One nagging thing...

---

Optimism

When my dear friend and colleague Roger Brown was alive he used to say that to him, I define the edge of the optimism continuum. I think my outlook explains my choice of research topics. Instead of describing what is, most of my work is aimed at exploring what might be. In my most recent book I discuss extending what we take as limits to our physical health and well-being. I don’t understand why I’m so confident that we’ve just scratched the surface of what our consciousness is capable of, but every year and every experiment I do makes me more certain that the future will only vaguely resemble the past in this regard. I don’t know how I came to these views, or whether in the long run people like me will ‘win or lose’ to the cynics. One thing I do know, however, is while the future unfolds people like me are having a better time as we consider all sorts of possibility. So, I remain optimistic about being optimistic.
Death and forgiveness

In my recent conversations with the Dalai Lama we disagreed about two matters. One was fear of death, which I claim not to feel and he claims everyone has. The evidence is in his favour since all religions promise life of some kind after death, and they would not do so if people didn’t need it. I fear a painful death, but not death itself. Can’t comprehend why people do; which doesn’t mean I don’t wish to continue living, but as time progresses and body parts and the mind wears out I expect death will be welcome. Our other disagreement was about forgiveness. I believe there are unforgiveable actions – child abuse, rape, holocausts, torture are examples. The Dalai Lama says he forgives but does not forget. In my view, since he believes such people will be reincarnated in an undesirable form, he doesn’t need to forgive them.

Nightmares

I don’t understand why I have nightmares almost every night. Nightmares of frustration. Obstacles in my way that keep me from catching an airplane trip on time. Obstacles that keep me from getting where I’m supposed to be. I wake up almost every morning with a sense of relief – ‘Thank goodness it was just a dream.’ None of my colleagues seem to spend their nights this way. What possible reason is there for this mental behaviour, night after night, that is clearly so uncomfortable? One colleague, a developmental psychologist, said: ‘That’s it – the happy relief you feel at the end. There’s your reinforcement.’ And thus she took away my one idea, by explaining it. It is now one nagging thing that I only partly understand. Or do I?
Lost opportunities

Why didn’t I ask my grandparents before they died, more about their childhoods?
‘Grandpa, what was it like being born in 1900 into a world where man couldn’t fly and an abacus was the closest thing to a computer?’
‘Grandpa, did it hurt when grandma burnt the leeches off your back on your return from the trenches, as you sat in the tin bath in front of the fire?’
‘Nana, did you enjoy being one of the first families in Sunderland to own an “automobile” and having to eat “below stairs” with the cooks and the maids?’
‘Nana, how did you cope as the youngest of 12 in a poor, Derbyshire, farming family, gaining a scholarship to grammar school, but being forced to go away into service at 13 to become a scullery maid?’
What should I do?

There’s plenty I don’t understand about myself, but nothing nags. Paradoxically, the deeper I got into neuropsychology the less interested I became in the details of my own inner workings. I’m not sure why. It certainly is not because I arrived at any great insight or understanding. I still experience the almost visceral sense of puzzlement over matters of brain, mind and selfhood that first drew me to the field. What happened, I think, was a shift – let’s imagine a neural switch somewhere in the frontolimbic circuitry – from one preoccupying question, What am I?, to another, What should I do? It left me less inclined to bother about self-understanding than to consider the value of things, moral and aesthetic. How best to live? But here’s a nagging thought: might those two preoccupying questions turn out to be one and the same, like the evening star and the morning star?