So Uncle Bert finally died, peacefully, at a great age.

    When you were six, he took you on his knee and played trains with you. There are a few scattered memories of this. Later, from the time when you were at school and your mother had the accident with the cement truck, you can recall a few of his words, which you now realize were quite wise and very helpful. You now remember one or two of the dinner-table stories told about him, which you didn’t follow up on at the time, because you were so interested in your latest romance. Then you moved away to university and only saw him a time or two at a family gathering. The last time, you found him clever, interesting and apparently younger than his years. You decided you’d have to visit him. Then you turned thirty, and he died.

    When a sequence like this takes place, the brain tries to order the information. There are different mechanisms it can use. You’ll most likely dream about him. You may not know it unless you’ve done some work on how dreams work, but in any case they’ll be full of symbols. You most likely won’t know what these are unless you’ve made a habit of recording them and thinking about them because many of the symbols in dreams are particular to the individual.

    Why would you dream about Uncle Bert? – for the same old reason: the brain is motivated by self-protection. You had things to learn from him. You learned some, missed many, and your personality needs to ensure it’s forgiven for its failings. You were young, after all. So, in this example, working outside the speech centre, that is, without language, the brain in its own way helps you process your relationship with a wise person from your youth, to get the best out of it, and to consolidate any gains that could be made, without undue and fruitless punishment of the self. Quite often someone in this position might have, say, a series of dreams, with the final one recognizing that Uncle Bert really is dead, but still leaving the dreamer with good memories or a sense of satisfaction or of peace.

    Let’s take a different kind of experience of death, in the form of someone who’s been through a war. If the events of the time haven’t been processed satisfactorily, that same dream process may be invoked, but in the form of nightmares. Again, using visuals, the horrors of the experience can be lived over and over. Once again, the aim is self-protection. The brain is saying that the events are not adequately processed and incorporated into the psyche, and the repetition serves as a warning. There’s work to be done, the brain is saying, if you want to be safe and comfortable.

    These have been two quite different examples of brain activity, which can take many forms outside the one we’re most familiar with – that is, language. A composing musician might be a lot less visual and could well have dreams where a score is presented not visually but as though vibrant in sound, and though this would involve less sight and more sound, it would still not invoke the language centre in the brain. Pictures might form of notes, and the sound information could be passed along that way. An architect might dream about problems with a current job in terms of angles and lines, and see the drawings.

    In other words, the brain will search out ways to communicate in accordance with need and very often through visual means will set up a line of communication which we need to think about before it can be integrated.

    Symbols are part of the brain’s stock in trade, part of the currency of this communication that the unconscious mind tries to set up with the more overt part of the personality. We may not be able to have an open conversation – which would run through a different part of the brain – about the lessons conveyed by a particular symbol, but that’s again because of the impulse to self protection. The brain doesn’t care about the niceties. It wants to keep the organism safe. It looks inward for recognizable concepts to present, and if symbols have been circulated for tens of thousands of years, they have currency in the old mind and it reacts to them. They’re another tool in the brain’s kitbag of options. You might run at one stimulus, fight at another, or freeze at a third. Those are the options.

    The unconscious mind has no concept of humour and it doesn’t differentiate between fact and fiction. The shower murder scene in the Hitchcock film Psycho famously never actually shows any contact between knife and flesh, but nobody ever saw the film and called it lacking in power. The right brain, which picks up and rapidly processes pictures, is very literal in its interpretations. Any event that moves us towards what the brain perceives as danger elicits a self-protection impulse. Pulses race while Psycho plays, just the same as they race in more overt bone-grinding modern horror films. In no case is the viewer in actual danger, but it’s all the same to the brain.

    Imagine finding yourself in a town with a couple of hours to kill stopping over on a journey elsewhere. You realize that you have an old, unvisited maiden aunt living there. You remember she had an art collection. You look at your watch, and decide she might be a bit lonely, so you decide to go and visit her. You obtain directions and start walking, passing a restaurant on the way, and becoming aware you’re hungry. Along the way in the rhythm of walking you wonder idly who she’s going to leave her inheritance to. You realize that might be a bit mercenary, and you try to put the thought to one side. After all, she hasn’t seen you for thirty years. She might not even remember you. She might think that you only came along because you had nothing to do. After a half an hour’s walk, you get to the house and as you approach the gate, you find yourself catching glimpses of a large, sprawling garden, quite out of control, and which you see in front of an equally unkempt house. Suddenly you reach the large iron gates, and in that instant there’s a loud, startling bark and a clang and you’re staring into the face of an attack dog in a bad mood, which has just jumped at the fence. You jump backwards. The problems of reaching the house suddenly seem larger. At that point, in just a moment, the whole process of bothering to continue with this visit is going to become too hard. You remember the restaurant you passed along the way, decide you really are hungry after all, and that’s where your time should be spent before you continue with your journey.

    In the world of internet adventures, the above applies as a metaphor. It takes time and effort to do searches, and the symbol bearing historical content of evil or danger is just the suddenly-appearing attack dog that bounces up in front of us. We don’t know the details, which are long forgotten to the conscious mind, and we don’t care. The symbol is just another stimulus that prompts a rapid, self-protecting response by the brain, with no regard for details or subtlety.

    This is why it takes only fifty milliseconds for a website with a badly chosen symbol to persuade a visitor that it’d be a good idea to be somewhere else.