The Mountain and the Marble

This writer recently got to glance inside a copy of The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Psychology and I spent a few days trying to figure out how to put what I found into words. It seems that for the past two hundred years we've been studying the ins and outs of the brain like a giant mountain. The sheer volume and intricacy of the entire structure has given us enough to think about in psychology that we haven't really had to worry about the mind, an entirely different thing. With the advent of more powerful technology however, we've been able to map the brain and all of the intricate mechanisms that take place within it, but our mind still eludes even the most sophisticated instruments. To jump back into my metaphor, only recently have we imagined a shiny marble, our conscious mind, slowly tumbling and bouncing down within the grooves of the mountainside. By using a non-local object to interact with, but not be tied down by the brain, we can accurately judge the mind-brain relationship as a whole without disturbing their individual characteristics. When we look at the field of psychology, it's extremely important that we understand the difference between the brain and the mind. Too often do we encounter problems studying something like the mind with quantitative tools (think test tubes and beakers) because it has no real location in the brain. It's ours and we use it, but it's not really a thing we can put under a microscope. We can measure the signals sent between neurons, but how we perceive the world changes from person to person. Because the process is so closely entwined with our own personalities, it's hard to design a system within the field of psychology that not only describes the process by which our identities are formed, but stands up to a wide variety of people and experiences. What we have identified thus far in psychology pertain more to the structure of the brain than the nondescript ideas and memories of the mind and for that, progress has slowed. We've been looking at a giant mountain, stoic and unmoving from a distance, wondering how the spirits of consciousness could spring from such an unyielding summit. Psychologists can describe abstract layers of the mind as well as a few broad, underlying mechanisms, but we have no movement to study, no place to watch consciousness take place. Only in the past couple of decades have new schools of thought popped up to address the this apparent gap in the textbooks. Psychologists have begun to approach this mountain through a variety of different means and what many are coming to realize is that what seem to be like a marble tumbling down a mountainside is in fact our mind following a web of loosely formed paths laid out by the brain. Who we are is what separates us from the rest of the universe and I don't mean to downplay the significance of the scientific method thus far, but reductionism is going to get us nowhere in understanding the driving force behind an organism that inherently looks outward and uses qualitative data to combine external concepts into an entirely new psychological element. We are greater than the sum of our parts because through imagination, we have the ability to change whatever we want. We are behind the wheel of a machine that is moving but we have only had a basic understanding of how to drive it, until recently. There are a lot of factors to consider when we think about navigating the world around us and any one of those factors can change the outcome of our intended path. People, responsibilities, opportunities, chance, and all the other motivators in our life influence us in discreet ways. Fortunately, when faced with situations where the unknown is a possibility, we usually choose to play it safe and choose the more conservative, well trodden path. It's a built in regulator that keeps you going back to work everyday instead of dedicating yourself to mastering the drums. What we might not realize are all the little influential hints that are passed down by family, reinforced by community and empowered by fear. All of those little factors have a decidedly different outcome when combined in different ways and ultimately, life comes down to which ones we choose to follow. In biology, the marble rolling downhill concept is applied to the disposition of neutral stem cells as a description of whether that cell will be a brain cell or a skin cell. Anything is possible at the beginning of our life but when one ill-advised decision after another is made, it can create an incredibly deep hole for us to dig out of. We have so many choices to make in the course of a single day that it's not hard to figure out why so many of us feel confused. Menus, guides, tables, charts, ratings and reviews have added an immense level of convenience to our life but with them we've lost the ability to make snap decisions for ourselves. We entrench ourselves in the popular opinion and create a deeper cultural wedge to lose our individuality in. But, there's a way out of the rut. Every second is a chance to turn off the television and work on something we're passionate about and every day is a chance to gather the materials to build something better tomorrow, but we have to keep going. We have to push ourselves through the low valleys of the mountain and not get too excited on the ridges. Just keep moving forward, let the path you're on guide you a little. Wait for opportunities, don't force them. If only we believed that the choices we made now had an impact on our brain that would, in turn, play such a large role in our future decisions, we might actually work towards improving the state of what is going on around us right now.