How the inner compass helps you navigate through life. Exercise "internal compass". What should I

Take a walk in the center of any old city: look at the old church, museum, park. . Now go home. Step back, trace your steps backwards. For you to return home again, your brain "recorded" all these turns.

We have an internal compass, always keeping track of which direction we are facing and always keeping track of changes in that direction. The brain can use this compass to guide the way. Just like your GPS device keeps track of every move you make in a car so it can develop a new route from the direction you are currently facing.

A deep question in neuroscience is how the brain can build an internal compass: how can a chain of neurons track turns and movement? The answer is simple: a structure called the “ring of neurons” is responsible for this.

Theorists have long loved this internal compass problem. Many of their solutions have one thing in common: there are many neurons in the ring. And the connections between neurons are arranged in such a way that a few neurons next to each other are active, and everything else is silent. This activity kick then represents the current direction in which the brain is moving (respectively, with the body):

How does a ring of neurons represent the direction of movement? When moving straight ahead, the neurons at the top of the ring are most active: there is a wave of activity at the top of the ring. Neurons on the opposite side of the ring are "silent". When the body is rotated 90 degrees to the right, so that the edge rotates around the ring to represent this new direction of motion.

And when the entrance to that ring changes, so the beat returns to a new location, and that new location is the new direction that the brain is moving. When the input does not change, the brain is stable. Noise can't move it. This stability means that this ring is an "attractor", a type of system that has stable states. It was theory. The main disagreement among theorists was exactly how the neurons were wired together to make this happen.

But recently, a group of researchers looked at bits of the fly's brain that helped it move, and they noticed that the group of neurons in the fly's brain was organized in a circle. Hmm, they thought it was an attractor ring? Testing was easy. The scientists recorded the brain activity in this ring of neurons while the fly was flying. And then they looked to see if the activity around the ring of neurons changed when the fly changed direction.

The constantly moving activity in this ring corresponded exactly to the constantly changing direction of flying.

So this ring in the fly's brain is like a compass. But is it a compass? Or is it just reading data from somewhere else? To test this, they turned to ideas from theories: if it's really a compass, it's a ring attractor. They stimulated several nearby neurons with light, increasing their activity. It was found that in the brain of a fly there is a ring attractor, which is an internal compass. And thanks to this fly experiment, chances are now that we also have a ring attractor in the brain. At difficult times in your life, you may ask yourself, “Where am I?” Luckily for you, one part of your brain always knows exactly where you're going.

Maxim Terekhov

One day I was returning home from a summer residence. It was a long time ago and I didn't have a car then. There were about twenty minutes left before the scheduled bus arrived. I sat on a bench and looked around, not knowing what to do with myself. Suddenly, my attention was attracted by a drunk guy walking in my direction. "Yes ... Entertainment in the form of a conversation devoid of any sense and logic with a drunk local resident is provided to me," I thought.

“Hi,” the guy said. - Sorry, I'm drunk.
“Hello,” I replied, very surprised at the beginning of the conversation.
- Shall I take a rest? – asked the guy quite clearly.
“Yes, of course,” I agreed, and moved forward.

There was no boring conversation.

The guy sat down next to him and now said to himself:

- So, I'm drunk, I'm going home, I sat down to rest.

After these words, he instantly fell asleep, and I began to examine this person with great interest. Ten minutes later he woke up and repeated the same phrase about the house and about the rest, then he saw me and again apologized for his condition. Then, having gathered his strength, he tore off the naughty body from the bench and, swaying, went on.

I was amazed at his ability to accurately assess his own condition and stay on track. Many people drank without measure at that time, especially in the countryside. The consequences were often terrible: people lost the inner compass that helps a person to remain a person, fell under cars, froze on a winter road, or, even worse, someone was killed in a drunken stupor.

“This one will come,” I thought, suddenly beginning to understand the meaning of what I saw. Then I was just beginning to read the Holy Fathers, and I was just tormented by the question of why the Christian life, attentive to prayer, was called “sobriety” by the fathers. “After all, we are all drunk to one degree or another,” I realized. It's just that instead of wine, we have plentiful food, bright shows and a thirst for comfort. “The lust of the eyes, the lust of the body and the pride of life” is a brief patristic definition of the goal of life for an ordinary secular person.

