The illusion of control
Here are some parts that I have marked in my copy of the book “The Self Illusion: The Self Illusion: Why There is No ‘You’ Inside Your Head” by Bruce Hood.
1. “We all certainly experience some form of self but what we experience is a powerful deception generated by our brains for our own benefit.”
2. “Throughout this book, the terms I, me, my, mine, you, yours, our, us and we are used, which all imply the existence of a self or multiple selves.”
3. “Our brain constructs models of the external world. We don’t have sufficient information, time or resources to work it all out accurately so we make educated guesses to build our models of reality. That working-out includes not only what’s out there in the external world but also what is going on in the internal, mostly unconscious workings of our mind.”
4. “Like any successful manufacturer, nature always seems optimized to cure the cost of production. Nature prefers to build machines that are tailored to work without being over-specialized. For example, there is no point building an all-purpose machine when some purposes are unlikely or redundant – that would be too costly. It is much better and more efficient to anticipate the most likely world rather than having the machine specified in advance. This is how evolution selects for the best fit. Those with systems that are not optimized for their environment are not as efficient and will eventually lose the race to reproduce. This explains why babies brains are pre-wired loosely to expect certain worlds they have not yet encountered and then become streamlined and matched to their own world through experience.”
5. “Our brains are tuning into the experience from our environments and losing the ability to process experiences that we do not encounter.”
6. “This is true for many species. For example, birds of species that flock together have comparatively larger brains than those that are more isolated. A change in brain size can even occur within the lifespan of an individual animal such as the locust. Locusts are normally solitary and avoid each other but become ‘gregarious’ when they enter the swarm phase of their life cycle. This swarm phase of the locust is triggered by the build up of locusts as their numbers multiply, threatening food supply, which is why they swarm to move en masse to a new location. As they rub against each other, this tactile stimulation sets off a trigger in their brain to start paying attention to each other. Amazingly, areas associated with learning and memory quickly enlarge by one third as they begin to swarm and become more tuned in to other locusts around them to become a devastating collective mass.”
7. “For example, gorillas may be big primates but they are fairly solitary animals with small close-knit family units and so their cortex is comparatively smaller than rat of chimpanzees, which are much more sociable and like to party.”
8. “The simple answer must be that as a species we have evolved a strategy to pass on as much information as possible from one generation to the next through our storytelling and instruction. Our ability to communicate means that our offspring can know more about the world they are to embark on by listening to and learning from others without having to rediscover everything for themselves. In short, our extended human childhood means that we do not have to reinvent the wheel with each generation.”
John Locke
9. “People used to think that the infant’s mind was completely empty at birth, and then filled up with information from the world around. The eighteenth-century English philosopher, John Locke, described the mind of a newborn infant as a blank piece of paper upon which experience would write itself. William James, the nineteenth-century American philosopher, thought the newborn’s world was a chaotic jumble of confusion. Both were wrong in assuming that a baby has no built-in abilities and that all experience is total chaos. Natural selection has been busy creating human brains ready for certain information. Like your lap top computer delivered through the mail, babies come with a brain operating system that has evolved to learn certain things about the world and ignore other stuff that is not of use to them. And the most important things to a human baby are other humans. Human infants are wholly dependent on others and, as mentioned, spend the longest proportion of their lives in this state of dependency compared to any other species.”
10. “Approximately 250,000 years ago, a few thousand Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa aided by a brain that was sophisticated enough to adapt to new environments, but also one that had evolved the capacity for the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. We were born to learn. Long before writing and the Internet were invented, humans had the capacity to communicate with each other in ways that no other animal could. With communication came an explosion in technology and skills. This was not information in our genes but rather knowledge gleaned from others. Our parents, and their parents and their parent’s parents before them, had thousands of years of knowledge passed down from each generation. That’s why every newborn baby does not have to start from scratch. This is such an obvious fact about human civilization that we often forget that we are the only animals on this planet that retain skills and knowledge that we pass on to our offspring. Other animals can learn about their environments but no other animal has the human capacity for acquiring thousands of years of experience within a lifetime.”
Viktor Frankl
11. “Without the ability to laugh, it is difficult to imagine how we could ever endure life’s challenges. Even during the worst imaginable atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, there was laughter. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, wrote how laughter was the one thing that helped many survive. In his memoir, Terry Anderson, who was held hostage in Lebanon for 2,455 days during the 1980s wrote about how his fellow prisoners coped by using humour. One captive told shaggy-dog stories. Another mimicked the guards. The laughter made the unbearable situation bearable. Maybe this is why in the wake of every shocking world event where lives are lost, someone comes up with the inevitable ‘sick’ joke. It’s as if we need laughter as a release mechanism for pent-up anxiety. Feud coined the term ‘gallows humour’ and described how it operated as a defence mechanism when confronted with the prospect of death. In such times, laughter can afflict us like a sneeze that cannot be suppressed. I know this because as a teenager at my own father’s funeral, I was overcome with a fit of giggles that I could not stop – something that I felt guilty about for years until I realized that this was a common reaction to stress.”
12. “John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist, was one of the first to describe this early social attachment behaviour. He had been very influenced by Lorenz’s imprinting in birds and reasoned that attachment was a similar evolutionary mechanism that ensured that mother and infant remained in close proximity. In Bowlby’s view, children are a bit like batsmen in a game of baseball or cricket – they feel secure when they are touching the bases or while behind their creases, but become increasingly anxious and insecure as they step farther and farther away from them. The mother serves as a secure base from which to explore the world.”
13. “The emerging social behaviour of the child must reflect the interaction between the child’s disposition and the environment. Parents instinctively adapt to the temperament of their children, but this can be shaped by cultural norms. For example, some cultures, such as in Germany, seem to encourage independence, whereas Japanese children traditionally spend more time with their mothers and do not cope with Ainsworth’s strange situation so well. This indicates that both the natural disposition of the child and the environment work together to shape the emotional and social behaviour of the child.”
