What Does Going "Deeper" Mean?
Is there a deeper place in the brain or is it just a metaphor?
Barbara: We have suggested that shifting attention inward can be a first step toward getting a deeper understanding of your own experiences. What you observe in yourself — the thoughts that come to mind, the feelings and sensations — can be used to enrich your writing or other creative work.
Elizabeth: We organized our last post around a little story I wrote for Instagram about an old sweater of mine. I expected that the story would be about connecting to my youth, but instead it ended up at a moment that was a turning point in my life.
Barbara: So, you got deeper. Advice about writing often includes, “Go deeper.” But what does going “deeper” actually mean?
Elizabeth: I think of deeper as more emotional, more complex, getting to repressed or forgotten material, exploring different perspectives or layers of meaning.
I suspect what I’m about to say isn’t real, but I visualize “deeper” as physically deeper in the brain, and this includes early memories or experiences. I see the “deeper” content that we grope for as being in something like a well that we can draw up from. But does this have any physical reality?
Barbara: Well, no. Not in the way you mean “deeper.” But, first, the most important thing to say is that the brain — how it is organized and actually functions — is incredibly hard to conceptualize. Just last week there was an astounding paper published with illustrations that mapped the fruit fly’s 140,000 neurons and all of their over 50 million connections to one another. Watch this video; you won’t believe your eyes!
Elizabeth: I saw it! It’s unbelievably complex, and it’s such a tiny creature.
Barbara: The fruit fly brain is the size of a poppy seed! But, the small size is deceptive. It’s a living organism, and its brain must support all the fundamental life functions… It eats, it breathes, it senses its environment, it moves purposively. Even more astonishing, fruit flies have circadian rhythms of sleep, as we do. Some individual fruit flies are early birds; some are night owls.
Elizabeth: Getting back to deeper.
Barbara: What I started to say before is that when we talk about the brain, we all use metaphors such as ‘deeper’ because it’s so hard to grasp the brain’s complexity. All the same, I think there are a couple of legitimate uses of the word ‘deeper’ when it comes to the brain. There are brain structures that are foundational, fundamental to life. These are deep evolutionarily, as in early.
And then, there is deeper in relation to memory — memory in the sense of what one has learned through life experience. There’s a process by which memories are put into long-term storage, which is another metaphor (there are no files in the brain!).
The brain is a 3-dimensional organ with a surface — the cerebral cortex — and other brain structures that can be said to be deeper in. But they are not deeper in the way that many think of it, as in adding complexity, or emotion, or “the place” where things are kept from awareness.
Elizabeth: This is bad news. I grasp that Freud’s id, ego, and superego are metaphors and don’t have locations in the brain, but the idea of ‘deeper’ is really solidly in my mind. For example, dark feelings that I’ve repressed. I think of them as being deeper because I’ve buried them.
Barbara: Well, here we are having a conversation about linguistics. And we find ourselves in the gap between brain and mind. But there really is no adequate language to bridge that gap.
Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts use the word ‘repressed’ to describe the process by which certain thoughts and feelings are placed out of mind … into the “unconscious.” Using psychoanalysis’ metaphorical conception, I would say those thoughts and feelings are deeper in the sense that you’re talking about … as kept out of awareness.
However, in the language of neurology, I’d say only that these thoughts and feelings are non-conscious, or perhaps they might actually be conscious but not have attention focused on them. But I would not use the word ‘deep’ to describe them neurologically.
Elizabeth: I really cannot see how to escape metaphoric language to talk about deeper in the way I envision it. I may know intellectually that this doesn’t correspond to reality. But I feel that my deepest emotions, my deepest desires, my core sense of self are deep within me. Of course, in the old days, it used to be all in the heart.
Barbara: There is no escaping the use of metaphors. Neurologists also have been using metaphorical language that has evolved over the years. Hebb’s law is a catchy saying to describe learning: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” But, there are no wires in the brain! One of our latest metaphors is circuitry. I’ve been struggling with linguistic limitations since I’ve been in the field.
Elizabeth: Well, it seems that metaphors are all we have.
Barbara: But the problem arises when we mistake the metaphor for reality.
The brain is an actual organ, made of neurons and other types of cells, with blood vessels providing oxygen and membranes surrounding it for protection. When you remember something — or “go deeper” — there is an actual physical process that is involved. That is what is real … even though the brain may be the consistency of pudding!
Finding ways to experience and express emotion or to come to a new understanding of an event or to see someone else’s perspective — these do happen but just not in the way you’re imagining. And there is no good language for it.
Elizabeth: Weird as this will sound, I have to admit that I find this answer reassuring. It’s hard to give up my tidy, lifelong vision of the brain — where different mental functions have specific locations — in exchange for a pudding from which thoughts mysteriously emerge. Such an amorphous conception feels threatening, destabilizing. But just knowing that digging deeper is a physical process that can be described is somehow grounding, even if it’s happening all over the brain and not in a single spot.
When you stop to think about it, the reality of what the brain is and how it works defies language: our thoughts, which are non-material, are produced by a bodily organ! How can we grasp that? It seems nearly impossible for a lay person to envision, let alone express, the physical thing that happens in your brain when you go deeper.
Barbara: Well, we as humans have for millenia lived our lives, expressing ourselves, being creative, developing culture … without understanding a thing about the brain. But by trial and error we’ve tapped into ways to optimize what we want our brains to do. It doesn’t matter that we don’t have words to describe it, we still can find ways to hack the brain.
People have tried for centuries to tap into feelings and insights that are not right there “on the surface” by using alcohol, opioids, meditation, free writing, psychoanalysis, psychedelics, ibogaine. There’s so much we don’t know about the biology of mental states, of looking inward, for example. But what we have learned gets us closer to understanding the fundamental component processes that together manifest as familiar psychological states.
I would say that the most readily accessible path to what you’re calling “deeper” is via the process of association. By harnessing the brain’s ability to generalize and conceptualize and link related aspects of experience to one another you can get deeper, in the psychological sense.
Let’s talk about that next time!
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Generally, I would say that neuroscientists agree that mind "emerges" from brain. This mans that brain functioning alone is the basis of what we experience as "mind." The brain is comprised of neurons and glial cells whose interaction is extraordinarily complex (though, of course, we can use advanced technology to study their behavior). And just as organized phenomena like hurricanes or hail storms emerge from simpler elements and forces such as water, wind, gravity, the spinning of the earth, and so on, so does mind emerge from brain.
I know it sounds like "fudging" it to use the word "emerge." There is a "leap" or a "gap" there. But, mathematicians are working on theories to understand emergence since this is a property of all complex systems. I hope this explantion helps!
Interesting conversation.
Going deeper (haha!): is it your impression, Barbara, as a neuropsychiatrist, that mind is something found "inside" the brain, or that our neurons are more like channels to receive "mind" which is nonlocal.
The metaphor I like for the latter our brain is like an antenna with receptors that are tuned to pick up the signal from a nearby radio station and filtered through our experiences both individually and as a collective.
I know this has been a controversial topic for millennia, and is still up for debate, but I'd be interested in your thoughts.