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December 1, 2019 - April 11, 2020
He speaks of “our addiction to a pattern of thinking with the self at the center of it.”
“So much of human suffering stems from having this self that needs to be psychologically defended at all costs.
You can take any number of more accurate perspectives: that we’re a swarm of genes,
vehicles for passing on DNA; that we’re social creatures through and through, unable to survive alone; that we’re organisms in an ecosystem, linked together on this planet floating in the middle of nowhere.
“I was everybody, unity, one life with 6 billion faces. I was the one asking for love and giving love, I was swimming in the sea, and the sea was me.”
“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.”
The default mode network appears to be the seat not only of the ego, or self, but of the mental faculty of time travel as well.
(As meditators eventually discover, if we can manage to stop thinking about the past or future and sink into the present, the self seems to disappear.)
Getting overly attached to these narratives, taking them as fixed truths about ourselves rather than as stories subject to revision, contributes mightily to
addiction, depression, and anxiety.
The predictive brain is getting so many error signals that it is forced to develop extravagant new interpretations of an experience that transcends its capacity for understanding.
The posterior cingulate cortex is a centrally located node within the default
mode network involved in self-referential mental processes.
Situated in the middle of the brain, it links the prefrontal cortex—site of our executive function, where we plan and exercise will—with the centers of memory and emotion in the hippocampus. The PCC is believed to be the locus of the experiential or narrative self; it appears to generate the narratives that link what happens to us to our abiding sense of who we are. Brewer believes that this particula...
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It is where we get “caught up in the push and pull of our experience.”
Buddhists believe that attachment is at the root of all forms of mental suffering; if the neuroscience is right, a lot of these attachments have their mooring in the PCC, where they are nurtured and sustained.
Big Pharma mostly invests in drugs for chronic conditions, the pills you have to take every day.
