You Are a Bundle, a Field, a Loop, and a Rhythm

Identity bundles - brain fields and strange loops - synchronize with me, baby

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Identity bundles

Where are you hiding?

I can see you standing behind that curtain. Nice try, but that’s not what I mean. Where’s the you you hiding? The sense of self that feels like it’s looking through your eyes. Your mind, spirit, identity, whatever you want to call it. Where is it? Most of us would think the brain or a specific area/network in the brain. Ancient Greeks and Egyptians would have said the heart. Or is it the brain plus the rest of the body? Or brain and body, bound by memories?

Or maybe there is no such thing as the self.

Throughout history and across cultures, there has always been the (often minority) view that the sense of self our current individualistic world so prizes is illusory in nature¹. Heraclitus went looking for himself and found only the process of searching. Everything, our ancient Greek friend thought, is change. Buddhism too categorizes the idea of a persistent self as an illusion and Enlightenment philosopher David Hume claimed we’re all bundles. In his A Treatise on Human Nature, he wrote,

Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv'd; and consequently there is no such idea.

Following this thought, he formulated what is known as his bundle theory of self. We are,

… nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

Your identity, Hume would say, is not the result of a single, unified, or permanent self, but a bundle of different experiences, perceptions, and traits. The perceptions in that bundle are connected, of course, which is where the illusion of a self comes from, so said Hume.

Not everyone² was swayed by Hume’s deconstruction of the self. If we’re just bundles of perceptions, then what makes my perceptions ‘mine’? Perceptions change all the time, so does my ‘self’ change with every breath? Hume (sort of) replied to these and other criticisms by appealing to the connections between the perceptions and the unifying role of memory. But who’s doing the remembering? And who/what bundles specific perceptions together (and how)?

Mmm, brains³.

Brain fields and strange loops

What if you are not a bundle, but a field?

An electrical field, that is.

Your brain is a blob crackling with electrical fireworks. When a neuron is activated, it generates an electrical charge (the action potential) that travels down the cell’s length. This charge is caused by the movement of charged particles (ions) in and out of the neuron, creating a small electrical current. When the electrical signal reaches the end of a neuron, it triggers the release of chemicals called neurotransmitters. These chemicals cross a gap between neurons (a synapse) to pass the signal to the next neuron.

Here’s the bonus fun: all that electrical activity in the brain also generates an electrical field beyond the brain cells. Bonus two: that electrical field beyond the cells feeds back to the electrical activity of the cells — a phenomenon called ephaptic coupling. In 2018, scientists played around with slices of mouse brain and they found that this coupling allowed information to flow through the brain without requiring synapse activity. Five years later, researchers found that, in living monkeys, ephaptic coupling is involved in memory formation. Or,

Like the conductor of an orchestra, the fields influence each musician or neuron and orchestrate the output, the symphony.

Finally, a study that modeled human brain activity suggested that,

… ephaptic modulation may contribute to the complexity of human function for cognition and behavior, and its modification across the lifespan and in response to pathology.

Memory formation? Changes throughout a lifetime? Perhaps (part of) your sense of self is hiding in the electrical field your brain generates as a sensitive and ever-changing representation of its overall activity.

It’s not a slam dunk and not everyone is a fan of the brain field as an important factor in the brainy feedback loop. Yet, some researchers suggest the general electromagnetic field generated by the brain plays a role in consciousness.

What if your sense of self doesn’t (just) exist in your brain activity, but in the effect of your brain activity… on your brain activity? What if you are, in the words of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, a strange loop?

No one loops alone, though.

Synchronize with me, baby

In 2009, scientists recruited sixteen guitar players, divided them into eight pairs, and asked each pair to play a melody.

The catch? The guitar players had to wear EEG caps to measure their brain activity.

The result? During the preparation and playing phase, the brains of the duos synchronized — called (inter-brain) oscillatory coupling.

This isn’t all that surprising. The guitar players were preparing for and performing the same action. It makes sense that their brain activity looks similar.

Okay, so what about the brains of guitar players during musical improvisation? Huh, that’s odd. Even though they were not playing the same melody, their brains still synchronized⁴ — mostly in the low delta and theta waves, the latter of which plays a role in learning and memory. The guitarists were building a shared (or at least similar) memory. With a bit of poetic license, such oscillatory coupling during musical improvisation has been called brain-to-brain communication. In a way, it is. Listening to music together also synchronizes brains and talented storytellers nudge the brain ripples of their listeners along similar paths.

We don’t see this only in music. Our brains synchronize when speaking to each other, engaging in shared tasks, online gaming without being in the same room, or going through a painful experience together. Those electrical blobs on our heads even attune themselves to rhythms in our environment.

Synchronized brains ripple in a shared rhythm⁵, and those brain rhythms matter. Not only do synchronized brains make us kinder toward each other, but attention-related brain rhythms help us make decisions, and the reason we have nursery rhymes is that they help babies encode language features.

Always, constantly, our brains are responding to our environment, including other people. More even, our brains respond to each other via oscillatory coupling and that affects our brains’ activity. That, in turn, changes our ‘brain field’, which feeds back to our brains via ephaptic coupling, which affects… You see where I’m going with this. You, your you, is indeed a strange loop.

In the wonderful book Metazoa, philosopher of biology Peter Godfrey-Smith writes,

And in the light of the recent work on ephaptic influences, one can add that once there is synchronization, if cells are also lined up in space in the right kind of way, the electric fields they generate may come to have effects of their own. They can bind the brain’s activity together in additional ways, enabling it to behave as a whole.

The combination of oscillatory and ephaptic coupling binds your brain to the environment, to other brains, and to itself. We are four-dimensional pretzels of feedback loops.

To return to our old Greek friend Heraclitus, you can’t step in the same river twice, not only because the river will be different, but because you will be different too.

In a way, this soothes my perennial panic about never being enough (or being too much). I am always becoming. We all are.

Let’s end with a heartwarming story/study about love.

Comparing pairs of close friends with romantic couples showed that romantic couples display higher neural and behavioral synchronization⁶. Romantic couples share a unique brain bond so we can (theoretically) see the friend or lover zones on a brain scan. Start-up idea, anyone?

Negative emotions were most strongly synchronized in romantic couples. That sounds bad but is actually good. It suggests that, for a good relationship, being open to and empathic for each other’s negative emotions is vital for resolving conflicts and providing support. Science confirms: it pays to work through the hard stuff.

Isn’t that devastatingly and breathtakingly beautiful? Romance is an entanglement of strange loops. Love is two brains making music and dancing together, sharing a rhythm that is uniquely their own.

Be still, my little… brain.

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Thanks for letting me play with your brain field. I’m glad you chose to loop with me.

1. For a wonderful take on this, check out Daniel Dennett’s ‘Where Am I?’

2. One of the most famous responders was Immanuel Kant who argued that there was a ‘transcendental ego’ that sorted the incoming sensations into categories and applied concepts to them. This view was quite influential on twentieth-century psychology, shaping Freud’s ideas, for example.

3. Go here for some tasty zombies.

4. I’m painting with a broad brush here. Our brains have different types of waves and many brain regions play a role.

5. Pro-tip: eye contact encourages brain synchronization. (An intense, no-blink stare might not be the best option.)

6. Unexpectedly, couples with lower relationship quality showed higher neural but lower behavioral synchronization, which could be a compensatory mechanism — more neural investment to maintain the overall positive balance of overall emotional (neural + behavioral) synchronization. As a pure guess, I wonder if this is part of why it can feel so draining to try to keep a failing relationship going.