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Think of yourself as having, in principle, the power to establish a different relationship with your feelings and thoughts and impulses and perceptions—the power to disengage from some of them; the power to, in a sense, disown them,
in my own view these arguments over what the Buddha actually believed about the self are in one sense pointless. There’s roughly no chance that all the sayings attributed to him in Buddhist texts were uttered by him.
Just as the gospel accounts of Jesus are products of evolution, of oral and textual accretion over time, so are ancient accounts of the Buddha’s utterances. Even assuming that most of these accounts were originally grounded in things he actually said, they were subject to amendment, intentional or not, as they passed through the generations. In this light, it’s hardly surprising that there should be inconsistencies and outright contradictions within the Buddhist canon.
there are some themes that everyone agrees are part of the Buddhist tradition from early on. And one of these is that our conception of our selves is, at best, wildly off the mark.
Twenty-five hundred years later, the science of psychology is talking the Buddha’s language.
This is a matter of nearly unanimous agreement among psychologists: the conscious self is not some all-powerful executive authority.
And some of the contents of your consciousness that you normally think of yourself as generating seem to be getting generated by something other than you. More than once I’ve heard a meditation teacher say, “Thoughts think themselves.” By the end of a retreat, oddly, that can start to make sense.
So if the conscious mind isn’t in control, what is in control? As we’ll see, the answer may be: nothing in particular. The closer we look at the mind, the more it seems to consist of a lot of different players, players that sometimes collaborate but sometimes fight for control,
The good news is that, paradoxically, realizing you’re not king can be the first step toward getting some real power.
we feel like we’re king; we feel that our conscious self is in charge of our behavior, deciding what to do and when. But a number of experiments over the past few decades have cast doubt on this intuition.
Among the most dramatic are the famous “split-brain” experiments. These were done with people whose left and right brain hemispheres had been separated via surgery that severed the bundle of fibers connecting them.
If, for example, a word is presented only to the left visual field, which is processed by the right hemisphere, it won’t enter the left hemisphere at all, since the hemispheres have been surgically separated.
It’s the left hemisphere that, in most people, controls language. Sure enough, patients whose right hemisphere is exposed to, say, the word nut report no awareness of this input. Yet their left hand—which is controlled by the right hemisphere—will, if allowed to rummage through a box containing various objects, choose a nut.
the part of the brain that controls language had generated a coherent, if false, explanation of behavior—and apparently had convinced itself of the truth of the explanation.
The split-brain experiments powerfully demonstrated the capacity of the conscious self to convince itself that it’s calling the shots when it’s not.
Psychologists have devised various ways to get people to do things without being aware of why they’re doing them.
Questions about how in control the conscious mind really is have now been raised from a lot of experimental angles. In a famous series of experiments first done in the early 1980s by Benjamin Libet, researchers monitored the brains of subjects while they “chose” to initiate an action. The researchers concluded that the brain was initiating the action before the person became aware of “deciding” to initiate it.
Still, at a minimum it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.
Why would natural selection design a brain that leaves people deluded about themselves? One answer is that if we believe something about ourselves, that will help us convince other people to believe it.
to convince the world that we’re coherent, consistent actors who have things under control.
Remember the guy whose right hemisphere was told to walk, and whose left hemisphere, when asked where he was going, said he was going to get a soda? His answer wasn’t really true, but it does inspire a kind of confidence in him.
In short, from natural selection’s point of view, it’s good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself, to depict yourself as a rational, self-aware actor. So whenever your actual motivations aren’t accessible to the part of your brain that communicates with the world, it would make sense for that part of your brain to generate stories about your motivation.
In 1980 the psychologist Anthony Greenwald invented the term beneffectance to describe the way people naturally present themselves to the world—as beneficial and effective. Lots of experiments since then have shown that people not only put out this kind of publicity about themselves but actually believe it.
If there is anything we’re more impressed by than our competence, it’s our moral fiber. One finding among many that drive this point home is that the average person believes he or she does more good things and fewer bad things than the average person.
And we don’t just consider ourselves above average compared to a vaguely envisioned population of human beings at large. When put on a very small team, we tend to convince ourselves that we’re more valuable than the average team member.
