Gotham Diary:
My Two Brains
The weather was glorious this morning — that is the only true word for it. Cool and clear and breezy and bright. To run an errand before lunch, I wore what I like to wear when I go out: pleated slacks, a colorful shirt, a light sports jacket (you might call it a “coat,” as in “coat and tie”), and an Ivy cap. It is grand to be comfortable in town clothes.
Walking out of the building onto the driveway, I felt so on top of things that it scared me: surely such an access of serenity must herald a disaster. But as I made my way up 86th Street — I was toting a bag of dry cleaning to Perry Process — I felt that the disaster was all behind me. I believed that I had earned this sense of being right with the world — finally. Most people enjoy it when they’re young, in the first flush of adulthood. But it seemed to me not only that fifty-odd years of poking and questioning and falling all over myself was enough, already, but that it had finally yielded results. My life felt like the clearest of fountains.
Of course, I tremble to write any of this down. Am I crazy? Do I crave a visit from the gods of irony — or, for that matter, from the Old Testament divinity who took everything away from Job? I know that everything in my life could go spectacularly wrong right this second, beginning with sudden physiological failures and working outwards toward mischiefs like identity theft. The horror of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man is never far from my imagination’s grasp — something that may explain my perennially guilty conscience.
But I’m learning, from Web sites like Jonah Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex, and books like Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, that it’s a mistake to confuse the belief that things are going well with the knowledge of their frailty. These rival and inconsistent states of mind cohabit the cranium with frictionless ease. That’s because they inhabit different regions of the brain. I’ve learned, just in the past couple of days, to think of myself as a “frontal agnostic.” The advenced — perhaps “pre-frontal” is the word — regions of my grey matter (evolutionarily recent puddles of intelligence shimmering in the folds somewhere just behind my eyebrows) know that — well, the whole point is that they don’t know anything. Here, life is a matter of working hypotheses and go-bags. It’s in the vaster, richer interior of the old bean that I savor life’s pleasure with a constitutional inability to imagine its being taken away.
The big challenge of this wonderful new way of being intelligent is keeping the agnostic brain from spoiling the back-brain’s fun, while at the same time making sure that the pleasure centers never get their hands on the car keys.