The Mind Machine

Here’s an embarrassing truth about humanity: the thing we use to understand everything is the thing we understand the least. If you don’t believe me, just look up “how does the mind work?” and see how everyone dances around the issue. You either get a bunch of technical information about the brain, or you get a lot of spiritual meditative self-helpy stuff. We probably skip over the real issue because we’d rather not admit how little we really understand about it.

This makes me kinda salty because I went to college for TEN YEARS to understand the mind (no, I’m not a brain surgeon, I’m just a slow learner). But no matter how long I waited for someone to give me the keys to psychology, I was never really taught how the mind actually functions or what its purpose is. Then I realized, it’s probably because we don’t really know! So I made my own system by taking the laws of physics and applying them to the mind, and boiled it all down to a four-stroke engine.

Yep, you're mind is a lawnmower.

That might feel pretty alienating and cold, like I’m trying to strip away your sense of individuality and control, or rip your soul out of your nose. But our need to be unique and in control is exactly what got us so confused in the first place, because if everything is unique, nothing can be nailed down into a system. What’s wrong with not nailing it down? Well, we are rapidly approaching the Anthropocene, and the very fate of the planet hinges on what humans will do next with our minds. Unless we get a handle on our heads, we’re going to find ourselves stacked up in wheelbarrows by some guy shouting “Bring out your dead!” and I don’t like wheelbarrows or corpses, or being a corpse in a wheelbarrow.  

So if you are tired of being in the dark about yourself, if you'd like to see what hard science has to say about our softest science questions, take three deep breaths and follow me…

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A summary of mental combustion                  

1. fuel     

2. time                

3. information                

4. fuel pump

5. intake                         

6. compression

7. spark  

8. combustion 

9. axle/output shaft  

10. exhaust 

11. valve overlap                               

            Mental combustion, just like physical and mechanical combustion, is a four-stroke process of intake, compression, power, and exhaust. This cycle involves fuel, an oxidizer, oil, a fuel pump, and a spark. In combination, these elements enable us to generate work to turn the axle or output shaft of this engine, and fulfill our needs. The various components of our mind’s fuel-to-work mechanism is explained below.

1. Fuel:  The mind runs on psychological fuel, which is made by the environmental events we participate in. Those can be either self-generated by our own behaviors, or created by forces outside of ourselves. The mind also uses calories from the brain to fuel itself.

2. Oxidizers: All machines require an oxidizer to combust fuel, and the human oxidizers are space and time. Time allows us to convert fuel, move energy, and exhaust waste, while it continuously erodes the constructive and destructive work our machines perform.

3. Information: Information is essential for our work process, it serves a function similar to oil, lubricating the combustion chamber to ensure a smooth and fluid workflow. We use information to secure fuel, navigate the environment, and effectively match our needs with our actions.

4. Fuel pump: Humans follow a schedule of behaviors to ensure we fulfill our needs in a consistent and balanced manner. Our life routines enable us to coordinate with outside energy systems and fuel resources.

5. Intake:  We receive signals about emerging needs that drive the piston down, creating a vacuum that sucks in psychological fuel. Or, the fuel pump of daily routine and schedule injects our systems with the fuel we require, even if our needs aren’t pressing. Fuel can be imposed upon us by the environment even without our planful consent, but the work it produces is always subjectively determined.

6. Compression: The mind perceives and makes meaning of the fuel that has been sucked into the combustion chamber. Compression engages thinking, planning, decision-making, and emotional sensations, so that fuel can be extracted according to the needs they impact.

7. Spark:  The fire of combustion is lit with a spark, and for us, this is motivation. When we reach an activation threshold, and we have sufficient emotional charge to drive our behavior, the spark ignites fuel and enables work to be made.

8. Power:  This is where fuel is burned to generate constructive or destructive work.

9. Axle/output shaft:  All of our work turns the axle or output shaft of the axia to produce our functional outcomes. For humans, this axle is need-fulfillment, our internal and external achievement, experiential and survival needs. All work is eventually eroded away by time.

Although I describe the first eight steps as sequential, it’s important to remember they really happen all at once. We feel our needs, adhere to a schedule, interact with the environment, behave, perceive and process information, feel motivation to act, and perform work on our needs in one burst. In four stroke engines, all four phases of combustion happen in milliseconds, and the same is true for the mind. The only phase that really takes very long is the exhaust phase.

1. Exhaust: After sixteen hours of intaking, compressing, and powering psychological fuel into psychological work, the mind enters the exhaust, or sleeping phase. In order to exhaust, the mind’s fuel intake valve must close, and this causes almost all work to stop. At the same time, the chamber’s exhaust valve opens, enabling the spent fuel to be pushed out. During exhaust, we refresh and replenish the machine, clean it out, and reset the combustion cycle. Even during the exhaust phase, we must sustain safety monitoring and breathing, an activation that produces our dreaming state.

2. Valve overlap:  Once the exhaust phase is complete, the camshaft (this is actually brain chemicals and the medulla that control circadian rhythm) engages the valve overlap to close our exhaust valve and reopen the intake valve. That’s how we go from asleep to awake. Once fuel starts flowing through the system again, our sense of alert orientation, identity, and consciousness returns, and we repeat the 1-2-3 intake-compression-power cycles throughout the day.

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WHAT DOES THE MIND MACHINE DO?

The mind has one purpose, making you interact with your environment in a way that fulfills and protects your needs. The human need system is called THE AXIA, it includes six categories of need, in an open energy system. 

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These needs are:

Survival:   The need for food, water, breathing, temperature control, safety, and procreation.

Achievement:  Things we do for the product they yield, the end result, the productivity goals we reach with a given action. Achievement behaviors aren’t done for the process, they are done for the outcome. When something makes you feel accomplished, successful, productive, or powerful, you are fulfilling an achievement need.

Experiential:  The things you do for the process of doing them, not for the product those actions yield. It’s play and leisure, what you enjoy and have fun doing. The purpose is the process, not the product.

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All human needs break down into the Internal and External categories. Internal needs are for yourself, and External needs are for other people. Since we are interdependent, other people’s needs are part of our own needs, and vice versa.

All of our needs are met with energy that flows through us, and since we run on energy, humans follow the laws of thermodynamics. Every energy system in the universe, from cars, to squirrels, to planetary bodies, to single fuel cells, must follow the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change forms. You might not realize it, but this unassuming little law is, by orders of magnitude, the most powerful force in human life. It shapes how we think, behave, operate, and live from the time we are born to the time we die, and we usually don’t give it more than a glancing thought.

But since the success of our lives and the health of our being is determined by how well and how completely we get out needs met, and if needs are met with limited energy, then everything hinges on efficiency and balance. We must distribute our limited energy evenly between our various needs, giving enough to our survival, achievement, and experiential categories, and ensuring that we give enough to ourselves and to other people, back and forth. Above all else, we must strive to waste as little energy as we can, and stretch our fuel as far as it will go, so as many needs are satisfied as possible.

The degree to which a need is fulfilled or depleted is called axity, and it’s a really important determinant of how we feel and behave toward ourselves. Axity is what we typically think of as “self-esteem” or “self-worth” and it’s built when energy flows toward our needs. We have two main types, internal axity is made when you fulfill your own needs, and external axity is made when you fulfill the needs of other people. Having a lot of internal axity might mean you are neglecting the needs of other people, and having a lot of external axity might mean you are neglecting your own needs. Since unmet needs create pathology and relationship dysfunction, it’s important for us to remain balanced in how much energy we give either internally or externally.

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