The Taste of Brain Juice
I love it when a plan comes together.
John "Hannibal" Smith
We all love it when things just “click.” When, after staring at a puzzle for an eternity with no signs of progress, the solution suddenly becomes obvious. We call it a “breakthrough,” an “epiphany,” a “eureka moment” that might even make us shout aloud. We want to make noise because we want someone to rush in from the other room, desperate to learn the hidden truth we’ve uncovered. Fortunately, most of us are too humble to think we need an audience for our Sudoku solution, our crossword conquest, our Wordle win. That rush of satisfaction is easy to feel, but hard to share. But if we could explain it to someone else, maybe it would provoke that same feeling. If we could keep finding a fresh audience, maybe we prolong the feeling indefinitely. Maybe we could keep drinking the same brain juice.
When I first saw “brain juice” pop up online it gave me exactly this feeling of satisfaction. It is an elegant term for the pop-science understanding of how the squishy organ in our skulls is responsible for our emotions. I like the word “juice” for this because it sounds as messy and childish as my understanding of how the brain functions. I am enough of a nerd that I might be willing to skim a research paper, but when I see the word “dopamine” used to explain something on the internet I just shrug. I know enough to spot when someone is waving a wand at neuroscience and hoping something useful pops out of the hat. I am not going to make guesses about how neurochemistry is responsible for the personal and social influence of bootleg brain juice. No, I am going to be providing anecdotes, personal exposition, and some uninformed conjecture. “Brain juice” is exactly as scientific as it sounds.
I also like the word “juice” because it makes me think of sugary fruit drinks. Apple, grape, orange – you’ve heard of these. I’m not talking about an energy drink or nutritional supplement that claims it can magically prevent altzheimers while giving you an extra pep in your step. Plain old fruit juices combine instant gratification with a vague promise of health benefits. Puzzles are the same: come for the sweet solution, stay for the dubious claims of general intelligence gains. We desire the taste, but we say it’s good for us. That’s an adult’s rationalization of a child’s impulse. At least, it is for me, and I am forced to face that fact because of how my body reacts to brain juice.
One of my earliest childhood memories is of brain juice. I’m sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce on the carpet in the reading area of my fourth grade classroom. A long, low bookshelf separates this corner from the desk area. It’s a cozy environment for a lesson, so I’m already feeling good even though the topic is tough: fractions. Teacher Annie is giving each of us a turn at the whiteboard to try adding them or something. I probably had seen fractions before, but this is the day I remember. This is the moment it clicked. I don’t know what the numbers were, but I suddenly understood their purpose, that they were useful, not just another thing I had to learn because school expected it. The pieces came together. It felt good. It felt very good. It wasn’t pride, or satisfaction, or joy. It was a unique physical sensation. It rushed through my brain, sent a little shiver down my spine, and made my pulse rush. Fractions did this.
Now, before you go saying “this creep is horny for math,” keep in mind that I was like nine years old, so it is you who is the creep for thinking that. And it’s not just math; throughout my life all kinds of miniature epiphanies have triggered this sensation. For a long time I assumed it was a universal experience—as I said above, everyone loves these moments. However, while the feeling of pleasure is common, I’ve come to realize my particular physical experience is not. It is similar to ASMR: we all can feel tickling, or enjoy soft whispers, but not everyone feels a “low-grade euphoria” from it. The sensation is equally hard to explain.
Writing about this experience is an embarrassing task, like trying to describe why a song from your sophomore year in high school makes you cry. But I had to explain myself before I got to the real subjects of this piece: gurus, internet philosophers, and other connoisseurs of brain juice. This low-grade euphoria is the reason I empathize with them, even as I find them completely intolerable.
I don’t remember my elementary school teacher ever again dropping knowledge on me that was as potent as potent as those fractions. I was lucky to have a lot of good teachers all the way through college, but none of them ever had the perfect recipe for delivering an epiphany in every lesson. Certain topics are more mind-blowing than others; most require a long, drawn-out setup before the punchline hits. Once or twice a semester would be a fantastic rate—I selected subjects where this seemed feasible. When there were long gaps between breakthroughs I would become frustrated. No one likes to plateau, and anxiety about grades or competition could crop up, but even success could be dissatisfying. Having a mentor’s guidance was almost more important when progress was steady, but boring.
