Thinking is Overrated: empty brain — happy brain

By Niels Birbaumer, Jörg Zittlau and David Shaw

Find the happiness of emptiness.

Few things scare us more than inner emptiness. The presumed emptiness of coma or dementia scares us so much that we even sign living wills to avoid these states. Yet as Zen masters have long known, inner emptiness can also be productive and useful. We can reach this state through meditation, concentration, music, or even during sex. In fact, our brain loves emptiness — it makes us happy.

Leading brain researcher Niels Birbaumer investigates the pleasure in emptiness and how we can take advantage of it. He explains how to overcome the evolutionary attentiveness of your brain and take a break from thinking — a skill that’s more important than ever in an increasingly frantic world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Jan 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781925548624

Niels Birbaumer

Niels Birbaumer is a psychologist and neurobiologist. He is a leading figure in the development of brain–computer interfaces, a field he has researched for 40 years, with a focus on treating brain disturbances. He has been awarded numerous international honours and prizes, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science. Professor Birbaumer is co-director of the Institute of Behavioural Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and senior researcher at the Wyss Centre for Bio- and Neuro-engineering in Switzerland.

Book preview

Thinking is Overrated

Niels Birbaumer is a psychologist and neurobiologist. He is a leading figure in the development of brain–computer interfaces, a field he has researched for 40 years, with a focus on treating brain disturbances. He has been awarded numerous international honours and prizes, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science. Professor Birbaumer is co-director of the Institute of Behavioural Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and senior researcher at the Wyss Centre for Bio- and Neuro-engineering in Switzerland.

Jörg Zittlau is a freelance journalist, and writes about science, psychology, and philosophy, among other topics. He is also the author of several bestsellers.

Scribe Publications

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Originally published as Denken wird überschätzt in German by Ullstein in 2016

First published in English by Scribe in 2017

© by Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin. Published in 2016 by Ullstein Verlag

Translation copyright © David Shaw 2018

Illustrations copyright © Peter Palm 2016

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

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9781911344582 (UK paperback)

9781925548624 (e-book)

CiP records for this title are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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Contents

Introduction: A Parachute Jump into Emptiness

1. There’s Always Something

how we have banished emptiness from our lives

2. Free at Last

philosophers as pioneers of emptiness

3. Marching in Slow Step

the brainwaves of emptiness

4. Beyond the Defence Mechanism

the brain areas of emptiness

5. Default-mode Network

the brain on autopilot

6. Senselessly Happy

what happens to us when nothing happens

7. Training for Emptiness

why is a mouse when it spins

8. Lusting for Emptiness

what sex, religion, and epilepsy have in common

9. The Rhythm of Emptiness

how music carries us away

10. The Pathology of Emptiness

how we should deal with ‘diseases of emptiness’

11. The Right Life in the Wrong Body

the happiness of locked-in syndrome

12. Emptiness as the Beginning of the End of Life

how emptiness will return to us at last

Notes

Introduction

A Parachute Jump into Emptiness

I was green around the gills. Only minutes earlier, I had been chattering away happily with a more or less healthy hue to my complexion as I boarded the plane — with a plan to demonstrate how our wireless technology for measuring heart and sweat-gland activity works under unusual conditions. But now, here I was, just about to jump out of the plane, with only a parachute to save me, and I had taken on the colour of a vampire who’s been snacking on the wrong blood group. Later, this will even be recognisable on photos of the event.

My mouth was so dry that my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth; my knees were so weak, they were trembling as I staggered towards the hatch. There was not a word to be heard from me now, not a peep. I would never have managed to put together a sensible sentence, anyway, as my mind was racing, without contributing anything constructive to the situation.

My friend, the brain scientist and musician Valentino Braitenberg, described the brain as a ‘thought pump’, continually drawing things up from the deep. Right now, my ‘pump’ was just about to go into hyperactive collapse, unable to draw anything but snatches of thoughts up from the depths, like a shipwrecked sailor trying desperately to bail out her leaking lifeboat with an empty yoghurt pot.

