The ascending and descending mind, the two layers

Have you ever heard someone say that an idea came to them out of nowhere? Beyond the philosophical debate about nothing and its properties, we cannot create something out of nothing. Of course, like any invention that has preceded it, most of the things we think of, including innovations, are the fruit of many neural processes. Sometimes these are more visible and tangible than others. For example, when we go to the market to buy groceries for lunch and, while passing by the cleaning products section, we remember that we need to buy soap. It is not that we had the spontaneous idea to buy it, but something in our mind associated and concluded that we will soon run out of soap and, therefore, we should buy a new one.

Similarly, some of the ideas, especially those we call spontaneous, work within our life or experience. The deepest part of our brain is making calculations, associations and other interpretations of all the data, leading us to think, for example, that we should start a business distributing books based on personality. In this case, it may be that my fascination with reading and my love and passion for entrepreneurship lead me to conceive something striking and brilliant. How my mind comes up with that, we may never find out.

There are two authors (actually, there are two, but one passed away years before the book and many of the studies were conducted). Their names are Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, a pair of psychologists who discovered that the human mind is more complex than we usually think. In a simple and undetailed way, they found that we have two types of independent mental processing, two different processes of how we interpret information in our lives. The book that was very famous several years ago (and still is) is called "Thinking, Fast and Slow," and it's basically what defines us mentally.

On the one hand, we have the system that in this book they call ascending. This is a set of processes and a section of the brain that specializes in decision speed. It is the mind that we use for our basic instincts and, at the same time, one of the oldest sections of the human brain. In many cases, it is involuntary and automatic, making decisions based on experience and a learning purpose that it has had throughout each person's life. The way it works is fascinating, since we need time to develop the ascending mind. It is the mind that develops from childhood, where we begin to learn, for example, to read facial expressions or with which we normally acquire our mother tongue. When we see something new, a neural network is formed that we can see as an act of cause and effect. A classic example is the crying of a baby, who learns that by crying he obtains food. As babies learn things like this, they understand that by crying they manage to obtain food, or in the same way, once they have learned to speak, if they say "hungry" or "food", they obtain food. This is done through an emotional experience, and it makes sense, since from the brain level, the region that manages our emotions is connected to this mind.

On the other hand, we have the descending mind, which is the part found in the front of the brain. It is a much more advanced version of thinking. Unlike the ascending mind, this is the one we use when we face complex situations, such as learning a new language. Once we are adults, learning a language is more complex because we have to use our head manually. We have to start by understanding new alphabets, grammar rules, irregular cases, and so on. So, the descending mind is an expert at learning. Once we have studied for many years, the descending mind creates new neural networks and thinking that would have been difficult before is now easier. An example that most people know is driving. At first, you embark on driving lessons, brake badly, your car stalls, you feel nervous, and you have to be extremely focused on the road. But after one or two years of driving constantly, there are people who do it automatically. There have even been cases where people who have been driving for 20 years do not remember what they saw on the way from home to work because they did it so automatically (using the bottom-up system) that it was an automatic process. They freed up their minds to think about how to solve a problem at work or understand what they did to upset their partner the day before.

In relation to this, we can understand that attention, therefore, is a faculty of the top-down system. Focusing on an action, lesson, or event depends on the top-down mind, as it is an unknown universe. We use our mind attentively and avoid being in automatic mode, which often takes over and we end up not paying attention or remembering what was said in a meeting or in a class. We do not use our top-down mind to see the beauty of a sunset. In these cases, we are not using high processing, but rather we are enjoying an experience and focusing on it. What we do use is that we allocate our attention resources using the system associated with the top-down mind; otherwise, we may wander off into whatever thoughts we have.

Related to these two-mind events are high-performance athletes, especially in some practices more than others. Athletes who dedicate themselves to hurdling races reach a level of lifelong practice where the circuits they use when running are not the downhill circuits. They don't think about what they are doing; they run automatically using the uphill circuit. Therefore, when they set out to ask themselves how they are running, if their technique is correct, they often lose their performance because they start using the downhill circuit, when the uphill circuit has already been mastered by the exercise for which they have trained all their lives.

Now, the mind is a double-edged sword. In some cases, it helps us develop amazing skills like speech, a second language, or the ability to drive. But it also contributes to negative habits. Think of people who, immediately after a negative or emotionally charged event, start drinking alcohol, or people with social anxiety who, at the first hint of a rejection signal, become upset and miserable. These events, over time, become more and more marked until they reach the point where they happen automatically, and we are not aware that an event has happened. We just feel miserable and walk away if someone gives us a dirty look for a second. This happens because of the connection between emotion regulation and the bottom-up system. Conversely, thanks to evolution, we have the other system that allows us to rationalize what is happening and look for alternatives. Instead of feeling miserable, we can think about what is happening and, through self-control, prevent emotions from taking over. This part of self-awareness is key to regulating when we are too elated or too miserable. It helps us restrain emotions and focus on the facts. The self-control sections are located in the left prefrontal area, and the emotions section is located in the amygdala, one of the innermost corners of the brain.

Depending on our history and processes, one of the two systems tends to have more influence. People with depression often have problems in the prefrontal part or in the amygdala, decreasing or increasing, respectively, the influence on mental attention.