The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness
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Last annotated on November 12, 2016
Many thinkers see the mind as a massive ancient temple newly unearthed in a desert somewhere.Read more at location 217
The role of emotion in thought, our use of memory, the nature of understanding, the quality of consciousness—all change continuously throughout the day,Read more at location 223
If you understand the nighttime sky, you understand how the stars’ positions change. Not to understand those patterns of change is not to understand the sky.Read more at location 227
is a strangely, strikingly different instrument from the same mind fighting through a nightmare,Read more at location 229
our thought processes differ when we are fresh and wide-awake, when we are at a comfortable midday midpoint, and when we are drifting off to sleep.Read more at location 230
like an island completely submerged and then released by the oceanRead more at location 231
As we descend from the top, our gift for abstraction and reasoning fades while sensation and emotion begin to bloom cautiously and then grow lusher and brighter.Read more at location 235
That night I was startled awake by a dream,” writes the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, “which began to dissolve as soon as I woke.”)Read more at location 241
The same idea can even be applied to societies as a whole. They have their favorite thought styles—oldRead more at location 248
“Dante’s is a visual imagination. It is visual in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions” (“Dante”). Ancient literature drifts farther and farther out of focus to modern minds—not just because old literature is written in old language, not just (by no means!) because it uses unfamiliar assumptions about society and each person’s status and value, but also, most important by far, because it uses different thought styles from those of today.Read more at location 249
Our elite thinkers cluster around the top of the spectrum, whether or not they belong there.Read more at location 253
Trying to read ancient literature (such as the older strata of the Hebrew Bible) without retuning our minds to lower-spectrum settings is a plain mistake—likeRead more at location 254
why being a small child is so important to our private mental histories:Read more at location 258
The spectrum is the first thing we need to know about the quality of consciousness.Read more at location 260
What are the mind’s dynamics? How do relations between thinking and memory change over a day? How does the role of memory itself change, between its duty as mainly an information source up-spectrum (where did I put it, what do I do next, who is that?) and its chattier, storyteller role down-spectrum, supplying remembered incidents, anecdotes, and eventually the whole rich ambience of dreams?Read more at location 263
It is hard to track the rising tide when you are in the water.Read more at location 279
As we descend the spectrum into the circus din of vivid, sometimes bizarre hallucination, our attention grows overstrained, sensation and emotion fill our mind to the edges—and we are less and less able to create sound new memories.Read more at location 280
We don’t pay as much attention as we should to the lower spectrum,Read more at location 282
The mind is a room with a view: from inside, we observe the external world and our own private, inner worlds. Mentally, we are stuck inside our rooms as we are stuck, physically, within our bodies.Read more at location 284
philosophers have tended to downplay or just ignore the room in favor of the view.Read more at location 291
“The history of philosophy of mind over the past one hundred years,” writes the philosopher John Searle, “has been in large part an attempt to get rid of the mental by showing that no mental phenomena exist over and above physical phenomena.”Read more at location 293
This focus on the physical over the mental seems supremely scientificRead more at location 295
“Tidal psychology,” “spectrum psychology,” “daily mind tracking” (take your pick) has yet to be born.Read more at location 305
We want neurobiology to explain the phenomena we’ve discovered, but first we must discover them,Read more at location 309
other people know just what we think and feel—because we tell them.Read more at location 311
“The human body,” writes Ludwig Wittgenstein, “is the best picture of the human soul.”Read more at location 312
Jack is a middle-aged man I know who takes a battery of medications for chronic pain. None relieves the pain absolutely, and the medications take hold and wear off gradually. On certain occasions his wife will ask, “Are you sure you took your meds this evening?” “Of course I did; I feel fine!” Jack will snarl. Then he will march back into the bedroom to establish that she is wrong—and discover, usually, that she is right. The pills will be laid out on the pill shelf, untaken. His wife knows his pain level better than he does.Read more at location 314
what you call red, I might experience as blue, while I see “blue” as red. Our subjective experiences of color might be radically different, and neither of us would ever know.Read more at location 322
Yet I can see that you smile slightly, and frown ironically, and sneer thoughtfully, in roughly the same circumstancesRead more at location 323
We describe ourselves constantly, and we try hard to be understood.Read more at location 324
Colorful clichés—butterflies in the stomach, insides twisted in knots, jumping for joy, bored to tears, bursting with news—help us to be understood. “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense . . .” (John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”).Read more at location 325
We must start our study by knowing what the mind is like from inside.Read more at location 333
Phenomenologists strive to understand subjective experience. They search for an underlying objective reality in subjective appearance. They care especially about consciousness.Read more at location 336
The first law of psychology—all psychology—is to know what needs explaining.Read more at location 338
