Neural Sparks: how epiphanies change us
Self and World Evaluation Expressions Test: a measure by any other name would not be as SWEET
Welcome to our first post! This one is written by Alan (Sarah comments in a side bar). In two weeks, we’ll switch. Why all the back and forth? Check out what we are about.
About 10 years ago, I wrote a paper, “The Parametric, Psychological, Neuropsychological, and Neuroanatomical Properties of Self and World Evaluation.” I was hoping it would make a splash but, alas, it was not to be. If you would be so kind, I’d like to revive it for you and let you know why it was so interesting to me. Unfundable but interesting. To do that, I’ll need to take you back about 12 years.
When you have little kids, you don’t have much time to think. But after five or six years of long days of work and longer nights of parenting, Sarah and I got a night away to Paso Robles and, of course, we did what every parent does when they get a free second … we sat in a hot tub and tried to figure out why schizophrenia tends to substantiate in the early to late twenties. Don’t lie, you were all thinking the same thing.
Sarah: Ah, I’m such a sucker for neuroscientist pillow talk. Whisper sweet domains of persecutory delusions in my ear…
But to tell you the story I should really take you back even earlier—ten years earlier—when I was a sophomore in college…
One morning, I woke up and everything made sense. You know when you stand on a wooden pier (there is a lovely pier near us in Pacific Beach) and you look down, past your feet, and through the slats in the pier, below to the water rushing underneath you? You can see dark water, sea foam, and light water. All the blues, whites, and greens pass by. There’s a pattern and a familiarity that you can expect but not predict. You know it will change but not when. Then, you walk to the edge of the pier and can see the waves forming over a hundred yards off and those waves rise and fall and those waves come in waves (aka sets). And it becomes predictable. It all falls into place. When I woke up that morning, for the first time in my life I could see it all — not just my slat-sized view of the world — I could see the enormity of the ocean.
Sarah: Now I get why you were always trying to play Jane’s Addiction Ocean Size to me in college.
Everything that anyone said, anything anyone did, none of it was a surprise. I could see the waves forming, I could see all of them swelling minutes before they passed by my humble slice of being. It was like living my Groundhogs Day where each inevitability rose to meet me. This feeling lasted two, maybe three days. I thought about trying to write it all down, in case it left me, so I would still be in possession of the blueprint for the design of all things.
But then I had another realization. The point of life isn’t to stand on the pier and see the broad surface of the water before you. It’s not to look down through the slats and see the frothy swirling water, either. The point of life is to experience the water itself. I was struck with the understanding that one could not live a happy life merely contemplating the waves, it’s in the water—away from the understanding of water—that life is actually lived.
Three days later, I woke up and the feeling was gone. The waves were hitting the back of my head, sand was stuck between my toes. Once again, I was dumb, and perplexed, and surprised by it all. And that was fine.
That was my moment of epiphany. Maybe I was seeing the Matrix, or maybe I was glimpsing the boundaries of my sanity.
Sarah: What you’re describing does share similarities with certain psychiatric symptoms…
Maybe it’s all kind of the same.
Fast forward ten years later, I was in a hot tub in Paso Robles with my beautiful wife and in that water we shared our moments of epiphany.
Sarah: That’s not a euphemism. We literally talked about our epiphanies while getting pruney and sharing a lovely bottle of wine…and while figuring out schizophrenia.
We discussed these broad corollaries of our experiences. These moments where we saw ourselves—the small fish in a broad ocean. The sense that the ocean could swallow us. Could we control the waves? Could we control the water? The answer we had both found, either by humility or hubris, was no.
Sarah: I don’t dare ask which one of us was humility and which one was hubris.
Sarah: By the way, my epiphany had nothing to do with water. It was about trees and the written language and the profound understanding of the oneness of…never mind. The moment also bears striking similarities to a variety of psychiatric disorders. But that’s another blog.
When we got home, we asked our friends if they had ever had an epiphany. A good number of them had had these moments. What their epiphanies had in common was the way in which the balance of the moment and the forever crossed paths. But even more than that, was a sudden realization of leaving the beach of childhood to enter the ocean of something bigger. The moment came with the understanding of not being able to change something as unchangeable as the world, of not being able to control the world, however, it also came with the realization that this moment existed in this time and place, but would pass leaving us to the mercy of the tides.
