How to Be Happy Lesson #15: Draino the Braino

How many hours per day do you think? This seems an odd question, but the reason for asking it becomes clear when you read Darius Foroux’s blog titled “How to Get Rid of the Thoughts that Are Clogging Your Brain.” If you answered his question by saying “I never thought about it,” DF would say (and did), “So, let me get this straight. You’re thinking all the time, and yet, you never think about how much time you spend thinking. That sounds like an addiction to me.”

But let us (me) back up a bit here. We are born with empty brains–not empty in terms of gray matter, but empty in terms of content. Although we “enter the world prepared to interact with it effectively” in reflexive survival terms according to Robert Epstein, author of “The Empty Brain,”

here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers — design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we don’t develop them–ever.

Robert is dissing those who assert that the human brain works like a computer. In fact, he tells us, human brains operate nothing like computers. He then goes on to list the various theories over time about how we came to be intelligent (broadly speaking, that is). One, some god infused us with its spirit. Two, different fluids in the body govern our physical and mental functioning (the “hydraulic metaphor”). Three, human brains are machines like the telegraph. And finally, human brains “operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software.”

Long story shorter, Epstein asserts that we don’t have represeentations of things stored in memory registers. Ask someone to draw a dollar bill from memory without looking at the currency, as he does, and you get a simplistic cartoon image that is nowhere near accurate. In his view, “no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem is ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions.”

All this seems to suggest that our brains are indeed empty (I can identify with this) of stored information but have mutated in ways over our lifetimes that allow us to act “correctly” in various situations. As Epstein writes, “all that is required for us to function in the world is for the brain to change in an orderly way as a result of our experiences.” And

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain — or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does — not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

Shoot, so not really empty. That means I won’t be able to use the “empty brain” defense (EBD) whenever I forget to remember something.

That also means DF may have a valid point about our brains needing to be cleaned every so often like, sorry Robert, computers need to be divested of old files, random bits, and other digital detritus. But, to be honest, DF writes more about how we use our brains rather than what’s in them: “The truth is that when you overuse your brain, just like a drain, it can get clogged.” (See “brain clog” on the Urban Dictionary.) His curative suggestion for this is “decide to live in the present moment–where you don’t have time to think, only to experience.”

So, lesson 15 on how to be happy is this: Stop thinking about it. The secret, DF says, is to “realize that too much thinking defeats the purpose.” All we need to do to avoid excessive cognitivity is to let go of every thought in our minds. I have to say I’m a little surprised, and perhaps slightly worried, about how easy this is for me.

[Published originally on RatBlurt™, March 20, 2019. Be sure to check out my other blog, TNTBAD, too.]