I'm thinking, I'm thinking about thinking...

We should be allowed to say “I do not know” when we really do not know. In many situations, like in legislative hearings and typical reunions that encourage a show of one-upmanship, I am inclined to suspect there is a circuit that sends a tingle up your spine if you say “I do not know.” Why, that is the only reason I could think of as to why people respond to questions with circuitous and irrelevant answers instead of just saying that they do not know. In most cases, I suspect that people do not even have an idea of what they know and what they do not really know.

The ability to think about your own thinking is called introspection. Being introspective is where you examine your own thoughts and even if you do not make a career out of it, is a requirement for sanity. I asked neurologist Dr. Joven Cuanang about this and he thinks “it is a way of understanding oneself and maybe an instrument to cleanse the mind. Therefore, it keeps the one who practices it sane!”

Being reflective is different from giving the right answer. It has to do with turning inward to see where you are in your thinking about the answer you are about to give. But thanks to neuroscience, we could forget my theory about a circuit that zaps you when you reflect. It seems that instead, there is a brain part that “glows” a lot when people are introspective.

I listened to a podcast (Sept. 17, 2010) at NPR.org that featured Stephen Fleming of the University College London as he explained a study on introspection and the brain that he and his colleagues conducted. Their study was published in the journal Science recently. It involved 32 healthy adults whom they asked to look at some patches on the screen to see which patch was the brightest. Then they were asked how confident they were about their answer (regardless of whether the answer is correct or not). That step was to give an indication of how reflective a subject was during the test. Then the brains of the subjects were scanned by MRI machines. The verdict was that introspection seemed to sit at a brain part behind your eyes toward your right, within the larger region of your prefrontal cortex (which is really responsible for “high level” thinking such as identity etc.). This part is called the right anterior prefrontal cortex and they found that if you think about thinking a lot, there is more gray matter (more connections) in that area as well as a difference in the structure of white matter in the surrounding parts.

It does not mean, however, that if you have more gray matter in that part of your brain, you are definitely Mr. or Ms. Philosopher extraordinaire. No one is sure yet whether this increased gray matter in that particular part in introspective brains was the result or the cause of a habit of reflection. So far, what they could only say is that these are related. How? They do not know yet and they had enough introspection to say that.

But what the researchers really want to do now is take the studies further to see how they could use this finding to help unravel the mysteries of mental illnesses that exhibit this absence of introspection. Stephen Fleming, in a separate interview reported in ScienceDaily last Sept 16, said there is a crucial difference if you are aware of your own mental illness and if you are not as it could spell the difference in one’s rehabilitation or recovery.

Socrates wrote that the unexamined life is not worth living. In my own personal chronicle of learning, it was followed over two millennia later by an operational definition by Miss Galang, my high school English teacher. She taught us to take our time before we raise our hands to answer her questions, to take a few seconds first to think it through. And lately, science has even thrown its bit to tell us that the more you reflect, the more “filled” your brain seems to be. Am not a neuroscientist so am allowed to think metaphorically about this study. And I say, hey, the more you “fill” your own brain, the less room you would have in your head for rent.

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