Our Mind Is a Jungle and We’re Not Its Kings
Or, are you really in control of your mind?
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Q: Is there a conscious self?
The movie The Last Samurai tells the story of U.S. Army Captain Nathan Algren (played by Tom Cruise), who is captured by the samurai and taken to their leader Katsumoto’s (played by Ken Watanabe) village to live among them.
In a scene where Algren is learning sword fighting (and failing badly), Katsumoto’s son comes to him and says (in broken English), “Too many mind.” Algren looks at him and wonders, “Too many mind?!” To this he replies, “Mind the sword, mind the people watching, mind the enemy. Too many mind… No mind!”
“No mind” or “empty mind” is a Zen expression that means a mind without mind. In other words, if you aren’t fixated on any specific thing, you aren’t distracted by that. You are prepared for anything.
But, as much as I love Zen philosophy, this isn’t what we’re going to discuss today. In fact, we are going to discuss the opposite of it: the idea of “too many mind” and why the idea of a “conscious self” is an illusion.
Today, let’s talk about the mind. More precisely, let’s talk about all the minds (within our mind) that are at a constant fight with each other without our conscious knowledge, and despite being an organisation without a leader, how our mind organises itself and helps us lead a normal life (without too much problem).
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, with victory going to the strongest.
The mind is a jungle. As much as we’d like to think, we aren’t the king of the jungle.
But it’s hard to believe this because we feel like we are king. We do feel…nope, we know fore sure that our conscious self is in charge of our behaviour. It is “I” who decides 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 conducted by neuroscientists Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga in the 1960s. These were done with people whose left and right brain hemispheres had been separated via surgery, mostly to control seizures in cases of severe epilepsy.
Surprisingly, splitting the brain into two has little effect on normal behaviour. You cannot tell one from the other, that is until you devise clever experiments to make patients behave strangely.
The key of the experiments was to confine information to a single hemisphere by presenting it to only half of the patient’s visual field. 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 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.
Now comes the interesting part. When the left hemisphere is asked to explain the behaviour initiated by the right hemisphere (for example, why they chose the nut), it tries to generate a plausible story.
Similarly, if you send the command “Walk” to the right hemisphere of these patients, they will get up and walk. But if you ask them where they’re going, the answer will come from the left hemisphere, which wasn’t privy to the original command.
One man replied, plausibly enough, that he was going to get a soda, and he seemed to believe the story.
In another experiment, an image of a chicken claw was shown to the patient’s left hemisphere and a snow scene was shown to the right hemisphere. Then an array of pictures was made visible to both hemispheres, and the patient was asked to choose a picture.
The patient’s left hand pointed to a shovel, presumably because a snow scene had been seen by the hemisphere that controls the left hand, and snow is something that gets shovelled. The right hand pointed to a chicken.
In his groundbreaking book Who’s in Charge, Gazzaniga recounts what happened next: “Then we asked why he chose those items. His left-hemisphere speech centre replied, ‘Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken,’ easily explaining what it knew. It had seen the chicken claw. Then, looking down at his left hand pointing to the shovel, without missing a beat, he said, ‘And you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.’ ” Again, the part of the brain that controls language had generated a coherent, if false, explanation of behaviour — and apparently had convinced itself of the truth of the explanation.
Now the million dollar question is this: why would natural selection design a brain that leaves people deluded about themselves? The fact is that if we believe something about ourselves, that will help us convince other people to believe it. And certainly it’s to our benefit — or more precisely, it would have been to the benefit of the genes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors — to convince the world that we’re coherent, consistent actors who have things under control.
Remember the guy who got up and went to get a soda? His answer wasn’t true, but it does inspire confidence in him. He’s in charge of himself — one who doesn’t go around doing things for no good reason. Compare him with a guy who offers a more truthful answer: “I don’t really know why I got up or where I’m going. Sometimes I just do stuff for reasons that make no sense to me.”
If those two guys were your neighbours in a hunter-gatherer village, which one would you want to go hunting with? Which one would you want to become friends with? During human evolution, the answers to such questions mattered: if you were thought unworthy of collaboration and friendship, your genes were in trouble.
From natural selection’s point of view, it’s good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself, to depict yourself as rational and self-aware. 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.
But you don’t have to be a split-brain patient to delude yourself. We delude ourselves on a daily basis. In another experiment, psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson asked shoppers to assess four pairs of pantyhose and choose the best pair. It turned out people had a strong tendency to choose the pair on the far right. But when asked why they had chosen that pair, they didn’t say, “Because it’s on the far right.” They tended to explain their choices in terms of the quality of the pantyhose, sometimes going into detail about the fabric, the feel, and so on. Unfortunately for these explanations, the four pairs of pantyhose were identical.
