Decades ago when I was working my way through NLP courses to completing my Trainer’s training, there was this one particular exercise that’s always left me astonished. The trainer had us take thirty seconds to look around the room and count how many things were blue, then we closed our eyes and he asked us to name even one thing that was brown.
We were sitting in a room with a brown rug and multiple brown chairs; even the door was brown. But nobody could remember a single thing that was brown with their eyes closed. The point our trainer was making was about how little of the decision around what gets into our awareness is really under our own control.
I mention this because I caught two studies this month that vividly explain how all this works.
The first was a report from Doris Tsao’s lab at UC Berkeley that’s gone viral on social media, pulling over 2 million views in just ten days. The paper is by Janis Hesse and in preprint awaiting peer review, and is good, solid science.
They used an old trick called “binocular flash suppression.” You put on those old 3-D movie red/blue (cyan, actually) glasses on, with each eye looking through a different color, and then view a picture of one person’s face in one eye, pause for a second, and then flash a second person’s face into the other eye.
Both eyes are seeing both faces now, but the brain stops seeing the first face and only the second one seems to be in front of you. It’s eerie.
Their human volunteers confirmed the experience, so they tried it again with macaque monkeys, only this time they installed electrodes into the brains and recorded what was happening, mostly in the monkey’s face-recognition regions and prefrontal cortex, at the neuron level.
They assumed that the “suppressed” face would show up like a faint memory, still available but not front-and-center, but instead they found that the brain was flipping back and forth between fully representing the face the monkey was seeing and fully representing the “suppressed” face it wasn’t, roughly fifteen times every second.
Tsao called it, in her thread announcing the work, “a pure correlate of conscious awareness.”
For years, researchers and scientists have been arguing about where awareness of things we’re seeing (and, presumably, feeling, hearing, tasting, etc.) lives in the brain. What this study seems to prove, though, is that it’s not a place but a frequency, a rhythm, that contains the content we think we’re seeing/sensing. The unseen face was always there but something having to do with that frequency was choosing what you experienced.
Another study seems to validate this but from another direction. When neurosurgeons at Baylor College of Medicine were doing epilepsy surgery on the brains of patients under full general anesthesia — fully knocked out — the “one day scratch pad of memory” for the brain, the hippocampus, was still recording everything that was being said in the room, even sorting out and distinguishing between nouns and verbs, and showing signs of learning from what they were hearing.
William James would have recognized what these studies are suggesting. In his 1898 Ingersoll lecture, Human Immortality, James argued that science didn’t actually prove the brain produces consciousness; instead, it filters or even transmits/receives it. He said our ordinary awareness is strained out of what he called a “mother-sea” of consciousness by our brains.
I wrote about this idea in September, in the piece on my friend Richard Silberstein’s twin experiments and in the essay on his book. Now here are two mainstream labs, one at Berkeley and one at Baylor, reporting that the brain holds and processes on a continual basis far more than it shows you, and even processes meaning when there’s no conscious “you” present.
A few decades ago I spent a week with a small group of people at Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s monastery in the Himalayas; Harrison Ford narrated a film about it and our group. We spent every afternoon with him all week and he repeatedly came back to the notion that we’re all part of, essentially, a sea of consciousness (my phrase, not his).
These studies, in other words, not only seem to prove James right but also comport with the world’s oldest contemplative traditions. Just google “beginner’s mind” and you’ll get an introduction to it all.
It’s also one of the core premises of NLP. Richard Bandler and John Grinder built their model on the observation that there sits between the world and your experience of it a set of filters that delete, distort, and generalize. The work of NLP is to learn to adjust those filters.