The Inner Movie
Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash
Our brains are incredibly active. In fact, they are endlessly active from birth until death.
The brain doesn’t wait until it is stimulated from the outside in order to turn on and react. Instead, it is constantly active, something that neuroscientists call intrinsic brain activity.
What is the brain doing with all this activity?
In part, it is keeping everything running inside, but it is also constantly trying to predict or anticipate what is coming next. The brain is not a reaction machine, but a prediction machine.
The brain takes all our past experience to date and uses it to constantly anticipate our next sensation, next necessary movement of our body, next sound we might hear, what the source of that sound might be, and on and on.
A lot of how we experience that predictive activity is unconscious to us, interwoven with our perception of the world.
But this constant prediction-making is also what we experience as our thoughts.
In other words, this is what thoughts are. Thoughts are the subjective experience of our brain’s constant predicting and anticipating of what comes next.
It’s not uncommon for our thoughts to seem louder when we step away from the stimulation of the outside world for a while, either because we are about to go to sleep, we are just by ourselves for a while, or we’re trying to do something like meditate.
They aren’t really louder, it’s just that the brain goes on making predictions, even without much going on outside of us to make predictions about. Without the outside world guiding or tuning our internal predictions, the brain just floats off like an increasingly odd stream-of-consciousness movie anticipating what comes next in reaction to its own previous prediction.
Relating to Our Inner Movie
It’s not uncommon to hear clients say how troubled they are by the thoughts that come through their mind. They’ll have a thought, whether as words or images, that they don’t want to have and that they don’t like, or that they’re worried mean something about who they are.
So, there’s good news and bad news.
The bad news is that we can’t turn off our thoughts. In fact, trying to force our thoughts to stop or change directions often just stirs us up even more inside, like trying to stop the ripples in a pond by jumping into the water and grabbing at them.
The good news is that the thoughts don’t mean anything about us. They are just our brains having thrown all past experience into a blender and tossed the result up into consciousness if it seems at all related to the current situation.
The other good news is that our thoughts don’t end up being nearly as troubling to us as our reactions to those thoughts when we try to make them go away. Most of our internal suffering comes more from the “I don’t want to think that” than the thought itself.
It may be more helpful to think of our brain like an inner movie director. Our inner director’s job is just to constantly keep creating movies in our head, whether we are awake (as thoughts and daydreams) or asleep (as dreams).
You can’t stop the movie. It’s your brain’s job.
What you can do is change your relationship to the movie. No need to take the contents of the movie personally, as if they mean something about you. No need to try to stop or control what comes up in the movie.
You can actually practice breaking the trance of being so focused on the internal movie of your thoughts and simply lose interest, like being bored watching a movie on your phone and so looking up and noticing what’s around you even as the movie keeps playing on your phone.
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