Words Can Change Your Brain (8 page)

To use the United Nations metaphor with which we opened this chapter, consciousness is like a single person assigned to translate a thousand different languages that are simultaneously being spoken by a thousand different speakers reporting on a thousand different subjects—all of which have an immediate bearing on your life.

If a government bureaucracy were run this way, the nation would probably collapse. But the human brain seems to do a fairly good job. Still, there’s plenty of evidence showing that the limitations of human consciousness cause us undue stress and anxiety. Although this is the dilemma we face, we can train our brain to process information more effectively. We can move from the language of everyday consciousness to the language of transformational awareness, which is the topic of our next chapter.

C
HAPTER 4

The Language of Consciousness

Awareness. Attentiveness. Alertness. Wakefulness. Intelligence. Self-reflection. Mental representation. Self-recognition. Symbolic association. Active thinking. Learned behavior. Linguistic understanding. Cognizance. Experience. Imagination. Internal testimony. Comprehension. Introspection. Personal identity. Remembering. Predicting. Imitation. Mind. Free will. Moral conscience. Inner speech. Explicit memory. Temporality. Subjective imagination. Analogy formation. Intentionality. Endogenous feedback. Rational control. Self-arousal. Mental time travel. Emergent creativity. Qualia. Universal being. God.

There you have it: a partial but concise summary of twenty-six hundred years of philosophical, theological, psychological, and scientific speculation on the nature of human consciousness. Everyone agrees that it exists, but so far no one knows what
it is, where
it is, or how
it works.
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We don’t even have an agreed-upon definition, which prompted William James—the father of American psychology—to conclude, in 1904, that consciousness was nothing more than “a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy.”

A hundred years later, Nobel laureate Francis Crick and neuroscientist Christof Koch expressed a similar sentiment when they implored scientists to stop using the term, “except in a very loose way.”
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Yet they, like so many others, continued to write dozens of articles and books in an attempt to delineate the nature of this mysterious beast. Today the search for a definition continues, and it continues to be one of the hottest topics in science, psychology, and theology. Even the Vatican has chimed in, suggesting that consciousness is divinely bestowed upon us at the moment of conception. In this new field that some call “neurotheology,” consciousness is the essence of one’s soul.

Depending on how you define it, consciousness may not be unique to humans and may even be found in the most primitive single-celled organisms. For example, you can train bees to recognize color-coded symbols that direct them to turn left or right as they fly. They, like many insects, have long-term and short-term memories, qualities that are essential in human consciousness. Bees grasp abstract relationships, make group decisions, and have communication skills that rival human beings. In fact, neuron for neuron they hold more information than we do.
³

We can’t definitively argue, like we once did, that human consciousness is superior. Dolphins and whales, for example, exhibit language and social skills that surpass those of human beings in many ways, and various primates also appear to have more complex versions of consciousness.

Consciousness is neurologically entwined with the workings of nearly every part of the human brain,
⁴
and it allows us to be socially aware and communicative with others.
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But there’s always been the chicken-and-the-egg question: is consciousness a by-product of brain activity, or does consciousness shape the brain? We now know that both are true. A single conscious thought can initiate activity throughout the entire brain,
⁶
and as our neuroimaging studies have shown, even the act of contemplating the nature of consciousness—as a group of Buddhist meditators did in our lab—is enough to alter both the structure and functioning of the brain.

Conscious Slime?

A slime mold is a funguslike organism that is neither plant nor animal. And yet this single-celled creature has enough intelligence to maneuver its way through a laboratory maze by mathematically calculating the shortest route to take. Should this not be considered a primitive form of consciousness?

Every year dozens of new studies appear that expand our understanding of human consciousness. Yet its nature and source remain a mystery. Because of this continuing elusiveness, scholars like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have suggested that the principles of quantum mechanics may be the best way to explain it.
⁷
So far no definite evidence has been found to support this intriguing idea, but it wouldn’t surprise us if a connection was one day found.

However, there is substantial evidence to suggest that human consciousness—or something
that appears to be related to intentional thought—can transcend what we normally assume to be the physical limitations of the body and the mind.
⁸
It may not be enough to have any practical use, but when Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, did a double-blind study on the effects of human intention on another person’s autonomic nervous system, his team discovered that the sender’s compassionate thoughts generated small changes in the skin conductance of the distant receiver, even though the person receiving the thoughts was unaware of the experiment
.
⁹

Radin’s team also showed that our thoughts might be able to affect inert substances at a distance—such as water crystals that were located, literally, on the other side of the planet.
¹⁰
It’s too early to evaluate the validity and consistency of such studies, but their findings strongly suggest that the brain’s ability to communicate extends far beyond the boundaries of normal human interaction, defying any established scientific principle.

Consciousness and the Brain

If we want to understand the power of language and human communication, we have to include what we currently know about the nature of conscious thought. Consciousness, as far as the most recent research shows, begins the moment we come out of the womb.
¹¹
Prior to birth the fetus is almost continuously asleep, with very little neural activity occurring in the areas that produce language.

