Thinking in Los Angeles

By Sergei Heurlin

Thinking in Los Angeles starts out as an exploration of the physiological basis of our thoughts and feelings. But before it ends, a new and unforseen foundation for Christian and Buddhist principles has come into view.

Part 1 begins by looking at the compartmental structure of our minds. Then examples of instinctive mental patterns such as infatuation and tribalism are reviewed. The ability to experience certain feelings is revealed to be limited by brain structure and therefore by heredity. Regional differences in inherited instinctive behavior are discussed together with implications for foreign policy.

Part 2 is a somewhat detailed but not very technical analysis of the human brain: how it is structured, where various mental functions are located, and how neurons work.

Part 3 launches a search for free will. It is a journey that carries the reader into the domains of philosophical definition, physical processes, mental illness, the criminal justice system, and the major religions of the West and of the East. Hinduism and Buddhism are discussed in some detail. The conclusion regarding free will is astounding- unlike anything the reader has ever heard or read before.

A new 2008 addendum examines the writings of Robert Kane, Daniel Dennett, and others, reinforcing the conclusion of Part 3.

Exploring the nature of self-esteem, compassion and free will, Thinking in Los Angeles will be especially valuable as a handbook for young people preparing for the 21st century, who can now learn what their elders did not know and could not tell them about these subjects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 14, 2003
• ISBN: 9781410711854

Sergei Heurlin

Sergei Heurlin was born May 12, 1942 in Palo Alto, California. He began to explore the sciences at an early age and eventually graduated from San Jose State College (now University) with a B.A. in Physics. Following two years in the Peace Corps he performed high energy physics testing at a research firm in the San Francisco Bay area. This was followed by four years in the Army, after which he became an aerospace engineer, working first at Vandenberg Air Force Base and then, from 1983 until 2008, at an aerospace company in the Los Angeles area.  He is now retired. Mr. Heurlin traveled through the Middle East and Europe following his Peace Corps tour, and later took a break from physics experiments with a six month vacation trip around the world, visiting fourteen countries in the Far East, Middle East and Europe. While in the Army he was stationed in Yemen for six months. In recent years he has completed ten trips to China.

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Contents

PART I. CONSCIOUSNESS AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS

PART II. BRAIN STRUCTURE

PART III. FREE WILL

ADDENDUM

RADIO INTERVIEW

PART I. CONSCIOUSNESS AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS

MEMORY AND OTHER PROCESSES

My mind works pretty much the same as each person’s mind. I observe, and think, and have feelings, but I don’t pay much attention to the thing that is doing the observing, thinking and feeling. Why are we so uninterested in our own minds? I suppose there are good reasons. First of all, our minds are inside us, not outside, and it’s just awfully difficult for the thing doing the observing to observe itself. Also understanding our own minds is not essential-certainly not needed for survival, as the existence of the human race proves. There may be other reasons too, related somehow to pride or other feelings that go along with being human. At any rate, if we could make a list of everything that people wanted to do in the world at any instant, eating breakfast would be near the top, and swatting flies and repairing shoes would be perhaps midway down the list, but self contemplation would always be at the bottom.

One thing I know: there is a lot more going on in my mind than meets the eye.

Take memory for example. Before I installed an automatic garage door opener, the garage door at the front of my suburban house had a combination lock hanging about one foot above the concrete driveway. Whenever I approached the lock a series of numbers would come into my mind: 1-19-36. This was of course the combination for the lock. I remembered the combination because I needed it. Today there are other locks and other combinations. And again I remember a combination because I need it. The mental process never fails. But the link between needing the combination and remembering it is something about which I know nothing. To call the process memory is to label it but not to explain it. Whatever the process is, it is invisible and automatic.

My memory seems to work by association between different images, and different notions, in a very flexible manner. Memories can seem to appear randomly. Often they are triggered by a previous thought about another event which had a similar time of occurrence, or was similar in style, or was associated in some other way. Sometimes memories seem to require some special conditions before becoming accessible. I am often in a situation where I cannot remember something that I ought to be able to remember. I know that if I simply wait, the answer will come without my exerting any effort.

