Particles of Thought

HAKEEM:

Let's play a little game. And the game we're going to play is what's my brain doing?

HEATHER:

Okay.

HAKEEM:

All right?

HEATHER:

Yes.

HAKEEM:

I am having déjà vu.

HEATHER:

Oh, that's a hard one.

HAKEEM:

Oh.

HEATHER:

Damn it. Déjà vu. Okay.

HAKEEM:

Is my brain quantum entangled with my future self?

HEATHER:

No.

HAKEEM:

Okay.

HEATHER:

Yeah, I wouldn't go that far. I mean, you never know. I don't know.

HAKEEM:

You never know, right?

HEATHER:

Spooky astrophysicist at a distance, whatever, entanglement. But what I think is going on is that we have a part of our brain that gives a sense of familiarity, something feels familiar to us. And I think it's little... Sometimes our brain does these little missteps or it misfires to things. So, you might walk into a room and you suddenly get this sense of, this feels familiar to me. It feels like I've been here before. And so, your brain then reconstructs the reality. It's trying to make sense of it. And then you sort of get this feeling of déjà vu, "Oh, I've been here before. I've seen this before." And even we can mess around with people's time perception.

And I did a lot of research during my PhD about what's the neural basis of time perception? How do we perceive time? And we can link it to certain... And people have certain brain damage, they perceive time differently or certain psychiatric illnesses. So, we can link it to underlying neural correlates. And we can also play around with when a person perceives that something happened in time. So, I can have something happen to you and then we do something TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, put a little magnet here, zap you a little, and suddenly you're like, "Oh, no, it happened over here." You can move people's-

HAKEEM:

Oh, you can stimulate my brain to-

HEATHER:

Yeah.

HAKEEM:

... change the place and time where things-

HEATHER:

Where you feel things happen, and also your sense of agency. How much control did I have over that movement? And so, our brains are tricky because we're also constructing our sense of time. So, I think there's these little tripwires in the brain where there are little flaws in the matrix. That's what illusions are, right? When we discover the little holes, and the brain is constructing things, but it's not perfect. And when things don't make sense... I say a brain is a meaning-maker machine. It wants to make meaning out of things. So, you walk into a room, suddenly things feel familiar, then it starts to construct a new reality, "Oh, I must've been here before. I must have seen this before."

HAKEEM:

Is there a novelty center as well? Like you said, there's a familiarity center.

HEATHER:

Yeah. I hesitate to call things centers. I'd say a circuit.

HAKEEM:

Well, not centers, circuit.

HEATHER:

A circuit. Yeah.

HAKEEM:

Okay. Yeah.

HEATHER:

But yeah, of course, novelty. I mean, dopamine is released with novelty. Our brain loves novelty because it's important for us to attend to things that are novel, because that could be something dangerous. It could be... It says like, "Hey, pay attention to this thing."

HAKEEM:

Right.

HEATHER:

So, it's more related to attending to things, but novelty sometimes when it's associated with pleasure as well, and you can increase caveman's activation, we tend to like novelty because evolutionarily, it makes sense to attend to things that are novel for better chances to survive.

HAKEEM:

Right. Right. Right. Okay. So, back to what's my brain doing?

HEATHER:

Okay. Okay.

HAKEEM:

Suppose I'm watching something or I listen to something particularly moving, and I get goosebumps.

HEATHER:

Yeah.

HAKEEM:

What's happening?

HEATHER:

So, that is an interesting thing, and I think it has to do with this feeling of sometimes with awe, this sense of awe, where you hear a piece of music, you see a vista, you have some emotional, something emotional that triggers you, it's very much related to a brain stem. It's lower in the brain. It's a very physiologic reaction that something triggers us, maybe emotionally and then it triggers this nervous system response.

HAKEEM:

Yeah. Yeah.

HEATHER:

It's an automatic response, just like crying is, this autonomic nervous system response where it's almost like you don't have control over it, but it can be triggered by different emotional experiences.

HAKEEM:

Interesting. Sometimes we have questions of what do other animals think or feel? So, is it the case that those fundamental basal feelings like awe, what leads us to cry manifest similarly in other mammals? Or does it have to be other primates or?

