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Shankar Vedantam: You don't actually know what your future self wants

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"You are constantly becoming a new person," says journalist Shankar Vedantam. In a talk full of beautiful storytelling, he explains the profound impact of something he calls the "illusion of continuity" -- the belief that our future selves will share the same views, perspectives and hopes as our current selves -- and shows how we can more proactively craft the people we are to become.

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How to Get to Know Yourself: Self-Discovery Questions & More

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The question "Who am I?" can bring on a series of thoughts, emotions, and feelings, but what if you don't know how to answer? Getting to know yourself is a life-long journey.

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We were flying up a two-lane state road, passing everyone in sight. 'Babe, why are you driving so fast?' I asked. 'What's the emergency?'

My wife looked back at me in panic, and said: 'Something's wrong with you, and we're going to the hospital.'

'OK... why are we going to the hospital?'

'You're not right. Here, you need to put on a mask.'

'Why do I need a mask?'

'The COVID-19 pandemic.'

'Where are we going?'

She hit the gas even harder.

Vanessa and I had been talking after we'd both got home from work. I asked her what we were doing about dinner, and she looked at me in surprise, because we'd just had that conversation a few minutes ago. I didn't remember it. 'I don't feel right,' I told her. She started asking me questions - when is our anniversary, when is my daughter's birthday, what month is it, what holiday is coming up - and I didn't know the answers to any of them. I didn't remember driving home, picking up the mail or teaching my classes at the university. Thursday had just disappeared. 'We need to take you to the hospital,' she said. I was confused but compliant.

At the hospital, I was competency-tested at intake, an exam that I failed spectacularly (if cheerfully - 'Do you know what month it is?' 'Nope!') Within 10 minutes of our arrival, I was inside a CT scanner while they looked to see if I'd had a stroke. It was negative. Back in my room, a neurologist did a video consult, with Vanessa answering most of the questions. Getting a patient history from someone clearly suffering from amnesia was fairly pointless. 'My brain can't be broken,' I offered, 'It's my best part.' Vanessa reported that I'd complained of a bad headache the night before, which had lasted all day. I had (and have) no memory of a headache, or indeed of anything I'm recounting here. This is all pieced together later. The doctors gave me an IV of the migraine special: a cocktail of over-the-counter analgesics, magnesium and Benadryl, which pretty well knocked me out.

First thing the next morning was an MRI scan of my head. That too came back negative. No stroke, no tumours, no history of epilepsy or other seizure disorder, no drugs, no alcohol - nothing. I'm prone to headaches but, as far I know, I've never had a migraine. Diagnosis: transient global amnesia (TGA).

Elizabeth Loftus compares our memories to Wikipedia: we can go back and edit the entries, but so can other people

Nobody knows what causes TGA. There are just some nebulous indicators, such as sex, sudden and extreme temperature changes, and acute emotional distress. The biggest risk factors are migraines and being older than 50. But no one really knows what's going on; there's not even a working theory of causation. The plus side is that it's a rare event, and very unlikely to happen again.

Losing memories is eerie, like a discontinuity in the narrative of the self. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke wondered what made him the same person as a particular individual who saw the River Thames flood last winter. His answer was that he had the same consciousness as the man who saw it overflow. Locke argued that he was the same person who just sat down at his desk because he is conscious of having done it; he remembers doing it. He gives the exact same reason for believing that he's the same person who saw the Thames overflow. He remembers having seen the flood at a particular time, from a specific location and perspective. The present Locke is connected backwards through time to the man who saw the river flooding through continuing consciousness. That's what makes the two of them temporary parts of one persisting person.

We all forget things, of course - who your 6th-grade social studies teacher was or what you had for lunch a month ago are washed away by the river of time. Looking at memory alone (as some of Locke's early critics did) is much too narrow a way to think about what it is to be psychologically connected to earlier versions of oneself. There are many overlapping strands of psychological connection: personality, tastes, beliefs, memories, interests, preferences, desires and ambitions, to name a few. These are woven together like the strands in a rope. No one thread continues from one end of the rope to the other, and that's to be expected. While the fibres that compose a rope are relatively short, they overlap, interlock and twist together so that the rope itself is strong and whole. The same is true of one's psychological history: it is the time-spanning rope that ties together the different temporal parts and makes us complete.

Amnesia frays the rope. In looking back on my temporary encounter with it, there's a feeling of fracture, of my brain trying but failing to keep synthesising my mind, like a camera lens gone badly out of focus and then gradually sharpened. I can call up images of my being in the hospital, or doing routine things that I know I must have done that day, but they're psychologically distant, faded and lifeless. The memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus compares our memories to Wikipedia: we can go back and edit the entries, but so can other people. I believe any feeling of recall I have is no more than the edits of others; Vanessa told me what I said or did during my bout of TGA, and the memory of her telling me gets infused with my own imaginings of those scenes. But I am Locke without a genuine conscious connection to Thursday's flooding Thames.

Profound memory loss breaks the rope between one's past and present so severely that it's an open question whether there's any true persistence through time. The musician Clive Wearing suffered brain damage in 1985 as the result of viral encephalitis brought on by the herpes simplex virus, and now has a dense, irreversible amnesia. The disease destroyed both of his hippocampi, located in the temporal lobes, and also a portion of his left frontal lobe. As a result, he's unable to store new long-term memories, and his short-term memory is vanishingly short. If his wife Deborah is gone for more than a few minutes, Wearing greets her return as if she's been missing for 20 years, with a tearful, heart-wrenching reunion.

In Wearing's own view of himself, he constantly feels that he's in the twilight zone between sleep and consciousness, and that he is just waking up at every moment, with the dream world of the past rapidly slipping into nothingness. When interviewed, he repeatedly insisted that he is just now conscious for the first time, that he has been asleep, that he has been blind, deaf, dumb, with no sense of taste, touch or smell. He has never been visited by anyone before. All of his senses, in the moment he's aware of them, have just been 'switched on'. When he viewed himself conducting the London Lassus Ensemble on TV, Wearing declared that the person on TV is not himself, that the person 'is not conscious to me ... no connection to me at all.' When he looked at earlier entries in his diary, written minutes ago in his own hand, he angrily crossed them out or revised them, and has insisted that 'these entries were written by other people.' Most hauntingly, Wearing steadfastly maintains that he has been dead, and just now, in the present moment, lifted out of the abyss of nonexistence.

In the middle of amnesia, my tunnel vision was absolute: the very idea of past and future had no concrete reality for me

Sudden amnesia brings persistence and continuity into sharp relief, and it's tempting to think that it's only these strange events at the psychological borderlands that raise issues of identity. But the final unweaving of the rope of ourselves is each our destiny, even if by very slow decay. The swift and permanent changes in Wearing, and temporarily, myself, are no different in kind from the gradual changes everyone experiences.

The Buddha thought there is no true self, that the self is a fiction, a mere name to describe a collection or aggregate of ever-changing components. In one text, he gives an analogy of a chariot - a chariot is made out of parts that are in a sense more real than the chariot itself, which is just a convention, a name we give to a certain assemblage of those parts. The 18th-century philosopher David Hume too insisted that he is no more than 'a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.' He described the mind as a theatre, the space in which these ever-changing perceptions and thoughts 'make their appearance, pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle'. Genuine identity over time he thought to be a fiction and an act of the imagination; we identify persons over time out of custom, without a more profound or defensible philosophical reason.

If Hume and the Buddha are right, then sudden amnesia is the kind of Zen shock that reveals the truth of anattā, the no-self. We are like bands, clubs, armies and teams - at any given moment, there is some collection of thoughts, ideas and perceptions that makes you up. There are psychological and causal links back in time to what are typically regarded as earlier versions of yourself, and forward in time to future yous. But there's no true persistence of a self through time any more than a rock band that has gradually replaced all its members. Mick Jones is the only remaining player from the original line-up of Foreigner. Is the present band still Foreigner? Could Foreigner exist 20 years from now, with all-female musicians playing dance electronica? We could know all the facts about the band members, all the facts about rock-and-roll, and still not have an objective, definitive answer to these questions. As Hume said, it's just a verbal dispute, an argument over words. Perhaps our own sense of self is just as much a convenient fiction, a story promoted by our brains that papers over the holes of loss, change and alteration.

