“Mind Control” as Energonomics

When I speak of “mind control” I do not refer to paranoid theories of government agents who have the ability of mad scientists to control the minds of others.  I mean self-mind control, the ability to channel one’s “mental” energy (i.e. steer the physical energy flowing through the mind, that 20% of the glucose we consume to support our brain, which takes only 3% of the body’s weight) toward some states and away from other states.  This kind of channeling comes up in Marvin Minsky’s newest book, The Emotion Machine, in which he develops a theory of how we think.  One of his ideas is that we have “Critic-Selectors” who can select certain kinds of thinking (i.e. emotional states) in order to solve a problem. 

 …in everyday life there remains a wide range in which it’s both useful and safe to regulate your collection of Critics. (91)

This also reminds me of a few other books: 

1. Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Emotions, a book I read as an undergraduate in an Existentialism class,  in which he claims that we choose to feel emotions at particular times
2. a more recent book by Howard Gardner called Changing Minds:  The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds.
3. Destructive Emotions, a book compiled by Daniel Goleman capturing conversations between the Dalai Lama and Western neuroscientists and psychologists, in which it is suggested that meditation provides a way of channeling mindbrain-energy from the fear-centered amygdala to the prefrontal lobes, where higher orders of thinking occur.

All of these support the concept of personal energonomics, controlling the energy flows in the mind (and, as a result, the kinds of thoughts we think, our behaviors, and our beliefs).