Animal Machine

Many baulk at the idea of being considered as an animal let alone as some fancy self-repairing machine. On the animal front the notion that we are some higher order super species prevails in many quarters. We give birth to live young, eat, defecate, and have a whole host of features in common with other species. So, what separates us? We are not the only ones with self-awareness. Other animals can plan too. We might be judged to have the most intelligence potential, but in other areas we are not as capable. We can’t run as quick as a cheetah or swim as well as a dolphin and obviously flapping our arms produces no flight. The combination of deftness, excellent language skills and useful extra intelligence give us a crucial edge. How you view this relatively small margin of superiority is not that important but taking a look at humans from a machine point of view is quite revealing.

There are a lot of ideas out there that propose amazing things, but there is nothing quite the same as having something to test yourself on your self. An examination into how you work takes a little grit yet is nothing more than paying attention to your attention. Firstly, you need to come to terms with the fact that you can only attend to one thing at time. We can multitask, we can do more than one thing at a time, but we can’t pay attention to two things simultaneously. We can switch the attention between a number of things quite quickly but have to dwell for some time on each item, one after the other. I have heard a few say that women are better at multi-tasking than men, well some have been shown to be good at talking and moaning simultaneously but that is the worst example of a difference between the sexes possible. Neither is it true. It appears as though we can manage two things at the same time, but you can only make active adjustments to one thing at a time.

There are numerous tests you can try to watch your attention flick from one thing to another. Walking and talking is a prime candidate. Watch a group of people when out walking and they encounter a gate or have steep steps to climb. The talking will stop briefly whilst they negotiate the obstacle. Anything that is new or unfamiliar will cause an interruption to the flow causing you to stop, work out what to do before proceeding. We can drive and chat, but again we pause speaking when something in the road diverts us. Much of what we do uses autonomy. We examine the procedure then follow it through using the sub-conscious without needing to pay much attention to it.

When we are learning a new skill, such as driving, we focus on all the aspects of handling the vehicle. Once we pass our test and have driven a car for a long time, we can drive with little thought or consideration of how we do so. Sometimes we take the wrong turn as we follow a regular route, one that has been firmly imprinted. We can go from one place to another and not really know how we got there. We paid no attention as we are so familiar with the journey.

Our attention is flipping, moving from one thing to another constantly throughout the day. The attention can dwell for twenty seconds or longer. At other times it is much more fleeting, very brief. The piece of time the attention holds on something is what we call a moment. The attention will get drawn away from the present item by something, an interrupt, maybe a loud noise, a knock on the door, the phone ringing or something moving that catches our eye.

The process of revealing your mechanical workings is a matter of perpetually observing each change of attention. You need to be alert to your every action to become aware of what each event really consists of. All through the day you can probe the countless moments and the physicality of your actions. You need to be fully aware of your attention whilst you are doing things as well as when you are relaxing. It is hard to describe and even harder to get under the skin of it straightway. It is doing something distinct from the notion of deep trances and mediation which might seem like opening a window into the soul. Instead, it is noticing the goings on inside you. Gradually over time you become positively aware of each thing that you are focused on and begin to note everything that distracts you. I found it a little disturbing. It took a few months to ‘get in’ and unfortunately it took the best part of a year to relinquish the habit and return to a form of normality.

When you blink, your mind shuts off the vision system in time to the blink making it disappear from your consciousness. You don’t see black flashes every few seconds as the mind fills in the blanks and creates an illusion of continuity. You will notice the blackouts when you pay attention to your blinking though. Your eyes are constantly scanning all over the place yet the same movement by a video camera would create a horrid fast paced jumping about. This again is not how we experience life. Each change of attention is merged and smoothed over unless you start scrutinising it.

Throughout your day you can spot all the autonomy and all the interruptions that you come across. You will notice the messages from your bladder informing you of the need to go to the toilet. A flight of stairs is briefly judged before you climb them without much need to make adjustments. That is unless you bump into someone coming the other way and need to recalculate a new path. Then there is the autonomy like your breathing, which can be controlled to a fair extent, but will work away on its own without any active input from your attention. You can ignore many an interrupt like a rumbling stomach more easily if it is below a certain threshold. As the pertinence of the bodily event rises, the messaging system increases the level and frequency of the reminders alerting you to it. An alarm of some sort, be it a loud noise or strange smell can jolt the attention into a mode for reaction. All of which can be monitored precisely by studying oneself.

The attention is the core of the being, the gateway to all areas of the mind and a key part to the sensation of being a conscious individual. As you can only pay attention to one item at a time, various mind modules need to buffer information. Your hearing system records a few seconds worth of sound. It will operate in an endless loop over writing the moments prior. If you feel the need to examine the sounds, you can pay attention to this area and copy the stream for further examination before you lose it. Sometimes we can’t make out what someone has just said initially, then after some processing you make it out. We work out what they said, but it can be error prone.

This mind buffer which stores a stream of sound has a time limit. It can be potentially circa one to two seconds in length. Thus, if a phone number is spoken to you quickly you will capture more digits than if they are spoken slowly. The buffer fills up. Extracting a person’s voice from all the background noise with other people talking is no mean feat. Some struggle with this when certain parts of the human machine begin to decline. When in peak condition it can decipher fragmented speech and calculate the most probable bits to string it all together into something coherent. Inventing something to place in the gaps is a native prominent feature of the mind and we get confused by what is invented to fit and what wasn’t.

