Can the brain really assemble such a beautiful poetic narrative on the spot without any preparation or planning? Well not the average person’s brain, of course, and certainly not my brain because I don’t have those poetic reserves in my neural library. But I was skeptical that even the stories of the great Garrison Keillor did not require a lot of advanced editing. He claims that the nervousness on stage facilitates the poetry, while I have a hard time viewing nervousness as anything more than paralyzing.
Well I stumbled upon a passage in Vernon Smith’s autobiography Discovery – A Memoir that (to me) convincingly describes the logic of how such brilliant unconscious assemblage is possible.
With lots of experience and practice, it may be possible for people to become less self-consciously aware of how they are coming off in public speaking. The mind is hell-bent on preparation for everything, including any oral presentation, by outlining in advance what it should talk about when the time comes. The mind fears that the brain cannot be trusted to organize its knowledge in real time. This is because the mind mistakenly and egoistically thinks the brain works incoherently in fits and starts, and requires executive control by the mind to keep it on track. It would be more accurate, however, to say that the brain develops the order that emerges and then deceptively proceeds to fool the mind into thinking the mind is in control of that emergent order.
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Somehow, brain to mind to natural language is a monitoring/translation process that entails high transaction costs and interferes with communication with other brains/minds. But one can learn to skip the middleman we call the mind and let the brain do the talking.
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The planning mind can operate only on the basis of memories of similar past experiences and try to anticipate a speech-delivery event in an imagined future. When that future arrives the brain is there. Nothing about the context and circumstances needs now to be imagined. All the mind has it the stuff it thought up earlier, on the basis of a forecast, and it has no current input unless it returns to the well. The brain can bypass all those stored prepared-paper notes, go directly to the primary input memory sources, and redo it all by directly translating its mentalese into natural language.