Then, finally, I jumped. I suspect someone must have pushed me, but I have no recollection of it now. Just as I have generally very little memory of anything from the moment I jumped to the moment I landed. Suddenly, the panic within me disappeared. The carrousel of thoughts in my head stopped spinning and I was simply falling, with the sky above and the slowly approaching forests below me.

It was a moment of rapture — my ‘self’ no longer seemed to exist. The fear I had felt before jumping was gone, and it was not replaced by a new fear, because there was nothing I could do anyway. Our wireless-technology project was certainly no longer of any concern to me, and all my other day-to-day worries were swept up into the sky by the wind that was thundering in my ears. I’ve heard of mountaineers seeing their whole life flash before them as they plummet from the heights. But for me there was: nothing. Just emptiness.

The world was still there, but the borders between it and me became blurred. The others who jumped with me later told me I let out a yell for several seconds as I was falling, the like of which they had never heard emanating from me. I can’t remember it. I don’t even remember my parachute opening. All I can remember is landing, which in my case involved the branches of a tree and a few light injuries because I forgot to steer. And I remember my deep disappointment at the fact that it was over. I felt as if I had awoken from a wonderful dream but could not remember what made it so beautiful.

I have not done another parachute jump since. Not out of fear of the fall itself, which was appeased by that first jump. My fear is a different one. It is namely the fear that plummeting into the depths will never be as wonderful as it was the first time: so wonderfully empty.

What remains when we no longer think or feel?

Brain scientists don’t usually have much truck with emptiness. Their work revolves around behaviours, thoughts, and emotions — their inadequacies, and also their potential.

We now know that our brain is an organ of enormous plasticity. It is always able to keep learning and adapting from our early youth to our old age. Infants grow up speaking two languages with no problem at all, old people can learn to juggle or play a musical instrument even in extreme old age, criminals can become useful members of society, and, contrariwise, successful business executives can become desperate criminals. The possibilities are many — both desirable and undesirable — and include the ability to cope with crisis situations. It is a constant source of amazement the way traumatised children, maltreated concentration-camp survivors, and victims of war somehow manage to lead fulfilled lives again. Other people, by contrast, fall into despair at nothing more tragic than a lost football match.

In all these cases, problem-solving thinking is what is required — and our thought pump begins working at full power. This not only brings us the realisation that the world exists, but also makes us realise that we exist in that world. René Descartes summed this up in his famous phrase: cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am. Everything may be uncertain and in doubt, but the fact remains that it is I who am thinking those doubts; and in the first instance, that sounds comforting.

In another way, however, it also sounds worrying, since it raises the question: what remains of us when we no longer think or feel anything? Are we then — nothing? Must we fear sinking into a sea of emptiness and eventually dissolving away?

In our daily lives at least, that fear does not appear to play an important role. We find it almost unbearable when the television breaks down or the internet is cut off, or when we have nothing to do or no one to be with. In a survey of young men and women, a third of the respondents said they would rather go without sex than their smartphone if they were marooned on a desert island. Other surveys have shown that people’s fear of boredom is similar to their fear of cancer. Almost as if to say: better to be fatally ill than empty. Yet another study found that healthy volunteers with no masochistic tendencies would rather give themselves harmless but unpleasant electric shocks than sit and wait for 15 minutes (see Chapter 1).

The fear of emptiness also plays a major role in many medical conditions (see Chapter 10). For example: dementia, which eventually leads to complete apathy. Or borderline personality disorder and depression, which lead patients repeatedly to express the lack of meaning and the pointlessness of their existence. Psychopaths and adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are driven to their abnormal behaviours by their fear of emptiness. They need powerful stimuli to escape it, which is why they torment animals and people, risk huge sums on the stock markets, or speed down the motorway at 200 kilometres per hour.

A study carried out at the University of Innsbruck in Austria showed that people with aggressive, sadistic, or psychopathic behavioural traits have a great preference for bitter-tasting foodstuffs. ¹ The reason for this is that bitterness is one of the extreme, even potentially life-threatening stimuli that psychopaths need. Many poisonous substances taste bitter, and that is why stimulating the bitterness receptors on the tongue sends the brain into alarm mode. Thus, black coffee and gin and tonic are among the kicks that psychopaths need in their lives. It’s no accident that James Bond drinks extremely dry vodka martinis.