A really great teacher is one who can supply the brain juice, but also helps you through the tough stuff. A “guru” just helps you chase the high.
Guru Sampler Platter
Before I continue I should clarify that my only point of reference for the word “guru” is its use in the west. I grew up in California, surrounded by the New Age white person version of… well, everything, but especially Hinduism and Buddhism. I have only had brief encounters with the genuine version of these cultural and spiritual practices. What I am much more familiar with is the inspidid ideology that sells itself online, in used book stores, and on bulletin boards in the Bay Area. These are the kinds of gurus who need to be decoded.
In ages past, before I was alive and online, the word “philosopher” may have been sufficient while also avoiding cultural appropriation. Diogenes could have been a great podcaster. Heidegger was happy to cater to Nazis—imagine the Twitter followers! Philosophers deserve critique, for their ideas and their application of those ideas. However, calling someone a philosopher implies a certain credibility that gurus do not deserve. I generally expect a philosopher to build on an existing foundation of knowledge: when a reference is necessary, it is cited; extra rigor is applied when a new concept conflicts with that reference; common terms are used whenever possible, and new language is only introduced when it aids understanding. A philosopher might fail to meet these expectations, but they will at least admit they failed; a guru would not. Instead a guru would rather introduce more complexity and make their ideas more vague. Gaps are filled with keywords pulled from any culture or discipline without respect for their content, only for the superficial association they draw. This is high-speed syncretism, as disposable as fanfiction.
That little rant is a comprehensive summary of the Big Data™ that goes into my Bullshit Detector™ when I’m deciding whether to take an Intellectual™ statement seriously. But we should run through some examples to train our neural networks (our brains). To keep with the “brain juice” theme, imagine these are glasses of wine, or flights of beer, or blocks of text.
Our first sip is light and sweet. It is reminiscent of buttered popcorn, but more so the jelly bean flavor. Does it make you giggle, or is it repulsive?
We can no longer afford to live with illusion. You must take a stand against desire. You may be ruled by desire without realizing it. Do not let it obliterate the truth of your circuit.
Only a prophet of the stratosphere may bring about this revolution of spacetime. Bondage is born in the gap where choice has been excluded. Where there is selfishness, rebirth cannot thrive.
That unrepentant artificial taste comes to us from the New-Age Bullshit Generator. This intentional nonsense acts as a palette cleanser: whatever comes next only has to be more meaningful than that. Sadly, Wisdom of Chopra demonstrates the line between artificial and genuine Guru-speak is too thin to see. Here are two quotes that fooled me:
Forms of consciousness within consciousness create total reality.
Consciousness is the ground of existence as awareness of existence is only possible in consciousness.
From here we move on to darker, earthier notes. Russel Brand serves as a savory every-day cup, well acquainted with the bitterness of reality, and unable to stop rambling about it. Honestly, it was very hard for me to pick quotes that didn’t require paragraphs of anecdotes to make sense, so consume the context of these excerpts if you must.
Here in our glistening citadel of limitless reflecting screens we live on the outside. Today we may awaken and instantly and unthinkingly reach for the phone, its glow reaching our eyes before the light of dawn, its bulletins dart into our minds before even a moment of acknowledgement of this unbending and unending fact: you are going to die.
Maybe if quantum physics could come up with some force, or web, or string or something that tethers the mystery to something solid, something measurable, you’d think again but until then there’s nothing but an empty grave and a blank tombstone, chisel poised.
A cocktail like this uses bitterness to mask a flavor that won’t become prominent until the whole glass is consumed and the aftertaste takes charge. Dang, this drink metaphor is getting confusing. I’ll drop the affect. Guru prose can lean so hard on poetic license that I can’t tell where the poetry ends and the philosophy begins. It’s a motte-and-bailey where the hard-to-answer question is “What do you mean?” and the easy defense is “Just vibes.” This ambiguity is especially concerning considering the source of those excerpts: Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, Brand’s self-help guide/memoir.
