Lights, Action, Camera/Cut

Researchers at the University of Rochester set ferrets to watching the movie Matrix, then measured the neural patterns in the ferrets’ visual cortex. Don’t worry if you don’t really know much about neural patterns, or you only have the vaguest idea a ‘visual cortex’ might be brain related (it is), or how you feel about the reality-altering Matrix, though exploring all those lines of thought are attractive. Today I want to talk about the results of the experiment: neural patterns in the visual cortex of adult ferrets correlated with the images they viewed. Not so with the young ferrets…which indicated, at least in ferrets, that young and old don’t comprehend what they are seeing in the same way.

But the experiment went further. Once the movie was over, the ferrets were placed in a darkened room. The researchers discovered the young ferrets’ brains did not keep working as if they were processing visual information, but the adult ferrets’ visual cortex kept working at 80 percent, only 20 percent less than when they were actually watching the movie.

Michael Weliky, associate professor of brain and cognitive science at the University of Rochester, says this study suggests the brain is doing 80 percent of its processing without any immediate, concrete visual data, processing which isn’t necessary for survival, since young ferrets don’t do it and still manage to breath in and out.

After reading about this study, I immediately incorporated it into the wash of ideas I’ve been gathering over the years, reconfirming my own superstitions: When we’re young, we don’t really have a fixed concept of what the world is about. As we grow, we make up a movie, playing it over and over again, elaborating, changing details, enhancing. Situation by situation we take external circumstances and adapt them to fit the reality we’ve already established in our brains. I know this is a slippery concept, but think about it. How else could your cousin have seen something encouraging enough in that scoundrel to have actually married him?

Check it out. The next time you are doing a mundane task—probably not folding clothes, because from what I hear, nobody gets around to actually folding the clothes any more— but anything else—rinsing the dishes, say. Try to notice your brain. What’s it doing? If you were a young ferret, it might be noticing how warm the water is, or observing the way the bubbles collect on the surface of glass. Of course young ferrets might have discovered the fun of splashing water, or wish to see how far a plate might sail across the kitchen…okay, my analogy is running away with me. But what are you doing, you who are neither ferret nor quite so young? Making a grocery list? Trying to explain to an ex-spouse how certain behaviors are really harmful to the kids? Wondering why you are doing the dishes—alone—again?

What happens when you just wash dishes? What happens when you walk to the car, you just walk to the car, aware of the leaves crunching under your feet, the dark clouds gathering in the west, the light haloing the edges.

I’ve tried it, hoping to find the joy the spiritualists talk about. I discovered I was more aware of the world about me, but for the most part I was still grim. One day I realized though I had stopped the movie in my head, I had retained the main character—me. And Me was grumpy…there were no victims to save, no villains to vanquish, no great feats to perform. A ferret brain with nothing to fiddle with. Who wouldn’t be grim?

What I do most of the time, even in my sleep, is rerun the movie. Like the ferrets, we are continually making the world in which we live…making it up with bits of that and pieces of this, matching them with the reality we’ve already constructed in our heads. But is the world in our heads the one we want to live in?

One day, for a brief moment, I gave up the Me. Now I was in the day, the walk, the step. And this is what happened when I gave up the movie and the concept of the main character… I can’t describe it. No drum rolls, no heralds of angels, no dissolving of the corporeal bindings of the material world. Nothing like the big-time mystics experience. Maybe peace. That’s as good a word as any. Peace and space. When I’m not running the movie of Me, external events still continue, but now, if I’m coming from peace and space, my ferret brain is still, peaceful, and I have left enough space for a different reality to emerge.