Rewiring the brain

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 04:31:24
Robert asked this question:

Are there some key mental/ psychological characteristics of those who enter the study of philosophy? Meaning, are there internal mental phenomena that occur in the psyche of those who first enter into studying philosophy (and who can actually grasp and internalize the material)?

Do people have parallel experiences of mental phenomena during their initial exposure to philosophy? Can one almost detect their own mental rewiring and the side effects of that wiring?

Are there time periods where people, who are studying philosophy, actually balance between two world views and the result of which is the inability to function normally? Can studying philosophy trigger underlying psychological problems? Can philosophy bring about ones propensity for schizophrenia for example?

Robert's question follows on naturally from my answer to Nastik last week. It is interesting that over 15 years of running Pathways to Philosophy I have gathered a lot of data on how students react to the challenge of philosophy, how it changes the way they think, how it changes them. And yet, I have comparatively little idea about how all this feels on the inside. Here's a telling response to my post last week on Philosophy as process from one of my more articulate students:

Yes to pleasure — the occasional experience of exhilaration, the aah moments, but more often pain, not to mention F*** it, I give up! Yes to mental gym, and the work-out is more demanding than I'd ever have imagined. And emphatically yes to wanting to know the answers — but in my case knowing that I, lacking the necessary equipment, will never be able to work any of them out myself. I'm glad you have your sense of being in the presence of the sublime — I don't know how you could carry on otherwise.

The vast majority of my students are different from me in one important respect, typified by this example. The most impressive thing, for the beginner, is the sheer difficulty of the subject. And one of the early decisions that one makes is that one is aiming for self-enrichment and self-improvement — and pleasure, to be sure — but not to become a philosopher. So, yes, you have to 'grasp and internalize the material' if you are to make any progress. But there is a cut-off point. You recognize your limits, and accept this as a fact. Then you can relax and drink at the deep well of philosophy and feel refreshed.

I realize that this might sound rather elitist. But I am talking about philosophy as a life choice. Apart from professional philosophers (not all of whom I would describe as 'philosophers' in the sense I mean), I don't get a lot of opportunity to talk to people who feel this way, who have made this life choice, who see the designation 'philosopher' as closest to what they truly are, or at least strive to be. Most of my students have successful careers in other fields. They are intelligent, inquiring, but they are happy to remain students of philosophy. They know their limits and stick to them.

What this boils down to is that in answering Robert's question I really only have myself to go on.

The human brain is versatile. You can develop your interests in a wide variety of ways — requiring very different ways of thinking — and not feel any great sense of strain. I have experienced this for myself. I like computers, I like photography, I like designing web sites, I like music. I used to like chess until I realized that I was so bad at it, that there was no point in pursuing that particular interest (although I still occasionally play against the computer when I'm feeling in a sufficiently masochistic mood).

It has been hypothesized that maybe this has something to do with the fact that there are two hemispheres of the brain with (to some extent) specialized functioning. I'm a rather peculiar case, in that in that I can only read comfortably with my left eye (my right eye is 'lazy') which means that information gathered from reading gets routed through the 'wrong' side (the right hemisphere). I would love to see a scientific study of this. It might explain why I have such immense difficulty in reading generally. (Of course, in the absence of evidence from research what I have said is not much more than idle speculation.)

Yes, I had a life before I 'discovered' philosophy. At one time, I wanted to be a scientist (I started a BSc in Chemistry at Leeds University but I was a lousy student). Then I discovered photography. I can remember vividly what it was like, doing dangerous chemistry experiments in the bathroom, then a few years later prowling the streets with my camera. Fond memories. But the person who did those things had no idea what lay ahead. (See the account I wrote in 1999 My philosophical life.)

And yet — and this is the ironic thing — human beings inevitably tell the story of their lives from a biased perspective. I can't help feeling that somehow, even then, I knew that I was bound for philosophy. At 12, I was nearly expelled from my barmitzvah classes for proudly telling a fellow student that I was an atheist. I have a memory fragment of wrestling with the God question in the toilet, calling God every rude name I could think of, scared of the punishment I would receive, but nothing happened. God ignored my insults. At some point, He just vanished. Only later, I discovered that this was a question you could argue about, logically. But the decision had already been made.

Then there's that memory fragment I had from when I was much younger, maybe 6 or 7 (discussed in Hedgehog Philosopher Day 29). What was that about? It feels so real to me now. Can I really say, for certain, that that experience was my first inkling that I would be a philosopher?

To cut a long story short, I like to think that some of the things I did were somehow explained by an innate propensity, a natural inclination towards philosophy. But there is no way to verify this.

So now, we skip to my first year at Birkbeck College London. I am going hell for leather. At every lecture I take copious notes, carefully filed in a large red binder. I stay up until 3 am in the morning solving a logic proof. (I succeeded, but what if I'd failed? would I have carried on?) — What is going on in my head?

This is what Robert wants to know. It seems to me that the study of philosophy has this peculiarity. That if you're serious about the subject — serious enough to want to be a philosopher — then everything you do and every interest that you have undergoes a form of mutation. I was no longer a photographer, I was a philosopher with a camera. I was no longer a hippie lookalike singing Bob Dylan songs, I was a philosopher with a guitar (who still looked like a hippie). Most important of all, everyone I met got to know very quickly about 'my' philosophy. I had discovered a way of being in the world.

I guess what this is working up to is that this isn't really about the brain. As I have already argued, the brain is versatile, it can cope with almost any new input. This is about the struggle to define oneself, to decide how you face the world and how the world sees you. Of course there will be hiccups in the process of transition. You do feel sometimes that you are going mad (good advice to take a complete break when this happens — go for a walk, have sex, do something distracting). Robert Pirsig's bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance paints a vivid picture of a philosophy student ('Phaedrus' named after Plato's dialogue) who goes over the brink from too much mental exertion — reading that may have saved me from a similar fate.

You've got to push yourself a little bit — actually rather a lot — if you are serious. But I would never take a student whom I suspected had mental problems. For the same reason you wouldn't let someone who had a heart condition do martial arts training. That's just asking for trouble. On the other hand, none of us is perfect. Maybe it is even true that a painful sense of one's own mental imperfections is what drives one to philosophy. As the cheesy sign you sometimes see in offices says, 'You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps.'