“In his commitment to find a scientific explanation of consciousness he shows very little understanding of ‘folk psychology,’ treating its contents in a very cavalier fashion.” (“Folk psychology” is commonsense, intuitive psychology.) Dilman continues: “What he needs is a clarification of the concept of consciousness, instead of an explanation of it along scientific lines.”Read more at location 340
from “a methodologically controlled reflective introspection.”9 One must (methodically) introspect.Read more at location 347
I will describe several other crucial information sources besides introspection.Read more at location 352
you cannot study an inherently subjective topic like consciousness without introspection.Read more at location 353
I can see (if I am sharp enough) how consciousness must be structuredRead more at location 357
“Until a person is able to fill up those concepts with their manifestations in his own life,” writes Jonathan Lear, “his understanding of those concepts will be hollow.”Read more at location 364
“I live inside a skin inside a house. There is no act I know of that will liberate me into the world. There is no act I know of that will bring the world into me” (J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country).Read more at location 369
V. S. Naipaul describes his proper topic: “The worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in” (Enigma of Arrival).Read more at location 371
Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experience of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue. . . . All these have a distinct experienced quality. . . . To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel—an associated quality of experience.Read more at location 380
Charles Siewert is more direct: “ ‘That noise sounded louder to me than the previous one’; ‘I was visualizing the front door of my house’; ‘it looks to me as if there is an X there.’Read more at location 383
Subjective experience has a different quality when we are awake than when we sleep and dream.Read more at location 388
“The first task of the science of mind,” writes Hobson, “—to describe, define and measure polar states of consciousness such as waking and dreaming—has only recently assumed a serious status.”Read more at location 389
the free-flowing, associative thought that occurs when we are deeply drowsy.Read more at location 395
we find the daydream- and fantasy-prone, easily distracted state of consciousness that is good for reminiscing but no good at all for systematic problem solving.Read more at location 396
You have one personality, refracted into many states of consciousness by the prism of mental focus.Read more at location 397
We can pay attention to a problem, work on it, focus. But prolonged focus is hard.Read more at location 399
we reach our best point for logical problem solving and systematic reasoning.Read more at location 401
A father teaches his children “not just to speak properly but to think logically, to classify, to analyze, to describe, to enumerate” (Philip Roth, The Human Stain).Read more at location 402
We lose our edge, the energetic biteRead more at location 404
from one thought to illogical, irrelevant next thought,Read more at location 406
We will move from mental acting to mental being.Read more at location 408
we don’t experience an event merely by living through it. To experience an event, we must live through and remember it.Read more at location 412
Surgeons will tell you that sometimes a patient is awakened briefly on the operating table when the procedure is almost finished, to make sure everything has been put back in place. But modern anesthetics and associated drugs ensure that no memories are laid down; the patient will never recall this little scene.Read more at location 413
Did it ever happen? Not in your experience. An experience is a memory.Read more at location 418
“paradoxical experience” (what we live through but don’t remember) grows more important as we move down-spectrum.Read more at location 419
Some of the most vivid experiences we live through never happened to us,Read more at location 423
we oscillate partially up and down the spectrum several times over a day.Read more at location 426
That the mental spectrum should be largely unknown is just one more expression of the terrible trouble we have in knowing ourselves.Read more at location 433
Seeing things that are too close instead of too distant to make out clearly is one definition of philosophy and the philosophical method.Read more at location 439
“How hard I find it,” writes Wittgenstein, “to see what is right in front of my eyes!”Read more at location 439
In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time,—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly. . . . For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.Read more at location 444
to give up introspection is to disarm completely in the face of subjective experience.Read more at location 448
Our goal must be transcendental insight,Read more at location 449
Blake, Keats, De Quincey, Racine, Rimbaud, Hugo, Hölderlin, Büchner, Rilke, Kafka, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Karen Blixen, Cynthia Ozick, J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul,Read more at location 454
Hebrew Bible, Donne, Sterne and Jane Austen, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Proust and Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and (of course) Shakespeare, to start.Read more at location 460
Philip Roth and Martin Amis, Cynthia Ozick, Jenny Erpenbeck, John Banville, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee—toRead more at location 462
novelist ordinarily has no theory to defend,Read more at location 466
we trust eminent novelists to take us where no one else can, into the subjective realityRead more at location 466
But what Shakespeare thought about the mind is not folk anything. It goes as deep as psychology can.Read more at location 469
Language is our handbook of common knowledge and common sense. Language is knowledge distilled,Read more at location 473
