As Brewer explains it, activity in the PCC is correlated not so much
with our thoughts and feelings as with “how we relate to our thoughts
and feelings.” It is where we get “caught up in the push and pull of our
experience.” (This has particular relevance for the addict: “It’s one thing
to have cravings,” as Brewer points out, “but quite another to get caught
up in your cravings.”) When we take something that happens to us
personally? That’s the PCC doing its (egotistical) thing. To hear Brewer
describe it is to suspect neuroscience might have at last found the address
for the “But enough about you” center of the brain.
Buddhists believe that attachment is at the root of all forms of mental
suffering; if the neuroscience is right, a lot of these attachments have
their mooring in the PCC, where they are nurtured and sustained. Brewer
thinks that by diminishing its activity, whether by means of meditation or
psychedelics, we can learn “to be with our thoughts and cravings without
getting caught up in them.” Achieving such a detachment from our
thoughts, feelings, and desires is what Buddhism (along with several
other wisdom traditions) teaches is the surest path out of human
suffering.
Brewer took me into a small, darkened room where a comfortable
chair faced a computer monitor. One of his laboratory assistants brought
in the contraption: a red rubber bathing cap with 128 sensors arrayed in a
dense grid across every centimeter of its surface. Each of the sensors was
linked to a cable. After the assistant carefully fitted the cap onto my skull,
she squirted a dab of conductive gel beneath each of the 128 electrodes to
ensure the faint electrical signals emanating from deep within my brain
could readily traverse my scalp. Brewer took a picture of me on my
phone: I had sprouted a goofy tangle of high-tech dreadlocks.
To calibrate a baseline level of activity for my PCC, Brewer projected a
series of adjectives on the screen—“courageous,” “cheap,” “patriotic,”
“impulsive,” and so on. Simply reading the list does nothing to activate
the PCC, which is why he told me now to think about how these adjectives
either applied or didn’t apply to me. Take it personally, in other words.
This is precisely the thought process that the PCC exists to perform,
relating thoughts and experiences to our sense of who we are.
Once he had established a baseline, Brewer, from another room, led
me through a series of exercises to see if I could alter the activity of my
PCC by thinking different kinds of thoughts. At the completion of each
frankie
(Frankie)
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