Our minds have a lot to contend with, just to maintain the health of the body. Regulating the metabolism and monitoring many things from the heart to the lungs and other organs, plus it is always alert for pain signals. There is a lot going on around the clock most of which we don’t pay attention to and can’t do much about. There is a lot we can do without being able to describe how we do it. We just learn how to do it with our conscious mind and then file it away in our sub-conscious. We can then do it automatically without having to pay any regard to it.

Each mind function runs autonomously at different levels according to need. The process by which the attention flits between them without jarring creates the illusion of consciousness. It is the amalgamation of all the sensory inputs and thought centres, each having their turn acting on the core attention that brings about the feeling of being alive. As there is a seamless transition from one to another and never locking onto one for any great length of time, we get this sense of cognition that we all take as experiencing normal life.

We can set a function a task to do and when it is complete it will let us know by way of bringing it to our attention. We may be working on a problem, cast it to the back of our mind for it then to reappear solved sometime later. Each area can only do one task at a time competently giving rise to conflicts. Doing something with your hands won’t detract from working on a solution to a mental problem. However, trying to write and speak at the same time is not feasible as the same language area is being utilised. Trying to look at two things at the same time is equally challenging. Whilst the eye will notice movements using a different schema to the visual processing area, all it can do it bring it to your attention. Quite often it will be set to look out for certain things. Where once tyre repair shops do not stand out, you begin to see them everywhere when you have recently been on the lookout for them because of a puncture.

Place a treat in someone’s bedroom. Put it somewhere it can be seen but not too obvious. Sometimes it can be days rather than hours before they notice it. People can be asked to count the number of times a juggler transfers some balls between their hands. In the background a big gorilla moves past and few notice it as they are paying attention to the moving balls. Magic tricksters understand this and will control the focus of their targets using sleight of hand. They distract and draw your attention away from what they are hiding from you.

As your vision is far removed from a camera and works by building up a picture, your mind makes up what could potentially fill the gaps. Every time you walk into a room you do not process each and every object as that would take a very long time. Instead, you scan around and just identify the important things. What we say we see and remember is far removed from what we actually receive through our eyes.

People leave a restaurant and have a great recollection of people they know, people that they are attracted towards and not a clue about anyone else that was there. We clock what we like the look of. Hence why old people literally grey out as the scan skips them completely. Camouflage works so well because to survey an entire scene in front of an animal takes too many mental resources. When you know what to look for and have an idea of the shape it becomes much easier. As a large region of the mind is devoted to the complex task of facial recognition it is hardly surprising that we can see faces in tree bark and clouds as it is always on the go trying to identify them.

Your mind skips a lot, ignores a lot, cuts corners, approximates things and allow much to pass it by. The errors we make stem from us storing things in a fuzzy emotive way, rather than as concrete digital data. Having an impression of something is a quick method of absorption. This is one area where we differ from mechanical devices. People believe they are right, convinced at times beyond any uncertainty, but in truth they are liable to make significant and frequent mistakes because our capacity to process information at speed is somewhat limited.

You can get under the skin of the attention movements caused by pain and sensory alarms. An unusual touch like an itch or bite or a sound above ambient levels and unexpected tastes will be easier to follow than reminder signals though. We set up inbuilt reminder calls for something we had planned to do. These are not quite so straightforward to work into the self-examination process. You can jostle with the itinerary nudge, but you will find the mechanics much harder to relate to compared with other interruptions. Each of us has different pain thresholds with some being able to tolerate a lot more than others. Some aspects of pain can be enjoyable to some. Pain is change after all. Change feeds the reward system. Some things we find are uncomfortable, but others take great pleasure in it. The rest are indifferent towards it. You may even get to appreciate what someone feels when they get pain from a phantom limb, a limb that they no longer have.

The heart has neurons very similar to those in your head. The heart gets a request to beat harder and faster rather than being controlled directly from above. I suppose saying someone has a good heart is appropriate as it is a separate entity to the spirit in the mind. When something does indeed drop on your foot, stop, and examine what is happening. You may notice that the pain is in the foot not your mind, the throbbing is very much there with the cells telling you about it. You are a collection of parts not a complete object which also hosts a few kilograms of bacteria with their own cooperative agenda. It is not only you that gets hungry. Life maybe a series of problems but it is also a sequence of interrupts.

The chance of anyone getting this far in this book is remote. Even less will bother to do any real self-examination, so an extensive explanation of the animal machine is quite a waste. However, if you are in the tiniest of tiny minority that wants something to while away a few weeks of your time keep focusing on your attention. Every action, pumping, inhaling, swallowing. It is all mechanical. It is distinctly different from relaxing, meditating or trying to blank the mind. It is following every single switch of action, being alert to all changes and constantly consciously observing all the things that divert you from the moment in hand. Nothing will seem the same if you persist with it. It is a different process from any mind aware quiet time, beyond thinking about thinking. It is intercepting every aspect of the human machine. The fantasy element during sex is curtailed and replaced by a bodily awareness, the input to the senses replaces the sensuality. If you begin to watch your blinking, you will notice the black flash but a few minutes later you forget that you forgot you are not noticing it. That’s no good. Apply this to the many other things going on and you are on your way. If that is too troublesome, try watching a game of football and keep watching the referee. Ignore the ball and the players. Just watch the referee for a while. Lie on your back. Close your eye. Plug your ears. Get someone to touch you at random, titillate or sensually sooth.