Mind the Gap
Recently a picture popped up on Vivian’s Facebook page. One of those ‘memories from the past.’ At first, we had a hard time remembering where the picture was taken. Pre-Covid, I travelled a lot. Almost half the year was spent someplace else. We finally remembered we were waiting for a bus in Taiwan.
As we reminisced about past trips, London came to mind. The Tower of London, the Crown Jewels, Churchill’s bunker, the shops on Regent Street, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the British Museum. We used to stop in London on our way to or from Zambia. The memory of that ever-present voice on the Underground, warning passengers to “mind the gap” still resonates.
There’s another ‘gap’ we need to mind--the one in our brains. Here is an interesting quote, often mis-attributed to Viktor Frankl. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Whoever actually said it, was exactly right.
According to Benjamin Libet, a half a second before a voluntary movement, your brain sends a signal. It takes about a 0.3 of a second for you to become aware of the signal. That leaves a 0.2 second gap for you to stop the transmission. That’s long enough, with practice, to exercise your veto power and stop it, or choose to follow through.
Can we see the importance of this? That first signal is called an action potential. We don’t seem to have any control of that. After all, it is 0.3 of a second after the signal was initiated that we notice it. However, in the 0.2 second gap we have the ability to make a choice. Do we proceed, or do we stop? In that gap lies the governing power of humanity, our ability to veto or follow through with responses and actions.
As David Rock points out in Your Brain at Work, without an awareness of this process, “brain signal, desire, movement” we are very likely to miss the gap. Our habit will be to proceed from signal to response without thinking about it.
By learning to pay attention to our mental experience, we will be able--in a way that impacts our reactions, responses and our lives--mind the gap.