In the experience-driven society we live in, the extent of our fear of emptiness can be seen in the fact that almost 30 per cent of people in Germany have signed a living will. Such a document determines that life-prolonging measures should be terminated if the patient is left bedridden and completely paralysed, with no hope of recovery. People’s fear of this state of absolute inactivity is so great that they would rather be dead. However, very few people know what life might be like for them when they have lost the ability to do anything.

At the University of Tübingen’s Institute of Behavioural Neurobiology, we have spent many years working on establishing contact with completely paralysed and locked-in patients (see Chapter 11). We have not only achieved various degrees of success in this, but have also been able to ascertain that these people appear to enjoy a high quality of life. For some, even higher than that of healthy people! This despite the fact that they were no longer able to move a single muscle, and their brains showed mainly low-frequency activity, which could be described as typical of ‘running on empty’.

Or is the very reason for their happiness because their lives are ‘filled’ with emptiness?

Emptiness provides an unfettered view of the world

Some philosophers even postulate that emptiness is the source of a special kind of existential happiness (see Chapter 2). For example: Gautama Buddha, or Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw the will as the source of all suffering because it always makes us desire and do things without ever leading to final satisfaction. Better to find a way of extinguishing it. This may be through compassion, because it detracts our attention away from our own will, or through meditation, because it helps to offer a view which is free of desire.

Or — according to Schopenhauer — through music, because it is a direct and immediate copy of the will, allowing our individual wills to merge with it and find peace. Brain research has, in fact, found scientific evidence for this theory (see Chapter 9). In Tübingen, we were able to show that music with a strong rhythmical beat in particular produces simple, i.e. mathematically predictable and therefore calculable neuro-electrical oscillation patterns in the brain, with only slight irregularities. Blues and techno music thus offer a better way to emptiness than classical music or free jazz.

Researchers have also discovered that our brains work in various different emptiness states, and prefer the so-called ‘twilight state’, in which neurons fire off in the low-frequency waveband and the thalamus closes its gates to limit the stimuli that can reach the upper levels of the brain (see Chapter 3). Thus, the brain has been proven to have an emptiness mechanism. The most fascinating aspect of this is that the brain very much likes to switch it on, as evidenced by the fact that such states recur repeatedly throughout the day, and especially at night as we sleep. We are ‘pro-emptiness’. As much as emptiness sometimes instils fear in us, it also attracts us. And this is astonishing, since it offers nothing — no concrete reward — that might cause such a preference in the brain. As a consequence, we must ask: what is it that we get from emptiness that makes us seek it out?

Closer inspection reveals an astonishing number of answers to this question. For example, emptiness allows our defence systems to take a rest (see Chapter 4). These are located mainly in the deeper regions of the brain, and their job is to identify sources of danger as early as possible, which is why the human species would undoubtedly never have survived without them. On the other hand, they also give our brains a natural ‘catastrophic bent’, as the psychologist Martin Seligman has so aptly put it: we tend to see danger all around us. And in a world such as ours, with all its complexities and the many potential dangers they occasion, this means our thought pumps are constantly concerned with averting or avoiding danger. Our defence systems are basically on permanent high alert. This is energy-sapping and — as psychosomatics frequently stress — opens the way for many illnesses. Emptiness can offer respite and relief from this. It helps put things into perspective, making them seem less problematic.

But that’s not all. Emptiness can also create new stimuli. This might sound absurd at first: surely nothingness cannot create anything? But when our brain activity forms a gently lapping ocean of low-frequency waves, high-frequency attention waves stand out more easily. If we place people in a floatation tank, where not only their senses of hearing, sight, touch, and taste are shut down, but, most importantly, also their proprioception — that is, their spatial sense of their own body — they feel blissfully happy and profoundly relaxed. Some even report having new, creative ideas in this state of ‘sense-lessness’ (see Chapter 6).

