Frames of Thought: Scene Four
This is the fourth scene in the Frames of Thought series of essays, offering a scene-by-scene glimpse into my thoughts, motivations, hopes, backstories, struggles, and anything else that comes to mind as I produce this animation.
Script Extract:
“And these are the people that are supposed to help us? It’s like asking a midwife to fix a truck—she might be able to point out where the oil leaks are, but that’s hardly going to fix the problem. They’re guessing at the basics—the basics!—the sort of things you’d think they’d have nailed down by now.”
The Scene:
You—you magnificent, self-important miracle of flesh and neuroses—feel in control. You’re the driver, the captain, the supreme overlord of the truck that is your glorious mind. But here’s the thing: that van you’re driving called your mind? It’s got parts. Engine, transmission, alternator, battery, radiator—stuff you don’t even know about, never mind how they work. You’re out there, gripping the wheel, deciding where to go—what to think, feel and decide. Still, you’re not the one dealing with whatever the hell a catalytic converter does, nor are you pushing the pistons. There’s a tremendous amount of stuff inside that mind-truck of yours that you have no clue about. And what if the van breaks down? Trouble! You can steer all you want, but you’re not getting anywhere without a tow.
So, when your mind van stalls out, what do you do? You go looking for help. You find someone who claims to “understand the mind.” But here’s the problem: nobody really knows how this thing works. Oh, sure, we have experts who are good at studying behaviour and making educated guesses. But actually ‘knowing’ how it works? That’s a whole different ball game. Consciousness, free will, intelligence—big words, no concrete answers. It’s like being a caveman trying to figure out your Wi-Fi. Good luck with that.
So yes, asking someone to fix your mental problems is like asking a midwife to rebuild your transmission (that’s a thingamajig in a car). Sure, she might be able to give you a shove down the road, but unless you’ve got a self-repairing engine, you’re pretty much hoping the damn thing just starts working again on its own. And you know what? Sometimes, it does! If the mind didn’t have a way of patching itself up, we’d all be in way worse shape than we already are.
So, next time you feel like you’ve got a handle on things, just remember—you’re in control of a van you don’t know how to fix, hurtling down a road you barely understand, hoping to hell nothing falls off before you get where you’re going. Good luck with that.
What Inspired This?
When I was in school, I wanted to be a particle physicist. You know, one of those people skilled in the art of making themselves and others believe they know what is going on at the foundations of the universe. Then life threw a curveball—two years of mandatory military service, where, for reasons beyond human comprehension, I had a brain fart of unimaginable proportions. I decided to study graphic design. The problem was that I knew almost nothing about art. The school I had attended didn’t even have art as a subject. It was like signing up for a cooking class and realising you don’t even know how to boil water.
What this meant was that I felt like an imposter. Not an artist—just some guy awkwardly moving his hands, pretending to do “art things” while hoping no one would notice. The so-called “artist me” was just a dumb puppet, yanked around by my puppet-master brain, desperately trying to follow my lecturers’ instructions. Brush here. Line there. Make it look meaningful. Pretend you know what you’re doing. I didn’t understand anything. It made no sense.
But here’s where things got interesting—some part of me, the rational part, the one that was always sitting in the back seat mumbling, What the hell is happening here?—that part was taking notes. It was watching, studying, trying to decode this strange, confusing process. Where do creative ideas actually come from? What was that bizarre gut feeling that sometimes told me, Yeah, that works? And intuition—what was that about?
At that time, I was very religious, but there were no satisfactory answers to be found there. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God” wouldn’t solve my problem. Faith? Yes, maybe, but I’d still be clueless about how to fix problems. And then I discovered that no one had a clue.
We didn’t know what consciousness was.
We didn’t know how thoughts are formed.
We didn’t know how memory works.
We didn’t know the mechanism behind self-awareness.
We didn’t even know if free will is real.
We didn’t know how intelligence worked.
We’re like midwives trying to fix a truck when things go wrong inside the mind. But hang on—why that metaphor? Why a midwife? Why a truck? Where did that come from? Well, see. That’s the point. It popped into my head, fully formed! All that processing—gathering information, noticing patterns, mixing representations, conceptual integration, clarifying emergent structures and establishing coherence—all happened without me being aware or in control of the process. Me going, “Oh! That’s a cool idea” is the behaviour part. That hidden processing is the inner mechanics we don’t have access to. And we cannot truly fix it because we don’t understand the basics.
If you don’t like the midwife metaphor, here’s another one that just popped into consciousness: we’re like cavemen having no clue about the basics of mechanical engineering and being asked to fix the truck so we can go mammoth hunting. Huh!?
Why This Should Bother Us More Than It Does
We assume experts have the big questions figured out. That’s what makes them experts, right? Except… they don’t. They are experts in the inferences we’ve made from studying behaviour. In other words, they are experts in coping strategies that, now and then, by luck, fix a problem.
And therapy? Oh boy. That’s a whole buffet of educated guessing. Three people show up with the same anxiety symptoms—one gets cognitive behavioural therapy and walks out feeling like a new person, the other latches onto mindfulness but still barely copes, and the third spirals into existential dread because nothing works. Why? No one really knows. Instead of understanding how the mind actually works, we observe its behaviour and build theories around that.
I mean, what’s with the placebo effect? The mind is so mysterious that sometimes it just fixes itself with nothing more than a sugar pill and a little wishful thinking. “Here, take this. It’s nothing.” And yet, boom—depression lifts, anxiety calms, pain disappears. If that doesn’t tell you how little we understand the mind, I don’t know what does.
That’s like trying to study the structure of trees by examining only close-ups of their canopies. You drive yourself nuts because it all looks like random chaos—until one day, boom, you realise all tree canopies follow the same basic branching pattern. A simple, underlying principle that suddenly makes all the madness make sense.
But in psychology? We haven’t found that pattern yet. So, therapy mostly focuses on symptom management instead of actual solutions. Like slapping duct tape on a leaky pipe and hoping it holds.
Now, don’t get me wrong—experts aren’t useless. They do their best with the lack of understanding we’ve got. Without them, many people would be a lot worse off. But when we finally do crack the code of the mind? Everything changes.
And won’t that be an enlightening day?
What’s Next?
In the next essay, we will puzzle out why it’s taken us so long to develop a robust framework for understanding how the mind works.
Until then, what’s the most ridiculous piece of “expert advice” you’ve ever heard about the mind? Drop it below—I need a laugh.