Ordinarily I have a good memory, not just for 18th-century philosophers, but for facts and dates, and hold my own at pub trivia. The cliché is that professors are absent-minded and lost in their own worlds, but the truth is that we tend to have tunnel vision when focusing on something, and everything else is excluded from view. In the middle of amnesia, my tunnel vision was absolute: the very idea of past and future had no concrete reality for me. There was no reflection on identity or how I might (or might not) be a continuation of a past self, because there wasn't meaningfully a past. It felt like existing moment-to-moment, and the usual conceptual toolkit that philosophers take for granted had nothing to wrench or hammer. My experience with TGA lasted around six hours, and my recovery was gradual; in Marcel Proust's words, my memory came 'like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being.' It's only in retrospect that I can make sense of how it seemed at the time and what it might mean. Now I'm left with the feeling of having briefly wandered backstage, behind the scenes, to see the props and pulleys, only to find myself out front again watching the show.

Mindfulness enthusiasts encourage living in the moment, without regret for the past or anxiety about the future. For them, I can recommend amnesia, which is an excellent way to live outside of time. It's not a state in which to take up residence indefinitely, though, as the story of ourselves is a temporal one. I'm glad to have rejoined the narrative.

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Sudden amnesia showed me the self is a convenient fiction | Psyche Ideas

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We were flying up a two-lane state road, passing everyone in sight. 'Babe, why are you driving so fast?' I asked. 'What's the emergency?' My wife looked back at me in panic, and said: 'Something's wrong with you, and we're going to the hospital.' 'OK... why are we going to the hospital?'

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Personality describes the unique patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that distinguish a person from others. A product of both biology and environment, it remains fairly consistent throughout life.

Examples of personality can be found in how we describe other people's traits. For instance, "She is generous, caring, and a bit of a perfectionist," or "They are loyal and protective of their friends."

The word "personality" stems from the Latin word persona, which refers to a theatrical mask worn by performers to play roles or disguise their identities.

Although there are many definitions of personality, most focus on the pattern of behaviors and characteristics that can help predict and explain a person's behavior.

Explanations for personality can focus on a variety of influences, ranging from genetic effects to the role of the environment and experience in shaping an individual's personality.

Personality Characteristics

What exactly makes up a personality? Traits and patterns of thought and emotion play important roles, and so do these fundamental characteristics of personality:

Consistency: There is generally a recognizable order and regularity to behaviors. Essentially, people act in the same way or in similar ways in a variety of situations.

Both psychological and physiological: Personality is a psychological construct, but research suggests that it is also influenced by biological processes and needs.

Affects behaviors and actions: Personality not only influences how we move and respond in our environment, but it also causes us to act in certain ways.

Multiple expressions: Personality is displayed in more than just behavior. It can also be seen in our thoughts, feelings, close relationships, and other social interactions.

How Personality Develops

There are a number of theories about personality, and different schools of thought in psychology influence many of these theories. Some theories describe how personalities are expressed, and others focus more on how personality develops.

Personality Types

Type theoriessuggest that there are a limited number of personality types that are related to biological influences.

One theory suggests there are four types of personality. They are:

Type A: Perfectionist, impatient, competitive, work-obsessed, achievement-oriented, aggressive, stressed

Type B: Low stress, even-tempered, flexible, creative, adaptable to change, patient, tendency to procrastinate

Type C: Highly conscientious, perfectionist, struggles to reveal emotions (positive and negative)

Type D: Worrying, sad, irritable, pessimistic, negative self-talk, avoidance of social situations, lack of self-confidence, fear of rejection, appears gloomy, hopeless

There are other popular theories of personality types such as the Myers-Briggs theory. The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator identifies a personality based on where someone is on four continuums: introversion-extraversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, and judging-perceiving.

After taking a Myers-Briggs personality test, you are assigned one of 16 personality types. Examples of these personality types are:

ISTJ: Introverted, sensing, thinking, and judging. People with this personality type are logical and organized; they also tend to be judgmental.

INFP: Introverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceiving. They tend to be idealists and sensitive to their feelings.

ESTJ: Extroverted, sensing, thinking, and judging. They tend to be assertive and concerned with following the rules.

ENFJ: Extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging. They are known as "givers" for being warm and loyal; they may also be overprotective.

Personality Tests

In addition to the MBTI, some of the most well-known personality inventories are:

Personality Traits

Trait theories tend to view personality as the result of internal characteristics that are genetically based and include:

Agreeable: Cares about others, feels empathy, enjoys helping others

Conscientiousness: High levels of thoughtfulness, good impulse control, goal-directed behaviors

Eager-to-please: Accommodating, passive, and conforming

Extraversion:Excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness, and high amounts of emotional expressiveness

Introversion: Quiet, reserved

Neuroticism: Experiences stress and dramatic shifts in mood, feels anxious, worries about different things, gets upset easily, struggles to bounce back after stressful events

Openness: Very creative, open to trying new things, focuses on tackling new challenges

Psychodynamic Theories

Psychodynamic theories of personality are heavily influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud and emphasize the influence of the unconscious mind on personality. Psychodynamic theories include Sigmund Freud's psychosexual stage theory and Erik Erikson's stages of psychosocial development.

Behavioral Theories

Behavioral theories suggest that personality is a result of interaction between the individual and the environment. Behavioral theorists study observable and measurable behaviors, often ignoring the role of internal thoughts and feelings. Behavioral theorists include B.F. Skinner and John B. Watson.

Humanist theories emphasize the importance of free will and individual experience in developing ​a personality. Humanist theorists include Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

Impact of Personality

Research on personality can yield fascinating insights into how personality develops and changes over the course of a lifetime. This research can also have important practical applications in the real world.

For example, people can use a personality assessment (also called a personality test or personality quiz) to learn more about themselves and their unique strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. Some assessments might look at how people rank on specific traits, such as whether they are high in extroversion, conscientiousness, or openness.

Other assessments might measure how specific aspects of personality change over time. Some assessments give people insight into how their personality affects many areas of their lives, including career, relationships, personal growth, and more.

Understanding your personality type can help you determine what career you might enjoy, how well you might perform in certain job roles, or how effective a form of psychotherapy could be for you.

Personality type can also have an impact on your health, including how often you visit the doctor and how you cope with stress. Researchers have found that certain personality characteristics may be linked to illness and health behaviors.

Personality Disorders

While personality determines what you think and how you behave, personality disorders are marked by thoughts and behavior that are disruptive and distressing in everyday life. Someone with a personality disorder may have trouble recognizing their condition because their symptoms are ingrained in their personality.

Personality disorders include paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder (BPD), and narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

While the symptoms of personality disorders vary based on the condition, some common signs include:

Aggressive behavior

Delusional thinking

Distrust of others

Flat emotions (no emotional range)

Lack of interest in relationships

Violating others' boundaries

Some people with BPD experience suicidal thoughts or behavior as well.

If you are concerned that elements of your personality are contributing to stress, anxiety, confusion, or depression, it's important to talk to a doctor or mental health professional. They can help you understand any underlying conditions you may have.

It is often challenging to live with a personality disorder, but there are treatment options such as therapy and medication that can help.

Understanding the psychology of personality is much more than simply an academic exercise. The findings from personality research can have important applications in the world of medicine, health, business, economics, technology, among others. By building a better understanding of how personality works, we can look for new ways to improve both personal and public health.

Additional Reading

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Personality arises from within and makes us who we are. Learn more about how psychologists define personality, study it, and why it is so important.

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Source: The Conversation
We all want other people to "get us" and appreciate us for who we really are. In striving to achieve such relationships, we typically assume that there is a "real me". But how do we actually know who we are? It may seem simple - we are a product of our life experiences, which we can be easily accessed through our memories of the past.
Indeed, substantial research has shown that memories shape a person's identity. People with profound forms of amnesia typically also lose their identity - as beautifully described by the late writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks in his case study of 49-year-old Jimmy G, the "lost mariner", who struggles to find meaning as he cannot remember anything that's happened after his late adolescence.

But it turns out that identity is often not a truthful representation of who we are anyway - even if we have an intact memory. Research shows that we don't actually access and use all available memories when creating personal narratives. It is becoming increasingly clear that, at any given moment, we unawarely tend to choose and pick what to remember.

When we create personal narratives, we rely on a psychological screening mechanism, dubbed the monitoring system, which labels certain mental concepts as memories, but not others. Concepts that are rather vivid and rich in detail and emotion - episodes we can re-experience - are more likely to be marked as memories. These then pass a "plausibility test" carried out by a similar monitoring system which tells whether the events fit within the general personal history. For example, if we remember flying unaided in vivid detail, we know straight away that it cannot be real.

