`Author:` Bruce Hood `Availability:` [[Available Books]] ## Summary ## Key Takeaways ## Quotes - ## Notes > [!info] > ![[The Self Illustion.jpg]] `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:` [[Books index]] ## Highlights - Holding another’s brain in your hands for the first time is the closest to a spiritual experience I have ever had. It makes you feel humble and mortal at the same time. - Shannon’s ‘information theory’, as it became known, was not a dusty theoretical notion, but rather it was a practical application that revolutionized the communications industry and gave birth to the computer age. - Wilder Penfield, the famous Canadian neurosurgeon who reported how he could induce dreamlike flashbacks in his conscious patients when he directly stimulated their cortex during operations, most dramatically demonstrated this. - Even though the cortex has fewer neurons that one might expect, it has much greater connectivity with more extensive and longer fibres that join together different, widely distributed populations. This is the secret to the power of the human cortex – communication. - The homunculus is a problem because you are left none the wiser about the location of the self. - Tags: [[Biology]] - To what extent are we preconfigured for the world by our genes and to what extent does that configuration emerge through our interaction with the world? It’s the old ‘nature versus nurture’ issue but at the basic biological level. It all depends on what aspect of being human you are considering but even the simplest features appear to combine biology with experience. - newborn babies have almost their full complement of neurons that will remain with them throughout the rest of their lives. Rather most of that weight change is due the rapid expansion of communications between the neurons. - Figure 5: Illustration of neurons’ increasing connectivity during development - only neurons that fire together, wire together. - like any successful manufacturer, nature always seems optimized to cut 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. - Although the modern world appears complex and confusing, the basic building blocks of how we see it are fairly predictable and unchanging from one generation to the next. - It has been estimated that a chess grandmaster can burn up to 6,000 to 7,000 calories simply by thinking and moving small pieces of wood around a board.36 What could justify such a biologically expensive organ? An obvious answer is that we need big brains to reason. This is why we can play chess. After all, a big brain equals more intelligence. This may be true to some extent but evolutionary psychologist, Robin Dunbar, has been pushing a less obvious answer – one that has to do with being sociable. He makes the point that big brains are not simply useful for any problem such as chess, but rather seem to be specialised for dealing with problems that must arise out of large groups in which an individual needs to interact with others. - Larger brains facilitate social behaviour. The link between brain size and sociability is especially true for primates where the extent of the cortex predicts the social group size for the species even when you take body mass into consideration. 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 that of chimpanzees, which are much more sociable and like to party. - According to Dunbar’s calculations, humans should coexist best in groups of up to 150. - The development of the child’s personality could not go on at all without the constant modification of his sense of himself by suggestions from others. So he himself, at every stage, is really in part someone else, even in his own thought. James Mark Baldwin (1902) - In humans, not only do we learn from others about the world around us, we also learn to become a self. In the process of watching others and trying to understand them, we come to discover who we are. During these formative years, the illusion of the reflected self we experience is constructed by those around us through our social interactions. - So the next time you think that other races all look alike, don’t worry, it isn’t racism – it’s your lack of brain plasticity. - Tags: #Psychology - 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 behaviour. - To be able to copy others is one of the most powerful skills with which humans are born.67 From the very beginning, babies are sophisticated people-watchers, following adults around and copying their behaviours. No other animal has the same capacity for copying the way we naturally do. This ability probably existed before we evolved language, as it would have been really useful as a way to pass on knowledge about tools. - Normally, it is in our nature to resonate with others, which is why these examples reveal our inherent dependence on others, and this is part of the self illusion. These findings reveal a whole host of external, extrinsic factors vying for control of us. If we resist, then we do so by exerting effort or alternative actions. - Tags: #Psychology - Most of us have had socially unacceptable thoughts about others but we can usually keep these to our selves. Imagine how difficult life would be if you acted out every thought or told everyone exactly what you were thinking. 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 can be so impulsive. They have not yet learned how to control their urges. - The presence of others triggers anxiety as we become self-conscious in public. We feel that we are being monitored and evaluated, which makes the need to appear normal more critical. This fear in turn increases levels of anxiety. As our anxiety increases, we lose control over impulses and urges. - others both trigger those reactions as well as suppress the need to express them. On our own, there is no need to conform, - Early social development begins by copying others and we continue to do so throughout our lives. The self illusion ensures that we are either oblivious of the extent to which we mimic others or think that we deliberately copy others. - We want to be part of the group but that, in turn, means we have to control our behaviours. We cannot just do whatever we want and be accepted. We want to be valued by others but before we can fulfill that obsession with self-esteem, we have to be able to gauge what others think of us. That requires developing an awareness and appreciation of what others think – something that takes a bit of experience and know-how. - 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.1 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.’ - Tags: #Psychology - In what are some of the most influential experiments in human psychology, Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated that if you show adults a video event of a car accident, and then ask them leading questions such as, ‘Did the white car jump the red light?’, adults correctly deny that there was a white car in the sequence.21 However, if several weeks pass and the adults are asked to recall the video, they are more likely to report seeing a white car jump the red light even though it was never in the video. The mere mention of a white car during the initial questioning has now become incorporated into their memory. - ‘The most horrifying idea is that what we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth.’ - Memory as a Compost Heap We all know that we forget things but to discover that a recollection is completely fabricated is something else. It is shocking because it makes us question our own minds. If we all can vividly remember events that never happened then this undermines the reliability of memory and ultimately the reality of our self. This is because part of the self illusion is that we know our own minds and recognise our own memories. But we are often mistaken. - If any metaphor is going to capture memory, then is more like a compost heap in a constant state of reorganisation. - another gene abnormality linked to aggression affects the production of an enzyme (MAOA) that influences serotonin and dopamine neurotransmitter activity. This gene has been nicknamed the ‘warrior’ gene because it is disrupts the signalling in the PFC, and this has been linked with impulsivity and increased violence.