And in this - lovely - state, we convince ourselves: "Everything is fine - I live like everyone else: family, work, I don't drink, I don't smoke - what else can you demand from me?" We are not visited by thoughts about our spiritual drunkenness, that we are not at all sinless and that we need to repent and try to follow Christ. But when this understanding comes, a certain inner compass is formed in a person, allowing him to cling to the “tunic of Christ” and not go astray.

Intoxication with sin, sweet and sticky, is detrimental to a church person. Now I don’t even want to go under the blessing, and it began to get stuffy in the church, and in general there used to be grace in the church, but now it seems to be gone ... But interest in the personal life of the priest begins: what car does he drive, in what house does he live and what is going on in his family… But you never know what else the mind, darkened by sinful intoxication, will do in order to “not notice the beam in its own eye”?!

How to live from the moment you realize your sin and until confession? Here the needle of our inner spiritual compass can start to turn frantically. As a child, I took a magnet and played with an ordinary compass. A slight movement of the magnet was enough to disorient the arrow for a long time. You remove the magnet, and after a while the compass comes to the correct position.

The traveler wakes up, begins to painfully think: “Where did I go, where I am, what happened to me and what to do next?” - and the compass will tell you: “I followed Christ. I have sinned. Behind. We must repent and follow our Savior.” The Holy Fathers are right. Through any person we meet on the path of life, the Lord can instruct us so that one more parable is added to our life baggage.

As well as . Even thick-skinned crocodiles turned out to be. However, it is still not known for certain whether people have a "magnetic" feeling.

In the summer of 2016, American scientists conducted, using a Faraday cage, proving that people's bodies have some kind of "magnetic sensors". The scientific community took such conclusions with caution, and many scientists continue experiments and studies aimed at identifying that very "sixth" (magnetic) sense.

Meanwhile, Cyborg Nest decided to go the other way, giving people the opportunity to feel the cardinal directions with the help of a wearable gadget.

The device, called North Sense ("Feeling of the North"), is a silicone "organ" no larger than a matchbox. It is attached to the chest under the skin with two titanium rods and emits a short vibration each time the user turns north. The gadget is completely waterproof and is charged from the mini-USB connector.

At the same time, company representatives emphasize that we are not talking about any medical changes in the body: Cyborg Nest specialists are interested in creating and expanding human sensations.

"There is a whole world around us that we do not perceive - radiation, X-rays, infrared and ultraviolet radiation, as well as the electromagnetic field of the planet," says co-founder Liviu Babitz. - Therefore, we want to create new feelings to make every day better feel the environment.

The "Inner Compass" is designed to expand human capabilities and develop the ability to navigate in space.

As the developers note, the "sense of the north", which helps to navigate in space, has always been very important for a person.

For example, the Australian natives of the Guugu Yimitir tribe indicate the direction not with the help of the egocentric coordinates familiar to us (left / right, back / forward), but use geographical coordinates for this. That is, even indoors, a representative of this tribe will ask you to move, for example, not to the left, but to the east. At any moment, a native of the Guugu Yimitir tribe, at an unconscious level, is able to clearly determine where the cardinal points are. They develop this skill from infancy: the brain learns to notice natural factors and remember movements and turns. As the creators of the North Sense gadget say, just such an "internal compass" would be useful to many people.

At the same time, Cyborg Nest engineers emphasize that they did not set out to create some practical tool like a navigator. "We are talking about all the sensory experiences that we experience as human beings," Babitz explains.

In his opinion, changing the nature of our sensations can work according to the domino principle: an improvement in the perception of space can lead to an improvement in other senses (however, correspondents of the Vesti.Nauka project). But Babits believes that if a person begins to use vision less for orientation in space over time (after all, a gadget will help him in this), for example, he may develop new ways and possibilities of using his eyes.

The creators of North Sense compare these devices with fashion trends. Just as piercings or tattoos used to be considered signs of rebellion and then gained popularity, "modifications" of the body with the help of gadgets will soon become widespread as well.