Then there are what I will call the Jeopardy instances. Once while watching Jeopardy and hearing a question about Mohammed, the founder of Islam, I quickly thought Medina. Although I probably knew the answer because of some past study, I was not aware of any learning context, or any linkage at all, as the answer popped into my mind. And when a question was presented regarding Scotland and wool, not only was the sense of learning context absent, but I was not aware at the time and still do not recall any past study which would have furnished the correct answer that nevertheless instantly suggested itself to me: Hebrides.

Also memory seems to have some strict limitations regarding sequence of information. When I recall music in my head the music always plays forward, never backward, although I can of course begin a phrase over again.

I think the most important fact about my memory is that when I wake up in the morning I remember who I am. This is not as trivial as it may sound. From time to time we hear about people who do not remember who they are, usually after a difficult emotional experience, or because of physical damage to the brain.

At this point, having made a series of personal observations about memory, I will summarize by saying that my ability to remember (and yours) depends on invisible functions that are beyond conscious control. When I say I remember such and so the simple word I does not really assist in conveying the truth of the matter. Not I, but an unseen process did the remembering.

There is a hidden process involved with listening also. Generally on Saturday and Sunday mornings my wife and I sit at the kitchen table, talking and eating breakfast. A small radio is always on, tuned to a news broadcast. Now the fact is that I can listen to my wife, or to the radio, but I cannot clearly understand both at precisely the same instant. In fact I can switch my attention from one to the other at will. I know there is a tendency to say So what? But this ability to switch between sources of sound, without moving one’s head or ears, is remarkable. The information to which we pay attention is smaller than, or a subset of, the totality of information entering our minds. Another thing about listening: some portion of our minds can hear while we are sleeping. And so we have alarm clocks.

One last example of the natural partitioning of my mind into separate functions would be when I shave in the morning. One section of my mind conducts the washing and shaving routine while another section thinks about problems at work or remembers past experiences. The shaving function becomes automatic, and goes on without my thinking about it. There have been times when the two functions (thinking and shaving) were so separated that after a few minutes at the mirror I had to check and verify that I actually did shave.

Hidden mental processes can be called unconscious processes. But the term unconscious has several meanings. As a noun it means a part of our mind hidden from view which in various psychological theories is said to be organized to some degree, and capable of influencing our actions. The unconscious as a noun comes into view in connection with mental illnesses. Freud explored the Unconscious. That’s one usage of the word, but there are other usages. As an adjective applied to a person, it means a condition something like sleeping: unaware, unable to see, hear, talk, or even think-often a temporary condition resulting from an accident. A person is unconscious. As an adjective applied to mental functions it suggests activities that are hidden in some way, so that we can see the result of the activity but not the activity itself This is the meaning that I would like to discuss further.

For illustration I list here some conscious activities and some unconscious activities. Conscious activities include using our senses, as in seeing and hearing;

using language, whether speaking or writing or silently commenting; having daydreams; and experiencing feelings.

Unconscious activities include the processes that generate our thoughts, feelings and speech; the storage and retrieval of memories of everything we have experienced and learned; the control of sleeping and waking; and muscular coordination, as in walking or driving a car.

Also maintenance of our individual personalities day after day is certainly an unconscious function. We don’t have to review notes each morning after we wake up to see what sort of person we are supposed to be. Our likes and dislikes, our mannerisms, and our long term objectives are stored and continually retrieved when needed, automatically, throughout each day.

Now if I try to imagine how much conscious activity is going on in myself (or in someone else), and compare that with how much unconscious activity is going on, I am faced with the fact that we don’t like to acknowledge the importance of unconscious activity. But I need to stress its importance. And so I make the rather unscientific but didactically useful assertion that there is more unconscious activity going on than conscious activity.

