The COAL acronym that Daniel J. Siegel uses for mindfulness is based on some fascinating research that touches on a question that’s been burning in my mind for a long time. If so much activity is going on in our brains and nervous system below the cortex, in the limbic system, brain stem and various clusters of neurons around the heart and stomach, how do we access that, particularly if it’s not language based?
It turns out that the flow of information through the cortex and down into the other regions of the brain is, as you’d expect, two-way. The cortex processes sensory input and feeds that back down to other parts of the body, while other information coming in through the lower parts of the brain is fed back up to the cortex. This produces a bit of a clash as the information flows up and down the 6 layers of the cortex (it’s surprisingly thin, but all coiled up to give the brain that wibbly-wobbly look). When the information clashes, it’s usually the top-down information that wins out, and the information going the other is lost.
This explains why we tend to ‘reside’ in the chatty realms of the brain - the cortex and its language based processes - and struggle to see the information coming up from below. One way to mitigate this is to slow down the flow of top-down information, and this can be done relatively easily by adopting an attitude of curiosity.
When we see something familiar, say a dog, our cortex processes the visual information and immediately goes, “Ah yeah, I know what that is: a dog.” Any information from the limbic region, such as memories about dogs or sensory information about them, is deemed unnecessary and ignored.
This happens all the time, with the top-down information flow is constantly winning out and suppressing so much interesting and valuable information from other parts of the brain. As a consequence, we become quite dull and unthoughtful.
Now, if we approach a dog with an attitude of curiosity, we immediately start paying more attention to it. We notice the way it walks and the way it sounds and the way it feels. Now we’ve stopped the cortex in its tracks, as we are deliberately overriding it’s smug, “I know what this is” operation. At that point we start to get information up from the limbic regions and beyond. Images and emotions might bubble up, and we can step back and look at those.
This is pretty much the fundamental way meditation works, whereby focussing on our breath, we go into a slightly curious state about our body, and we can shut the cortex up and examine what’s going on. The problem is that in a lot of the guided meditations I’ve listened to and apps I’ve used, the state of curiosity isn’t even thought about, let alone encouraged (I doubt most are even aware that it should be involved).
Curiosity. It might have killed the cat, but it also gives our brains a chance to function a bit better.