We see similar phenomena in connection with meditation: a brainwave-sea of emptiness, from which occasional rocks of absolute but disinterested attention stand out. It should be noted, however, that the forms of a meditation practitioner’s brainwaves depend heavily on how far he or she is able to descend into a truly meditative state. Among followers of the Indian guru, and founder of the Transcendental Meditation technique, Maharishi, we found a relatively large number of meditators who simply fell into a state of sitting slumber. We then went on to examine followers of Zen meditation. One of its main proponents in the USA did at least remain awake, but his brainwaves also showed nothing that is not normally found in everyday life.

It was only the ‘original’ Zen practitioners, from Asia, whose brain activity showed that they were neither asleep nor awake in the everyday sense. These meditation experts detached the front part of their brains from the rear, thus also severing the link between their sensory perceptions and the meaning of those perceptions. In other words, they were able to render the world empty of meaning and observe it as it really is, in a dispassionate, functionless, and objective way (see Chapter 7).

There is no alternative: emptiness requires trust

There are many ways to achieve emptiness. Apart from meditation, floatation tanks, music, and dance, these ways also include sex, religion, and epilepsy — three things with quite a bit in common (see Chapter 8). And there are probably many more.

While writing this book, I was once again aided by the philosopher, science journalist, and — particularly helpfully this time — experienced musician Jörg Zittlau, and, during the process, new potential techniques to achieve emptiness kept occurring to us.

One such example is art, to which Schopenhauer assigned a certain potential for release from will. Others include things such as cheering in the crowd at sporting events or marching in step, which might not be quite so culturally highbrow, but which have just as much of an ‘emptying’ effect on some people. Some sports enthusiasts enter a kind of ‘emptiness zone’ as they rock climb, row, or run a marathon; for other people, doing the ironing is enough to reach this state.

Some types of drugs also bring about such emptiness, but many have rather hefty side effects. I had a very intense experience of emptiness with curare (see Chapter 6), but this arrowhead poison used by the indigenous people of South America is famous for causing complete paralysis, and so cannot be used except in the presence of an experienced anaesthetist to ensure continued breathing. Which brings us to a pivotal point to be considered on the way towards emptiness.

I would never conduct an experiment that involved paralysing the respiratory system unless there were an anaesthetist present whom I trust implicitly. If that trust is not there, what remains is caution and fear — and those are barriers to achieving emptiness. This is not only true for those experimenting with curare. Anyone who makes only a half-hearted attempt to meditate or keeps one eye on the exit during a floatation-tank session will fail to achieve a state of emptiness. Mediocre musicians will be less able to lose themselves in the music than practised professionals who do not need to concentrate so hard on mastering their instrument. Completely locked-in patients achieve a higher level of satisfaction with life than many paraplegics, presumably because they have come to terms with their fate and their loss.

During my parachute jump, I only experienced a state of emptiness because there was nothing I could do about the situation I was in once I had jumped. Positive emptiness can only occur when we allow ourselves to surrender to a given situation completely, with trust, and without compromise or a feeling of regret for what we lose when we gain emptiness. We cannot have an alternative to emptiness in mind, or feel fearful of it, or hope to gain something from it. Otherwise, it will not work.

Some readers will now be asking themselves what on Earth we are talking about. What is this emptiness, which can only occur when fear, mistrust, regret, and expectation are banished? Jörg Zittlau and I have spent much time debating the definition of emptiness. We discovered many new aspects of emptiness — but no definition of it. Slower rhythms occur in the brain, the defence and stress systems in the brain are inhibited, a strange kind of openness occurs in the senses, thinking in words and sentences is rolled back, and any feeling of ‘drive’ ebbs away. The difficulty in defining this emptiness comes from the fact that it is a description of something that isn’t there, and which lacks structure, form, content, meaning, and anything

