I’ve got a touch of insomnia at the moment, which is why I’m writing this in the middle if the night. This is my theme tune. This is the extended mix. I used to love Max Headroom back in the day.

Travis Bickle suffered insomnia, as did the unnamed protagonist of Fight Club. It didn’t end well for those guys.

It was 11 months before my boy learnt to sleep through the night, during which time we, as you’d expect, assigned a new value to sleep, and now have a much greater appreciation for the purple cloak. So now, when he’s finally sleeping through most nights and I can sleep as much as I need, I’m lying awake at 3am with a chattering brain that just won’t shut up.

Why do we have these ridiculously over-productive brains? Why do they never shut up? This constant thinking doesn’t seem to have any real survival advantage. It is not a constant state of readiness to react to threats to our survival; these night-time thoughts are rarely processing of current stimuli, they are more often replaying old events, fretting over imagined scenarios or pure flights of fancy. In evolutionary biology terms, thinking uses up a lot of energy, energy we could save for other more pertinent survival techniques, like running away.

It is near impossible for us to shut our brains off, to simply stop thinking. The Buddhists claim to be able to do it with meditation, I’m not sure I believe them. If we attempt to empty our mind and think of absolutely nothing we cannot, as soon as the void is there another thought will pop up to fill it. Try it, prove me wrong, please.

But all the other animals we share our planet with seem capable of emptying their minds with ease. George, my old cat, used spend many happy hours just staring into space, occasionally checking her bowl to see if any food has miraculously appeared. You’d never hear of a cat suffering insomnia.

There are theories for this of course. Dr Susan Blackmore had crazy one in her book The Meme Machine, where she posited a theory of the human race as simple virus carriers – our brains have grown to four times their required size in order to house the memes that rule us, who fuel our advances in communication skills and technologies in order to replicate. Her idea isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds, although she was probably stretching the concept of memetics a little far. But I’m yet to come up with a better one as I lie staring at the ceiling in the dark for hours on end.

tags: memes brain science zen

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 11:42 pm and is filed under introspection, philosophy, zen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.