“Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.”
- Alan Watts
The Theory of Interconnectedness
Interconnectedness is a critical concept in many Eastern philosophies and spiritual practices. The purpose is to illustrate that nothing is separate and everything arises co-dependently. In Buddhism, this phenomena is often referred to as “interdependent origination.” It is often used to describe the nature of existence.
Alan Watt’s spider web is a great analogy for interconnectedness. If every individual is a dew drop on a spider web filled with other dew drops, and every dew drop contains a reflection of all other dew drops, than we can say that each individual is a reflection of all other individuals. This helps describe the non-duality between “self” and “others.” We are all reflections of other personalities. Last year I tried to describe this using another analogy, “consciousness is a house of mirrors.”
Perhaps the most famous analogy for interconnectedness is Indra’s Net:
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“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great God Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.”
The Practice of Interconnectedness: Empathy
Empathy is a logical, existential and practical extension of the truth of interconnectedness. It is our “capacity to experience the same feelings or emotions that someone else is feeling.” When empathizing we are literally treating another living being as if it is a part of ourselves. Like the way our hand is attached to our body. In a moment of empathy, we are one.
Consider the implications that empathy has when we are trying to achieve happiness. If our feelings are interdependent on the feelings of others, then part of making ourselves happy is making others happy too, and vice-versa.
Interconnectedness is the metaphysical reasoning behind Buddhist morality. It tells us to show compassion and loving-kindness toward everyone, because they are no different than ourselves, and our sense of separation is an illusion.
We are all connected by virtue of being sentient beings, beings that suffer, and beings that seek happiness, meaning, and fulfilling relationships.
I think we all empathize in varying degrees. The Dalai Lama is on one side of the spectrum and sociopaths are on the other side. However, I think we can also exercise our empathy and build it up like a muscle. So even if we don’t have any experience being really good at empathy, we can train our minds to be more empathetic.
Here are some actions we can take to increase our capacity for empathy:
- Listen to others more and try to adopt their perspective.
- Do something kind for a family member, friend, or stranger.
- Donate to a charity you believe in.
- Dedicate a song or poem to someone.
- Do a metta meditation. Metta means “a strong wish for the happiness of others.”
These are all ways we can exercise our empathy right now. With practice, we may find ourselves feeling more connected with our world, more attuned to the emotions and thoughts of others, and feeling a greater sense of belonging and satisfaction. To me, these are simple practices, but they can make us much happier.
Positive psychologists identify “kindness” as one of the key Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV) that lead to happiness. According to researcher Ben Sahar, doing small acts of kindness leads to good feelings lasting much longer throughout the day than when we only act with our ego in mind. This is more proof that others happiness and well-being plays an intimate role with our own happiness and well-being – a product of empathy.
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1. The Labyrinthe of Inception
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“It’s easy to why the movie [Inception] has attracted neuroscience fans, including a brain-based review in this week’s Nature. It’s a science fiction film, the dream entry device presumably alters the brain, and director Christopher Nolan’s previous film Memento was carefully drawn from a detailed reading of the science of brain injury and memory loss.
Inception itself, however, contains so little direct reference to the brain (I counted about three lines) that you have to do some pretty flexible interpretation to draw firm parallels with brain science. Perhaps, most tellingly, for a film supposedly about neuroscience, the dream entry devices don’t even connect to the brain and nothing is made of how they achieve their interface.
But for those familiar with the theories of Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst and dissenter from Freud’s circle, the film is rich with both implicit and explicit references to his work.”
- “Mark Beeman is one of the eminent neuroscientists studying the ‘aha’ moment. As he said in a paper in the first NeuroLeadership Journal, “…variables that improve the ability to detect weak associations may improve insight solving.” In short, insights tend to involve connections between small numbers of neurons. An insight is often a long forgotten memory or a combination of memories. These memories don’t have a lot of neurons involved in holding them together. The trouble is, we only notice signals above whatever our base line of noise is. Everyday thought, like wondering what to have for lunch, might involve millions of neurons speaking to each other. An insight might involve only a few tens of thousands of neurons speaking to each other. Just as it’s hard to hear a quiet cell phone at a loud party, it’s hard to notice signals that have less energy than the general energy level already present in the brain. Hence, we tend to notice insights when our overall activity level in the brain is low. This happens when we’re not putting in a lot of mental effort, when we’re focusing on something repetitive, or just generally more relaxed like as we wake up. Insights require a quiet mind, because they themselves are quiet.”
