Month: March 2009

Timothy Gallwey, in his book The Inner Game of Tennis, does a good job describing the strange nature of how people talk to themselves. He’s talking about tennis, but it happens all the time. Picture yourself, having just hacked an easy shot into the fence. “Keep your eye on the ball you idiot!” you grumble. “What?” says your momentarily puzzled opponent. “Just talking to myself,” you say.

Gallwey’s observation is penetrating: in this scenario, just who is talking to whom? There appears to be a talker in your head, and this talker, this chatterbox, is constantly instructing and berating a silent second self who listens and tries to obey. The talker is happy to take credit when things go well and quick to assign blame when a scapegoat is needed. But the curious thing is that, despite the evidence of this silent other quietly trying to perform as directed, it is the talker who gets all the credit for our self identity.

The thing we think of as the ego-identified self is a tiny raft awash in a sea of brain activity. But since he does all the talking, he loudly claims, and proudly accepts on his own behalf, sole ownership of the psyche. Who can contradict him? And when sudden inspiration strikes, or when an important problem is solved in a dream, we describe it as coming from somewhere else. Because this unexpected gift bewilders our vocal spokesbrain. I like to think of the silent self, a wordless savant from the right brain, dropping a beautiful idea on the front porch of the left brain and ringing the doorbell. The left brain comes out in his robe, peers into the darkness and then spots the gift. “What’s this? Why it’s lovely!” He grabs it and hustles inside, whereupon he types up a quick press release filled with outrageous lies about how he got this new idea. The mute right brain watches through window. Maybe he smiles. I picture him wanting to say “I’M RIGHT HERE, YOU DOPE! I SPENT A SOLID WEEK MAKING THAT FOR YOU.” But instead he turns, wipes his hands, and heads back into the woods to get some work done.

I was thinking about this topic recently because I happened to watch two great TED talks back-to-back that touch on the nature of our multiple selves. The first is by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert on the nature of inspiration. The second is by neuroscientist and stroke victim Jill Bolte Taylor talking about the insight that can come from watching your own brain shut down. I recommend watching both of them.

You are a republic of many entities. Quiet the voice and enjoy the view.

One day when I was maybe nine years old, I was in the very back, what we called the “way back”, of the family station wagon. An empty box was next to me, so I put it over my head, as any bored nine year old boy might do. The day was bright, and the box had a small hole in one side, and so it was that I happened to create a pinhole camera (or camera obscura) by accident. It was one of the most magical discoveries of my life. Projected on the dark inside of that box was a blurry upside-down color image of the moving world outside. If you’ve never seen a pinhole camera in action, it really is amazing to behold, mostly because it is so utterly unexpected. All the more so when you’re a nine year old boy with no notion of why this should be.

If you want to see what it looks like, here’s the story of an artist who built a camera obscura on wheels.

You see this and you start to understand why the word “camera” comes from the Latin for “room”. To think that a big box with a hole in the side makes a passable real-time video monitor is so wonderfully strange. The basic principle of photography seems so simple when you start here.