If you think you know who you are, you’ve sold yourself short. Who you are is incomprehensible—by anyone, even by you. As I wrote in a recent post on Age and Change, the difficulty of comprehending ourselves arises from the limits of conscious thought: we just can’t think about very many things at once, and “who we are,” includes far more things than we can be aware of at any one time, unless we’re satisfied with a very abbreviated answer to that question.
There is a huge difference between how we are taught to think of ourselves, and the facts of how our brains work. It puzzled me, at first, that the people who know the most about the brain say so little—nothing, in fact—about the relevance of their work to how they think of themselves. They talk about brains—theirs and ours—as if what they’re saying had nothing to do with their self-concept, or with anyone else’s. It’s as if they were talking about the weather.
This was brought home to me again by an article from Discover Magazine, recently published online, called, “Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain.” The “top neuroscientists” interviewed included Daniel Levitin, Michael Gazzaniga, Sam Wang, and Rebecca Saxe, and they confirmed things I’ve been writing here for years, with a few embellishments. Well worth reading if you want the “official word.”
Michael Gazzaniga points out how different circuits are activated at different times, and how the activity of those circuits is what constitute our current mental state: “Consciousness is not a thing in the brain that information gets poured into and you’re aware of it. It’s the constant struggle of all these circuits to come up to the top and hold the stage for that second.” All our circuits can’t be equally active at the same time, so whichever ones are most active determine who we are at that moment.
I’ve written and talked about how the environment influences which circuits are active, and Rebecca Saxe elaborates on that idea: “One really interesting discovery about the brain is that one of the major ways it works is by generating all the possible responses to a situation and then inhibiting the ones that you don’t want.” She describes the behavior of patients with a particular kind of frontal lobe damage that reduces inhibitory controls and results in what are called, “utilization behaviors.” If you place an object in front of them, they will use it, whether it’s appropriate to the current situation or not.
Which brings up the question of who decides what’s appropriate, with or without brain damage. Sam Wang talks about some ideas in research on decision-making and concludes that this process, though it is “…something that we might imagine being integral to our consciousness is in fact composed of components that are not explicitly accessible to us.”
For the most part, these ideas are familiar to anyone who’s listened to or read much of my stuff, as is the next question: “Given what we know, how do we think of ourselves?” Wang suggests that these ideas differ from what we might imagine about ourselves, but doesn’t suggest how we might correct our imagination.
While the neuroscientists don’t talk about it, some philosopher’s do, at least in terms of it’s social ramifications. Tom Clark’s naturalism.org offers some of the most insightful thinking on this subject, and in a much more organized way than the labyrinth you’ll find here.
My focus is more on how it feels to be inside this organism, and for me, the more I’ve learned, the more interesting the feeling of “being me” has become. To quote myself from the previous post: “By paying attention to the moment-to-moment surprises blossoming in our heads, we can get comfortable with the idea of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Life can become a perpetual surprise party, with each of us the honored guest.”
The question of who we are and how we think of ourselves is ancient, and I’ll leave you with a favorite quote from one of the old guys, Rumi: “When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, ‘This is certainly not the way we thought it was!’”
Many Veils
