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In the first case—while struggling to focus—you see thoughts capture you, and in the second case you see them fail to capture you, but in both cases you realize that the thoughts aren’t coming from “you,” from your conscious self. So both experiences make sense if thoughts are in fact propelled into consciousness by modules that are themselves beyond the reach of conscious awareness.
In other words: if the modular model is correct, then the view of thoughts afforded us by meditation is truer than the everyday, unreflective view, the view that has thoughts emanating from a CEO self.
As we’ve seen, in the modular model, feelings are the things that give a module temporary control of the show. You see someone who inspires feelings of attraction, and suddenly you’re in mate-acquisition mode, seeking intimacy, being exquisitely considerate, maybe showing off, and in other ways becoming a different person.
It stands to reason that if these feelings—of attraction and affection, of rivalrous dislike—didn’t get purchase in the first place, the corresponding modules wouldn’t seize control.
I’m talking about is the part when you can’t focus on your breath because thoughts keep intruding. But if you’re paying close attention to this “failure” to meditate, then, of course, it isn’t a failure to meditate—because paying attention to whatever is happening is mindfulness meditation.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve noticed about thoughts that intrude when I’m trying to focus on my breath: they often seem to have feelings attached to them.
Even that most cerebral of mind wanderings—wondering—seems to have feelings that accompany it.
sometimes the quest to know something feels more like an urgent drive, an unsettling thirst.
Whether curiosity is more like a desperate hunger or a delightful lure seems to depend on how directly and urgently relevant it is to our interests as defined by natural selection; the less direct and urgent the connection, the more subtle and pleasant the feeling.
It’s no surprise, then, that brain scans are showing that a curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system, the system involved in motivation and reward, in desire and pleasure.
thoughts that grab my mind and carry it along with them have feelings attached, however subtle those feelings may be.
One night during a dharma talk, he said, “Every thought has a propellant, and that propellant is emotional.”
When your mind is wandering, when your default mode network is running the show, how does the network decide which module gets to propel its thought into consciousness at any given time?
So far as I can tell, the best candidate for that honor is feelings. Of all the thoughts engaged in subterranean competition at a given moment, maybe the thought that has the strongest level of feeling associated with it is the one that gains entry into consciousness.
After all, feelings are judgments about how various things relate to an animal’s Darwinian interests. So, from natural selection’s point of view, feelings would make great labels for thoughts, labels that say things like “high priority,” “medium priority,” “low priority.”
In all of these cases, the feelings associated with the thoughts will be commensurate in strength to the importance of the thoughts as natural selection defines importance. And when the default mode takes over—when your mind isn’t focused on talking to someone or reading a book or playing a sport or some other immersive task—it is the most “important” thoughts, the ones labeled with the strongest feelings, that get priority.
Feelings are, among other things, your brain’s way of labeling the importance of thoughts, and importance (in natural selection’s somewhat crude sense of the term) determines which thoughts enter consciousness.
As I mentioned earlier, I find it easier to view my feelings with some measure of detachment than to view my thoughts that way. And I don’t think I’m an aberration. Lots of meditators seem to have an easier time with feelings than with thoughts.
you’d have to be good at viewing even very subtle feelings with objectivity before you could view a wide variety of thoughts that way.
The Greater Discourse on the Destruction of Craving, the Buddha says that a “mind object”—a category that includes thoughts—is just like a taste or a smell: whether a person is “tasting a flavor with the tongue” or “smelling an odor with the nose” or “cognizing a mind object with the mind,” the person “lusts after it if it is pleasing” and “dislikes it if it is unpleasing.”
It turned out researchers could do a good job of predicting whether someone would purchase something by watching which parts of the brain got more active and which got less active.
the nucleus accumbens, which plays a role in doling out pleasure and gets more active when people anticipate rewards or see things they like. The more active the nucleus accumbens while subjects were looking at a product, the more likely they were to buy it.
On the other hand, there’s the insula, which gets especially active when people anticipate pain and other unpleasant things. The more active the insula got when people were shown the price, the less likely they were to buy the product.
So reason does play a role in what a person finally does. Still, this experiment suggests that maybe reason can play that role only by influencing the ultimate motivator: feelings.
After all, feelings are the original motivators. Good and bad feelings are what natural selection used to goad animals into, respectively, approaching things or avoiding things, acquiring things or rejecting things; good feelings were assigned to things like eating and bad feelings to things like being eaten.
We may buy a parka with a lining whose virtues we’ve confirmed through rigorous online research and extended contemplation, but the reason we finally buy the parka is because all that rational analysis gives us a good feeling about buying it.