Everyone wants to become, company representatives are sure, and the moment when such experiments are no longer considered extreme is probably not so long to wait. After all, Babitz says, many today use augmented reality glasses, pacemakers, chips implanted in the body, or cyberprostheses.

Silicone "sense organ" no larger than a matchbox.

However, no one can yet predict what the long-term consequences of constantly wearing the "internal compass" will be. New senses require a long integration, so scientists want to study how the innovation will be accepted by the organisms of different people and how their perception of the surrounding space will change.

A whole community has already gathered on the Internet wishing to test North Sense - from an elderly rider from Spain to an accountant from Chicago. "At the moment, there are no groups of people that would have the same artificial senses. Also, you can not build theories on the experience of only one brain. We will have a group of people with the same device, so we will begin to understand what this means in a wider context," Babic adds.

To travel and navigate in space, mankind has come up with a lot of inventions. Starting from the astrolabe and compass to modern satellite navigation systems. But all these achievements of progress cannot be compared with the natural mechanisms used by many representatives of the terrestrial fauna.

To date, science knows more than 50 species of bacteria, insects, birds and animals with excellent navigational ability. Migratory butterflies easily travel from Europe to Africa and back. Sea turtles find their favorite feeding grounds hundreds of kilometers away. Salmon, years later, overcomes gigantic distances, returning to spawn at the place of their birth. Why is the most perfect creation - man - deprived of this gift, the so-called internal compass?

The phenomenon of navigation of living beings is being studied by hundreds of scientists around the world, but it still remains one of the most secret mysteries of zoology, the answer to which will bring the Nobel Prize. And who knows, perhaps we will get closer to the mystery of our origin if we understand how migratory birds can travel many thousands of kilometers without losing their course. Scientific data collected over the past 60 years lead to the conclusion that all living beings, including humans, have an internal clock that counts seasonal and even annual rhythms.

This clock is located in a small group of neurons located in the brain. It is he who tells the birds that it is time to migrate. After that, their body automatically begins to prepare for the journey. The plumage is updated, the body actively accumulates fat - the most compact fuel for long flights. Nervous excitement is growing rapidly - this phenomenon is called migratory anxiety. The secrets of this mysterious behavior are being studied by the world's largest Scientific Institutes.

Every person from time to time also overcomes the thirst for change. For no apparent reason, we are ready to drop everything, break away from our homes and go to an unfamiliar city or even to the other side of the planet for adventure. It is possible that these are echoes of a biological migration program, deeply hidden in our subconscious. So maybe we just forgot how to use the internal navigator? After all, the inhabitants of the steppes and the polar regions, especially the indigenous peoples, moved to vast spaces and at the same time did not use any complex devices.

This assumption is supported by surprising facts. Olesya Gorbenko is included in the Russian version of the Guinness Book of Records. At the age of 13, she got lost in the Khabarovsk taiga. In these places, even experienced hunters disappear and die without a compass. Exactly a week the girl wandered through the forest, and then, by some miracle, she came to her native village. What was it? Intuition sharpened to the limit by fear? Or, in a critical situation, some mechanism, which had been dormant before, worked?

Dutch scientists who studied the ancient tribes of Australia announced a sensational find. They are discovered natives who are able to accurately determine the cardinal directions even in complete darkness and indoors. Moreover, in the lexicon of these natives there are no such concepts as "left" and "right". Instead, they say "spear pointing north" or "foot turned west". So maybe our internal navigator was discarded as unnecessary as a result of evolution?

Perhaps this is true, and all our troubles are from the mind. In the pursuit of comfort, we lose the skills inherent in us by nature. And if we discard the plaque of civilization, we will acquire them again? But do not rush to conclusions. Ornithologists have long noted an amazing fact - an internal compass exists even in migratory birds that are bred in artificial conditions and have never come into contact with the wild environment. So maybe the navigation mechanism is provided only for animals that make migrations? Does everyone else, including humans, simply not have it?