3. You Must Remember This: What Makes Something Memorable? by Christof Koch, California Institute of Technology
- “Nerve cells do not generally operate in lockstep. They typically send out pulses irregularly, whenever their excitation levels exceed a threshold. What the Caltech team found, however, is that neuronal rhythms can be highly orchestrated at times—and that this synchrony helps people form lasting memories. Think about a freestyle swimmer. She regularly turns her head to the side to breathe within the triangle formed by her upper and lower arm and the waterline. If she takes a breath during a different phase of the crawl, she most likely will swallow water and lose her rhythm. And so it seems to be for these memory-forming neurons.
During the learning phase, the team found, if a picture flashed on the screen at a moment when neuronal spikes in the hippocampus and the amygdala lined up with the local theta clock, patients were more likely to remember the image and feel confident that their recollection was accurate. When people were viewing images that they would later fail to recognize, this coordination between individual memory-encoding neurons and overall brain activity was much reduced.
This research reveals an extra factor besides attention, novelty and emotional impact in determining what makes something memorable: timing. Neurons always spike in response to new images and experiences. But when the spikes happen to coincide with the theta rhythm, this coordinated electrical activity alters the brain’s synapses, those specialized molecular machines between neurons, enabling memories to form.”
4. Hallucinogen Can Safely Ease Anxiety in Advanced-Stage Cancer Patients, Study Suggests
- “In the first human study of its kind to be published in more than 35 years, researchers found psilocybin, an hallucinogen which occurs naturally in ‘magic mushrooms,’ can safely improve the moods of patients with advanced-stage cancer and anxiety, according to an article published online September 6 in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Patients enrolled in the study at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) demonstrated improvement of mood and reduction of anxiety up to six months after undergoing treatment, with significance reached at the six-month point on the ‘Beck Depression Inventory’ and at one and three months on the ‘State-Trait Anxiety Inventory.’ A third screening tool, the ‘Profile of Mood States,’ identified mood improvement after treatment that approached but did not reach significance.”
5. A Stranger In Half Your Body
- “An amazing study has just been published online in Consciousness and Cognition about a patient with epilepsy who felt the left half of his body was being “invaded by a stranger” when he had a seizure. As a result, he felt he existed in one side of his body only.
The research is from the same Swiss team who made headlines with their study that used virtual reality to make participants feel they were in someone else’s body, and one where brain stimulation triggered the sensation of having an offset ‘shadow body’ in patients undergoing neurosurgery.
The researchers suggest that having an integrated sense of our own bodies involves three types of perception: self-location – the area where we experience the self to be located; first-person perspective – the perceived centre of the conscious experience; and self-identification – the degree to which we identify sensations with our own bodies.”
6. What Calms Distress And Causes Growth?
- “What causes personal growth? Memories and memories alone (I’ll explain later). Start the process by remembering something horrible. Feel your pot stirring? A slight frown? A faster heart beat? What happens next?
That fresh experience is a command to calm the distress we now feel. With this memory, we have started a process, however unconscious, designed to accommodate, resolve and integrate the upsetting memory.
How do we calm our stirred pot and resolve the painful memory? To find the answer, it’s helpful to have separation and perspective from the distress, which is hard when it’s our own. We get too emotionally involved.
We can find separation and perspective when we follow someone else’s horrible thing. For the example below, I use a section from Isabel Gillies’ book Happens Every Day: An All Too True Story. We can track our experience of her story.”
7. Designing your own workspace improves health, happiness, and productivity.
- “Employees who have control over the design and layout of their workspace are not only happier and healthier — they’re also up to 32% more productive, according to new research from the University of Exeter in the UK.
Studies by the University’s School of Psychology have revealed the potential for remarkable improvements in workers’ attitudes to their jobs by allowing them to personalise their offices.
The findings challenge the conventional approach taken by most companies, where managers often create a ‘lean’ working environment that reflects a standardized corporate identity.”
8. Consumers pay more for goods they can touch.
- “Investigations into how subjects assign value to consumer goods — and how those values depend on the way in which those goods are presented — are being published in the September issue of the American Economic Review.
The question they address is at the heart of economics and marketing: Does the form in which an item is presented to consumers affect their willingness to pay for it?
Put more simply, says Antonio Rangel, professor of neuroscience and economics at Caltech, ‘At a restaurant, does it matter whether they simply list the name of the dessert, show a picture of the dessert, or bring the dessert cart around?’”