Sarah: According to Wikipedia (which I love and I donate to), an epiphany is an experience of a sudden and striking realization. It can be used to describe a scientific breakthrough or a religious or philosophical discovery. Epiphanies are thought to be relatively rare phenomenon, but our very scientific process of asking a bunch of friends if they had ever had an epiphany suggested it’s quite a common occurrence. It seems like the world only pays attention to epiphanies if they result in something concrete and deliverable (for example: Isaac Newton’s apple gravity moment). But for the holder of the epiphany, it can be a moment of insight that affects their world view the rest of their life.
For me, this new understanding of the world crystalized in a moment (or at least in three days), as though I were a cup of water that froze clear. It was a super-cooling of my concept of self and world.
Sarah: Ah, directional freezing—you’re a hipster bartender’s dream. Or, if we’re talking about invisible ice, it’s black ice which, in that case, foreshadows a car sliding off the road…
But then I got to thinking… what if this went wrong? What if when this super-cooling happened, I didn’t get a crystal-clear cohesive slab of ice through which to view the world? What if when I looked through this super-cooled slab, a schism—a nearly invisible flaw in the ice— distorted the view? I might believe I understood things. I might feel like the pieces fit—and some of them would— but overall my perception of the world would be distorted. Maybe my epiphany was not the moment when I could reach out and touch god. What if it was the moment that heralded my break from reality? What if, unbeknownst to me, the fissures in my crystal gave me a distorted view of it all?
Sarah: Or, in other words, can an epiphany-gone-sideways be the sentinel event for schizophrenia?
Now this moment of epiphany—of psychosis—comes in our early adulthood.
This is when our brain is chock-full of neurons with an overabundance of neural connections. The intense inter-connectivity of the cortex creates a neuronal mesh that can actually get in the way of efficiency. So, the human brain begins pruning away the long connections that tied together areas of the infant brain that have long since become redundant or inefficient in adulthood. This is what’s happening as we integrate our understanding of the water under the pier and the ocean on the horizon, or we make our way from the shore to the water. This is our brain, our world, and ourselves converging at a point in time.
So being a scientist, or at least a nerd, it wasn’t enough to think about it — I wanted to study it. So, I made a study called the Self and World Evaluation Expressions Test or SWEET.
First, I needed a questionnaire that got to the point. Sarah and I decided that there were five ways that 1.) people influence the world and 2.) the world influences people to help us find our place:
* Emotional (i.e., your/everyone else's personal mood)
* Social (i.e., your/everyone else's relationship with others)
* Intellectual
* Financial
* Spiritual
Next, I needed a population that was transitioning between youth and adulthood (say 18-23). The next important step, and this is a hugely important part of any great study, I talked to Dr. Susan Tapert.
Dr. Tapert, heretofore to be referred to as Susan, allowed me to add this questionnaire to one of her studies. Being Susan, she had a fantastic population with anatomical data, information on these white matter tracts throughout the brain, just all sorts of wonderful data.
With all the elements in place we now had a paper. We found that people who felt like they affected the world were more extroverted than those who felt like they didn’t. People who felt they had less effect on the world were more depressed and had stronger white matter in thalamic pathways. Those who were keenly aware of the intellectual and financial aspect of things were more open, more conscientious, had more cortical development in the anterior insula (my favorite brain region), and stronger white matter connections in the prefrontal cortex.
So, when we enter the ocean of adulthood, our landlocked mind grapples with the new lack of control and chaos of the world. We catch glimpses of the waves through the slats in the pier. We see the ocean on the horizon. But, I like to remind myself, that fundamentally, this is not how we should be. We just need to let the water surround us, to be of the water itself.
Maybe when Sarah and I sat in that hot tub in Paso Robles, we didn’t make the splash we thought we would. But I did have that moment of indulgence in the hot tub with the person I love discussing theories of schizophrenia.
Every Boots and the Brain post has two parts: the brain-y part (typically Alan) and the boots on the ground practical part (usually Sarah).
Boots…
Sarah: Have you ever had an epiphany? What was going on in your life at that time? How did it change you and why did it stay with you? Have you stayed true to the realization or insight that you gained?
If you haven’t had an epiphany, but you’d like one, some say that meditation can create the right conditions. If that doesn’t work, then never fear, there’s a whole world of psychiatry and psychedelics coming to a future near you (I’m sensing a future post)…
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