But newborns immediately become aware that they are separate from other people and objects in the world. In other words, they have a sense of self and other. They also have a primal awareness that they need to communicate to others if they are going to survive in the world, and they do so through their vocal cords and body language. They scream, they smile, they wave their arms around to communicate their basic needs, and they exhibit emotional responsiveness and signs of shared feelings. They remember sounds and vowels that they heard in the womb,
¹²
and they exhibit spontaneous neural activity that corresponds to what William James called “the stream of consciousness.”

Many of the structures that govern conscious speech reside in the outermost layers of the brain, but these areas are largely undeveloped at birth. Rapid neural growth begins immediately after we are born, as dense neural connections are made between the neocortex, the thalamus, and other deep structures of the brain. These changes predict the degree of consciousness that infants and children have, and consciousness continues to develop and change throughout one’s life span.
¹³
Disrupt any part of this delicate circuitry, and conscious awareness can be permanently impaired.
¹⁴

How Thoughts Become Real

In the center of our brain there’s a walnut-shaped structure called the thalamus. It relays sensory information about the outside world to the other parts of the brain. When we imagine something, this information is also sent to the thalamus. Our research suggests that the thalamus treats these thoughts and fantasies in the same way it processes sounds, smells, tastes, images, and touch. And it doesn’t distinguish between inner and outer realities. Thus, if you think you are safe, the rest of your brain assumes that you are safe. But if you ruminate on imaginary fears or self-doubt, your brain presumes that there may be a real threat in the outside world. Our language-based thoughts shape our consciousness, and consciousness shapes the reality we perceive. So choose your words wisely because they become as real as the ground on which you stand.

Consciousness is a world unto itself—an abstract mental representation of an outside reality that we can never fully grasp. Take color, for example. It doesn’t actually exist in the world. Light waves exist, but they are not what we “see” inside our brains. The brain’s visual centers interpret the effects of the light waves on the color cones in our eyes, and the information is then reconstructed into an internal palette of colors, and it is categorized by the way we use our language.
¹⁵
Because human beings share the same visual functions, we all see a blue sky on a sunny day, even though the sky is not really “blue.” But if you don’t give that visual experience a specific name, the brain might not be able to “see” that specific color.

Color is also influenced by the culture in which we are raised, and if you grow up in a different part of the world—be it Russia, England, or Africa—the words you assign to colors will alter what you actually see.
¹⁶
For example, members of the Berinmo tribe of Papua New Guinea cannot distinguish between blue and green. But they can be taught to do so, demonstrating that the perception and categorization of color is a language-bound category controlled by cognitive processes unique to human brains.
¹⁷

The same is true for words. Change the sound or the intonation and the entire meaning can differ. When we talk to others, we need to keep this in mind, because different people can react to the same word or phrase in different ways based on their culture or childhood experiences. For example, a statement like “you are beautiful” can be viewed as a compliment by some people or as an invasion of privacy, especially by someone who may have experienced sexual abuse. In China, to tell someone that they are beautiful would be considered impolite.

Normally, when we speak we make the erroneous assumption that other people relate to our words in the same way we do. They don’t. Thus we have to expand our consciousness about language to include the fact that everyone hears something different, even when we are using the same words. Words are needed to create our own inner reality and map of the world, but everyone creates a different map. To put it another way, consciousness—and the language we use to convey our feelings, thoughts, and beliefs—is a very personal and unique experience.
¹⁸
When we recognize this neurological fact, we become better communicators because we don’t assume that other people understand what we say.

The Limitations of Everyday Consciousness

Scientists have identified many different levels, or states, of consciousness, and each one is governed by distinct neural networks in the brain.
¹⁹
But the one that concerns us the most is “everyday consciousness,” which is different from other forms of self-reflective awareness.
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Everyday consciousness consists of all the ordinary thoughts, feelings, and sensations we are aware of in any given moment, and it represents a very limited view of reality. It’s like a snapshot, a tiny picture taken of an enormous panoramic view, and the information it contains changes from one moment to the next, altering our perception of the world.
²¹

Everyday consciousness relies strongly on short-term working memory. We use it to form meaningful sentences and convey them to other people. But as we mentioned in the opening chapter, the average listener can only pay attention to a small amount of information for a brief period of time. When we consciously want to communicate something to someone else, our working memory selects about three or four “chunks” of data at a time, pulling it from our vast reservoirs of stored information.
²²

What’s a chunk? It’s a small packet of related information that the brain has chosen. It represents a specific feeling, idea, or thought, and short-term memory can only hold on to those chunks of data, on average, for about twenty to thirty seconds.
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Then they get dumped from working memory as new chunks of information get uploaded. It’s like looking at a vast landscape of trees, rocks, vegetation, chirping birds, and sunlight filtering down through the leaves. We can’t consciously pay attention to all the details, so the brain consolidates the information and calls it a “forest.” It picks one word to represent a complex experience, uses it to deal with the immediate situation, and then forgets about it as it loads the next four chunks of information into working memory.