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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

“Why can’t you just relax into it?” is a question many of us have asked in frustration with ourselves or others – be it on the dance floor, the sporting field or in rather more private circumstances. The task typically requires us to respond spontaneously to external events, without any deliberation whatsoever. It ought to be easy – all you have to do is let go – yet it can be infuriatingly difficult.

“Stop thinking about it!” is the standard remedial advice, although cancelling thought with thought is something of a paradox. The retort, “I am trying!”, is equally puzzling, for deliberate intent is precisely what we are here struggling to avoid. So what is this act of choosing not to choose, of consciously relinquishing control over our actions? Our new study, published in Communications Biology [nature.com], has finally provided insights into how this capacity is expressed in the brain.

Astonishingly, this fundamental human phenomenon has no name. It might have escaped academic recognition entirely had the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche [stanford.edu] not given it a brilliant gloss in his first book The Birth of Tragedy [google.co.uk], itself a paradoxical work of philosophy in tacitly encouraging the reader to stop reading and get a drink instead. Whereas other thinkers saw culture on a single continuum, evolving into ever greater refinement, order and rationality, Nietzsche saw it as distributed across two radically different but equally important planes.

Perpendicular to the conventional “Apolline” dimension of culture, he introduced the “Dionysiac”: chaotic, spontaneous, vigorous and careless of the austere demands of rationality. Neither aspect was held to be superior, each may be done badly or well, and both are needed for a civilisation to find its most profound creative expression. Every Batman needs a Joker, he might have said, had he lived in a more comical age.

Of course, Nietzsche was not the first to observe that human beings sometimes behave with wanton abandon. His innovation consisted in realising it is a constitutional characteristic we could and should develop. And as with any behavioural characteristic, the facility to acquire it will vary from one person to another.

Tests were performed with people undergoing an MRI and observed trying to discern which of two nearly simultaneous lights was first illuminated.

We used magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the brains of people performing the task, focusing on white matter – the brain’s wiring. A striking picture emerged. Extensive sections of the wiring of the right prefrontal lobe, a region heavily implicated in complex decision making, was revealed to be stronger in those who were worse at the task: the Apollines. The more developed the neural substrates of volition, it seems, the harder to switch them off.

So, "smarter" people are less able to be spontaneous?

I would posit that those who are more sensitive to negative feedback (i.e. have developed a part of the brain to detect and avoid potentially negative consequences) are less spontaneous. They strongly consider how others react to their actions and such thinking takes time. Those who are less concerned about other's perceptions have a less developed region and thus it takes less time for them to go from conception to action.

Think of the speed of a computer program. Those programs having exhaustive input validation and with thorough error checking of intermediate results run slower than "proof of concept" code which performs only minimal checking, if any at all.

Original Submission