Cool Story

Excerpt: Second Person, Present Tense – Daryl Gregory

When I want to freak out, “I” think about “me” thinking about having an “I.” The only thing stupider than puppets talking to puppets is a puppet talking to itself.
Dr. S says that nobody knows what the mind is, or how the brain generates it, and nobody really knows about consciousness. We talked almost every day that I was in the hospital, and after he saw that I was interested in this stuff – how could I not be? – he gave me books and we talked about brains and how they cook up thoughts and make decisions.
“How do I explain this?” he always starts. And then he tries out the metaphors that he’s working on for his book. My favorite the Parliament, the Page, and the Queen.
“The brain isn’t one thing of course,” he told me. “It’s millions of firing cells, and those resolve into hundreds of active sites, and so it is with the mind. There are dozens of nodes in the mind, each one trying to out shout the others. For any decision, the erupts with noise, and that triggers…how do I explain this…Have you ever seen the British Parliament on C-SPAN?” Of course I had: in a hospital, TV is a constant companion. “These members of the mind’s Parliament, they’re all shouting in chemicals and electric charges, until enough of the voices are shouting in unison. Ding! That’s a ‘thought,’ a ‘decision.’ The Parliament immediately sends a signal to the body to act on that decision, and at the same time it tells the Page to take the news- “
“Wait who’s the Page?”
Dr. S explains that the Page isn’t one thing, but a cascade of neural events in the temporal area of the limbic system that meshes the neural map of the new thought with the existing neural map – but by then I know that “neural map” is just another metaphor for another deeply complex thing or process, and that I’ll never get to the bottom of this. Dr. S said not to worry about it, that nobody gets to the bottom of it. “The Page takes the news of the decision to the Queen.”
“All right then, who’s the Queen? Conscience?”
“Exactly right! The self itself.”
“The Page,” he said, “delivers its message to Her Majesty, telling what the Parliament has decided. The Queen doesn’t need to know about all the arguments that went on, all the other possibilities that were thrown out. She simply needs to know what to announce to her subjects. The Queen tells the parts to act on the decision.”
“Wait I thought the Parliament had already sent out the signal. You said before that you can see the brain warming up before the self even knows about it.”
“That’s the joke. The Queen announces the decision, and she thinks that her subjects are obeying her commands, but in reality, they have already been told what to do. They’re already reaching for their glasses of water.”

Read the last three paragraphs closely and tell me that isn’t impulse anger and BP outbursts summed up and neatly and succinctly put.

Later, Ash out…