Think of your mind as similar to a television set. All of the thoughts and feelings that you are experiencing from moment to moment are like pictures on the glass surface of the television picture tube. But the television set has a lot of other things in it too. There are little black plastic components with metal legs attached to mounting boards; a hundred other small parts; wires of many colors and lengths; and electric currents invisibly buzzing and vibrating at a multitude of frequencies. (Older sets had vacuum tubes, each giving off an orange glow, with equally varied currents vibrating and jittering in them.) Just as the true operation of a television set involves much more than the visible picture, so the true operation of our minds is much more than what we can notice.

EMOTIONS

Having noted that there are momentary activities going on in our minds that involve invisible processes, I now want to change the subject a little and consider certain patterns of feelings and of behavior we typically have that are not momentary. These patterns maintain themselves day after day, year after year. Some patterns appear to be more or less universal-that is, they are apparent in just about everyone. Other patterns, while not being identical for everyone, nevertheless repeat continuously in a given individual with little change as time goes on. As with momentary activities, these long-term patterns involve invisible processes.

Infatuation

First I want to describe something that happened to me a long time ago having to do with my feelings-specifically, infatuation with girls. When I was in the first grade there was a girl in the school who was a friend of my older sister. I remember almost nothing about her; but on one occasion the dress she wore had an elastic band incorporated at the waist. I knew this because she pulled it with both hands and let it snap. At some later date I became aware that she was no longer in the school, and I remember experiencing something like missing her.

This type of experience happened again, during the summer prior to my entering the second grade. Somewhere there was a sandbox and a slide. A girl came to play in the sandbox on a couple of occasions, and then was gone. I missed her too. Beginning with the third grade, and extending through high school, the girls (different ones at different times) did not go away, and these infatuations lasted longer. I could not get the chosen girl out of my mind. Fortunately this type of experience eventually disappeared and most of my adult life has been free of such things. This is no reflection on the girls, who were always the finest specimens around, but there was wasted time, and often there were feelings of anticipation and disappointment that had no useful purpose. An emotional flywheel just kept spinning. There was no way to simply bring feelings to a halt and substitute a more appropriate frame of mind to deal with the present moment.

I know I am not alone in having experienced these kinds of feelings. There are all sorts of real and fictional accounts of falling in love. See for example Proust’s Within a Budding Grove.

We also know from television and newspapers that there are other emotional states similar to infatuation but much more damaging in their effects. We hear about married people who are undergoing a divorce, or separation, or couples who have broken up in some other way, and one of the pair kills or attempts to kill the other. The violent one, usually the male, acts as though he cannot live without his mate. This sense of attachment blinds the afflicted person to any reasonable view of life. Sometimes suicide is the result. Stalking has been in the news a lot in recent years, and is a variation of the same theme. A destructive mental process is somehow stuck in the on state, and can’t be turned off.

We have to conclude that we can have feelings that are totally beyond our control, and that we act upon, without questioning their usefulness.

People Owning Other People

Here’s another pattern involving useless but tenacious feelings: People owning other people. I mean by this the pattern of behavior we see nearly every day in the news media that involves excessive control of one person over another. Usually we only hear about it if violence is involved. Husbands beat wives, and parents beat children, sometimes to death. There seems to be a feeling of a proprietary right to do this. Currently people who exhibit this pattern are called control freaks in the media.

Wife and child beating is a display of arrogance and an exercise of pure physical power over a smaller or less equipped individual. Typically the compulsive nature of this behavior is disregarded or downplayed. I have a Dear Abby newspaper clipping wherein the wife says that she knows her husband will eventually change and will get better (that is, he will stop beating her). The naive concept of spouses getting better seems to arise anew in each generation

Acts of violence against wives and children help to define what the human mind is capable of doing. The point is that we can have feelings that are instinctive and compulsive, and that serve no useful purpose, at least in the context of modern civilization.

