Story
Thursday morning, Caroline sat again at her desk, staring at her first three paragraphs from yesterday and the outline (such as it was) for the rest of the essay, an exploration of how Shakespeare handled death and vengeance. Theoretically, she was more than halfway through. In actuality, she ground her teeth and could hardly make the words make sense, let alone remember how she had interpreted the examples she listed. In a state of frustration, she slammed her hand down, knocking a precariously poised pile of papers to the floor. Pressure built in her chest as she glanced at the clock. She pushed her chair back and began to pace, thoughts racing. I’ll never finish this on time!
And inspiration struck: Mercutio’s death and the lovers’ deaths made a pair, and though they were in some ways opposite, the former led to the latter! Her state transformed to excitement. Ideas flowed through her mind — and she hurried back to her desk. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, typing out notes and sentences in a jumble. This is it! I can do this! Energy coursed through. She laughed out loud. She could see the teaching assistant handing it back to her graded — she would get an A! he would praise her insights! maybe she could submit it to a contest! —- and the thrill of possibility ignited her creativity.
But as she wrote, her state shifted to self-doubt. She paused and read over her words with a sinking feeling. Her sudden “insight” now seemed obvious and childish, and it didn’t follow well from her first three paragraphs. Excitement faded, replaced by gnawing worry. She rubbed her eyes. Maybe I’m not cut out for this. The cursor blinked mockingly, and she felt trapped in her own mind, caught between hope and fear.
Analysis
A state (or self state) is a mental version of the self in a given context – which may have thoughts, feelings, beliefs, actions, and/or goals. For example, Eliott goes through an excitement state, a frustration state, and a self-doubt state.
Likewise, you might have a state for cooking, complete with goals (cooking in time for dinner), emotions (frustration due to missing ingredients), and so on. When you cook, your cooking state activates and takes over your conscious mind. In that context, you feel like a cook, you think like a cook, and you act like a cook. Ideally, you have the sense that you are choosing to activate the cooking state, rather than its activating automatically.
Other states might include “talking to my friend about our pets,” “being anxious because of an upcoming test,” “working on a project with teammates,” and so on.
A major purpose of Nexus State Theory is to increase our optimism that we can reach positive or pleasurable states. In part two of this work, I will discuss the general nature of states. This will help to explain both nexus states (which are optimistic) and sink states (which are pessimistic). I will still focus on autonomous states, but dyadic states will become important in part four.
Are Caroline’s states momentary reactions – or persistent features of her brain?
“State” can have a twofold meaning. When I talk about Caroline’s frustration state, I could be talking about Caroline’s momentary frustration. However, I could also be talking about her brain’s memory of how it is to be frustrated. So I might say that Caroline “returned to the same state of frustration as last week.”
On the latter view, states are not momentary experiences, but are structures of neurons in the brain. In Hebbian theory, it is said that “Neurons that fire together, wire together”: this suggests that neurons form states that work together.
In this sense, a state is located in your mind and body: it is not a particular event in time (cooking on a particular day, such as yesterday). Rather, the state is the knowledge recorded in your mind and body about how to think, feel, and act while cooking.
There is another ambiguity: if Caroline is hungry and frustrated at the same time, does she have a hungry state and a separate frustrated state at the same time? Or does ahe have a “hungry and frustrated” state? I think it is best not to pin this down. Because the word “state” has multiple meanings, it is an ambiguous word.
This reminds me of a Niels Bohr quote that says “never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.” In the context of quantum mechanics, this might have meant that nobody knew exactly what a “wave function” meant, but physicists had to do the best they could without such precise knowledge. (Still today, physicists argue about how to interpret the wave function.). In the case of the word “state,” I think it is helpful to leave some ambiguity about these three definitions of the word.
Vocabulary
- State can have three meanings:
- A momentary experience in the brain.
- A recording of such a momentary experience that persists in the brain, which can be accessed to recreate such an experience.
- A partial recording; several states together make up a recording of the brain’s experience, and several states are needed in order to recreate an experience.
Nexus State Theory 