Into Maaya - A journey with Neuroscience

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All of science and its ingenuity have come out of the human mind. 'We' observe complex patterns in the Universe, and try to formulate hypotheses that might explain a host of 'observations'. We often use a logically deducible human abstraction like Mathematics as a tool to express the hypotheses, which when proven, becomes a theory. If it can't be proven by present abstraction but has always been observed true under all circumstances, it becomes a law. Thus far, our brain has been able to comprehend and fit beautifully into a vast variety of observations - be it on the cosmic scale or the atomic scale. Through the centuries, fundamental ideas changed diametrically and kept on refining. That reduces a large number of observations into a handful of equations with which we can predict the future of a complex system given its past set of states! However lately, the logical understandability and comprehensibility we were proud of are slowly getting blurred as we look closer and closer into subtle patterns underlying our creation. They defy sense in a way that our fundamental notions of what an observation is, come under scrutiny. That clearly shows that a linear form of logic that was the foundation of classical theories can't fully encapsulate everything we have to know about the Universe.

The mind captures data only from the five sense organs. Then it processes it and finds patterns in it. That makes the brain a powerful predictive engine. All our life, it does just that - processing & rediction. Although the brain is the most sophisticated information-processing system known in the Universe, there is something more to it. We merely don't only process information, there is an 'experience' attached to every sensory information we acquire. Science is all about information processing. Here's the catch. Technically speaking, there is no necessity for a human experience to exist in order to process information. Modern-day computation systems are live examples of that. But all of us experience. No theory has ever been built that can dive into the nature of experience. And that is because it is impossible to fathom an objective source of experience. Experience, by its very definition, is subjective. With our subjective experience, we agree on a common notion of objectivity and that is why the objective world makes sense. And the subjectivity of human experience can't be deduced by objective ideas. Hence, an introspection of our subjectivity with absolute openness is as important as it.  

We all somehow agree with the notion of the objective world around us. This agreement makes social interactions possible. All the sense organs through which we gather information, have some physical limit on sensitivity. Somehow, nature intertwined almost the same band of sensitivity into each member of a species. This means the frequency range of colors, the sound we hear, etc. that we can comprehend is almost about the same for all of us. This is the reason why we can interact with each other using a common language, a language of agreement on our experiences. We, the Homo Sapiens, are bestowed with a specific Oomvelt. An Oomvelt is essentially an organism's unique experience of the world around it limited by the limits of sensory sensitivity. It's the German word "umwelt" anglicized and refers to this concept developed by a German biologist and philosopher. Imagine how different a dog's world is from ours. They can smell things we can't even imagine, and their hearing is much more attuned to high-pitched sounds. Their whole perception of the world is shaped by their senses and their biology. An oomvelt encompasses all that - the way an organism takes in information and creates its mental world based on that. So, it is not very difficult to agree on the fact that our sensory world is a very limited one, and obviously not absolute. Something relative is subject to change. If we try to look for something that is, that is real, we need to lift the veil of relativity into absolutism. Let's see if we can walk this trail to find it out. 

If you have reached here, there awaits a mind-blowing fact ahead. This needs a little bit of attention to grasp. Consider the basic units of your sensory experiences. Let's look at how an eye 'sees'. Photons of light reflected off an object fall on the retina and the cone cells translate those frequencies into what you experience as color. Technically, no property called color exists in the Universe, the brain makes it up for you to experience it. Very similarly, nothing called sound exists in the Universe. Particles vibrate, the wave hits your eardrums, and your brain creates the experience of sound. In the same manner, there exists nothing called as taste or smell, all of it is made up by the brain. There is nothing called pain or pleasure in the Universe, our brain makes it up - it translates electrical and chemical activities into experiences of pain or pleasure. You alter the neural circuitry and what was pleasure before would give you pain and vice-versa. For example, during penile surgery, there's a slight risk of inadvertently crossing sensory nerve connections, despite precision equipment embedded with cutting-edge technology. The penis has both sensory nerves that transmit pleasurable sensations and those that transmit pain signals. If these nerve pathways get mixed up during a procedure, it could potentially result in pain signals being triggered by stimuli that should normally produce pleasure, like an orgasm. I want you to pause reading and reflect on it well because, with this realization, we will go ahead into more. 

Going ahead, we have someone who experiences all these - 'the experiencer'. For most of us, there is a voice in our head that constantly attributes everything to an experience of 'me'. A part of the left brain continues to stitch memories into a continuum. It is irrefutable that we all are accustomed to our identity, which is constantly fixated with all the experiences we undergo. But once again, it's an illusion created by the brain. There is a network in the brain, called the Default Mode Network or DFN (a term coined by neurologist Marcus Raichle) which plays a key role in creating the sense of 'me'. If somehow your DFN is switched off, you would lose the sense of self. Extensive experiments on experienced Buddhist meditators who claim they have no sense of self has shown very less activities in DFN. Let me explain it from another standpoint. 

The famous experiments related to split-brain syndrome were conducted by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga in the 1960s. They studied patients who had undergone corpus callosotomy (severing the connection between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere of the brain) to control their severe epilepsy. The results of these studies provided profound insights into the lateralization of brain function. One of the most intriguing findings was the suggestion that each hemisphere of the brain could operate independently, almost as if there were two separate "minds" within one body. This led to the notion of "dual consciousness" or "two personalities" within a single individual. For example, in experiments, when visual information was presented to only one hemisphere (by showing images to one eye while the other eye was covered), the corresponding hemisphere could process the information, but the other hemisphere was unaware of it. For example, if a picture was shown to the left visual field (processed by the right hemisphere), the patient could draw it but could not verbally describe it, because the right hemisphere lacks the language capability and the left hemisphere did not receive the visual information. Also, there were instances where the two hemispheres seemed to give conflicting commands. For example, one hand might button a shirt while the other hand unbuttons it. This highlighted the independent functioning and potential conflict between the hemispheres. 

Contemplating this fact, this is all we have - that we experience anything is created by the brain. Be it beauty, pleasure, sorrow, joy, pain, every sensation - is created by the brain. It has no real existence. This marks a very essential point of this entire article I want to make. All of the experiences are created by the brain, according to stimuli from the outside, and because we think we have no control over it, we, being an aggregate of our experiences, are almost completely controlled by the external conditions we are in. But there are techniques, which, by gradual practice, can make you the creator of any experience you want to sustain within you. The art of perfecting it is meditation. Is it not awesome that the illusions of experiences that torment you, make you suffer or make you joyful and happy are something that you yourself can manufacture, irrespective of the outside stimuli? If that is the case, won't you choose to stay extremely joyful most of the time? When you are joyful, our system functions at its best. Persistently being joyful gives you a stable ground to make great leaps in exploring the subjectivity of human existence, thereby opening a window for you which, for most people, stay closed as they keep on flowing with the unconscious flow of experiences overpowering them every moment! Nothing is impossible, and if you persist enough, and get out of where the unconscious, crippling flow tries to take you, you become independent and truly gain freedom- something which we all aspire for inherently!