Sherlock Holmes, the legendary
fictional detective of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and his faithful chronicler
Watson were once in the forest camping. Late into the night after an
invigorating discussion about the brilliant celestial bodies, they retired for the
night in a make shift tent. In the middle of the night, Holmes suddenly woke
Watson up and asked him an innocuous question “What do you see?” Watson, the
simple soul that he is, despite feeling sleepy, started to reply
enthusiastically “I see the constellation of the Taurus..” when Holmes rudely
interrupted him and said “My dear Watson, someone has stolen our tent!” The
moral of the story, as often Holmes puts it, is “We see but don’t observe!” How true!
Assume that we are driving to our
office and we see a BMW car in front of us. Here is how our thoughts might
wander .. BMW what a great car – the Germans are marvelous in engineering – but
how did they obey the orders of such a devil as Hitler.. Poor Jews so brutally
terminated in Auschwitz … Good that they fled to Israel.. And Israel is such a small country but they
produce such outstanding software especially in the area of security … and
presto you are already in office! You have driven 5-6 Kms without observing
what is happening on the road in a mechanical way oblivious of the surroundings
– the cyclists, the buffaloes on the road et al! This is living on auto pilot.
Is this abnormal? – Not at all. But the sad part is you miss out on a lot of
stuff that is happening around you besides putting yourself at risk. This
becomes a difficult habit to get over.
It is not only when driving but most
of our activities from morning till we go to bed is done in an mechanical way
without really experiencing what we are actually doing. I go for early morning
walks and I see people invariably with their ipod’s plugged in and plodding
along. They don’t enjoy the birds chirping, the beauty of a sunrise, the
milkman peddling his way on the road or the paper wallah throwing the paper
very deftly into the balconies! Are we really living?
This extends to all our activities.
The worst among them is our eating habits. We have no idea what we are eating –
we eat while driving, dressing up, seeing the morning news, reading – you name
it and someone does it that way. What happens then is we do not “enjoy” our
food in the real sense of the term and at times unable to even recall what we
ate a while ago. I have been at the receiving end on many occasions on this
count! And the modern malady of the need to upload photos to FB has made things
worse. The folks who take photos are not really enjoying the scene but want to
“capture” the moment to post it on FB. So much so, the Chennai city police have
put up warning signs on busy intersections with the message “Your FB updates
can wait. Please watch where you are walking!” Even without FB updates crossing
the road in Chennai is a catastrophe – what to say about crossing the road
while updating FB! But this is precisely what people are doing.
Why are we all doing this? Is this
normal? Norman Farb and his six other colleagues at the University of Toronto
studied this phenomenon and discovered that we experience the world in two
different ways using two different set of networks in the brain. One is called
the “default” or “narrative” network. When you use this network, you take in
information from the outside world, process it through a filter of what
everything means, and add your interpretations. This default network is
effective for most of the waking moments and doesn’t take much effort to
operate. This network perhaps operates when we live on an autopilot!
There is nothing wrong with this
network, but there is a whole other way of experiencing experience. Scientists
call this as one of “direct” experience. When the direct network circuit is
active, different parts of the brain are activated. We do not think about the
past or the future but take in information from the outside world in real time.
In other words you are in the “Here and Now” – the holy grail of all religious
practices! How do we switch to this direct network more often?