But what is selected as a personal memory also needs to fit the current idea that we have of ourselves. Let's suppose you have always been a very kind person, but after a very distressing experience you have developed a strong aggressive trait that now suits you. Not only has your behaviour changed, your personal narrative has too. If you are now asked to describe yourself, you might include past events previously omitted from your narrative - for example, instances in which you acted aggressively.

False memories

And this is only half of the story. The other half has to do with the truthfulness of the memories that each time are chosen and picked to become part of the personal narrative. Even when we correctly rely on our memories, they can be highly inaccurate or outright false: we often make up memories of events that never happened.

Remembering is not like playing a video from the past in your mind - it is a highly reconstructive process that depends on knowledge, self image, needs and goals. Indeed, brain imaging studies have shown that personal memory does not have just one location in the brain, it is based on an "autobiographical memory brain network" which comprises many separate areas.

A crucial area is the frontal lobes, which are in charge of integrating all the information received into an event that needs to be meaningful - both in the sense of lacking impossible, incongruent elements within it, but also in the sense of fitting the idea the individual remembering has of themselves. If not congruent or meaningful, the memory is either discarded or undergoes changes, with information added or deleted.

Memories are therefore very malleable, they can be distorted and changed easily, as many studies in our lab have shown. For example, we have found that suggestions and imagination can create memories that are very detailed and emotional while still completely false. Jean Piaget, a famous developmental psychologist, remembered all his life in vivid detail an event in which he was abducted with his nanny - she often told him about it. After many years, she confessed to having made the story up. At that point, Piaget stopped believing in the memory, but it nevertheless remained as vivid as it was before.
Memory manipulation
We have assessed the frequency and nature of these false and no-longer-believed memories in a series of studies. Examining a very large sample across several countries, we discovered that they are actually rather common. What's more, as for Piaget, they all feel very much like real memories.

This remained true even when we successfully created false memories in the lab using doctored videos suggesting that participants had performed certain actions. We later told them that these memories never actually happened. At this point, the participants stopped believing in the memory but reported that the characteristics of it made them feel as if it were true.

A common source of false memories are photos from the past. In a new study, we have discovered that we are particularly likely to create false memories when we see an image of someone who is just about to perform an action. That's because such scenes trigger our minds to imagine the action being carried out over time.

But is all this a bad thing? For a number of years, researchers have focused on the negatives of this process. For example, there are fears that therapy could create false memories of historical sexual abuse, leading to false accusations. There have also been heated discussions about how people who suffer from mental health problems - for example, depression - can be biased to remember very negative events. Some self-help books therefore make suggestions about how to obtain a more accurate sense of self. For example, we could reflect on our biases and get feedback from others. But it is important to remember that other people may have false memories about us, too.

Crucially, there are upsides to our malleable memory. Picking and choosing memories is actually the norm, guided by self-enhancing biases that lead us to rewrite our past so it resembles what we feel and believe now. Inaccurate memories and narratives are necessary, resulting from the need to maintain a positive, up-to-date sense of self.

My own personal narrative is that I am a person who has always loved science, who has lived in many countries and met many people. But I might have made it up, at least in part. My current enjoyment for my job, and frequent travels, might taint my memories. Ultimately, there may have been times when I didn't love science and wanted to settle down permanently. But clearly it doesn't matter, does it? What matters is that I am happy and know what I want now.

About this neuroscience research article

Funding: Giuliana Mazzoni receives funding from ESRC, British Academy, Canadian SSHRC, Leverhulme Trust, Wellcome Trust.

Source: Giuliana Mazzoni - The Conversation
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from The Conversation news release.

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

[cbtabs][cbtab title="MLA"]The Conversation"The 'Real You' is a Myth." NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 19 September 2018.
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Source: The Conversation We all want other people to "get us" and appreciate us for who we really are. In striving to achieve such relationships, we typically assume that there is a "real me". But how do we actually know who we are?

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I've had only one psychedelic flashback in my life. It was about 20 minutes into a therapy session. Unfortunately, I was the therapist.

This was many years ago now, and I believe it lasted much less than a minute. But when that particular veil lifts, time is a yardstick with no markings. For time to be meaningful, one must have purchase on a moment, and then another, and the temporal distance between the two can be measured, like the distance between two pitons on a rock face. But on the other side of the veil, the pitons cannot hold. There is only presence, and presence does not have a duration. Nor does presence, at this deepest expression, require a subject. As time collapsed, so too did any sense of a self that was separate from other things. The very sense of being 'Eric' - so foundational and inviolable day-to-day - was revealed to be a notion that required ongoing (if automatic) construction.

Perhaps it is ironic that the bottom fell out of my construction of self in our modern-day Church of the Self: the psychotherapy consulting room. For many years, my work with patients has been focused on engaging with the same centre of selfhood that for me, in that moment, had instantly vaporised. In the therapy room, we investigate with great care the contours of being a particular person, real and distinct from everything else. In this space of therapeutic enquiry, the self is centre-stage and taken as, above all, a very real thing. And of course it is.

But consider an amoeba placed under a microscope. We can adjust the focus to bring a particular plane into sharpness, and in so doing other planes become obscured. The full 'truth' of the specimen cannot be seen all at once, but can be approached only in the aggregate of various planes of focus. So it is for the self. To investigate the nature of the self, we might pose these three very different questions, at three particular planes of focus:

At the time of my flashback, I was sitting across from my patient Marjorie, whose name, along with other details, have been changed here. I suspect it was no accident that my temporary loss-of-self occurred during one of my sessions with Marjorie, who was so sure of the solidity and force of her own self, her eyes locked on mine for 50 minutes at a stretch. Over the preceding years, I had invited Marjorie, as I invite all my patients, beyond the question 'Who are you?' (the stuff of cocktail parties) and into the depths of the second question: 'Who are you, really?' (the focus of psychotherapy). Yes, Marjorie was a successful business owner, but she was also driven by a narcissism that demanded frequent stroking. Yes, she had many friends but, with the subtle game of domination that she played, she drove others to turn away just obliquely enough to leave her vaguely lonely.

By 'spiritual', I do not mean to suggest any particular religion or organising cosmological story

The question that we explored together - 'Who are you, really?' - is hugely important, and it must be answered coherently if one is to find a way through this relational world. On what other foundation could we hope to build and sustain intimacy; honestly present ourselves to others; comprehend why we think and feel and react the ways we do; behave in alignment with our values; or even know what we truly like and need? If I am to find love, meaningful work and some semblance of satisfaction in this life, I must know myself well (and hopefully with some compassion) at the level of 'Eric'.

But viewing the self in this way also reifies the basic dualistic premise of self and non-self: there is Eric, and outside of his skin is not-Eric. Eric has been placed in this world that is not him, he must try to navigate it but will mostly be pushed around by it, and in the end he will suffer annihilation. This perspective on the self is inherently neurotic, a breeding ground for worry and often more than a little death anxiety. How am I? Am I OK? How's my health? My station in life? Am I significant enough? The aim of traditional psychotherapy, often, is to experience meaning, dignity and growth within an essentially neurotic situation.

And so, yearning for more, perhaps suspecting more is possible, we might turn to the third, even deeper question: 'Who are you really, really?' This typically is not the stuff of traditional talking psychotherapy. It is instead a spiritual enquiry. By 'spiritual', I do not mean to suggest any particular religion or organising cosmological story. I'm referring to an enquiry into who or what we are most essentially, if far less obviously - outside the frame that reifies the idea of the self as an individual unit, instead recasting it as a natural manifestation of, and inseparable from, the timeless substrate from which it arises.

Imagine a dramatically sped-up film of Earth's history. In the beginning, there is no sign of life. Earth is covered by a vast, salty ocean, containing an array of elements and molecules. Zooming in on this primordial soup, we witness a chain of simple chemical reactions, some of which give rise to basic nucleotides. As time passes we witness more and more complex chemical processes, and emerging from this world in fits and starts are the first single-cell organisms. Over the aeons these organisms bubble into various kinds of tiny creatures, then there are fish, little mammals, bigger ones, untold species living and dying in a split second, until we get to something called Marjorie. It's all so obviously a single, unbroken happening, beginning with the soup. Watching this film, it's evident that Marjorie is simply a fleeting moment in a strange event.

So who are you, really, really?

In 1971, the philosopher Alan Watts said: 'You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.' To many people, if this makes sense at all, it makes sense only intellectually, at some level of abstraction far removed from actual experience. But my momentary flashback, in its abrupt termination of the concept of separateness, plunged me into this experience. In fact, it was not really a 'flashback' in the sense of a return to the past - it was instead an instantaneous and strangely timed revelation of an ever-present consciousness, one that I'd once and most starkly accessed under the influence of a psychedelic.

