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

by Chris Niebauer

without thought, the self does not, in fact, exist.

This may be a difficult point to grasp, chiefly because we've mistaken the process of thinking as a genuine thing for so long. It will take some time to see the idea of a “me” as simply an idea rather than a fact. Your illusionary self—the voice in your head—is very convincing. It narrates the world, determines your beliefs, replays your memories, identifies with your physical body, manufactures your projections of what might happen in the future, and creates your judgments about the past. It is this sense of self that we feel from the moment we open our eyes in the morning to the moment we close them at night. It seems all-important, so it often comes as a shock when I tell people that based on my work as a

neuropsychologist, this “I” is simply not there—at least not in the way we think it is.

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.

“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you

think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn't one.”

left brain is an interpreter or story-maker.

Pattern recognition, language, mapmaking, and categorization are all located in the left brain, and the evidence

suggests that it is exactly these types of functions that collectively lead to the sensation of a self and the str...

right brain

finding meaning, our ability to see and understand big-picture ideas, expressing creativity, experiencing emotions, and spatial processing.

The brain breathes mind like the lungs breathe air. —Huston Smith

corpus callosum.

800 million nerve fibers

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 should have said, “I haven't talked to the right brain in a long time, I don't know why it does what it does with that left hand,”

In another example, researchers presented the word walk to a patient's right brain only. The patient immediately responded to the request and stood up and started to leave the van in which the testing was taking place. When the patient's left brain (language side) was asked why he got up to walk, again the interpreter came up with a plausible but completely incorrect explanation: “I'm going into the house to get a Coke.”

In another exercise, the word laugh was presented to the right brain and the patient complied. When asked why she was laughing, her left brain responded by cracking a joke: “You guys come up and test us each month. What a way to make a living!” Remember, the correct answer here would have been, “I laughed because you asked me to.”

Ramachandran found that the left brain's role is one of beliefs and interpretation and that it had little regard for reality in making up its interpretations.

Most people are unaware that we have a right-side preference;

As you can imagine, this second bridge was designed to cause rapid heartbeat and shortness of breath—namely, to simulate arousal. After the male subjects crossed the respective bridges, a female assistant asked them to fill out a questionnaire and make up a short story about a picture they were shown. Finally, the men then had an opportunity to ask the assistant for her phone number in order to

call at a future time to “learn more about the experiment.” Nine out of eighteen males who crossed the scary bridge called her back, compared to only two out of sixteen males on the less arousing, safer bridge. Their brains had told a story that connected their increased arousal to the female assistant.

In one of Gazzaniga's original studies of the split-brain patients,6 the experimenters presented the right brain with a video of a person being thrown into a fire. This very likely aroused the patient's nervous system and stimulated fear in the right brain, but the subject's left brain was clueless as to why and left searching for an explanation. She said, “I don't know why, but I feel kind of scared. I feel jumpy. I don't like this room, or maybe you are making me nervous.” Later, to another researcher, her left brain said, “I know

I like Dr. Gazzaniga, but right now I'm scared of him for some reason.”

These studies strongly suggest that we live our lives under the direction of the interpreter, and for most of us the mind is a master we are not even aware of. We may become angry, offended, sexually aroused, happy, or fearful, and we do not question the authenticity of these thoughts and experiences. While it is clear that these experienc...

if something noticeable happens, say a person cuts you off in traffic, someone gets up and suddenly runs out of a room, or an attractive person looks at you a second longer than normal, you hear a voice in your head that creates an explanation of the event: “He is a jerk,” “They

must have forgotten something,” or “He or she is interested in me.” Notice that those are all interpretations; they may be true or they may not be. However, because many people are not conscious of the left-brain interpreter, they can't even consider that their thoughts are interpretations, but rather feel secure they are seeing things “as they really are.”

The first is that the interpretive mind is constantly making interpretations without a full

account of the facts and it believes these interpretations to be true, much of the time without doubting its conclusion.

when actions or facts arise from someplace to which the left brain does not have access, the interpretive portion of our mind will simply explain them. Again, this explanation may have nothing to do with reality.

The second thing that is overlooked in the explanation “I made an assumption” is the presumption of “I.” In these experiments, the “I” that makes an assumption is really just the interpretive

portion of th...

We have already seen that this “I” can be wrong about so many things in the “outside” world, so is it possible then that the “I” is even wr...

realizing and accepting that the self is a fiction can lead to the end of suffering.

the inaccurate explanations generated by the left brain, as well as the presupposition of this “me,” are the most prevalent causes of internal suffering we experience as humans.

even though the left-brain interpreter is always on and cannot be turned off, once it is recognized—or that is to say, once we become aware of its constant interpretations—a new awareness of ourselves and the world begins. Instead of being so identified with the “me” in our heads, we find ourselves noticing things like “that's my left-brain interpreter telling stories.” When the stories it creates don't evoke as strong a mental or emotional reaction, our suffering lessens as a result.

the left side of the brain works: it focuses on objects in space, labels them, categorizes them, and tries to make sense out of them. We have become such experts at organizing our perceptions into categories and patterns that it's difficult to see reality in any other way.

As we move forward, here are some questions to consider: 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? Have you ever looked up at the stars in the night sky or the clouds during the day and been convinced some patt...

Given that language is controlled by the left brain, it's no coincidence that it is the interpreter's main form of expression. This is most noticeable when we communicate with others, but the interpreter also talks to itself in the form of thoughts. This internal dialogue is happening continually for almost everyone on the planet, and it plays a central role in the creation of the mirage that we call the self.

Iain McGilchrist's masterpiece of a book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,

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.”

When the mind mistakes the map for reality, the result is that we carry on blindly in a world of language-based stories created by the left-brain interpreter. Keeping in mind that the left

brain creates stories it believes completely—often without regard to the truth—one could compare this t...

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.

Think of an example in your own life when someone said something to you that you found hurtful. You may have suffered greatly, but the truth is that this person was simply sharing an opinion and expressing it via sounds emanating from their voice box. How is it possible that such a thing “hurt” you? Obviously you were hurt by your interpretation of it or the map that these sounds created in your left brain. Next, imagine for a moment if there were no self to hurt? Would words directed at this “you” ever be seen as a problem?

when you mistake the voice in your head for who you really are, the tool is using you.

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.

Helen Keller, who lost both sight and hearing very early in life. It is particularly telling that she states that she only developed a sense of self after she learned language.