This opinion was spread for a long time, but recently the scientific world was stirred up by the discovery of German and Czech zoologists. For two years, scientists studied the habits of foxes, namely how they attack their prey, and noted a strange feature. Having studied hundreds of fox jumps for prey under the snow, zoologists have come to unexpected conclusions - foxes always pounce on the prey from the southwest. And such behavior cannot be explained by reasonable reasons - the position of the sun or the direction of the wind. This means that when performing a maneuver, these animals use not only ordinary sense organs, but also something more.

But the loudest sensation was brought by the study of ordinary cows. Cattle breeders have long known - in the pasture, these animals line up in lines and columns like soldiers, and, according to zoologists, this is not just a herd instinct. In fact, cows have a real internal compass. Cows tend to align their body axis along the Earth's magnetic field, that is, with their heads either north or south. To prove this theory, a group of German scientists conducted a large-scale experiment.

Experts studied satellite images of more than three hundred cow herds scattered throughout continents. And they understood that such a clear orientation along the magnetic meridian simply cannot be accidental. This feature of artiodactyls is confirmed by the observation of roe deer and red deer in the wild. But if almost all living beings on the planet have a magnetic feeling, then it, at least in a primitive form, should be in a person. Unless, of course, this planet is really our own.

Problem solved: the perception of life as an integral interconnected system of many ideas is often disturbed due to identification with any one part, side of life, and ignoring or isolating other sides of life. Often we act as if some part of our experience is more significant than another, without presenting a big picture of intentions, or without keeping it in the field of awareness when deciding on the choice of the direction of the next step.

Idea: Our changing self needs to be aware of all the main potential directions calling for realization in order to be in the First Register of consistency and acceptance of those actions that are realized in the living space. A complete map of these tendencies, arising from the place where we are doing this exercise, will allow us to overcome, at least for a while, the error of identifying with a life plan isolated from other plans.

The main task such work is to create a holistic map of vectors (directions) emanating from our Self at a given time in a given space.

The result of the work- the opportunity to take a more conscious position regarding the diversity of internal trends that form our great life plan. Bringing together the macro and micro levels of meanings that determine our movement.

To work with this technique, it is necessary to live several principles, postulates that ensure its effective and full passage.

Principles used:

1. At each moment of time, our Self (Personality, perceiving subject) is in one place of the chronotope.

To understand this principle, you can do the following exercise. "Name of the Moment". Try to feel and call yourself a name that would accurately characterize you at the moment. It should be a name that you will readily and willingly respond to right now if someone calls you. This is not necessarily the name that we were given at birth, most likely it is a name that exists only in this place and space. For example, my name is now: Dancing-Jazz-Letters-And-Meanings

2. In every place and moment, we have many trends, directions for movement.

To understand this principle, the following exercise is suggested. "Realization of Premonitions". For a while, freeze and take the position of an observer of your body, which will mean that there is no need to consciously direct the movements of your body. Just watch what tendencies, weak signals appear in your body. Perhaps you want to get up and stretch, and sit comfortably, and run for delicious food in a cafe, and say something out loud, etc. at the same time. In the beginning, try to be a witness to the variety of inner directions that flicker within you. As soon as you manage to take the position of a witness, let your body begin to move, choose the direction of movement without the participation of your observing Self. Trust the spontaneously manifesting vectors, directions of movement, no matter how paradoxical and strange they may seem. Allow yourself some time to realize the premonitions of your body in movements.

3. Our movement is always dialogical. That is, there is always someone else at the end of our movement vector. This Other is a necessary condition for the existence of a movement vector, since only a couple of systems, uniting into a Personality of Contact, generate the idea of ​​movement. Such an Other is not always realized and recognized immediately, on the contrary, it may take some effort, movement towards him to realize this figure.

To illustrate this principle, you can use the exercise "Magnetic Pole of the Other". To begin with, mentally imagine someone with whom you would like to work with a relationship right now. It is more convenient to choose such a person who is significant and close, important to you. Say his name, imagine his face, figure. Then, trust your body to determine the direction in which you can move closer to that Other. Feel it as clearly as the Arabs feel the location of Mecca, and the birds identify the south and north. Having found this direction, with the maximum attention and awareness available to you, begin to move in this direction, following the vector like a compass needle. Move, being aware of the quality of your movement, your gait, your condition. Move until you feel this movement as understandable, meaningful, lived, or limit yourself to time, since many vectors of our movement require almost eternity for full implementation!!! Stop and realize how your relationship with this Other is connected with how you moved towards him along the vector.

