I can be in the middle of thinking about something and discover that my body has other plans. It needs lunch. It needs water. It would like me to stop staring at a screen and go to sleep. None of these are unreasonable requests, but I tend to receive them as interruptions. There is work to do, and the thing doing the work keeps needing to be looked after.
This is a strange way to understand being alive. I know that. Still, I often behave as though the thinking part is me and everything below it is equipment. Hands for typing, legs for getting somewhere, eyes for taking things in. Eat, sleep, repeat. Keep the equipment running so the person can get on with her day.
Then I look down at my hands for a moment too long. They begin to seem extraordinary: all those small joints moving together without a separate instruction for each one. Or I notice my heartbeat and remember that something has been keeping time inside me through every conversation, every book, every ordinary afternoon. I am responsible for so little of what is keeping me here.
Thinking about the brain makes this harder to ignore. The tissue we study is also what makes studying possible. It takes part in remembering a name, understanding a sentence, feeling attached to someone. Ideas that seem to belong to a completely different order of things — love, justice, mathematics — depend on a living nervous system. Knowing that in theory hasn't made it feel ordinary.
What unsettles me is how personal the machinery is. Changes to the brain can change memory, language, attention, perception, and personality. The body isn't simply helping an otherwise complete self express itself. It is involved in the self taking shape. Once I take that seriously, I find it difficult to say where the person ends and the mechanism begins.
Perhaps this helps explain the appeal of imagining a mind that can stand apart from the body. It is easier to picture a person using a machine than a person arising through its activity. From inside my own experience, I feel like an observer looking out. But that feeling doesn't establish that there is a separate observer tucked away somewhere. It may be part of the very process I'm trying to understand.
There is no small version of me behind my eyes, receiving a finished picture of the world. Seeing, thinking, and feeling happen, and they arrive with a strong sense of belonging to someone. I can describe parts of the biology. I still find the experience of being that someone difficult to account for.
A photograph introduces another small difficulty. Someone points to a face and says it's mine. I recognize it, of course. But it belongs to a view of me that other people have direct access to and I don't. I meet my own face through mirrors and pictures. Other people see it while I am busy experiencing something else entirely.
Meanwhile, I know things about being me that a picture can't hold. The almost-words of a thought before I can explain it. The feeling of embarrassment arriving before I've worked out its cause. The particular way a colour appears to me. My visible body and my private experience seem inseparable, yet they are available to people in such different ways.
I keep returning to the assumption hidden in the question ‘what am I supposed to do with a body?’ It sounds as though I existed first and was handed one later. As though there is a clear operator and a clear set of controls. My ordinary days offer very little support for that arrangement.
A bad night's sleep changes the way I think. A smell brings back a memory before I have tried to remember anything. Fear can announce itself in my chest before it becomes a sentence. Music moves me before I can explain what I like about it. The body is already there in the things I tend to call mental.
I don't think noticing this resolves the question. It changes how I ask it. I am trying to understand a life that is happening through a body, including the thoughts that sometimes wish to be independent of it.
Tomorrow I'll probably return to treating most of this as background. I'll eat, move around, work, and eventually sleep. There is something necessary about that forgetting. It would be difficult to answer an email while remaining fully astonished by the fact that I am alive. But every so often, the astonishment returns.