The brain is basically composed of lots of specialised modules — modules for sizing up situations and reacting to them — and it’s the interplay among these modules that shapes our behaviour. And much of this interplay happens without our conscious awareness. Our “conscious self” is just an illusion. We aren’t in control.
But why on earth is it like this? You see, the brain got built bit by bit, chunk by chunk. As our species encountered new challenges, new chunks (or modules) were added. When you are at war with yourself, deciding whether to take addictive drugs, to eat another sugary donut, to cheat on your spouse, there are modules inside your brain at war among themselves. The resulting action depends on which modules win.
When asked how we would go about something, we often say: It depends. We basically mean, it depends on the situation. Well, it doesn’t, at least not completely. It depends more on which module inside the brain dominates under the given circumstances. And it has something to do with feelings.
In a study, participants were shown clips from different movies, either the terrifying The Shining or the romantic Before Sunrise. People in each group then saw one of two ads for an art museum. In the first ad the pitch line was “Visited by over a Million People Each Year.” In the second the pitch line was “Stand Out from the Crowd.”
People who had been watching The Shining felt more favourably about the museum, and more inclined to visit it, when given the first pitch, presumably because a state of fear inclines you to see crowds as safe havens. People who had been watching Before Sunrise had the opposite reaction, perhaps because feeling romantic inclines you toward a more intimate environment.
This may not seem earthshaking. We all know that we behave differently in different “moods” so it stands to reason that putting us in a romantic mood would change our behaviour. What we call a mood is nothing but a module.
We have a variety of moods, and likewise we have multiple modules. In the above case which movie we watch determines which module gets triggered. The romantic movie puts our “mate-acquisition” module in charge. The scary movie puts your “self-protection” module in charge.
But, as mentioned already, nobody controls the modules. They get triggered by feelings that are generated from circumstances. We don’t consciously decide to go into romantic mode or fearful mode.
In that aspect, what emotions do — what emotions are for — is to activate and coordinate the modular functions that are appropriate for the moment. Strong emotions often tend to transform us completely.
As an example, the following is an analysis of what goes inside our minds during a fit of sexual jealousy, as described by psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby:
“The emotion of sexual jealousy constitutes an organised mode of operation specifically designed to deploy the programs governing each psychological mechanism so that each is poised to deal with the exposed infidelity. Physiological processes are prepared for such things as violence. . . . The goal of deterring, injuring, or murdering the rival emerges; the goal of punishing, deterring, or deserting the mate appears; the desire to make oneself more competitively attractive to alternative mates emerges; memory is activated to re-analyse the past; confident assessments of the past are transformed into doubts; the general estimate of the reliability and trustworthiness of the opposite sex (or indeed everyone) may decline; associated shame programs may be triggered to search for situations in which the individual can publicly demonstrate acts of violence or punishment that work to counteract an (imagined or real) social perception of weakness; and so on.”
That’s a lot of stuff! Indeed, it’s so much stuff — so much change in a person’s attitude, focus, disposition — that you might say a whole new self has emerged and seized control of the mind. When you really mean is that the “sexual jealousy” module has taken over.
Bottomline is this: It’s a dog-eat-dog world going on in our brain, with different systems competing to make it to the surface to win the prize of conscious recognition. While hierarchical processing takes place within the modules, there is no hierarchy among the modules. It is a free-for-all, self-organising system. It’s an organisation without a CEO.
The things I pay attention to, the stories I tell about the things I pay attention to — all these result from choices getting made. But “I,” the conscious “I,” the thing I think of as my self, am by and large not making the choices. “I” am not in control.
Timeless Insight
Often, rather than figuring out how something should work, it’s easier to understand what doesn’t work and simply do the opposite. For example, why do most incentive systems in companies fail? First, they are hard to explain. They are complicated, wordy, and full of jargon. Second, they are abstract. There’s no good way to measure them. “Excellent job” is more about how your manager feels about your job, and less about how excellent a job you have really done. Third, the rewards are small and untimely, such as yearly bonuses. A year-end bonus isn’t nearly as effective as a weekly bonus. A year-end review isn’t nearly as useful as immediate feedback. Fourth, the programs are designed such that they can be easily gamed. In conclusion, good incentives systems should be straightforward, measurable, immediate, ungameable.
What I’m Reading
Self satisfaction alone cannot determine if a desire or action is positive or negative. The demarcation between a positive and a negative desire or action is not whether it gives you a immediate feeling of satisfaction, but whether it ultimately results in positive or negative consequences.
— Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness
Tiny Thought
A humble brag is a successfully disguised arrogance.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, jokes. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