As anyone who has visited this mental space can attest, it becomes apparent that the notion of one's self as a thing, distinct from everything else that exists, is simply an idea. In this space, the mind does not operate in concepts and there is simply what is. Experience and experiencer are undifferentiated, and in this non-differentiation there is the famed experience of 'union' so often marvelled at by successful spiritual seekers. And yet because the experience itself is non-conceptual, efforts to describe it afterwards are typically lame.

Perhaps we can best approach this realm of oneness through a poetic rendering of what it is not. 'The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao,' wrote the ancient philosopher Lao Tsu, to my mind coming the closest one can to furnishing something pithy about the spiritual holy grail. The act of naming is an act of differentiation, creating a boundary around some part of our experience. The 'eternal Tao' - the non-differentiated space of experience, where there are no things, no names, not even any ideas - is sheer existence without the conceptual imposition of subject and objects, and beholding it is the aim of many spiritual practices.

What's needed is not-knowing in a particular kind of way: with a sense of wonder, of mystery

Psychedelics, of course, have come in vogue again, but there are a variety of practices meant to bring contact with the non-dualistic space that cannot be named - various traditions of meditation being the most well known. Each practice has its own serious-minded devotees and faddish enthusiasts: breathing techniques, yoga, chanting, extreme exercise, immersion in the natural world, certain sex practices. These are all methods that might lead practitioners into undifferentiated experience, where subject and object are one.

Psychotherapy, for all its enormous use and even beauty, is not a spiritual practice. That it is often treated like one speaks to the pursuit of self at the core of our basic acts of meaning-making. In seeking to understand the situation in which humans so strangely find ourselves ('What is going on here?'), many of us respond with an emphatic assertion of selfhood: 'Why, I am going on here!' Often, we become consumed with trying to live an important life, typically as compared with the importance of other people.

All the while, for many, a hunger remains. My psychotherapy practice is filled with successful people who fear they are missing the meal. They've taken their personhood to a winning place, and yet so often they feel empty, disappointed, anxious, confused, alienated. They've done it all right, they've made money and raised healthy kids and kept in decent shape all the while. And now the kids are gone and doing it for themselves, the money is great but it turns out it's no destination, and the body is slowly dying. Is this all there is? Has something been missed this whole time? And so, again, we might ask ourselves: who are we really, really?

Of course, it's hubristic to hope for a full, conceptual answer to this question. But, in the end, an answer is perhaps entirely unnecessary. What's needed is not-knowing in a particular kind of way: with a sense of wonder, of mystery and, perhaps above all, of belonging here. In the undifferentiated space of spiritual experience, we are not interlopers in a strange land, we are simply of this place. We are, and can only be, home.

I believe deeply in psychotherapy; I've devoted my professional life to it. Even if one never engages in spiritual enquiry (and the vast majority of my patients do not), the benefits of good therapy are often profound. Yet, for many people, finding one way or another to engage with the basic spiritual question - who they are, really, really - opens a doorway to the lived experience of being a natural phenomenon, inseparable from a world that otherwise, too often, leaves us with a vague sense of estrangement and loneliness.

After my 'flashback', the veil dropped again just as quickly as it had lifted - and I was back on the usual side, in my office, in my therapist's chair, my chin still cradled in my hand. Marjorie had noticed nothing. I could hear her again: she was talking about herself, excitedly. It was drizzling, and a crow stood sentinel atop the telephone pole outside my window. I was a bit shaken, yet beneath that, utterly at ease, freshly reminded of a belonging beyond measure.

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The question therapy doesn't answer: who are we really, really? | Psyche Ideas

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I've had only one psychedelic flashback in my life. It was about 20 minutes into a therapy session. Unfortunately, I was the therapist. This was many years ago now, and I believe it lasted much less than a minute. But when that particular veil lifts, time is a yardstick with no markings.

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Stanford professor, athlete and psychologist Alia Crum investigates the role of mindsets in affecting health behaviors and outcomes. Inspired by research on the placebo effect, Alia's research was the first to reveal the physiological effects of mindset in core areas of behavioral health, including the benefits of exercise, the metabolic processing of nutrients and the effects of stress. Alia's research moves us beyond the limited notion of the placebo effect as a mysterious response to an inert substance toward recognizing that, ultimately, our mindset is responsible for physiological responses. As the director of the Mind & Body Lab and the health director at Stanford SPARQ, Alia leads researchers in better defining and utilizing the roles social and psychological forces play in overcoming chronic disease.

Find out more

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Stanford professor, athlete, and psychologist Alia Crum investigates how our mindset can affect health behaviors and outcomes. In her 2016 TEDMED Talk, Alia shares her research on placebos and encourages us to consider the placebo effect as more than a mysterious response to an inert substance.

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There is a classic Monty Python sketch in which a customer, played by John Cleese, enters a pet shop to buy a cat. The dodgy shopkeeper, played by Michael Palin, whips out a terrier instead and offers to convert the dog surgically into a cat, a budgie, or a fish.

"Terriers make lovely fish," he assures the customer. "I could do that for you straight away. Legs off, fins on, stick a little pipe through the back of its neck so it can breathe, bit of gold paint..." In real life, we often view our pets in terms of other animals, and no scalpel is required.

Perhaps you've met dogs who are so aloof that they seem like cats, or cats who are so affiliative that they're more like dogs. My family used to have a pet betta fish named Ariel who seemed more puppy than fish. She'd allow us to pet her without complaint, and when we dropped food in the fish tank she'd nuzzle our fingers.

This topic might seem frivolous, but it reveals a superpower of the human brain. We can consider a physical object, such as a fish, and impose new functions on it that are not part of its physical nature, using only our collective minds. To my family, Ariel was a puppy, even though nothing about her body was dog-like.

We simply agreed that Ariel had puppyish qualities, and that agreement became our reality. (The perceptive reader may have noticed that I've referred to Ariel as 'she', even though the colourful bettas sold in pet shops are always male. Our daughter, who was three at the time and in love with Walt Disney's The Little Mermaid, informed us in no uncertain terms of Ariel's preferred pronoun.)
Read more about the brain:
This superpower to modify physical reality is called 'social reality'. You or I can simply make something up and communicate it to other people, and if they treat it as real, it becomes real. For better or for worse.

Social reality has an astonishing level of influence on our lives. We impose functions on bits of paper and metal and they become money. We draw imaginary lines in the dirt and they become the borders of a country, and the people on opposite sides of those imagined lines transform into citizens with rights, and foreigners without them.

Brexit is also social reality. Even your own name is social reality. Someone just made it up, and you and other people treat it as real. In fact, most of us spend most of our time in a real world of serious make-believe.

How your brain deals with sensory information

How do human brains create social reality? To answer this, let's consider it from a brain's point of view. For your whole life, your brain is trapped inside a dark, silent box called your skull.

Your brain constantly receives data from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sense organs. It also receives a continuous stream of sense data from inside your body as your lungs expand, your heart beats, your temperature changes, and the rest of your insides carry on their symphony of activity.

All this data presents a mystery to your brain-in-a-box. Together, the data represents the end result of some set of causes that are unknown.

When something in the world produces a change in air pressure that you hear as a loud bang, some potential causes could be a door slamming, a gunshot, or a fish tank toppling to the floor. When your stomach unleashes a gurgle, the cause might be hunger, indigestion, nervousness, or love.

So, your brain has a problem to solve, which philosophers call a 'reverse inference problem'. Faced with ambiguous data, your brain must somehow guess the causes of that data as it plans what to do next, so it can keep you alive and well.

Fortunately, your brain has another source of information that can help with this task: memory. Your brain can draw on your lifetime of past experiences, some of which were similar to the present moment, to guess the meaning of the sense data.

A slammed door, rather than a fish tank, may well be the best candidate for a loud bang if, for example, there is a strong breeze blowing through a nearby window, or if your heartbroken lover has just stormed out of the room and you've experienced similar exits in past relationships.

Your brain's best guess - right or wrong - manifests itself as your action and everything you see, hear, smell, taste and feel in that moment. And this whirlwind of mental construction all happens in the blink of an eye, completely outside of your awareness.

The esteemed neuroscientist Gerald Edelman described daily experience as "the remembered present". You might feel like you simply react to events that happen around you, but in fact, your brain constantly and invisibly guesses what to do next and what you will experience next, based on memories that are similar to the present moment.

