Pi in the Sky

The puzzle of the mind

Posted on May 26th, 2008 at 8:43pm by Pi.
Categories: Unimultiverse.

In 2008, I read a book called “Sunbathing under the rain”, by Gwyneth Lewis (a wonderful gift from a wonderful friend). The book deals with the experience with depression that the author had, a welsh poetess. As poetess, she made many metaphors, analogies and other figures of speech related to depression. One of the analogies caught my attention very much, and in it she compared the emotional depression with the meteorologic low pressures, and how they, indirectly, cause the rain, because the rain is what fits the inestable void of the low pressures. Just like that, in our depressions we search for causes which fit in that void, although they don’t have any relationship. It looked to me as a very accurate concept, although not enough developed. Inspiring myself in that analogy and in the described concept, I applied it to my current situation and to my experience in searching for psychological causes for my moods, and as result, I established another analogy.

An analogy could be established between our self and a jigsaw puzzle. The self, to say, our thoughts, memories, emotions, consciousness, etc., it is like a huge puzzle. Parts of our self are the pieces, which sometimes are put in their right place, and other times not. When those pieces are unsorted and spread around leaving gaps, holes without meaning or content, it is when we feel lost, depressed, doubtful…

However, in my experience I’ve discovered that analogies, although very useful to explain concepts, they are very dangerous if taken literally. A puzzle is a definite space where each place has only one correct position. When joining several pieces, and leaving a gap between them, there’s only one other piece which can fit there. And there’s a definite, specific number of pieces. Our self is not a fixed space, but changing. Our thoughts, memories and emotions aren’t rigid pieces, but flexible, and their number raises or lowers with time.

The puzzle analogy is appropiated for an analitic and introspective mind; without going too far, mine. I’m very prone to autoanalyze myself, always trying to discover more things about myself, about who I am and how I am, about how I’ve got to be who I am. In self-analysis, very often feelings and wishes could induce self-deception. It’s not about isolating every feeling either, but about avoiding that they control the reasoning and logic. This form of self-analysis is critical and logical, using reasonings as causality: if there is an effect, it’s because there was a cause which made it possible. If a girl dumped me for someone else, that could have caused that today I feel insecure in my relationships with women.

In this self-analysis, the causality fits perfectly in the analogy of the mind-puzzle. We have a gap with a specific form; this gap must have been caused by some event. The gap is insecurity with women; in self-analysis you’d search frantically for the piece which fits in that gap. Until finally it’s found: that girl who dumped me for someone else. The piece is placed in the gap, and it fits. I feel as if I’ve solved one part of the problem, I know finally why I have that insecurity. A step ahead towards the solution.

Maybe the gap is for one piece, or maybe the gap is for many pieces. As in the puzzles, the figures drawn in our mind have different sizes and complexities. Maybe the gap of our problem needs to be covered by more pieces: besides our loving disappointment, maybe shyness and lack of self-esteem should be added, for example. Often we do this even unconsciously, it’s a completely normal reflex action.

But as I’ve already said, analogies are dangerous. The more literally the analogy is taken, the more erroneous the comparation will be. I’ve commented that our self is changing, and even the pieces are flexible. The memories change with time, the thoughts are readjusted depending of new information, feelings aren’t still but flowing and mixing.

It’s there where we can realize that our brain is not at all like a puzzle. In a critical and logical self-analysis, we search for the causality of things. We could despair trying to find the pieces which fit in the gaps of our problems. Unfortunately, those mental pieces don’t have rigid shapes, they’re adaptable. Thus we don’t find the right pieces which fit; simply we find the pieces which in a specific moment seem to us to fit better. Moreover, the more we look at them, the more we can deform the pieces or the gap so in the end we convince ourselves that they fit perfectly: the pieces between them and in the gap, making a mental figure which seem appropiate to us.

Actually, what we do could be described as selecting randomply plausible correspondences. We can choose randomly a piece which has the apparent colour of the gap, and ironing out a little here, and forgetting the small colour change there, we fit somewhat forcibly a piece in a gap that maybe it’s for it, or maybe not. We can choose a piece that, for pure chance, is close in time or space to the gap we try to fill.

