Our experience is not unified but an assembled story by the interpreter that we are
While we all feel ourselves to be unified creatures, that is not the reality of our experience or our brains. There is no central command post in the brain, says neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Rather, there are millions of highly specialized local processors—circuits for vision, for other sensory data, for motor control, for specific emotions, for cognitive representations, just to name a few modules—distributed throughout the brain carrying out the neural processes of experience.
What’s more, Washington University neuroscientist Jeffrey Zacks told me, such modules monitor external experience not continuously but in a kind of punctuated way, a process he calls event sampling. “The mind/brain segments ongoing activity into meaningful events,” he says. How is it, then, that they function as an integrated whole and we experience ourselves that way?
Gazzaniga knows this from decades of work with so-called split-brain patients, people in whom the connection between right and left hemisphere has been surgically severed. With no transfer of information between hemispheres, such patients can’t possibly know why they are, say, raising their left hand after Gazzaniga “sneaks into the right hemisphere” to give a command to do so. Yet, when asked what they thought their left hand was doing, they invent a story to explain why their left hand was moving.
“Consciousness,” says Gazzaniga, “does not constitute a single, generalized process.” It involves widely distributed processes integrated by the interpreter module.” The psychological unity we feel emerges from the specialized system of the interpreter, our built-in storyteller, generating explanations about our perceptions, memories, and actions and the relationships among them. What results is a personal narrative, the story that confers the subjective experience of unity, that solid sense of self.
We literally create ourselves through narrative. Narrative is more than a literary device—it’s a brain device. Small wonder that stories can be so powerful.
- Peter Guber
Related
Narrative as a basic organizing principle of memory (video)
Stories are mental representations that provide order from the chaos (at an expense)
Desperate to find order in the chaos and to infer cause and effect, the left hemisphere—in a module Gazzaniga dubs “the interpreter”—tries to fit everything into a coherent story as to why a behavior was carried out. The brain takes information spewed out from other areas of the brain, the body, and the environment, and synthesizes it into a story. If there is not an obvious explanation, we fabricate one.
The way things seem isn’t always how they are
Our brains create an illusion of unity and control where there really isn’t any
Now consider yourself. Consider your own left arm. It feels perfect, under your control, a part of you, exactly where it should be. But this unified perception relies on neuronal machinery humming in the background, far beneath conscious awareness. Your sense of unity, only perceptible to you, is a sheen on the surface, not a deeper layer of reality.
Where neuroscience meets buddhism
Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to “exist” at all…As revealed by scientific inquiry, what we call a mind (or a self, or a soul) is actually something that changes so much and is so uncertain that our pre-scientific language struggles to find meaning.
Buddhists say pretty much the same thing. They believe in an impermanent and illusory self made of shifting parts
In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else
The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.
Our brains make up stories in order to make sense of what we do
Take the example of patients who’ve had split-brain surgery (when the corpus callosum is severed to help patients with epilepsy). In a 1978 experiment of patients who had this kind of surgery, researchers showed an image of a chicken claw to a patient’s left hemisphere and an image of a snow-filled winter scene to the right hemisphere. When asked to pick the image that symbolized what they’d seen, the patient’s right hand chose a card with a chicken, and their left hand chose one with a snow shovel. As Eagleman writes:
The experimenters asked him why he was pointing to the shovel. Recall that his left hemisphere (the one with the capacity for language) had information only about a chicken, and nothing else. But the left hemisphere, without missing a beat, fabricated a story: “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” When one part of the brain makes a choice, other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why.
We are emergent, yet we are involved in the interplay that surfaces our emergence!
It’s quite amazing, that is, to think that our sense of self is achieved by some dozens of such modules working in loose formation with one another - in the absence of any real self at all.
So, as Gazzaniga and the many scientists of his sort see it, they, you and I are but the imaginary focuses created by our nervous systems in order to better serve the evolutionary demand of our trillions of component cells to survive and reproduce.
Gazzaniga’s departure from this orthodoxy is his acceptance of “downward causation”, the capacity of higher emergent entities to affect the lower entities from which they emerged and on which they depend.
(Source: psychologytoday.com)
