LIVING ON AUTOPILOT

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?