Here causality has not much to do anymore. In our search for a pair of cause-effect, we are able to find patterns which seem to be cause-effect, although they don’t have to be. Simply they seem to. Pursuing causality, we end deceiving ourselves, giving importance to causes which weren’t determinant with the effect being analyzed. Following the puzzle analogy, it’s something like deforming the gap of a piece with another piece until the new piece can fit due to pushing, cursing and convincing ourselves that is the right piece. And the only thing we did is deforming both the problem-gap and the cause-piece.

This doesn’t mean that in our self the causality doesn’t make sense; it does. I think that it’s sane and sensible to autoanalyze ourselves to be able to reach the cause of a problem and thus correct it. What it’s not sane is to think that just because the pieces seem to fit, we have advanced in the reconstruction of our particular puzzle. Neither trying to find all the pieces which could fit. We have a gap and we try to fill it, and our brain is very, but very good finding patterns and correlations even where there aren’t any. So maybe there’s a relation between being dumped by a girl, and my current insecurity with women; but that doesn’t mean much. Maybe the pieces have a similar colour, but actually they’re in different parts of the puzzle.

If I’d look further, maybe I already had insecurity with women before that. When trying to match pieces in the gap, I’ve added an extra burden that, in my opinion, could interfere in the solution, or make the resolution of the problem harder. Maybe that piece could have made the gap more noticeable, but it doesn’t have to be part of the problem. As many psychologist suggest in depressive cases, it’s better to regain contact with positive experiences in life, than to try to find the causes of the depression. Unfortunately, many of us don’t act like that, simply due to our instincts. We must realize how negative it could be the dance of pieces and gaps, of problems and past events. Better start from where we are, without revisiting old and depressing places.

And the best of it all is that this point of view allows me to ignore peacefully a burden, a part of my life that I don’t want to have influence in my current life. When trying to fit the pieces, I allowed that a part of my past kept influencing in my present. I start to think if she dumped me because I’m not worth it, or if it had to do with the fact that she was much more messed up mentally than myself, or whatever. But that’s not going to help me much, because maybe it has more to do with other different pieces or gaps, than with the particular gap I’m trying to fill and understand. What I was doing was enlarging artificially a gap so a piece could fit, when it simply wasn’t needed.

When realizing that I didn’t need to put that piece there, and even that there was no space for that piece there, I advanced a bit towards completing the gap. And that’s what this is about, isn’t it? And I did it simplifying the thing, instead of making it more complex with things that, although somewhat related, shouldn’t affect it more than we allow them to do.

It’s a very satisfying feeling fitting a piece which was using too much mental space; but it’s even more satisfying realizing that the piece, the burden, doesn’t have to make a presence in our present, besides a simple memory, a past experience. The same we can create an artificial need for a piece in a gap, we can also make the gap smaller so that piece isn’t needed anymore.

The understanding of this simple concept allows me to leave behind burdens that I’ve dragged along with me for a long time. I’ve managed to get rid of memories or traumas that I’ve deformed with beating and pushing them around, that I transformed in ghosts much larger than they should be. Now I can put them in that corner of the puzzle called “past experiences”, and concentrate in solving my current problems only with the necessary pieces, without traumas or unneeded burdens which affect my ability to face those problems. And it’s pretty impressive to see how many of those burdens I’ve been able to left behind, to be able to start from scratch, or as closer to scratch as my small and complex pieces and gaps allow me.

Introspection and self-analysis, the reasoning without self-deceit, they are still needed, but now the rules they work under are more bearable, less onerous for our self. Using another analogy, we could finally make a true cleaning; get rid of the spiderwebs and old, useless stuff, and throw them through the window (or at least corner them in a room to not see them continuously). And when the cleaning is done, we’ll have more space, and that space will be more clear. But that’s another analogy which shouldn’t be carried too far either.

To resume, our self is like a puzzle; but it’s not exactly like a puzzle. It’s more complex, more flexible, more ductile. As gaps are created by problems, we can also create pieces with the solutions, without using past traumas. And at the same time this allows that the process is more simple and easy. Maybe it’s equally difficult to solve a problem, but maybe the solution, although still hard, might be more clear and understandable.

This is the second version of this article, and as the previous version, it’s dedicated to Rebeka, the little wonder who gave me the book which inspired this article.

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