This is a book on how the mind, as opposed to the brain, works. It is about thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, and dreams. Gelernter’s thesis is that the human mind’s journey proceeds on a spectrum, as we humans progress throughout our day. “The role of emotion in thought, our use of memory, the nature of understanding, the quality of consciousness- all change continuously throughout the day, as we sweep down a spectrum that is crucial to nearly everything about the mind and thought and consciousness…. As we descend from the top, our gift for abstraction and reasoning fades while sensation and emotion begin to bloom cautiously and then grow lusher and brighter.” He points specifically to the role of memory, which transforms from becoming an information source to a retriever of stories, fragments, and anecdotes, all as we move down-spectrum. “Memory’s tasks go far beyond supplying reminiscences and facts. Memory is a pattern recognizer, discovering and supplying us with the knowledge of patterns we need in order to get through the day.” Furthermore, memory acts like a kind of mental shorthand. “When many separate memories are largely the same, we tend to forget the little differences and blend those memories together into one abstract, heavyweight memory.”
Mind is not pure thought. It combines the brain and the body. We not only think, but we feel through our minds. “The mind is consciousness and memory. Consciousness deals only with now; memory, with not-now, with the past. I can think consciously about the past or the future, but I can experience only the present moment and no other.” Gelernter breaks the spectrum down into three states, but these states are not distinct- they blur and we can float in and out between them. “The act of thinking about, of stepping back and examining myself and my sensations, comes more naturally up-spectrum than down…. We rarely give way to emotion. We focus on our plans, goals, surroundings. Early mornings are rarely the time for storms of rage or despair. Nor are we normally at our wittiest or most engaging at breakfast.” At this point in the spectrum the mind is conducive to abstract thought. “Abstraction means skipping detail and special cases. High analytic intelligence, high IQ, makes you quick. You are quick because you wield abstractions confidently and use them at the highest level…. Abstraction is the defining procedure of the rational mind.” Furthermore, memory serves a distinct purpose. “The conscious mind is in charge and uses memory as a tool. Memory is kept on a short leash and is not allowed to wander. The conscious mind makes focused, specific queries to memory and gets information back..”
The middle part of the spectrum is where your creative mind gets free reign. “Creative problem solving centers on discovering and using a new analogy, and that equals recollection plus reflection.” This is when emotion starts to creep into the mind. “The mind’s most effective essence summarizer is emotion. Two objects, persons, or events that are wholly unlike on the surface might make me feel the same way- or basically the same. And that similar feeling suggests, in turn, that these two must have something in common…. But we rarely decide how an event makes us feel; we just feel that way. The event presses our keys, registers directly on our feelings. Human emotions are essence summarizers. They take us directly from a real-world situation to a particular emotion that captures, for us, the essence of the situation.” That is how we make leaps of thought and analogies between disparate things. We create patterns through emotion.
“The bottom of the spectrum is no place for self-awareness. It is a place where being drives out reflection.” There are three states associated with down-spectrum in which we exhibit similar tendencies: daydreaming, sleep-onset thought, and night-dreaming. “Day-dreaming keeps reminding us of our current concerns…. The concerns it comes back to most are those emotionally most important to us.” By the time we dream we are completely down-spectrum. “Dreaming is first and foremost recollection- not creating, but reexperiencing, memories…. Every night we experience, in dreams, sensation or emotion so vivid as to occupy our minds almost completely and leave us no space, or not much, for self-awareness or reflection or making memories…. When we hallucinate, we don’t just recall the memory; we reexperience it. We reenter the experience instead of merely inspecting it from outside. A hallucinated recollection is clearly more involving, enveloping, and attention-grabbing than a typical recollection.” Furthermore, dreams do not exist in the ordinary, linear flow of life. In that way, they suspend time. “We have no consistent, continuous measure of time that reaches into our dreams. Each dream inhabits its own separate world, with its own separate clock.” However, dreams are not disconnected from our waking world entirely. In fact, they are intimately intertwined with our reality as we subjectively have perceived it. “Dreaming is remembering, unconstrained. Ideas and speculations appear too, expressed in visual form, but remembering dominates dreams…. We start with recent memories and work our way back. In the process, we discover what truly interests or worries us. We are good at rejecting unpleasant thoughts, keeping them out of waking consciousness. Even in dreams we never surrender completely; dreams tend to be haunted by “dysphoria,” unfocused unhappiness…. Why do dreams predict the future? Because they tell us truths we know but are not brave enough to acknowledge. They don’t so much foretell the future as remind us what it was always going to be.”
Gelernter ends his discussion by relating his spectrum theory to children. He suggests just as adults move from up-spectrum to down during the course of each day, a person’s childhood is actually an effort to move from down-spectrum gradually up: from a baby, to a toddler, through adolescence, and ending at adulthood. In the womb you are just in a state of being, with little to no outside stimuli. Then, “infants are perfect candidates for overconsciousness- consciousness burn, in which we are overwhelmed by sensory or emotional data and have no attention to spare on the recollections that form automatically within memory. Accordingly, these new memories are never hardened, never consolidated- and most can’t survive.” Infants are living their days in a dream state- so enthralled with being that they cannot process specific memory. “There is every reason to believe that infants’ conscious experience has an intensity, unexpectedness, magic, and mystery…. Unrealistic, illogical, or magical thought is a child’s first guess at how things are…. Children are famous for curiosity and asking questions. But they can make do without answers.” Even as they progress, “strongly related to short attention spans is the small child’s tendency to concentrate on local neighborhoods, not on global or overall consistency.” Abstract reasoning is still beyond them. Gelernter suggests that it is healthy and natural to transition between the conscious and emotional states of mind. “To reason is human. To long for our minds to be flooded with powerful emotion, so that we can only feel and can’t think, so that we can’t reason, is also human. We long for pure experience. We long to lay down the burden of reason…. for an occasional rest period. Reasoning is the crown jewel of human achievement, but it is hard work.”
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