As Kurzban has summarized this finding, “We think we’re better than average at not being biased in thinking that we’re better than average.”
Our egocentric biases are aided and abetted by the way memory works. Though certain painful events get seared into our memories—perhaps so we can avoid repeating the mistakes that led to them—we are on balance more likely to remember events that reflect favorably on us than those that don’t.
What’s more, when we recount an experience to someone, the act of recounting it changes the memory of it. So if we reshape the story a bit each time—omitting inconvenient facts, exaggerating convenient ones—we can, over time, transform our actual belief about what happened.
Of course, people don’t always have inflated conceptions of themselves. There is such a thing as low self-esteem—and there are explanations, speculative but plausible explanations, as to why it would make Darwinian sense for certain experiences to instill it.
Later the extroverts recalled more positive experiences than they had in fact had, and the neurotics recalled more negative experiences than they had in fact had.
But note that both kinds of people were wrong; their particular personalities had steered them toward different kinds of illusions, but in both cases illusion is the operative word.
on average, people think they’re morally above average. This is an especially important piece of self-flattery, because it helps fuel the self-righteousness that starts and sustains conflicts, ranging from quarrels to wars.
So, all told, we’re under at least two kinds of illusions. One is about the nature of the conscious self, which we see as more in control of things than it actually is. The other illusion is about exactly what kind of people we are—namely, capable and upstanding.
If the conscious self isn’t a CEO, directing all the behavior it thinks it’s directing, how does behavior get directed? How do decisions get made? An increasingly common answer within the field of psychology, especially evolutionary psychology, is that the mind is “modular.”
the interplay among these modules that shapes your behavior. And much of this interplay happens without conscious awareness on your part.
For starters, it makes sense in terms of evolution: the mind got built bit by bit, chunk by chunk, and as our species encountered new challenges, new chunks would have been added.
Perhaps most important for our purposes, thinking of the mind as modular helps make sense of things you hear from Buddhist meditation teachers, such as that “thoughts think themselves” and that appreciating this fact can be liberating.
let me try to preempt misunderstanding by listing three ways you shouldn’t conceive of modules: 1. The modules aren’t like a bunch of physical compartments.
the truth is that there is much more interaction among and overlap between different mental modules than you see in a Swiss Army knife or even a smartphone.
All told, the division of labor among, and delineation among, the modules in our mind is much less clear-cut than the word modules suggests, and the extent of interaction among them is greater than the word suggests. So if you’d rather use a word like networks or systems, feel free.
3. The modules aren’t like departments in a company’s organization chart.
Yes, the modules may sometimes collaborate, but they sometimes compete, and they can compete fiercely.
“While hierarchical processing takes place within the modules, it is looking like there is no hierarchy among the modules. All these modules are not reporting to a department head—it is a free-for-all, self-organizing system.”
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world going on in your brain, with different systems competing to make it to the surface to win the prize of conscious recognition.”
Gazzaniga is talking more about struggles that get resolved at an unconscious or barely conscious level. The things I pay attention to, the stories I tell about the things I pay attention to, the stories I tell about myself—all these result from choices getting made, and “I,” the conscious “I,” the thing I think of as my self, am by and large not making the choices.
Kurzban has written, “In the end, if it’s true that your brain consists of many, many little modules with various functions, and if only a small number of them are conscious, then there might not be any particular reason to consider some of them to be ‘you’ or ‘really you’
Still, the conscious mind—the conscious “self”—isn’t special in the way we commonly assume it’s special. It’s not calling as many of the shots as we think it is.
Indeed, you may find it useful to think of meditation as a process that takes a conscious mind that gets to do a little nudging and turns it into something that can do a lot of nudging—maybe even turns it into something more like a president than a speaker of the House.
we change. And we don’t just change in the sense of changing from children into adults. We change on a moment-by-moment basis. And sometimes we change along dimensions that are commonly thought to be constants.
if you built a robot whose brain worked like the human brain, and then asked computer scientists to describe its workings, they’d say that its brain consists of lots of partly overlapping modules, and modules within modules, and the robot’s circumstances determine which modules are, for the moment, running the show. These computer scientists would have trouble pointing to a part of the robot’s programming and saying, “This part is the robot itself.”
