What's going on in your head? (um, literally)

Aphantasia, myelin sheaths, and why I didn't want to get the ladder out of the garage

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

A little departure from writing today, although not that far because anyone interested in writing should also have an almost unhealthy interest in what goes on in people’s heads. My alternate career, if I couldn’t write, would be psychotherapist: I’m fascinated by how we act out the ghosts of our childhoods, sabotage our own happiness, get stuck in patterns and occasionally even escape them. All these behaviours apply to characters in thrillers, romance, literary fiction, biography… pretty much any kind of story. How can you write well if your characters don’t display the same, fallible traits?

But recently I’ve been discovering that there are far greater differences between our brains than I had thought. That might sound a little ridiculous – of course everyone is different. But lately it’s been brought home to me quite how much we experience and process in astonishingly different ways.

It began with ADHD. I know, I know, everyone has an ADHD diagnosis these days (actually, they really don’t). Someone close to me received a late age diagnosis and for the past couple of years I have been on a journey of understanding. Mostly that my brain works in the exact opposite way to theirs. There are lots of well-known executive function challenges that someone with ADHD faces: difficulties getting started on things, challenges to focus, impulsive behaviour, and some less-known traits: hyperfocus (where the ADHD person can literally work for HOURS non stop) and rejection sensitive dysphoria (where an argument feels like the end of everything in far more dramatic way than it does for a non-ADHD person). The best description I heard of ADHD came from a friend’s son, who said the inside of his head felt like ‘post-it notes in a wind tunnel’.

I have other friends who have late diagnosis autism and we talk a lot about our different ways of experiencing and coping with the world. One of the things I particularly love about those friends is their absolute honesty. They have no ‘side’, and I find that particularly nice to be around.

But this new awareness of how differently brains can work led to other revelations. A few weeks ago, a friend happened to mention their ‘internal narrator’.

“Your what?” I asked.

“You know, the voice in your head.”

Me: “What voice in your head?”

“You know, the one that says ‘oh this is going well’, ‘oh he’s not going to like that’. You know, the commentator.” And then, when he saw my disbelieving face. “What, you …. don’t have one?”

Me: “No.”

Him: “You’re kidding. Then what happens in your head when you’re doing stuff?”

Me: “I don’t know… silence?”

We stared at each other like we had just discovered we were speaking two different languages. But that wasn’t all. A family member recently mentioned that they couldn’t ‘see’ things in their imagination. If I were to talk about an orange, he explained, he would understand intellectually what I meant, but he couldn’t actually create an image of it. He just knew that it was round, and orange-coloured and sort of created an orange in theory.

Again, reader, after some interrogation (“but you must be able to see it!”) I stared at him slack-jawed. But he had already looked this phenomenon up and it is a thing. It is called aphantasia, and while it was discovered in 1880, has been relatively unstudied until ten years ago. And yet an estimated 4% of the population has it.

Seeing things is how I write; I literally play through scenes cinematically before I write them. So this really got me thinking about how different life must be for him. If I had that, I’m not sure I could write.

It also got me thinking about how much better we all might get on if we understood our differences stemmed from not just our beliefs, or our learned behaviours, but because we literally experience the world physiologically – chemically or structurally - in different ways.

An example: the other night it was excessively warm in my kitchen, where my dogs sleep. Just before bedtime my partner announced that he was going to get the enormous three tier ladder from the garage and use it to try and open a window unreachable from the ground. I protested: that window hadn’t been opened since moving in, I had no idea where the keys were, it was late, the ladder was enormous and would crash into the furniture. All I could see was chaos, damage and a late night spent looking for lost keys and digging around in a dark, spidery garage. He was frustrated with my refusal to let him try.

A grumpy half hour later we talked about our respective reactions – and realized: This was our brains at work. My brain, it turns out, projects forward all the time. I am apparently incapable of doing anything without simultaneously calculating the consequences. I think I’ve probably done it all my life. All I could see was problems, and a late night. His brain generally operates in the present. All he thought was: “It’s too hot. I’ll open the window for the dogs and make Jojo happy”.  Once we understood these vagaries of each other’s cerebellar operating systems, harmony was restored (and the dogs slept upstairs).

We all have a wider vocabulary when it comes to people’s brains and their operating systems these days, and it’s not just ADHD. Instagram is rife with it. No discussion of a toxic ex takes place without someone bringing up narcissism – which is not just an insult to bandy about, but a signifier that a person literally does not have the ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. There are neural pathways in there that are simply missing.

And once you understand those differences – that often can’t be helped – it’s very hard to get mad at someone in the same way (although yes, H, you still need to tidy your room).

Did you know that when you have an argument, and your body goes into fight-or-flight mode (raging, door-slamming, shutting down, however you experience it) there is a part of your brain – the part that deals with reason – that literally shuts down? And that it cannot be accessed again for around 20 minutes? So the old fashioned advice to go for a walk makes actual chemical sense. Let the adrenaline and cortisol levels drop. Once you know that there’s no sense to be had for a bit, it becomes much easier to step away and calm down.

We are also told that good habits come from repetition. You have to do something again and again, eg writing 1000 words a day to create a habit. But it turns out there is a structural reason in your brain for this. If you write 1000 words a day for a week, for example, you create a new neural pathway. But if you keep on doing it, that neural pathway is gradually covered with something called a myelin sheath, which makes it stronger and more established. If you don’t, the neural pathway can be washed away like a footprint in the sand. My years of journalism – where I didn’t have a choice to not write – have apparently left me with industrial-strength myelin sheaths all over my writing brain (lovely image, that). It’s relatively easy for me to sit down and start writing because I am literally wired to do it (yes that is the sound of me finding some nearby wood to touch…)

There are far more scientific and probably better expressed variations on this topic out there on the internet if you’re interested. But to me the implications are fascinating. Can you imagine the prospects for world peace if every time a leader felt that their emotion levels were dangerously high, they were forced to take time out until the reason-section of their brain had kicked in again?

Right. I’m off to try and be more impulsive. As long as I can get this finished first.

xx