A key word here is 'similar'. The brain doesn't need an exact match. If you saw Ariel the betta for the first time, your brain could guess that she's a fish because you've seen similar fish before in bowls. Likewise, you have no trouble climbing a new, unfamiliar staircase because you've climbed staircases in the past. So similarity is enough for your brain to help you survive and thrive in the world.
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In psychology and philosophy, things that are similar to one another form a category. For example, think about fish, a common-sense category that includes many taxonomic groups of aquatic animals. Fish come in all colours, shapes and sizes. They swim with a variety of motions. Some travel in schools and others are solitary. Some live in oceans, some in ponds, and some in human homes.

A typical fish may have fins and scales and breathe underwater, but some fish have no scales (such as sharks), some have no fins (such as the hagfish), and a few can breathe on land (such as the lungfish). Despite this, we still consider all of these creatures similar and call them fish. We would never consider a dog to be a fish (Michael Palin's creation notwithstanding).

You might think that categories exist in the outside world, but in fact, your brain makes them. If I ask you to imagine a fish as a pet, your brain creates a category that could include bettas, goldfish and guppies. But if I ask you to imagine a fish in a restaurant, your brain would more likely build a category from cod, haddock and salmon. So a category like 'fish' is not something static in your brain. It is an abstract category that your brain creates, based on context.

The most important similarities forming a category like 'fish' are not about physical looks but about function. You don't eat a betta sandwich for lunch or keep a salmon in an aquarium, because the function of a pet is different from the function of a meal.

Similarly, the function of a fishbowl is usually to hold live fish, but in another context it can become a vase for flowers, a container for pencils or spare change, a drinking bowl for a thirsty dog, a fire extinguisher for a small blaze, or even a weapon to hurl at an attacker.

How social reality creates physical reality

Abstract categories are tremendously flexible. Consider the following three objects: a bottle of water, an elephant and a pistol. These objects do not look alike, feel alike, smell alike, or have any other obvious physical similarities. It turns out that they do share a physical function: they can all squirt water. So they form a category.

But they also share another function that, unlike water-squirting, is completely untethered from their physical nature. They are members of the category, 'things that would fail to pass through airport security'. This purely abstract category is only based on function and is a product of human minds (other members of this category include cocaine, the Sahara Desert, and loud, rude songs about immigration officials).

Purely abstract categories, in fact, drive many of your actions and experiences. When your brain makes guesses about the sense data around and within you, those guesses often form an abstract category based on function.

To explain a feeling of shortness of breath, your brain might construct a category containing physical exercise, a punch in the gut, surprise, lust and a hundred other potential causes that are all similar to the present moment, so it can whittle them down and act. Category construction is the process by which your brain figures out what something is, what to do about it, and how it should regulate your organs, hormones and immune system as it prepares for action.

Abstract categories are also the engine behind social reality. When we impose a function on an object, we categorise that object as something else. Throughout our history, all manner of objects have belonged to the abstract category 'money': not only paper rectangles and metal discs, but also shells, barley, salt, and carved boulders too heavy to move. We even impose the functions of money on intangibles such as mortgages and Bitcoin.

We share such categorisations and make them real - sometimes with only a small group, like my family did with Ariel the fish-puppy, and sometimes with a large population, as with money and countries and citizenship.

Social reality is so powerful that it even influences our genetic evolution as a species. Money, for example, is entirely made-up, but it's so real to us that people who have more money live longer. They can eat healthier foods, live more comfortably, and obtain better medical care. These factors influence who is available and healthy enough to reproduce, and how likely it is for their offspring to survive and thrive.

As another example, various cultures in history have established laws or norms for who may reproduce with whom. Some rules prohibit sex between people of different skin tones, such as the segregation laws in the United States during times of slavery. Others limit childbirth, such as China's former one-child policy which, in a culture that values sons over daughters, led to more male offspring than female and ultimately to millions of Chinese men who cannot marry Chinese women.
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Social reality can even shape physical reality. For example, it's a stereotype to think that girls aren't good at maths. When people believe the stereotype, which is social reality, they may expose girls to fewer maths and physics problems than they do boys, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates the stereotype and wastes the potential of half the population.

A more pernicious example is childhood poverty. Research shows that early and long exposure to poverty is harmful to developing brains and may lead to poorer performance in school. Less education increases children's risk of living in poverty when they grow up and have children of their own. Through a vicious cycle, society's stereotypes about poverty, which are social reality, can become the physical reality of brain wiring.

Social reality is normally constrained by physical reality. We could all agree that we can fly through the air by flapping our arms, or that it's healthy to eat glass. But mere agreement won't change the physical nature of things and make these ridiculous ideas true.

Nevertheless, social reality can become completely untethered from physical reality, as we are seeing today. Viruses like COVID-19 are physically real. They don't care about human categories; all they require is a nice, wet pair of lungs to occupy. And yet, in the current pandemic, despite abundant physical evidence, many people still believe and behave like the deadly virus is not a serious problem, leading to further spread.

This potential for untethering leaves social reality fragile and vulnerable to manipulation. Consider democracy, which is social reality on a large scale. The act of voting for a leader, by making and tallying little marks on paper, is meaningful only because we give it meaning and agree on that meaning.

Now witness what happened when a US president claimed to have won an election that he verifiably lost by a large margin of little marks. Millions of citizens believed his story anyway, thereby creating an alternative social reality, and a crowd of them broke into a government building in protest, stole and destroyed property, and even caused death.

The building in question wasn't just any government building, but one that holds a sacred meaning in a social reality shared by both sides: the US Capitol, home of the United States Congress. The same superpower that gives us achievements like democracy, can also destroy those achievements.

The human brain is one of the most incredible 1.5kg blobs of jiggly meat that evolution ever produced. In every moment, through electricity and swirling chemicals, your brain somehow conjures up the past to predict the future, to control your body and create your experience in the present.

An ensemble of human brains together create social reality, a superpower that can turn fish into puppies, boulders into currency, stereotypes into brain wiring, and a person into a president. Any group of people can make up abstract concepts, share them, and weave them into a reality. Consequently, we have more control over reality than we might think, and more responsibility for reality than we might realise or want.

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The mind-blowing science behind how our brains shape reality

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There is a classic Monty Python sketch in which a customer, played by John Cleese, enters a pet shop to buy a cat. The dodgy shopkeeper, played by Michael Palin, whips out a terrier instead and offers to convert the dog surgically into a cat, a budgie, or a fish.

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERAnil Seth is both a leading expert on the neuroscience of consciousness and one of most prominent spokespeople for this relatively new field of science. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness.
A Best Book of 2021- Bloomberg Businessweek; A Best Science Book of 2021- The Guardian; A Best Science Book of 2021- Financial Times; A Best Philosophy Book of 2021- Five Books; A Best Book of 2021- The Economist BEING YOU: A New Science of Consciousness.
Anil Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to twenty-first-century science.

What does it mean to "be you"-that is, to have a specific, conscious experience of the world around you and yourself within it? There may be no more elusive or fascinating question. Historically, humanity has considered the nature of consciousness to be a primarily spiritual or philosophical inquiry, but scientific research is now mapping out compelling biological theories and explanations for consciousness and selfhood.

Now, internationally renowned neuroscience professor, researcher, and author Anil Seth is offers a window into our consciousness in

Seth has been interviewed for documentaries aired on the BBC, Netflix, and Amazon and podcasts by Sam Harris, Russell Brand, and Chris Anderson, and his 2017 TED Talk on the topic has been viewed over 11 million times, a testament to his uncanny ability to make unimaginably complex science accessible and entertaining.

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Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

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Amazon.com: Being You: A New Science of Consciousness eBook : Seth, Anil: Kindle Store

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is also a compelling insider's account of scientific discovery, one that takes readers behind the scenes as the astonishing answer to this neurological puzzle is pursued and pieced together from seemingly unrelated fields of scientific inquiry. This book will fundamentally alter the way that neuroscientists and psychologists categorize sensations and understand the origins and significance of human feelings.

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How Do You Feel?: An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self

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Buy How Do You Feel?: An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self: Read Books Reviews - Amazon.com

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In Feeling & Knowing,

In forty-eight brief chapters, Damasio helps us understand the relation between consciousness and the mind; why being conscious is not the same as either being awake or sensing; the central role of feeling; and why the brain is essential for the development of consciousness. He synthesises the recent findings of various sciences with the philosophy of consciousness, and, most significantly, presents his original research which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behaviour.