4. Movement in a certain direction implies not only approaching something (someone), but also moving away from something (someone).

To understand this idea, try to do the exercise "Moving Against the Current". Return to the image of the one with whom you worked in the previous exercise, or choose a new image. Do everything that was described in the exercise “The Magnetic Pole of the Other”, but at the end, having reached the point of completeness, turn around and try to realize the path that you have traveled as a path not only to this Other, but also a path from something, what you left behind. Be aware of what you were moving from, going in the chosen direction. Perhaps you were leaving from loneliness, from boredom, from indifference. It is likely that you were moving away from what has already been completed, or needs to be completed. Realize the meaning that is at the source of your movement, and try to take a few steps in the opposite direction, start moving towards the source of your movement. Use all awareness and attention to comprehend the meaning of this movement.

5. We are always moving within the context of our entire lives (even if our steps are small and insignificant). This principle can be illustrated by the metaphor of the canvas and the artist painting on the canvas. Even if the artist puts one small stroke in the very corner of the canvas, this stroke changes the perception of the whole picture, as well as its whole meaning and design.

To understand this idea, try the exercise "Habit Strengthening". This exercise can be done alone, in pairs, or in a small group. Recall and name any habit that you consider problematic for yourself. Imagine and describe your life until its very end as if this habit had remained unchanged in it. What kind of person would you have ended this life if this habit had remained unchanged? What would you gain and what would you lose with it? When answering these questions, try to listen to your body as a source of experiences and meanings that explain your reasoning.

After meeting and living the described principles, it becomes possible to implement the process "The Inner Compass of Life Plans" which consists of several steps. To complete this exercise, you will need a piece of paper with a large circle drawn on it. This circle symbolizes the context of our life, the living space in which there are many different trends and directions.

A. First, be aware of your name in the present moment and write it in the center of the circle.

B. Listening to your feelings, fix inside the circle in the form of a vector the most relevant and significant plan of your life. Let the length of the vector correspond to the scale of the idea - if this is a plan for a lifetime, bring the vector to the border of the circle, if this is an instant, momentary plan - draw a short vector. At the end of the vector, leave a note that would explain its meaning to you.

C. Fill in this circle with vectors representing your life plans, relating them to each other. The closer the meaning of the vector, the smaller the angle between them. This stage ends when you have reflected all the significant life plans, and felt the completeness of this scheme.

D. In the next step, extend those vectors that you have turned out to be short to the border of the circle, and name the process that is behind the implementation of these vectors on a lifetime scale.

E. On the border of the circle, at the ends of the vectors, try to place the names of those Others who are the most vivid exponents of the identified processes for you. These Others should be not just symbols of these processes, but also figures that motivate and encourage you to realize and embody one or another life plan. This Other can be anyone - from a real person, to some part of yourself, from a fictional character to an object or image. It is important that you experience this Other as a person capable of entering into a dialogue.

F. Extend for each vector from the center in the opposite direction the radii that would describe FROM WHAT you are moving, realizing this or that life plan. Name this process and finding that Other that literally pushes (pushes) you to move and start doing what you have in mind. Thus, you should get that each life plan is the diameter of a circle, where one part symbolizes the process of movement TOward the Other, and the other part symbolizes the movement FROM the Other.

G. Having created a complete map of your life intentions and relationships, place the sheet in front of you, and stand beside you. Using attention and awareness, feel all the directions you have indicated. Try not to move until you feel the wholeness and connectedness of all the indicated directions. Ask yourself what name suits you best right now. Follow your tendencies, no matter how strange they may seem, and try to be aware of what meaning is born from this situation. If you manage to formulate it in the form of a Word-Act or a movement, carry it out while maintaining the state of an observer, a witness of a self-unfolding process. This process may require quite a lot of time before you feel its completeness and integrity.