| Date: | 2010-08-03 01:30 |
|---|---|
| Author: | Stefano |
| category: | Medicine, Movies, Psychology |
| slug: | hacking-your-brain-for-fun |
I just came back from Nolan's latest creation, Inception, and I was completely blown away. The core of the very elaborate plot is the concept of dreaming and consciousness levels inside dreams, in particular taking advantage of the science-fiction concept of "shared dreams". Not unlike in The Matrix, questions about "what is real, what is a dream" are central in the movie.
That brings me to recall my exploration of the dreaming realm. I used to perform Yoga for a while, and in particular a sub-activity of Yoga called Yoga Nidra. It is an interesting technique that allows you to relax and feel refreshed by "sleeping" a very short amount of time. It is not a substitute for regular sleep, though. The idea is to relax under the guide of the teacher, whose voice instructs you to feel and concentrate your awareness first on different parts of your body, then to colors and visual images, in a completely dark and quiet room. The very relaxing and soothing situation will most likely bring you to fall asleep, and here is the trick: you must not sleep. Instead, you have to fall asleep only "halfway through". This probably "disables" parts of your brain, allowing you to achieve a strange state of mind where your brain is awake, but lose consciousness of your body. An inexperienced person like me is not able to hold this state for long. It is very subtle and prone to collapse either to full sleep or to full alertness, but with practice and training it is possible to keep it stable for a considerable amount of time. I experienced a floating-like state, or vivid, very real pictures of landscapes, like they were in front of my eyes.
There's nothing mystic about Yoga Nidra. The brain is a very strange and complex entity, still far from being understood. At the moment we don't know how it really works while being awake, asleep, or when involved in a Yoga meditation, as we don't know many, many other things relatively to self-awareness, consciousness and dreaming: we don't know why children are not self-aware until the 18th month of age; we don't know why sometimes we have a Deja-vu; we don't know why we never remember how a dream begins; and we don't know why even if the dream details are vivid shortly after waking up, they generally vanish within few minutes with poor or no chance of recalling them afterward. We don't even know why we dream.
What we do know, however, is that the brain is a biological computer, a neural network whose wiring, weights and operations have been laid out by evolution, primed during pregnancy and trained during our lifetime to answer the inputs provided by the external environment. Two consequences should come to no surprise: that it's a difficult machine to understand, and that it has "exploits", bugs and "undocumented features", like any other traditional computer. Our brain is a hackable machine that under proper conditions and inputs can behave in very strange ways: lucid dreams, out of body experiences, pre-lucid dreams, and the false awakenings (the Matryoshka dreams) exploited in Inception. If the system "breaks down", it can produce temporary or permanent pathologies, such as depression, seizures, schizophrenia, and hallucinations among others. The brain is such powerful sensation and perception processor that it can create symptoms for an illness as real as the actual pathology, even when no actual cause exists. It can get a woman to feel and show the full symptoms of a pregnancy even if there's no developing fetus at all. These phenomena are found in animals as well. I personally witnessed a false pregnancy in my Great Dane, as well as various level of dog dreaming.
I suggest to give Yoga Nidra a try. It's a highly instructive and pleasant activity that allows an easy, accessible and harmless experiment with your brain.