Free Running with the Pack by Mark Rowlands Page A

experiences. For example, Joyce Carol Oates writes: ‘Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.’ And, in a similar vein, but with a slightly different emphasis, Haruki Murakami writes: ‘When I am running my mind empties itself. Everything I think while running is subordinate to the process. The thoughts that impose themselves on me while running are like light gusts of wind — they appear all of a sudden, disappear again and change nothing.’ Both Oates and Murakami identify important but different aspects of the experience. With Oates, the emphasis is on rhythm: the fleeing and pulsing of thought in tune with the swinging arms and moving feet. Murakami emphasizes the emptiness of the mind, and compares thoughts to gusts of wind that blow through this emptiness. I differ from Murakami in this respect: he claims that, for him, these thoughts change nothing. Sometimes that is true for me too. But occasionally, just occasionally, they can change everything. Then, rather than a feathery breath that gently caresses my cheek, they are more like a sharp slap.
    Thoughts only come when they are ready. They cannot be forced, they cannot be hurried — they cannot be bargained with. They come in their time, not ours. In the many years that have come and gone since that day on Mynydd Maen, I have lost count of the number of times that a problem I have been trying to solve — and my business is hard, abstract, conceptual problems — has suddenly resolved itself, or if not thatthen dissolved before my eyes, during a run. Part of the explanation for this almost certainly lies in the idea of rhythm.
    When someone taps out a regular rhythm, activation will occur in regions of the left frontal cortex, left parietal cortex and right cerebellum. Just as important as the location of this activity is its frequency. This frequency is in the gamma band: 25—100 Hz, but 40 Hz is typical. Gamma oscillations are thought by many to be the key to optimal information processing in the brain, underlying processes like attention and perhaps conscious experience. Some think this is because of the role gamma oscillations play in binding activity together into a unified whole. Francis Crick and Christof Koch famously argued that gamma oscillations of around 40 Hz are responsible for binding information together in visual awareness, and so are essential to visual experience — although this claim is controversial. Nevertheless, the idea that gamma oscillations are implicated in efficient cognitive performance is now largely accepted. In fact, the technique of optogenetics, developed by Karl Deisseroth’s team at Stanford University, fairly conclusively demonstrates this. In optogenetics, one manipulates the rhythm of the brain through pulses of light directed at a type of neuron that produces parvalbumin — a type of protein that regulates the frequency of gamma wave oscillations in the brain. Using this technique, Deisseroth demonstrated that the right frequency of gamma oscillation will ‘enhance information flow among cells in the frontal cortex’. The frontal cortex is the area of the brain associated with higher cognitive functions like thought.
    It is notable that the optimal frequency of gamma oscillations — around 40 Hz — can be induced simply by tapping out a rhythm with one’s finger. So it is not too much of a stretch to suppose that moving one’s entire body in an appropriaterhythm can produce the same effect. Indeed, one might suspect that if tapping one’s finger can induce the appropriate frequency of gamma oscillations, moving one’s whole body might do this a little more forcefully. It is therefore not