READY, FIRE, AIM: Living in an Hallucination

Photo: Screenshot of neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, explaining why we have brains.

…your brain’s job is to anticipate the needs of your body and meet those needs before they arrive. Budgeting resources like glucose, oxygen, salt, and all of the nutrients that your body needs so that you can do your most important job from an evolutionary standpoint: pass your genes on to the next generation…

— from an interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett on GQ.com, November 2020.

I’ve had the sense, over the past couple of months, that I was living in an hallucination.

It’s apparently because, I’ve been living in an hallucination.

That’s one of the conclusions from psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

Which suggests that her book is presumably also an hallucination.

In an interview, four years ago (has it really been that long?) she talked about hitting a baseball, and the fact that the brain cannot react fast enough to successfully compute the correct response to a baseball pitched at 80 MPH.  So what the batter actually does is predict the correct swing based on past experiences.

In a sense, hitting a home run is the result of an hallucination about future events.  Or so she tells us.

I’ve seen a video of Dr. Barrett speaking and she definitely doesn’t strike me as a baseball player.  So how she knows so much about baseball, I can’t say.  I used to play baseball as a kid, and usually struck out at the plate, and I don’t recall ever hitting a home run.  But I did once get a base hit that drove in my team’s winning run.  I hate to think that was an hallucination, but apparently it was.

Dr. Barrett doesn’t mean the word, “hallucination” in the same sense as a schizophrenic person has hallucinations.  She’s talking about the fact that the brain of an ordinary person is constantly interpreting sensory information and predicting the best possible response.  In her view, the best possible response will lead to a person fulfilling their most important job from an evolutionary standpoint: passing your genes on to the next generation.

Something I have in fact done, but probably will never do again.  But it was fun while it lasted.

She notes that this process of predicting (that is, hallucinating) is going on constantly, based on whatever we happen to be experiencing at the moment.  The implication being, that we live in a constant state of imagining future events based on what happened to us in the past.  But some of our experiences are not actually our experiences; they’re information that we’ve assimilated from the society we live in.  Like when Joe Biden told us, if we got the vaccination, we wouldn’t get COVID.

Like I said, hallucinations.

In that same YouTube video (mentioned above) Dr. Barrett discounted the popular theory that our brains evolved in three ‘stages’… the ‘Lizard Brain’, the ‘Mammal Brain”, and the ‘Human Brain’.   This idea of the brain’s ‘three-tiered’ evolution was first made popular by scientist Carl Sagan in Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Dragons of Eden. 

According to recent genetic investigations of the human brain, however, it would appear that we actually evolved from fish.  Or so she said in the video.

All of this brings up a series of interesting questions for me.

1. If we evolved from fish, how did we come up with the idea of baseball?

2. What possible purpose can there be to human life after we have passed on our genes?

3. Did America really just elect Donald Trump to another four years in the White House?

But now I’m not sure if those are actually real questions.

Louis Cannon

Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.