Flourish As You Age
BRAIN HEALTH
MENTAL MANAGEMENT
A GOOD DEATH
Let's not just fade away; let's FLOURISH as we age!
The MINDRAMP Podcasts focus on three key components that have been shown to contribute to flourishing in the later years of your life. You will find mini-series of episodes that explore each component.
1) Keeping your brain and body healthy - see The Roots of Brain Health
2) Managing your mental states - see Flourishing
3) Planning the kind of death you want to have - (coming 10/1/24))
You will also find the occasional episodes that focus social concerns that I feel have an impact on our well-being, for example "Elections."
Flourish As You Age
Welcoming Wisdom #9 - The Kluge Within: Navigating the Accidental Mind
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In this episode of Flourish As You Age, Michael C. Patterson explores the “accidental mind”—not a perfectly engineered machine, but a brilliant kluge (pronounced klooj): an evolutionary patchwork that works despite its awkward design. Drawing from David Linden and Iain McGilchrist, we look at why the brain’s jury-rigged architecture needs scaffolding—culture, contemplation, and mature perspective—to function wisely.
You’ll hear about:
- Why evolution builds “good-enough” solutions—and what that means for flourishing
- Opponent processing: the productive tension of neural opposites
- The hemispheres in dialogue: big-picture right, analytic left, and the role of the corpus callosum
- How skillful integration (not uniformity) turns inner tension into growth
This episode is part of a series based on Michael’s forthcoming book, Welcoming Wisdom: How Mature Minds Can Help Shape a Kinder, Wiser Future.
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Title: The Kluge Within: Navigating the Accidental Mind
INTRO
Welcome to Flourish As You Age, the podcast where we explore the science, soul, and subtle art of growing wiser as we grow older. I’m Michael C. Patterson.
This episode is part of a series drawn from my forthcoming book Welcoming Wisdom: How Mature Minds Can Help Shape a Kinder, Wiser Future. The book makes a simple but powerful case: the human mind is still evolving, and mature adults have a vital role to play in guiding that evolution toward greater compassion, insight, and flourishing.
Today, we take a deeper look inside the human mind—not as a marvel of perfect design, but as a work-in-progress, a brilliantly flawed improvisation millions of years in the making. We explore the concept of the accidental mind and how embracing its imperfections can help us live with greater wisdom, adaptability, and grace.
SEGMENT 1: The Brain as a Kluge
A kluge (k-l-u-g-e) is a clumsy yet effective solution to a problem—an improvised contraption that works not because of its elegance, but despite its awkward design. Think of a Rube Goldberg machine: complex, indirect, and held together by duct tape and makeshift ingenuity. In engineering, a kluge is often a workaround born of necessity, not planning.
Our brains, as it turns out, are kluges of the highest order.
Neuroscientist David Linden, in his book The Accidental Mind, offers a crucial insight: the brain is not a perfectly engineered organ. It is a makeshift contraption assembled over millions of years through a process of evolutionary bricolage.
Rather than a sleek, integrated system, the brain is a patchwork of components added at different times for different reasons, often layered one atop another in a way that is functional but far from optimal. It gets the job done, but not without redundancy, inefficiency, and design compromises. Evolution, after all, doesn’t aim for perfection—it settles for “good enough.”
This perspective is essential to our project of mental management. If the brain is an evolutionary patchwork—riddled with mismatched modules and competing agendas—then it stands to reason that flourishing requires more than just instinct. We need conscious, cultural, and contemplative scaffolding to manage the kluge within.
SEGMENT 2: Scaffolding the Kluge
The human brain may be a kluge, but we’re not stuck with its flaws. One of the great strengths of our species is our ability to build scaffolding—structures that support and extend our natural capacities. Scaffolding can be external, like schools, laws, or rituals. Or internal, like habits of mind that help us regulate emotion and guide attention.
Cultural evolution gives us tools: education, ethics, art, and social norms. These external structures help align our cognitive modules toward shared goals. Contemplative traditions offer internal tools: metacognition, emotional regulation, and focused awareness. And mature minds—shaped by experience and reflection—bring perspective and discernment.
Our task is not to perfect the kluge, but to work skillfully with it—to cultivate mindsets and environments that help it function in ways that promote insight, connection, and well-being. With strong cultural and contemplative scaffolding, we may not only manage the mind more wisely—we may, over time, help guide its evolution toward a more integrated, adaptive, and collaborative form of consciousness.
SEGMENT 3: Opponent Processing
One of the earliest thinkers to illuminate the dynamics of the kluge-like mind was Sir Charles Sherrington, a British neurophysiologist and early pioneer of neuroscience, Sherrington helped define how the nervous system functions, introducing the concept of the synapse and shaping foundational theories of brain-body communication. He also introduced the concept of opponent processors: neural systems that maintain balance and adaptability through mutual inhibition.
Opponent processes enable flexibility and nuance. The energy of the system comes from the dynamic tension between opposites. Alan Watts once described the universe as a dance that "wiggles" — always in motion, never quite still. Our minds are part of that dance.
But this dance is delicate. If the tension becomes disorganized or unsupported, the system can spiral into confusion, rigidity, or fragmentation—especially in a kluge-like mind.
SEGMENT 4: The Hemispheres in Dialogue
This same principle of opposition plays out at the highest level of brain architecture—between the left and right hemispheres.
Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, describes how the two hemispheres process reality in fundamentally different ways:
The right hemisphere sees the big picture—it’s holistic, relational, and grounded in lived experience.
The left hemisphere dissects that picture—it’s analytic, abstract, and focused on precision.
Each hemisphere brings a valuable perspective. But their power lies in coordination, not competition. The corpus callosum, the communication bridge between the hemispheres, contains a high proportion of inhibitory fibers. Its job may be less about sharing data and more about preventing interference—ensuring that one side doesn’t drown out the other.
McGilchrist argues that the right hemisphere should lead. It takes in the world as a living whole. The left hemisphere then models, names, and analyzes that world—before returning its findings to the right for reintegration. But in modern life, the roles have been reversed. The left dominates. Abstraction, control, and certainty have replaced context, connection, and mystery.
SEGMENT 5: Multiple Minds and Meaningful Tension
The hemispheres are just one example of the brain’s divided design. In truth, we host a crowd of competing impulses, drives, and subroutines:
A self-preserving mind and a compassionate mind
A cautious mind and a risk-taking mind
A verbal mind and an intuitive one
This inner multiplicity reflects evolution’s kluge-like process. It built new systems over old ones, with no central conductor. No wonder we feel conflicted. No wonder we sometimes self-sabotage.
As complex organisms living in even more complex environments, we need minds that can negotiate contradiction. The human brain may have expanded not just to handle the outside world, but to manage the expansion of its own inner complexity. So, The systems we rely on don’t always cooperate. Sometimes they misfire. But they are the best evolution could manage. And with the right support and management, they can do remarkable things.
CLOSING
Flourishing doesn’t come from imposing uniformity or suppressing contradiction. It comes from skillful integration. We choreograph opposing forces. We translate tension into growth. We let the dance of the kluge become, in fact, our source of wisdom.
In future episodes we’ll explore different aspects of these kluge-like systems and consider how we can effectively manage them to promote peace, wisdom and wellbeing.
Thanks for joining me today on Flourish As You Age. Until next time, stay curious, stay flexible, and keep dancing with the beautiful, klugey mind of yours.