Reviews for Thinking is Overrated

[davidwineberg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Your Brain on EmptyIn this permanent-stress society, there are two ways to escape: overkill and emptiness. Overkill is taking psychedelic drugs that open the mind to every possibility, while suppressing ego (control) and reality. Emptiness is removing all the external inputs and seeing only what is essential - and from inside. Empty Brain - Happy Brain is about emptiness. We used to have it when life was simpler. We lost it, and now we’re trying desperately to get it back. But be careful what you wish for.Niels Birbaumer is a neurological scientist who is obsessive with his science. He has injected himself with curare, jumped out of planes, talked to the locked-in, all in the quest for self-knowledge. This book is a very strong collection of stories, experiments, studies and analysis of the upsides and downsides of emptiness. Because the line between them, as he clearly demonstrates, is so fine as to be essentially invisible. The old saw about genius and madness is on display throughout the book.As with psychedelics, emptiness is a dissolving of the ego, a dissipating of the line between the body and the world. The self no longer matters. For locked-ins, verbs have lost their meanings. Actions become an alien concept. The affairs of the world are irrelevant. By their thinking “yes” or “no” to specific questions, Birbaumer has been able to communicate with people unable to move even their eyes. Among other things, they seem to be content and even happy. They don’t want the television on because it interferes with their contentment. They are not miserable. They don’t want to end it all. They just want peace.Birbaumer and his co-author Jorg Zittlau have structured the book around the many ways of achieving emptiness, because it occurs both through effort and through mental conditions or diseases. They examine the differences in brainwaves between Indian Yogis and Japanese Zen masters (and find that the Indians were not so much in a state of profound emptiness as asleep). They looked at psychopaths, thrill-seekers, schizophrenics, and borderlines. They also looked at dementia, near-death experiences and locked-in, where people remain alive but unable to move a muscle. Sex, religion and epilepsy have similar effects on us, and originate in the same cranial areas.Even music comes under the microscope, as the book analyzes the differences between classical and jazz, vs. pop and rock. Music that is more rhythm-based engages significantly less brain power, speaks to the listener at a more basic level, and puts them on a path to emptiness, where nothing else matters. This has been shown right down to newborns. The love of rhythmic music is an innate appeal to emptying the brain and swaying with the flow.They measured the size of brain components, and found that a slight increase or decrease made all the difference in the world. For example, the amygdala is enlarged in people who live in fear, because fear plays a larger role in their lives and the amygdala is fear central. Enlarged amygdalae are also present in autistics, as well as people who spent their childhoods in unsafe family environments “The same is true of voters who regularly choose candidates who espouse conservative social values. When people feel they are unsafe or under threat, they tend to want to cling on to the status quo and to that which is familiar and therefore comforting to them. In this respect, conservative voters and autistic children are remarkably similar.“ This kind of insight makes Empty Brain – Happy Brain a riveting read.We spend 47% of our time daydreaming – thinking of things other than what we are supposed to be focused on. The energy used for this is far higher (in higher IQ people) than in concentrating on something relevant. But our brains run more smoothly on empty. We seek ways to achieve that, through sensory-deprivation float tanks, meditation and chemicals. In a lot of ways, the harder we try, the more elusive the goal. And yet, mental illnesses provide it boldly, in many different ways, with less than attractive results. Lack of empathy is a facet of emptiness, and people with borderline personality disorder spend their lives trying to fill it, while narcissists and psychopaths glory in being free of it.Clinical depression, Birbaumer says, is not a deep sadness. Depressives think they have been given the keys to the kingdom. They know with certainty that this is all for nothing, that nothing matters, that nothing they do can possibly make a real difference. So prescription drugs don’t fix that. They don’t change minds; they twist them into another shape.Meaninglessness has an interesting relationship to memory. Because our brains store associations of meaningful things (events, objects, acts), there is no real place for the storage of meaningless things. Those who meditate successfully often show memory gaps (and hemorrhoids, from sitting in the lotus position for hours daily).Those locked-in to their unresponsive bodies may not be suffering the way we fear, from our perspective of constant action. We are discovering they don’t care, and actually enjoy their lives free of day to day concerns. It is their very hopelessness that has opened up this new appreciation. The authors cite a Zen saying: “A life without hope is a life full of peace, joy, and compassion.” So emptiness is a double-edged sword, and while it is easy to cut yourself, it is a tool worth trying: “We can behave as if emptiness will come to us of its own accord, since it opens itself up only to those who place no hope in it.”David Wineberg