9. Meditation And “Drugs” by Jay Michaelson
- “[One] point of similarity between drug use and meditation is that both lead to states of consciousness that are different from the ordinary. Enjoying these seems to be a matter of taste. A lot of people like to take vacations in foreign countries. Some like exotic foods. And many others like vacations from their ordinary modes of consciousness into a different ‘mind-space’ where new insights can occur and even ordinary stimuli (and even without the sensual enhancement above) can be experienced in a whole new way.
Many people deeply fear altered states of consciousness, I think because they are overly afraid of their own non-rational minds. Subscribing to a worldview in which ‘rational’ rules of decency, propriety, etc., govern every aspect of life means relying on our capacities of rational judgment for every important decision. And so, mind-states which relegate such faculties to a subordinate or even invisible role is scary. Now, of course, I’m all for rational judgment making most decisions in the world, and certainly all of those which seriously affect other people. But is it a rational judgment to dance? To let go of the self in orgasm? To fall in love? Some of our most transcendent moments come when the rational mind is quieted and something else takes its place. In some aspects of life, being in touch with the nonrational is essential to being human.”
10. Derek Silver: Keep Your Goals To Yourself
- “Solitude, quite literally, allows introverts to hear themselves think. In a classic series of studies, researchers mapped brain electrical activity in introverts and extraverts. The introverts all had higher levels of electrical activity—indicating greater cortical arousal—whether in a resting state or engaged in challenging cognitive tasks. The researchers proposed that given their higher level of brain activity and reactivity, introverts limit input from the environment in order to maintain an optimal level of arousal. Extraverts, on the other hand, seek out external stimulation to get their brain juices flowing.
Neuroimaging studies measuring cerebral blood flow reveal that among introverts, the activation is centered in the frontal cortex, responsible for remembering, planning, decision making, and problem solving—the kinds of activities that require inward focus and attention. Introverts’ brains also show increased blood flow in Broca’s area, a region associated with speech production—likely reflecting the capacity for self-talk.”
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1. Habits of the Heart: Life History and Developmental Neuroendocrinology of Emotion Regulation by Carol Worthman, Emory University
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In this lecture Worthman shows that human health and behavior are dependent on both nature and nurture by design. Our genes, evolution, culture, and parenting all play causal roles in the development of social intelligence, emotions, and health. In only 45 minutes she crams a lot of information and research, which can get a little sophisticated at times, but is all-in-all very interesting and well worth the watch.
2. General-purpose Brain Circuits Used To Solve Major Moral Decisions
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“Amitai Shenhav and Joshua D. Greene of Harvard’s Department of Psychology present the findings this week in the journal Neuron.
‘It seems that our capacity for complex, life-and-death decisions depends on brain structures that originally evolved for making more basic, self-interested decisions about things like obtaining calories,’ says Shenhav, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard. ‘Many of the brain regions we find to be active in major moral decisions have been shown to perform similar functions when people and animals make commonplace decisions about ordinary goods such as money and food.’
Some researchers have argued that moral judgments are produced by a ‘moral faculty’ in the brain, but Shenhav and Greene’s work indicates that at least some moral decisions rely on general mechanisms also used by the brain in evaluating other kinds of choices.”
3. The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry
- “The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry began in the early 1950s, about 10 years after Albert Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic properties of LSD, and lasted until 1970. It was uncovered by medical historian Erika Dyck, who examined the archives from Canadian mental health researchers and conducted interviews with some of the psychiatrists, patients and nurses involved in the early LSD trials. Dyck’s work shows early LSD experimentation in a new light, as a fruitful branch of mainstream psychiatric research: it redefined alcoholism as a disease that could be cured and played a role in the psychopharmacological revolution which radically transformed psychiatry. But, despite some encouraging results, it was cut short prematurely.”
4. Nicholas Carr: Surfing our way to stupid
- “Digital communications technologies are very compelling and provide us with a lot of benefits. And the way the web supplies information in small, simultaneous bits appeals to something very primitive in our minds. Early in our evolutionary history we were rewarded for our ability to quickly shift attention and learn as much as we could about our surroundings. Later, especially with printed books, we learned to focus our attention. Today, the internet is leading us back to a more distracted, scattered, skimming and scanning mode of thought and away from attentive, contemplative thought.