Here is an indispensable guide to understanding the fundamental human capacity for informing and transforming our experience of the world around us and our perception of our place in it.

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Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious

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Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious - Kindle edition by Damasio, Antonio. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious.

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2020 Audie Finalist

As concise and enlightening as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, this mind-expanding dive into the mystery of consciousness is an illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience.

What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take our experience of being in the world for granted. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we?

In this wonderfully accessible audiobook, Annaka Harris guides us through the evolving definitions, philosophies, and scientific findings that probe our limited understanding of consciousness. Where does it reside, and what gives rise to it? Could it be an illusion, or a universal property of all matter? As we try to understand consciousness, we must grapple with how to define it and, in the age of artificial intelligence, who or what might possess it.

Conscious offers lively and challenging arguments that alter our ideas about consciousness - allowing us to think freely about it for ourselves, if indeed we can.

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Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

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Amazon.com: Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (Audible Audio Edition): Annaka Harris, Annaka Harris, HarperAudio: Books

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Rosa Spagnolo, MD, is a child neuropsychiatrist, child and adolescent psychotherapist and psychoanalyst based in Italy. She is a member of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI), the IPA and the NPSA, and co-founder of the Italian Psychoanalytic Dialogues Association. She is the editor of Building Bridges: The Impact of Neuropsychoanalysis on Psychoanalytic Clinical Sessions (Routledge).

Georg Northoff, MD, PhD, FRCP, is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and psychiatrist. He is one of the world's leading scientists in the field of brain and mind, having established neurophilosophy and, more recently, a novel approach to brain-mind relationship in terms of time-space dynamic. He is the author of Neuropsychoanalysis in Practice (2011) and Neurophilosophy and the Healthy Mind (2016), as well as a Professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada and holds multiple affiliations to universities in Europe and Asia.

"This book concerns a fundamental topic in mental science: the nature of the self. The authors bring an incredible range and depth of expertise to it. Spagnolo is a psychoanalyst and paediatric neurologist; Northoff is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist and philosopher. The result is an intellectual banquet of clinical descriptions, science and philosophy, with extremely rich theorizing."
Mark Solms, Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Co-Chair of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society

"The case of psychoanalysis remains a puzzle. You can look at it as a form of treatment, or as a scientific approach to the study of the mind, or as a philosophical topic. But you always find the same mixed response: on the one hand, you encounter great success, a large following, and a multitude of sensation seekers; on the other hand, you find the critics and the controversy.

The death of psychoanalysis has been announced and postponed but it never took place. Ironically, in spite of no death, there already is a revival of psychoanalysis. The branch of it that carries the day concerns the natural marriage of psychoanalysis and neuroscience which began with the work of Mark Solms and has only gained in strength. To this setting, come Rosa Spagnolo and Georg Northoff with a welcome addition to the pertinent literature. They aim at explaining each side of the partnership to the other side and their effort will reward the intellectually curious and the practical minded alike. I wish them great success."
Antonio Damasio, author, The Strange Order of Things; Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology & Philosophy, and Director, Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

"Is it possible to build a bridge between two different, but intertwined, disciplines such as psychoanalysis and neuroscience? What is the glue that aligns together the different elements of this bridge? For Rosa Spagnolo and Georg Northoff, the Self, and its dynamic at psychological and neuronal level, might be the candidate.

Several psychoanalysts like Jung, Kohut, Winnicott, Modell, Bromberg, and neuroscientists like Northoff, Panksepp, Damasio, Solms and Schore, just to name a few, tried to define the intrinsic sense of subjectivity that characterize our psyche. The Self is shaped by the alignment with the world where the intra/inter-psychic structure is nurtured by a good enough interaction with the animate environment.

In this book, departing from the building blocks represented by time and space, moving through the relation with the body, the other, the world and finally to the dreams, the Self is disentangled in its own dynamic features.

The continuous integration of the spatio-temporal approach with psychodynamic processes behind the transformation of the Self is highly innovative and sheds a novel perspective on the case histories reported.

Wisely describing clinical experiences, The Dynamic Self aims at looking for the continuity in the relation between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, emphasizing how they might be two sides of a coin informing psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment. The spatio-temporal approach will have huge implications for psychotherapy and future research."Andrea Scalabrini, PhD, PsyD; Neuroscientist and Psychotherapist-Psychoanalyst; Post-doc researcher at University G. d'Annunzio of Chieti-Pescara, Italy

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The Dynamic Self in Psychoanalysis: Neuroscientific Foundations and Clinical Cases

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The Dynamic Self in Psychoanalysis: Neuroscientific Foundations and Clinical Cases - Kindle edition by Spagnolo, Rosa, Northoff, Georg. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Dynamic Self in Psychoanalysis: Neuroscientific Foundations and Clinical Cases.

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Top reviews from the United States

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Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2016

I find something to disagree with on almost every page, but I still end up agreeing with the book as a whole. Not with Metzinger's ontological point on the incoherence of the self, but certainly with the steps which lead him there - the self as simulation; the empty Platonic cavern. And the details are well worth spelling out.

Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2007

I came to this book from a footnote in Peter Watt's new novel 'Blindsight'. As an older layperson, I can say that Metzinger assumes a background and vocabulary in philosophy that I don't have. But, he has a habit of summarizing and clarifying his points that gives you a thread through the discussion. It's been like an immersion course in another language, and oh the joy when you can grasp a concept or some of his ideas flash out at you. I can think of nothing else I've read in the past few decades that has repaid my hard work with so very much food for thought.
Being No One (and note the specific grammar: it's not 'Being No-one) is more than worth the work. Highly recommended for anyone interested in how consciousness relates to brain activity.

Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2004

This book is very hard to review. There are many reasons for this. One is that I may be biased: I think this may be the most important book written about consciousness in the last couple of decades. Then there is the fact that the book is enormous in scope, (and not far in size either- it is 650 pages long), brilliantly written and argued, and succeeds in doing something few other related books do. Reading this book makes you feel that consciousness has been explained. It makes you feel that the monster has been tamed, that progress can be made, that those who believe there can be no sensible exxplanation for consicousness are just wrong. Now in reality, it is not obvious that consciousness HAS been explained. But one feels like it has. And this is why I think this book is superior to Daniel Dennetts ¨Consicousness explained¨, arguably the book regarded as the most significant and influential philosophical contribution in the field. After reading Dennett, few believed consicousness had been explaied. Even few felt like it had. This book is unique, and I believe it is a matter of time until its impact is made apparent.
Metzinger wanted to show that the self can be explained in subpersonal terms, using representational analysis. He quickly noticed that since Selves are usually consicous entities, that he would first have to do this for consciousness. Imagine that. Having to explain consicousness to try to explain the self. And so, the book could be seen as divided in two. First, a theory of consicousness, and second, a theory of the self. I am by far more impressed with the former, although undoubtedly the latter is extremely interesting as well.

Before proposing a number of theorethical entities supposed to play the explanatory role, Metzinger carefully analyses the conceptual tools necessary to understand the problem, and formulate solutions. Thus, he analyses the concepts of representation, mental model, phenomenal presentation, etc. His account is also almost completely positive; that is, he almost does not stop to defend his ideas, or to analyse other philosphical theories. He focuses on arguing step-by step for a conceptual edifice that may lead to the explanation of phenomenal states in terms of non-phenomenal objective relations. This part of the book alone seems to me to be one of the strongest formulations of a representational theory of mental states.

Metzinger, then, is able to answer the question of what makes a mental state a conscious state. He argues that mental states have representational, and these states can have phenomenal content if the representational states meet some constraints. Consciously experienced content is content of an active phenomenal model, and phenomenal contents are all representational. The various constraints are the conditions that the representational content must meet in order for it to be a phenomenal content. Examples of these constraints are globality (integration into a global whole), activation in a window of presence, transparency.

The constraints are what makes these ideas powerful. Metzinger analyses the constraints in representational, phenomenological, information-processing, functional and neural-implementation terms. He gives what could be seen as necesary and sufficient conditions for a mental state to be a consicous state. He presents a theory of consicousness. And a very sensible, conceptually simple, naturalistic, and powerful one.

After doing this, he shows how his analysis can acomodate some abnormal phenomenons like blindsight, agnosia, and neglect. He then does much of the same last steps with the problem of the self. He defines concepts like subjectivity, self-hood, self-models. Then he proposes theorethical entities like the phenomenal self model, or the phenomenal model of the intentianality relation, to try to show how the conscious self might emerge. Here too metzinger argues that self content must meet some constraints to be considered phenomenal self content. He also tests his constructs against cases like anosognosia, multiple persoality, lucid dreams.

