Inspiration

The human brain is one of the most mysterious objects in the known universe, which is ironic given that all of us have one, sitting right there inside our skull.

The ongoing existential crisis that I seem to have been living through since about 2018 has caused me to reflect a lot on the nature of the brain.

As Homer Simpson famously said of beer, the brain is both the cause of and solution to almost all of life’s problems.

Because, in a very real sense, I am just my brain.

The conscious experience it produces is my entire experience of the world.

Were I to be placed in a medically induced coma, in which the light of consciousness went out, though my body may still be alive, my existence would, from my perspective, have ended.

And not only is the brain the filtering system through which we experience reality, it also constantly hums with activity that we - our conscious selves - aren’t even privy to.

And I’m not just referring to unconscious processes like breathing, or the rhythmic beating of our hearts.

Benjamin Libet was a pioneering neuroscientist who explored the relationship between the self and the brain in the 1960s.

In one of his experiments, participants were asked to perform a simple voluntary action (like flexing their wrist or raising their finger) whilst watching a fast-moving clock.

They reported the moment they first became aware of the intention to move.

Libet measured brain activity and found that the readiness potential, a type of brain activity indicating preparation for movement, started several hundred milliseconds before participants reported their conscious decision to act.

In other words, our brain often decides what we are going to do before ‘we’ think we have come to a decision.

We’re all intuitively aware of this when we stop and consider it.

‘Thinking’ itself isn’t about stopping to evaluate every given option from the ground up before making an informed choice.

When you talk, you don’t have to pause before every word to judge its suitability against every other possible word.

The words and sentences just come out of you; we often feel like we’re encountering them for the first time as they emerge from our mouths.

As Sam Harris points out, if someone asks you to name a film, the title of a film will simply appear in your consciousness, straight out of the darkness.

You don’t run through a neural inventory of every film you’ve ever heard of and pick one off the mental shelf.

You might be able to post-rationalize your choice: maybe you thought of a film you’d seen recently, or something about the situation you’re currently sat in reminded you of it.

But that still doesn’t mean ‘you’ selected it in any real way.

It still just popped into your head.

If you had been asked the question an hour later, you probably would have come up with an entirely different answer.

The ancient Romans understood this.

Our word ‘inspiration’, specifically the verb ‘to inspire’, comes from the Latin ‘inspirare’, which means ‘to breathe into’.

It shares an etymological root with words like ‘respire’.

Because the Romans recognized that, often, having an idea feels like you have been possessed by the spirit of something else.

Sometimes that can be pretty tiring.

Writer’s block is a concept we’re all familiar with, and it’s easy to empathize with the frustration it must create.

When the dam bursts, though, and ideas pour forth constantly at the most inconvenient times, it can be just as difficult.

On a recent trip abroad, I found myself asleep in a berth on a Vietnamese cruise ship, anchored for the night somewhere deep within the ethereal islands of Ha Long Bay.

It was an overnight stay, and I was sharing the cabin with my brother.

A local fisherman, were they incredibly unfortunate, would have been amazed at 4am to see an Englishman standing entirely naked on his balcony overlooking the water, whistling as quietly as he could into an iPhone.

Because you don’t know when inspiration is going to strike.

Ideas don’t care whether you’re asleep, on a date, in the gym, or at a funeral.

The only thing you do know about them is that they can disappear just as quickly as they arrive.

There are currently 439 voice memos on my iPhone.

Almost all of them consist of me whistling something breathily into it.

I’d estimate that about 420 of those melodies will never see the light of day again.

The problem is, though, that you never know whether the melody that has gripped you will turn out to be one of the 420 useless bits of nothing or one of the 19 little nuggets that eventually turn into a song you might not hate.

This can be awkward in social situations.

I’ve found myself trying surreptitiously to whistle into my iPhone in the back of an Uber, for example, which is weird behavior by anyone’s standards.

It’s not even like you can explain what it is you’re doing to the driver without sounding utterly pretentious.

And the dangers of inspiration don’t end there.

Once you have an idea you like, you have to do something with it.

This can mean hours, sometimes days, of torturously fleshing, trialing, and refining it until it becomes something resembling a song.

This can be completely consuming - but not in the pleasant way you’re consumed by a great novel, or a TV drama; more like the way you are consumed by trying to disentangle an impervious knot, or driven to obsessively scratch at a mosquito bite.

Worse still: there’s no guarantee you’re going to like whatever is left once you’re finished.

A fact that makes whistling naked on a boat in Ha Long Bay all the more embarrassing.

But what else is there to do?

Keep dreaming,

Rob