Niels Birbaumer

Your Brain on Empty

In 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… (mehr)