Some people would argue that having access to lots of information, being able to juggle lots of things simultaneously and collaborate broadly and quickly with lots of people is the ideal way to use the mind. I disagree. Paying attention leads to deep modes of thought. It’s the way we transfer working memory to long-term memory; it seems to activate a lot of the mental processes that give rise to conceptual thinking, critical thinking, and even creativity. The ability to filter out distractions and interruptions and to engage in solitary contemplative thought is essential to gaining the full potential of our minds.”
5. Maslow, Emotion, and a Hierarchy of Service
- “It helps to distinguish between [customer] service as ‘technical delivery’ and [customer] service as ‘fantastic experience.’ And the distinction reminds me of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs which suggests that people have different levels of needs which need to be met — and needs at the bottom of the hierarchy must be fulfilled before needs higher up can truly be met.
The points of view I had been reading suggested that a similar hierarchy exists when it comes to meeting consumer needs and motivations with customer service. There are different levels of service which companies may provide, but the ones at the bottom of the service hierarchy need to be delivered before the ones higher up can be meaningful and have impact.”
5. Steven Pinker – The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews
- This is a fascinating uncut dialogue between evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. They cover a wide-range of topics from a Darwinian perspective, including emotions, language, phobias, and music, as well as public misconceptions regarding evolutionary theory.
- “The incidence of psychotic disorders varies greatly across places and demographic groups, as do symptoms, course, and treatment response across individuals. High rates of schizophrenia in large cities, and among immigrants, cannabis users, and traumatised individuals reflect the causal influence of environmental exposures. This, in combination with progress in the area of molecular genetics, has generated interest in more complicated models of schizophrenia aetiology that explicitly posit gene-environment interactions. “
7. Brain Enters And Leaves States Of Induced Unconsciousness Via Different Processes
- “Researchers observed that once a group of animal subjects underwent a transition from wakefulness to anesthetic-induced unconsciousness, the subjects exhibited resistance to the return of the wakeful state. Based on their findings, the authors propose a fundamental and biologically conserved state, which they call neural inertia, a tendency of the CNS to resist transitions between consciousness and unconsciousness.
‘The findings from this study may provide insights into the regulation of sleep as well as states in which return of consciousness is pathologically impaired such as some types of coma,’ said Kelz. ‘This line of research may one day help us to develop novel anesthetic drugs and targeted therapies for patients who have different forms of sleep disorders or who have the potential to awaken from coma but remain stuck in comatose states for months or years.’ “
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Ever since Darwin, and perhaps long before him, it has been theorized that our emotions play a crucial role in adapting to our environment. This means that emotions are not just an inconvenient byproduct of consciousness, but a form of higher cognition – an ability for living beings to experience their world in deeper and more complex ways.
Humans are a species that thrive on social relations, and our emotions become a gauge on morality and justice. They help facilitate our interactions by giving us clues on how to connect with others in meaningful and productive ways. When someone makes us feel bad our emotions tell us to ignore them, while when someone makes us feel good our emotions tell us to appreciate them.
Emotions however come in many different qualities, degrees, and intensities. While “positive” and “negative” are the broadest sense of emotions (and also the types most commonly researched), theorists have devised hierarchies and scales that range anywhere from 36 different types of emotions [1] to 65 types [2] to 135 [3]. These differences can often depend on the culture being studied, or the intentions of the reseachers to construct an emotional framework that fits their line of research. For example, Laros and Steenkamp often do emotional research related to consumer behavior [1].
Perhaps more important than how researchers conceptualize different emotions is how we experience them. You can probably reflect on some past experiences right now and write down a handful of common emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, etc. You might also recognize that different experiences elicit different intensities of each emotion. Eating some ice cream might give you a mild sense of happiness, while winning the lottery would give you a much stronger sense of happiness. Researchers can try to measure this based on arousal response in the brain.
The first key to emotional intelligence is being able to identify these emotions while they occur. This requires some sense of reflection or introspection into our internal state. While this seems like commonsense, many people can go about their day being grumpy without ever consciously thinking, “Boy, I’m really grumpy today.” Instead we experience and act on these mental states unconsciously, which is a sign of poor emotional intelligence.
Of course even after we are aware of our emotions it doesn’t mean they can’t mislead us to undesirable actions. That is why the next step to emotional intelligence is to assess the origins of our feeling. In other words, ask yourself, “Why do I feel X?” If we attribute the origins of our feelings correctly, then we have a better idea on how to modify our behavior. There is no need to meditate to achieve results (although meditation will speed up the practice): just the will to be mindful and the seconds spent doing a quick “mental check-up” whenever one notices increased emotional arousal.