14. “However, what is shocking is how quickly isolation can permanently impair our social development. It would appear that within a year of birth, each of us needs others in order to be happy for the rest of our lives. This suggests that the sense of self that emerges over development is one that carries the legacy of early social experiences because the processes that construct the individual during this sensitive period are disrupted. In other words, the developing human brain critically expects input from others and, if this is not available, it has lasting impact on the epigenesis of normal social behavior.”
Tiffany Field
15. “The most likely explanation comes from animal studies that show that grooming and tactile contact stimulate the release of growth hormones in the brain. These growth hormones affect metabolism and the calorific uptake so that these little guys can absorb more from their food. In the United States, psychologist Tiffany Field has shown that simply stroking premature babies for fifteen minutes each day for ten days leads to significantly increased body weight, an earlier discharge from hospital and an estimated saving of around $10,000 for each infant. It may all seem a little too touchy-feely, but massaging babies makes sound financial sense on top of all the health benefits.”
16. “It’s not just love and attention children need: they also require order and structure. They seek out adults who behave predictably. Paradoxically, they will even form strong attachment to parents who are abusive just so long as they are reliably abusive. This is because the abuse creates anxiety in the child that, in turn, increases their need to attach. This becomes a vicious dysfunctional cycle of love and hate that sets the scene for abusive relationships later in adult life. Infants need adults that respond reliably to them because they are attentive and predictable. That’s why most babies love ‘peek-a-boo’ – it’s more than just a game – it’s a way for infants to identify adults who are prepared to invest their time and effort.”
17. “It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. By the time infants reach their first birthday, they are always looking for opportunities to imitate. Their social brains, percolating with explosions of connectivity, are on the lookout for useful information from others. By watching others, babies are making use of thousands of years of evolution that has equipped them to learn rapidly by observation – which is so much easier and better than trying to figure stuff out for themselves.”
18. “Have you ever wondered why you wince when you see someone else being punched? After all, it’s not you who is taking a beating, but you copy their reaction. Neuroscientists have been studying the neural basis of this social copying phenomenon following the discovery of brain cells, aptly named ‘mirror neurons’, that appear to fire in sympathy when watching other people’s actions. Mirror neurons can be found in the cortical regions of the brain towards the front and top of the head known as the supplementary motor area that is active during the planning and execution of movements.”
19. “What about yawning? Have you ever had that involuntary urge to yawn after watching someone else stretch open their mouth and bellow out that wail to slumber. Around half of us will yawn if we watch someone else yawning. No one is quite sure why we do this as a species. One theory is that it is a behaviour that helps to synchronize our biological clocks. However, a more intriguing possibility is that yawning is a form of emotional contagion – like a rapidly spreading disease, we catch the urge to copy others as a way of visibly bonding together. This may explain why contagious yawning is not present in young babies but develops somewhere between three and four years of age when children sharpen their awareness of others having thoughts.”
20. “It might make for compulsive viewing but all hell would break loose as social conventions collapsed, which is why we need to control ourselves in public. This control is achieved by mechanisms in the front part of the brain that regulate and coordinate behaviours by inhibition. These frontal regions are some of the last to reach maturity in the developing brain, which is one of the reasons why young children ea be so impulsive. They have not yet learned how to control their urges.”
Charles Horton Cooley
21. “Our self exists in the reflection that the world holds up to us. In 1902, American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley coined the term, ‘the looking glass self’ to express the way that the self is shaped by the reflected opinions of others around us. People shape themselves to fit other people’s perceptions, and these vary from one person and context to the next. Spouse, family, boss, colleagues, lover, adoring fans and beggar in the street each hold a looking glass up to us every time we interact and we present a different self. Each person or group may think they know us but they cannot because they are not privy to the all the different contexts in which we exist. This is the familiar lament of celebrities who complain that the persona they present to the general public is not the true personality they hold privately. More than that, Cooley argued that there is no real identity that exists separately to the one created by others. We are a product of those around us or least what we believe they expect from us. He summed up this notion of the self illusion in this tongue-twister of logic, ‘I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think that you think I am’.”
22. “As we age, brain death can progressively destroy everyday functions that we take for granted – including those that generate our sense of identity.”
23. “Clearly, if brain disorders and stressful life events can distort the personal experience of self such that an individual does not feel that they are really themselves anymore, then these episodes reveal the fragility of the self in the first place.”
24. “Without the ability to form memories, your sense of self would be utterly shattered. This loss happened to Clive Wearing, an eminent musicologist at Cambridge University, who was struck down with Herpes simplex encephalitis in 1985. Herpes simplex is the same infection that produces cold sores, but for Clive it had infiltrated the protective tissue that protects the brain, which caused it to swell and crush the delicate structures of the hippocampus – a region where the neural circuits encode memories. Even though he survived the encephalitis, Clive was left with severe amnesia and is now unable to remember from one moment to the next.”
25. “Probably the most harrowing aspect of Clive’s condition is that he still remembers fragments of his previous life and knows exactly who Deborah is – each time he sees her, he runs tearfully into her arms like the reunion of long-lost lovers when in reality she may have only left the room minutes earlier. Without the ability to store new memories, Clive is permanently trapped in the here and now. He maintains a diary in an attempt to keep track of existence but this makes for painful reading: ‘2.00 p.m. – I am awake for the very first time. 2.14 p.m. – I am now conscious. 2.19 p.m. – have just woken for the first time.’ Each previous entry is crossed out as he asserts that he has only just become conscious. Deborah describes how one day she found Clive holding a chocolate in one hand and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand as if practising a magic trick. Each time he removed his hand he was amazed by the appearance.”