For that matter, the reason we started the analysis in the first place is because being cold in the winter gives us a bad feeling. Feelings tell us what to think about, and then after all the thinking is done, they tell us what to do.
As our species became more complexly social, getting food and sex came to depend on navigating a social landscape, which included goals like forging alliances and being held in high esteem. So making friends and earning respect came to feel good, and being rejected came to feel bad.
Still, this growing web of feelings and thoughts was a straightforward extension of the basic value system evolution built into us to begin with—a system that prized surviving and getting our genes spread.
Brain-scan studies have shown that the same parts of the brain that mediate physical pain also mediate the pain of social rejection. Which helps explain why opiates and other painkillers can take the sting out of social setbacks. Even extended doses of Tylenol, one study showed, can dull the pain of social rejection.
Self-control has often been described as a matter of reason prevailing over feelings. Plato invoked the metaphor of a charioteer (the rational self) keeping horses (the unruly passions) under control.
The prefrontal cortex, which sits right behind your forehead, is extolled in high school textbooks and museum exhibits as the thing that makes you human. It is said to be the “executive seat” of the brain, endowing us with a capacity for extended reasoning and planning and self-control.
Reason has its effect not by directly pushing back against a feeling but by fortifying the feeling that does do the pushing back. Yes, that Hershey bar looks good, and the thought of eating it feels good, but reflecting on that article you read about the toll high blood sugar takes on your body makes the thought of eating the Hershey bar guilt-inducing. And it’s the guilt, not the reflection, that does direct combat with the urge to eat the candy bar.
“Reason alone,” Hume argued, “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.” Nothing “can oppose or retard the impulse of passion but a contrary impulse.”
No, the powers of reason embedded in the prefrontal cortex are themselves under the control of feelings.
natural selection’s conception of what’s good and what’s bad, what we should pursue and what we should avoid—continues to be, more or less, the prevailing value system.
It’s the desire to live a long, healthy life that focuses our reasoning on the link between sugar consumption and longevity, and it’s through this desire that the results of the reasoning can overpower the desire for the chocolate itself.
the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: “The DLPFC, the seat of abstract reasoning, is deeply interconnected with the dopamine system, which is responsible for placing values on objects and actions.
The part of the brain known as the limbic system is routinely identified as the “seat of emotion,” but that description is turning out to be misleading.
“There were certain systems in your head that were designed to be motivated to eat high-calorie foods, and those systems had certain kinds of motives or beliefs or representations, and there are other systems in your head that have motivations associated with long-term health, and those systems have certain beliefs about the chocolate.”
In other words, neither kind of module was more “rational” than the other; they just had different goals, and on this particular day, one was stronger than the other.
All of this highlights a puzzle: Why does our conscious mind have to spend time witnessing the presentation of reasons—that is, participating in the “deliberation”? If it’s just a show trial—if it all comes down to a contest of power between modules
“My guess,” said Kurzban, is that the reason your conscious mind observes the debate, including the winning rationale, is so that “if someone ever challenges you or asks you why you did x, y, or z,” you’ll be able to cite a plausible rationale.
Sometimes the social stakes are higher than what a passing stranger thinks of you. If everyone you know finds out that you’ve been cheating on your spouse, you can’t just say “I was driven by sexual urges that were designed by natural selection to maximize genetic legacy.”
of course, you’re not that kind of person! So you need to be able to say something more like “But you have to understand: my spouse had grown emotionally distant and wasn’t meeting my deep need for companionship and intimacy.” Then people will say they can’t really blame you.
Either way, one virtue of your conscious mind being in touch with the reasons generated by competing modules is that you can share the reasons with others, and get their feedback, before making your decision. Strictly speaking, though, the way I should put it is this: You can share the reasons with others, and then their feedback will recalibrate how good or bad the two options feel.
modules seem to have the ability to recruit reasons on behalf of their goals.
Just because feelings are critical players in this drama doesn’t mean we’re powerless to intervene. In fact, we have a tool—mindfulness meditation—that’s well suited to intervening at the level of feelings and altering their influence.
it will help to understand how and why some appetites become dominant in the first place—what the evolutionary logic is behind the power they’ve amassed within your mind.
self-discipline is like a muscle. If you use it, it gets stronger, and if you don’t, it gets weaker. This truism does seem to capture the broad pattern; if the part of you that’s arguing against indulgence prevails a few times—if it gets successfully “exercised”—its chances of success will be better next time, whereas if it loses a few times in a row, it will be headed toward a very long losing streak.