As reflective and rational beings, we all have the resources we need to adapt to our emotions in ways that facilitate our livelihood. Some use these resources more effectively than others, but we all have the ability to improve with practice – and, it is actually quite easy to practice because 1) Most of our conscious experiences have certain emotions integrated into them, and 2) Mindfulness is a skill that can be applied to all activities.
Sources
[1] LAROS, F., & STEENKAMP, J. (2005). Emotion in consumer behavior: a hierarchical approach. Journal of Business Research, 58, 1437-1445.
[2] McNAIR, D. M., LORR, M., & DROPPLEMAN, L. F. (1971). Profile of mood states. San Diego: Educational and Industrial Testing Service.
[3] ZUCKERMAN, M., & LUBIN, B. (1985). The multiple affect adjective check list revised. San Diego: Educational and Industrial Testing Service.
This may seem a bit counter-intuitive to some practitioners of mindfulness meditation or Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, but unconsciousness too can be a necessary facet to a healthy mental life.
Think of it this way. Our attention span is a finite resource. In order to expand consciousness toward one aspect of life, we must sometimes contract consciousness in other aspects. Trying to juggle it all at the same time is impractical and mentally taxing.
Non-awareness, too, is not only an unavoidable aspect of mind, but a valuable counterforce that contributes to our psychological homeostasis.
I am talking about deliberate non-awareness – “letting go.” To let go is to lack concern – to shift consciousness away from and, perhaps, toward more important things.
Like economic resources (raw materials, capital, labor, time) our mental resources must be allocated depending on our needs. Consciousness (or awareness) is that currency of exchange that makes it all possible. It is the center of our control.
If you are pitching a baseball game, but you are worried about the fans booing you or your girlfriend cheating on you or a pigeon flying by and shitting on your head – you are diverting focus – and, therefore, not concentrating all your resources efficiently in the moment (what if the pitcher was in a better state of flow?).
It has been shown that our working memory can only hold so many isolated bits of information in a single moment (see George Miller’s “The Magic Number 7, Plus or Minus Two: Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information“), so it can be concluded that, to some extent, there is a decision to be made on what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
We’ve all had those periods in our life where we spend day and night worrying about something in the past. We can’t let it go, and it eats away at our ability to think and live fully in the present. Think of all the creative and productive things you could be doing if you weren’t wracking your brain over stuff that you can’t control.
The most obvious form of unconsciousness is when we go to sleep. Sleep is crucial to our mental acuity as well as the consolidation of memories. Without sufficient sleep, some may even become psychotic. Sleep is a way the mind shuts itself off from the moment-by-moment experience of time so that it can unconsciously process the information it has gathered throughout the day.
Similarly, scientists, artists, and other experts often report how their brains need time to mold over details and search for answers at a deeper and more unconscious level. Some of the greatest ideas of our times have taken years of processing and re-processing different solutions for a particular question. This kind of creative problem-solving is one of the main mechanisms described in Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From;” he called it the “slow hunch,” and it perfectly describes intelligence at an unconscious level.
Perhaps intuition in itself is a byproduct of unconscious intelligence. I have seen many people argue intuition as “a laser fast version of logic,” a logic that is performed unconsciously. Certainly it can be argued that there are levels of understanding that seem to lay beyond verbally-expressed reason – so perhaps these can be attributed to unconscious processes of knowledge – a contextual understanding that we can’t pick apart into individual bits of knowledge.
Unfortunately, intuition has become a kind of taboo in Western Psychology because of its difficulty in being studied under a scientific, third person framework. This taboo has in-itself contributed to the inefficacy of scientists to figure out more about intuition or to develop any explanation regarding its evolutionary origins.
However, it has been illustrated that many people use intuition and are wrong – so, a scientist might say, intuition is inaccurate and untrustworthy (?) – but perhaps these people have not worked with their unconscious enough to be good at intuition (just like people are bad at reason, or writing, or swimming, or any other skill). I don’t see enough evidence to altogether dismiss using intuition as a means of knowledge or practical decision-making.
Perhaps the most extreme form of alleged unconscious intelligence can be attributed to revelations and mystical experiences. These claims to knowledge, like intuition, are subject to the same modern day scientific scrutiny, and often times (if you compare the modern definitions with the religious experiences) equatable to mental disorders. I don’t think this is a fair characterization however, and I believe there is a lot more study that needs to be done to draw conclusions on the psycho-”spiritual” factors of revelations and the supposed knowledge acquired through those experiences.
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