HEATHER:

I do think that other animals have basic sensations like this, but we interpret them differently. And that, for example, you can have a certain physiologic sensation in you like you feel butterflies in your stomach or something. And then once we get that sensation, then our higher cortices, prefrontal cortex starts to interpret that as either, "Oh, I'm really anxious about something." Or, "I'm really nervous." Or, "I'm really excited about this thing." And we could reinterpret the same physiologic sensation in different ways. And so, other animals might just have sensations and not interpret them, so they don't sort of elevate them to these other... You might start feeling some sensation of crying. Then you start thinking of, "Oh, my God, I'm thinking of my grandmother," or whatever. And then it becomes more and more and more, and it elevates it. So, I think other animals have different feelings, but they don't have these more complex feelings that we have like envy and jealousy or lust, and because they don't also can't think that far into the future. They don't have as evolved prefrontal cortex, which thinks about the future.

HAKEEM:

That's right.

HEATHER:

So, anxiety is really a very human emotion because it's about fear of something bad happening in the future. Animals have fear, other animals, but not so much anxiety.

HAKEEM:

It's more the here and the now.

HEATHER:

Yes, it's the things that are happening right now, but not like, "Oh, my God, in two days I'm going to have this exam." Or, "I'm going to have..."

HAKEEM:

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

HEATHER:

So, they don't have these more complex emotions that we have, but there's these beautiful images like with them, Jane Goodall... And there's these apes looking out at the vista, and it looks as if they're-

HAKEEM:

Oh, really? They're experiencing the beauty and-

HEATHER:

The beauty or animals like Jaak Panksepp was someone, a colleague I knew for a long time. He unfortunately passed away, but he always talked about these rats that would like tickle. You can tickle the rats, and they would laugh. He recorded their laughter, and they would play and they would... So, they're experiencing things like joy, but it's just very much in the moment.

HAKEEM:

Right. Right. Wow. That is something. What about when, for example, I leave my keys in the refrigerator. What has my brain done?

HEATHER:

I think you need to come to my office.

HAKEEM:

Oh, you ain't heard nothing yet. Oh, boy. Do I need treatment?

HEATHER:

So misplacing objects or-

HAKEEM:

Misplacing objects, I walk into a room, I forget what my thought was, these forgetful, or I'm looking for my keys, and they're in my hand the whole time.

HEATHER:

Right, yes.

HAKEEM:

Yes. Yeah.

HEATHER:

So, various reasons, not one answer for everything, but the sort elements that seem to be involved are attention. So, you might've had an intent to go into a room, and then first of all, your mind is wandering. Then you start thinking about, "What's my grocery list? Oh, what's the thing I got to do later?" Whatever.

HAKEEM:

Yeah.

HEATHER:

So, now that memory of why you went in the room slipped away. You knew there was a purpose of going in there, but you had moved on to other things.

HAKEEM:

Yeah, my brain started thinking about something else.

HEATHER:

Yeah.

HAKEEM:

That's why. Yeah.

HEATHER:

And then suddenly you're like, "Why am I here?" Or-

HAKEEM:

Right.

HEATHER:

So, a lot of it has do with attention and memory, and there's different parts of the brain that do, like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has to do with working memory. So, that's like when you're trying to remember four digits, seven digits, a number or something, you got to keep it on saying it over and over again.

HAKEEM:

Right. Right.

HEATHER:

But then when you have something in more long-term memory, it moves over to the hippocampus. But usually these things like your keys where you're putting them, whatever, that's the kind of working short-term memory. And if you don't stay attending to what you're doing or focus on where your keys are, it's going to slip away because your mind starts attending internally to other things, especially people with ADHD, it becomes even harder. And then, yeah, of course with age, there's normal aging brain where memory starts to get not as sharp.

HAKEEM:

Right, exactly. Yeah.

HEATHER:

So, if you really want to remember where your keys are or whatever, you have to stay focused on that. So, you're like, "I know I'm going in this room." And keep remembering why you're going in the room, says, "I'm going to get my keys. I'm going to get my keys"

HAKEEM:

That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

HEATHER:

Just the second you go off that, you're-

HAKEEM:

It's done.

HEATHER:

You're done.

HAKEEM:

I know that. I tell people that when I work with them, I was like, "Listen, if we come up with a task for me, make sure you see me, put it in my calendar before."

HEATHER:

And I always say this, "Do it now. Write it down."