In sum, Metzinger deals with everything from mental representation, to content, qualia, subjectivity, intentionality, self, and does it in carefully ordered and convincing ways. Metzinger is a philosopher, and the theory is mostly philsophical. But few philsophers include such careful empirical and neurobiological observations. Few philosophers have such knowledge of the extensive literature. Few are as convinced of the central role that scientific objective theorethizing must play.

I must repeat that it is in no way evident that consciousness is explained in Metzingers book. But if there is a book that will set the conceptual framework that leads to such an explanation, it is this one. It is virtually imposible to explain his ideas concisely, and to understand them one has to follow his discussion completely. Therefore, I can do not much but to recomend that anyone interested in consicousness read this book. The book is quite technical and it is fairly long, however I believe that this should not stop the lay reader. The book is in my opinion simply too important. I have reviewed close to 100 books now, most of them on consicousness. I have said on numerous times that such or such a book is a must read. This one is the one I think more closely matches that description.

Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2018

700 pages of small print. He’s a great thinker. This is like a glass of water in the desert.

Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2016

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2016

Reviewed in the United States on August 4, 2014

I WANT TO SEE THE TABLE CONTENTS OF AMAZON BOOKS!!!

Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2014

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5.0 out of 5 stars What is it like to be a bat for the bat?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 3, 2012

I am currently approaching the halfway mark of Metzinger's majestic opus, with progress between ten and twenty pages a day. As such, this review might be amended upon my completion of the book.
I have no doubt that this book is a millennial achievement, that will still be influencing thinkers for decades or more to come. It represents the 'ne plus ultra' of current thinking in consciousness studies, and I suspect that future progress must proceed with this work providing a new, deeper and broader foundation. Unfortunately it is not remotely a book for beginners, and I have created the listmania list 'How to realise that you are no-one', giving what I think would constitute the minimum background required for a realistic attempt at reading it. To a large extent Metzinger is describing the phenomenal world that we are all intimately familiar with, but he disassembles that world with the most meticulous precision, and re-presents it to us within the context of a carefully prepared systematic theoretical framework. The result is like watching the assembly of a huge building or jumbo jet. We are shown that consciousness, as the central core of mental processing in humans and higher animals, is not a raw undifferentiated process, but an exquisitely intricate structure that manages to integrate a huge array of disparate functional requirements into an optimally flexible and adaptive whole. To some extent the book is like an updating of Husserl's Phenomenology for the computer age, and with a determinately physicalist agenda. However, into this framework Metzinger manages to synthesise many of the key ideas that the mind sciences have generated in their renaissance of the last three decades. Along the way I have finally managed to clarify what some philosophers of mind have been trying to impart when talking of 'representationalist' theories of consciousness, and am gratified to see that it means what I, as a software designer, thought it should have meant in the first place. Metzinger's theory is a representationalist theory insofar as it shows the mind-brain as conspiring, through consciousness, to present the animal with a model of the world with itself and all its behavioural potentials actually integrated into that model, so seamlessly, that the animal mistakes the model for the world itself. We do not know that we are inhabiting a virtual reality, and the self at its centre is as virtual as the rest of it.

The bottom line is, at least in terms of what I have read so far, that Metzinger has explicated every aspect of phenomenal consciousness except the central enigma of raw consciousness; that is the logically coherent notion of an abstract, non-self-or-temporally-centered consciousness that 'experiences' a continuum of data points as an integrated whole. This is not to devalue Metzinger's achievement. His work provides the basis for many years of empirical research in cognitive-neuroscience and related fields. At the very least, Metzinger's analysis should eliminate once and for all the tendency of less subtle thinkers to claim a solution to the problem of consciousness when only providing solutions to simpler cognitive problems such as those of thought or language. It may yet prove that Dennett was right and there is no such thing as consciousness, in the raw, as such (I'm gradually coming round to the eliminativist perspective). It may just be that when an information processing system does all the stuff that Metzinger has so laboriously outlined, as implemented by a corresponding or related architecture, then what we experience as consciousness is just there as a surface feature of the processes involved, of the causational flux as it were. Consciousness would not then be a thing, an object or substance, and thus would be without physical ontological status. Like the 'picture' on a TV, having no independent existence over and above the pattern of flashing lights generated by the hardware substrate.

The adventure continues...

5.0 out of 5 stars Per chi ha voglia di esercitare i lobi frontali e annessi e riflettere sulla coscienza

Reviewed in Italy on November 30, 2012

Tenete presente che questo e' un libro per accademici o studenti magistrali di psicologia o di medicina: non e' per tutti. Ma se volete leggere un approfondimento sulla problematica della coscienza e al contempo rivisitare in ottica interdisciplinare tematiche fondamentali emerse negli ultimi 100 anni della storia della psicolgia, della psichiatria e neurologia, della linguistica e soprattutto della filosofia e non avete paura di riflettere fa per voi. Si capisce che e' stato scritto da un europeo- nella nostra migliore tradizione. Coloro che invece desiderano leggere la versione riassunto divulgativo: leggete (tradotto in italiano) il tunnel dell'io dello stesso autore.

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2015

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Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity

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Buy Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity: Read Books Reviews - Amazon.com

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Examine the inner workings of the mind and learn what consciousness and a sense of self really means - and if it even exists. provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.
We're used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel , philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain-an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is "a virtual self in a virtual reality."But if the self is not "real," why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability? In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel

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The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

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Amazon.com: The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self eBook : Metzinger, Thomas: Kindle Store

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In recent years, the scientific study of meditation and psychedelic drugs has seen remarkable developments. The increased focus on meditation in cognitive neuroscience has led to a cross-cultural classification of standard meditation styles validated by functional and structural neuroanatomical data…

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Right now, as you read this text, it may seem like your eyes are simply detecting words out there in the world. But you're not detecting-you're constructing. In every moment, outside of your awareness, your brain constructs a model of the outside world, transforming light waves, pressure changes, and chemicals into sights, sounds, touches, smells, and tastes. Your brain continually anticipates what will happen next around you, checks its predictions against sense data streaming in from your eyes, ears, and other sensory surfaces of your body, updates the model as needed, and in doing so creates your experience of the world. This covert construction of your senses is called exteroception.

Your brain also models the events occurring inside your body. In much the same way that your brain sees sights, feels things that touch your skin, and hears sounds, it also produces your body's inner sensations, such as a gurgling stomach, a tightness in your chest, and even the beating of your heart. Your brain also models other sensations from movements that you cannot feel, such as your liver cleaning your blood. The construction of all your inner sensations is called interoception and, like exteroception, it proceeds completely outside your awareness.

For a long time, scientists treated interoception and exteroception as completely separate domains of sensation, bounded by your skin. But recent research has revealed that the two might not be as separate as they seem, and their boundary is fuzzy. Perhaps more importantly, the science of interoception reveals some surprising insights about how your brain works and may be a key to better understanding health and illness.

Your Brain Runs a Budget for Your Body

You live in a complex body. With over 600 muscles in motion and dozens of internal organs, your body pumps 2,000 gallons of blood per day, balances dozens of hormones and other chemicals, regulates the energy of billions of neurons, digests food, excretes waste, and fights illness-all of it nonstop throughout your life. Your brain's most important job is to coordinate and control the systems of your body as they burn and replenish energy efficiently. Your brain ensures that the right amounts of salt, glucose, water, and other vital resources are available where and when they're needed, so you can walk, think, learn, innovate, and love. This constant budgeting of your body's needs is called allostasis.

Allostasis is a predictive balancing act. Your brain moves your body through a massively complex world full of other brains-in-bodies, so it must constantly guess which of your cells need what resources... and guess well. If your heart rate is too fast or slow for the physical demands you face, or your lungs don't process sufficient oxygen, or your cells become insensitive to the glucose that ultimately powers your muscles, you're not likely to live long. So, your brain is engaged in the constant body-budgeting of allostasis, anticipating your body's needs at every moment while deciding which efforts are worth the metabolic investment. Right now, for example, your brain is using some glucose and other metabolic resources to read these words. Learning and moving your body are some of your brain's most costly operations, metabolically speaking.