Self-esteem

I think the most universal human trait (beyond those instincts that are simply necessary for survival) is the need to experience sufficient status in relationship to those around us. Rich, poor, literate, illiterate, child, adult-all of us exhibit this trait. We want to feel proud. We value self-esteem. We want to achieve and maintain status. On the other hand we also strive to avoid the least suggestion of any decrement in status. We want to avoid shame or humiliation or loss of face. If we haven’t done anything lately that would provoke applause from our peers, at least we can simply be thankful when we escape humiliation. Our self-esteem may depend upon the opinions of others, or the imagined opinions of others, or it may be self-sustaining. A combination of all three would seem to be normal.

An extreme example is the historic Japanese tradition of suicide to avoid the experiencing of loss of face. Abstract concepts such as honor and loyalty can be used to try to explain this behavior, but they are not enough. Overcoming the natural fear of death undoubtedly required a powerful motivating force which would have to come from the contemplation on the part of the doomed person of some future state of humiliation while still alive among his peers.

This tradition was evident as late as World War II among Japanese soldiers, and is still practiced from time to time by bureaucrats and businessmen in Japan (Time, July 13, 1998).

A less extreme example of the overpowering need for self-esteem would be causing the death of others without risking one’s own life. For example, a factor in President Johnson’s Vietnam War policy was his notion that he was not going to let the Vietnamese push him around. And we can recall, following Johnson’s time in power, Nixon’s peace with honor. Honor is the word we use when we are projecting the internal need for self-esteem onto the external world. Honor is taken to be an absolute requirement, and the original psychic source of the need is concealed. National policy is often stated in terms of national honor.

The perception of honor is also important among criminals. So we have the scene in a movie where the good-guy-gone-bad says Don’t let them see me wearing handcuffs. The compassionate officer or G-man then takes off the handcuffs. In the case of Mafiosi, someone, possibly a lawyer, covers the handcuffs with a coat. Once I watched a police officer chasing someone on one of those cop shows that are popular now on television. When the officer caught up with the young man the young man said, You didn’t catch me. I decided to stop. No matter how much or how little is going on in a person’s mind, you can be certain that the need for self-esteem is near the surface.

Gang members talk about the need for respect. They sense this need as being never-ending, but are not really aware that it is an instinctive need. Like any instinctive need, it does not disappear upon being satisfied, but eternally recurs. It dominates the daily lives of gang members.

The marking of graffitti on walls is an instinctive activity, as instinctive as building a bird’s nest or marking a tree with musk. It arises from the need for respect and also from the need to mark territory.

Anthropologists will recognize similarities between certain gang activities and the American Indian practice of counting coup.

Other examples of status maintenance are happening at every moment of every day, all over the world. Taunting, or other threats to self-esteem, can provoke acts of violence. In at least one South American country a man can murder his wife if he catches her fooling around with another man, and the penalty for this act of murder turns out to be small or nonexistent. The rationale supporting the husband’s case is that his honor or dignity needs to be restored. Here a process is working on two levels: Honor and dignity are intellectual concepts, existing as unquestioned requirements in the typical thinking and discourse of the people, while the unspoken motivation is the instinctive need to maintain status.

The need to avoid humiliation begins early in life. I remember a girl in my elementary school who accidently fell into a mud puddle. Sitting in the puddle, she had a look of burning anger on her face. When she used her hands to splash the mud I feel certain that she was expressing defiance, a natural response which would be an attempt to regain status.

My recollection is that junior high school was the time when the need for approval came into full flower.

This was evident in the way students dressed-that is, in the fact that they copied one another’s clothing styles. One group wore Pendleton wool shirts, hanging outside the trousers, with cuffs unbuttoned and turned up just right. Another group wore tee shirts and blue jeans. The tee shirt sleeves were rolled up to the shoulder, and the jeans were hung low on the hips. Belts had to be narrow, approximately one half inch in width. (I had a narrow belt.) Flat-top haircuts were popular, and girls wore ankle-length skirts. I wouldn’t doubt that the same intense need for conformity continues among today’s youth. You certainly see it in the clothing worn by