions which were largely ignored until the 70s. So, it’s become a much more sophisticated model and I think with the right kind of popularization it can be usefully applied to your own life. And if you’re going to have a model, this one is as good as any.”
Steven Johnson is the author of the new book “Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life.”
For the Health Show... I’m Greg Dahlmann.
a journalist
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I've admired Steven Johnson's work for a long time, starting back with the now departed web mag Feed. So, I was excited to have the chance to meet him in person. Of course, any meeting of this nature carries a bit of risk. I mean, what if he turns out to be a jerk? But I'm happy to report he's just as smart, funny and just plain nice in person as you'd expect from his writing. And he has some of the coolest kitchen cabinets you'll ever see.
Fans of Feed, take heart. Steven told me the site's content is still stored on a drive somewhere. It's just a matter of reposting it someday.