On that note, I once had a friend explain he enjoyed Jordan Peterson’s lectures as poetry—more an ambient flow of words than a series of arguments and conclusions. It is difficult to say there is anything wrong with that; I would not debate whether you can enjoy listening to the soothing sounds of a babbling brook? But a brook can be downstream from a sewage treatment plant and while you’re listening you’re going to have to smell it as well. Here are some of those odors, as transcribed for a pungent Current Affairs article:
The individual, once capable of coherently integrating competing motivational demands in the private sphere, nonetheless remains destined for conflict with the other, in the course of the inevitable transformations of personal experience.
You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you identify with the part of your being that is responsible for transformation, then you are always the equal, or more than the equal of the things that frighten you.
These lines are certainly more aesthetically pleasing than the words generated by an Artificial Unintelligence. But Peterson does not sell himself as a poet. He intends for his words to have meaning, or at least to have influence; hence, he is a guru. For me, he fails on all counts.
In the next section I will try to explain my distaste for this kind of rhetoric, but before that we have to eat dessert. This final sample is not from a celebrity, academic, or parody site. It is from a post on r/numbertheory about imaginary numbers. Don’t worry, having a degree in mathematics would not help you understand this:
When you look at something, such as the sun for example, the movement of light from the consciousness being observed to the consciousness doing the observation is defined as a wave. From an outside perspective, however, one could simply draw a line connecting the two Consciousness' position in Space. This led me to the concept of visualizing Space as a line and Time as the curvature of Space! This allows us to define movement by a real value defined by the distance from zero, and Time as the imaginary rotation of this Real value! Since a line can be defined by a single real number that is its length, I redefined imaginary numbers as always existing at the center of such a line and being representative of an exponential rate of rotation about an imaginary axis perpendicular to the line!
As far as I know, the user who wrote this is not a celebrity or an academic. They are not trying to build a following or sell a product, and therefore I would not call them a guru. This is just a delicious sample that helped me acquire a taste for math mysticism. It is an extremely common flavor. Often it comes from someone with a new-found “passion” like this user, but it’s loved by conspiracy theorists as well. These less-informed examples are useful points of comparison when a big name academic presents their own big idea.
Dilettante or Connoisseur?
It would be impossible for me to provide a sample of every flavor of guru rhetoric. I can only hope that you, the reader, react to those words in the same way I do. Maybe you don’t. I can’t open up your brain and find out. However, I can reveal some of my brain to you. I’m going to speculate about why I don’t react the way these gurus intend. Why isn’t my brain juicing?
The first option I have to consider is that it’s simply a matter of habituation. I am Pavlov’s dog, just like everydoggy else; some bells are going to make me slobber and some won’t. Just look at my upbringing. My parents never prayed, never took me to church. I don’t have a long history with religious language, it doesn’t have a personal or communal significance. I actually feel a bit tone deaf: I don’t get to hear the juicy version of “transformation” or “the universe” or “consciousness.” My education rewarded me for being critical, analytical, and willing to write it all down in too much detail. Perhaps I get my thrills from nitpicking, while others get theirs from believing.
Except, it’s not like I’ve been bred into a relentless analytical machine. I know that I will overlook critical flaws, just as I will often over-analyze a subject that should be simple. There are countless topics I can only understand by accepting an explanation on faith. That faith has to be consistent with the rest of reality, but this is only a heuristic. There is a fog of war covering vast regions of my mental map. I know from experience that it requires thorough, repeated surveys to reveal these areas. In the meantime I rely on others to guide me.
Sometimes I’m led into dead-ends: I thought What the Bleep Do We Know!? was full of cool ideas. I was a pre-teen when it came out. The adults in my life suggested that the movie presented a useful way to think about quantum physics and the universe. I was rewarded (with attention) for trusting in that version of reality. As a teenager it was fun to have these “mind expanding” discussions, especially when smoking weed, but my interest was already starting to wane. Despite all of the time spent on these ideas, nothing ever clicked like a thorough, disciplined explanation of something observable. Quantum brain juice was always trapped in a quantum state: if it was there, I couldn’t taste it; if I knew its taste, it would disappear.
