No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism

by Chris Niebauer

Buddhism, Taoism, the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, and other schools of Eastern thought have quite a different take on the self, the ego, or “me.” They say that this idea of “me” is a fiction, although a very convincing one. Buddhism has a word for this concept—anatta, which is often translated as “no self”—which is one of the most fundamental tenets of Buddhism, if not the most important.

This book will explore strong evidence suggesting that the concept of the self is simply a construct of the mind, rather than a physical thing located somewhere within the brain itself. Put another way, it is the process of thinking that creates the self, rather than there being a self having any independent existence separate from thought. The self is more like a verb than a noun. To take it a step further, the implication is that without thought, the self does not, in fact, exist.

Mistaking the voice in our head for a thing and labeling it “me” brings us into conflict with the neuropsychological evidence that shows there is no such thing. This mistake—this illusory sense of self—is the primary cause of our mental suffering. What's more, I contend that it blocks access to the eternal, expansive thread of universal consciousness that is always available to us.

Gazzaniga determined that the left side of the brain created explanations and reasons to help make sense of what was going on.1 The left brain acted as an “interpreter” for reality. Furthermore, Gazzaniga found that this interpreter was often completely and totally wrong.

Because the left brain looks outward and only focuses on objects, categorizes them, and labels them, is it possible that it also looks inward and does the same thing? In other words, does the left brain see thought happening in the brain and continuously create a “thing” out of the process of thinking, which it then labels “me”? Is the sense of self related to seeing patterns in randomness? Is it possible that the self we invest so much in is nothing more than a story to help explain our behaviors, the myriad events that go on in our lives, and our experiences in the world?

In Iain McGilchrist's masterpiece of a book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,4 he describes the central role of the left brain as a mapmaker to reality, and language is the pen with which the left brain draws. Language can obviously be extremely helpful in communication with others, but the left brain also becomes so dependent on language that it mistakes the map of reality for reality itself. There is an old Zen proverb that points to this problem, advising against “confusing the menu with the food.”

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with making maps in general—we need them. The issue, as scholar Alfred Korzybski, the developer of the field of general semantics, might have speculated, is that the left brain mistakes the map for the territory.5 We will spend a good deal of time navigating within the framework of this mistake. Our association of our true self with the constant voice in our head is an instance of mistaking the map (the voice) for the territory (who we really are). This error is one of the biggest reasons the illusion of self is so difficult to see.

Researcher Martin Teicher has found that verbal abuse is at least as harmful as physical abuse and a strong risk factor for depression and other psychological disorders.8

Language creates a story, and this story—combined with our memories and the sense of a command center behind our forehead—creates an illusion of self that virtually everyone on the planet identifies with. In the same way that we mistake words for what they represent, we also use our linguistics-based thoughts as the basis for a fictional self as a genuine self.

The root of the problem is that many of us do not see language as a representation of reality, but confuse it with reality itself. This mistake contributes significantly to suffering when we take words too seriously. We might be disappointed by frozen food we thought would taste fresh. Taken to a much more significant extreme, we can observe this as a contributing factor in the modern phenomenon of teen suicides that result from online bullying.

Identity is merely a pattern of events in time and space. Change the pattern and you have changed the person. —Nisargadatta Maharaj

Every day it needs to get its fix, and it does that in a variety of ways: telling stories about what it perceives, comparing and categorizing itself again others, judging things as right or wrong—and it uses all of these processes to define “you” as “yourself.”