This leads me to a second hypothesis for what causes my brain to juice: I have an innate sense for good ideas. That feeling of epiphany is my subconscious letting me know I’m on the right track. It might take a whole lifetime (or many) to determine what good actually means, but it’s something absolute, fundamental, and entirely up to my discretion. This explanation feels amazing! It gives me permission to try anything, do anything, say anything, as long as it gets me juicing. That feeling of satisfaction is proof that I am right.
Unfortunately, that explanation is just more magic. That’s what I get if I feed my arrogance until it grows into a Dunwich Horror creature from a dark dimension. It seems possible that with enough positive reinforcement I could turn this into a Unifying Theory of its own. My mockery of gurus could just be the first step in letting my followers know what good rhetoric sounds like: me. Me good. Me make brain go brr. And yet I doubt that choosing the dark side would stimulate the feeling I crave. The pleasures of attention, of ego, of self-satisfaction are not the same as revelation. Without guidance I would never find the next “fractions.” Prolonged dissatisfaction would only make me more desperate for absolute, if unearned, confidence in my self-referential explanation of everything.
I name those two hypothetical versions of myself the Dilettante and the Connoisseur. The Dilettante is an amateur, uncultured, lacking the vocabulary necessary to enter the flow of a spiritual-ish monologue. The Connoisseur considers himself the culture, the taste-maker, but who’s ready to abandon actual criticism in favor of selling his own brand. These are characters, parts I play when it is useful, mainly when it will help me get through an awkward conversation.
If someone quotes Chopra at me or dives into a politically-charged anecdote to explain “reality” then I’m happy to nod and smile. To complete the Dilettante act, I also have to indicate that I am too tone-deaf, too incurious for an explanation to get through to me. I become a Straw Vulcan who isn’t worth confronting.
If someone really wants to engage, or if their ideas are too caustic to go unquestioned, the Connoisseur takes charge. This defense mechanism is mostly just stubbornness, but by playing the know-it-all who has competing principles. This never works to actually change their mind, but it can occasionally steer the conversation towards into a pedantic vortex until it sputters to a tortured end.
A Tolerance
Those two versions of myself are wrong. They are ungenuine modes I adopt after the fact, having already decided to disengage from someone. There must be a reaction that comes first, a first reflex that helps me decide which shields to put up. As much as I hate to admit it, I think that reflex has a common name: cynicism.
I opened this piece by describing that childlike feeling of euphoria to make it clear that I want to be thrilled by new ideas. I have a profound desire for the profound. I hope I made myself sound like a wide-eyed intern who just discovered non-fiction books and wants to adopt every lifestyle change that is proposed by any press-release of a single peer-reviewed paper with weak correlation. Sometimes I wish I could be that person, because in reality that feeling of euphoria is becoming more rare as I grow older.
If brain juice is a liquor—to keep straining the metaphor—then I have built a tolerance. Some of this is due to an increase in knowledge: there is less unexplored space in my mental map. However, as I wrote above, there are still such huge areas that are mysteries to me. I don’t know shit about flowers! Where is my brain juice when I watch a video about tulips? No, I think the sensation itself is weakening.
How is that for a brilliant conclusion? Aging Man Discovers the Thrill Is Gone.
The point of observing this is not to give up on new ideas. I want to confront my cynicism so that I can give an idea its fair chance, without expecting it to shower me in brain juice. I don’t want to rely on that physical impulse. I want to enjoy it, spontaneous and rare, without it being an extrinsic reward that I value more than the idea itself. I hope that by softening my expectations my cynicism remains soft as well, instead of calcifying into a shell that can only be dissolved by an ecstatic revelation that will never come.
I suppose this self-reflection contains an implied accusation: if you enjoy those gurus, if that sampler platter got you salivating, then you are letting a whiff of brain juice overcome your better judgment. I think this is a possibility, but I don’t actually know what an “epiphany” feels like for you. I can’t predict how your tastes are going to change as you grow older. But if those words felt insightful, allow me to give you a second helping:
You must take a stand against desire. You may be ruled by desire without realizing it. Do not let it obliterate the truth of your circuit.