Efficient energy regulation, therefore, is a major selection pressure for all living things. Animals live longer and suffer from fewer diseases when their tissues, organs, and systems receive the right nutrients just when they are needed. Such animals are more fit to reproduce. They can explore further for food and better protect themselves from predators, learning all the while and honing their models of the world. The more effectively and efficiently a brain can invest its energy, therefore, the greater the metabolic return.

Sensing the World Around You

Reading this text depends on seeing, which is one form of exteroception. To perform this activity, your brain makes metabolic investments to model the world outside your body. It directs your eye muscles to contract and relax in a pattern that allows your eyes to sweep across a line of text-at each moment predicting what you will see next, based on past experience (see Figure 1). Your brain then directs your eyes to stop and fixate briefly to compare its predictions to the visual data arising from the page. It makes any necessary corrections and then directs the next volley of eye movements.

Vision, like other forms of exteroception, operates in the service of movement. Think about it: How do you know how far away to hold this page, so the article is legible? How do you even know where your limbs are in space? How do you manage not to bump into things when you walk, successfully guide your spoon to your mouth, or pick up a cup with the right amount of force? It's all about sensation and its intimate ties to allostasis. Your brain sees, hears, feels physical contact, and constructs other sensations not because these activities are intrinsically fun or valuable, but because sensations are the means by which your brain controls your body's many moving parts. Your movements give your brain the sense data to build its model of the world, and this model guides your actions, ultimately supporting allostasis so you survive, and even thrive, in the world around you.

Exteroception works mostly by prediction. Your brain issues motor commands, say, to move the muscles of your head, eyes, and other body parts (even before you're aware) and simultaneously predicts the sensations likely to result from those movements. When the actual sense data arrives from the sensory surfaces in your eyes, skin, and other sense organs, your brain integrates the data to confirm or correct the predictions to refine or adjust the motor movements. In constructing your sensations, your brain estimates the state of the world in order to control and coordinate your body's movements.

Sensing the World Inside You

The muscles attached to your skeleton are not the only moving parts of your body. As you read this article, your brain is conducting a mostly silent symphony of movement inside your body, involving your organs, autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system. Your lungs continually expand and contract to take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide as your heart beats to pulse blood throughout your body and brain. If what you're reading seems interesting or unexpected, your heart rate and respiration may slow.

Many other things that you might not think of as movements are indeed movements of a sort. For example, the flow of your saliva to aid digestion; the surge of chemicals that create inflammation; and the gush of cortisol from your adrenal glands. (Cortisol has been called a stress hormone, but it is more correct to call it a metabolic hormone; it gets glucose into your bloodstream quickly when your brain predicts your body will need it.) Even conversations between the cells of your intestine and the bacteria that reside there are considered motor movements; this constant chatting aids digestion, and over time can even adjust the length of your intestine to regulate how quickly you digest!

Interoception, like exteroception, operates in the service of movement predictively. Here's the gist: Your brain issues motor commands that adjust the insides of your body, and it simultaneously predicts the sensory consequences of those movements. At the same time, the sensory surfaces inside your body, including dozens of cells that monitor pressure changes, temperature, contractions, stretches, nutrients, gases, toxins, and various chemicals, send a steady stream of sensory signals back to your brain via electrical impulses in your spinal cord and swirling chemicals in your blood. Your brain integrates these sensory signals to confirm or correct the predictions and adjust its predicted movements, if necessary, thereby maintaining allostasis efficiently. In this way, your brain anticipates the needs of your body and proactively coordinates the internal movements that deliver glucose, water, salt, oxygen, and other resources to billions of cells just in time.

For example, think of the last time you were thirsty and drank a glass of water. Within seconds after draining the last drops, you probably felt less thirsty. This event might seem ordinary, but the water actually takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, so it can't possibly quench your thirst in a few seconds. What relieved your thirst? Prediction. As your brain plans and executes the actions that allow you to swallow, it simultaneously anticipates the interoceptive consequences of gulping water, causing you to feel less thirsty long before your brain learns from the body about your increased hydration.

New Insights and Deep Implications

There is still much to learn about the mechanisms of interoception and what they mean for health, illness, and basic mental functions. Exteroceptive senses such as vision are relatively better understood-perhaps because scientists are often guided by their experiences, and we don't experience most interoceptive activity. Nevertheless, creative research by those who do study interoception has brought forth some intriguing insights. New ideas are transforming our most basic understanding of brains and bodies and challenging our most basic assumptions of how they work together to create the mind, control actions, and cause illness. We'll share three such insights that blur three fundamental boundaries: what is inside versus outside the body, what is mental versus physical illness, and what distinguishes different mental phenomena.

Inside vs. Outside

The first insight is that the skin, which seems to physically divide body from world, is an illusory boundary when it comes to sensation. Traditionally, interoception is thought to mean sensing the inner body from signals beneath the skin, as we've discussed so far. But some exteroceptive senses, like proprioception (awareness of body position), olfaction (smell), and taste, emerge from signals coming from inside and outside the body. And other signals, like wetness, are entirely computed by the brain. Your skin has no wetness receptors, for example; your brain constructs wetness as a combination of touch and temperature.

It might sound bizarre, but your brain doesn't know where your body ends and the world begins. Instead, it approximates a continually shifting boundary. Sometimes the shifts are slow, accomplished by touch, hearing, and watching body parts in action. If you were an ungainly teenager, or you've been pregnant with an ever-growing belly that unexpectedly whapped into things around you, then you know what we mean. Other times the shifts are quick. Everyone who has driven around town without hitting other cars or the curb has benefited from just how quickly and effectively a brain can expand the boundaries of a body to include the car's perimeter. (Exit the car and the boundaries shrink back just as fast.)

There is another way in which internal and external cannot be neatly bisected. Interoception gives you an extra, fuzzy, exteroceptive sense for free: the gut feeling that something has happened around you. Here's how it works: The light waves that hit your retina and the air pressure changes that reach your cochlea are the outcomes of changes in the world, and your brain guesses, using past experience, what the causes of that sense data might be. Such guesses prompt your brain to prepare for movement internally, such as quickening your breath or secreting cortisol, to support your next actions. These plans for coordinated movement come with predicted sensory consequences.

Evolution did not wire us to feel every interoceptive gurgle, gush, and tug directly, so instead, we often experience them as simple feelings: pleasure or displeasure, idleness or activation, fatigue or energy. Scientists call these simple feelings or mood. Affect does not reveal what in the world has changed, where the change is, or what to do about it. Rather, it is just a quick and dirty sixth sense that something has happened. That particular something may be outside your body and require a rapid and energetically costly response.

But there's a tricky bit: This arrangement allows and maybe even encourages you to search for the causes of your mood in the outside world-in your relationships with other people, or in your responsibilities at home or at work. Feel on edge? Maybe you're late for an appointment. Feel unpleasant? Maybe someone has wronged you. Many internal perturbations have purely internal causes, however, such as lack of sleep, dehydration, or eating too much processed fat and sugar. Just because you feel bad doesn't automatically mean something bad is happening (or is about to happen) to you.

Mental vs. Physical

This brings us to a second insight: Interoception diminishes the boundary between physical and mental. In every moment, your brain transforms something physical-interoceptive predictions (which are neural patterns) and sense data (which are neural or chemical patterns)-into something mental (affect). The same brain circuitry that models the physiological state of your body to create interoceptive sensations also creates the ups and downs you feel every day. Hundreds of studies from laboratories around the world, including ours, have observed this, but scientists still puzzle over the mechanisms that transform physical signals into mental feelings. They remain one of the great mysteries of consciousness.

A particularly permeable aspect of the mental/physical boundary is between mental and physical disease. Obesity is traditionally viewed as a behavioral disorder, heart disease as a physical disorder, and depression as a mood disorder. But the three are highly comorbid, with any one of them appearing as the so-called "initial" disorder (i.e., depression can precede obesity or vice versa). In addition, the seeds for all three diseases are planted in early life. This confluence of findings suggests that some behavioral, physical, and mood disorders share disruptions in efficient energy regulation, implying disruptions in allostasis and interoception.

Scientists are still unraveling the complex entwining of metabolism, the immune system, and other internal systems of the body. For example, problems with energy regulation, if they go on long enough, produce chemicals and activate receptors that kick the immune system into high gear. Immune responses are incredibly energy-consuming, which further burdens your metabolism, and such cascades often end in serious illness. Exploring and understanding such basic mechanisms may open the door to new strategies for prevention, treatment, and cure.

Some say that the body "keeps score" of adversity and trauma from childhood onwards, making you more vulnerable to illness; but in fact your brain keeps score, and your body is the score card.

Mental Phenomena

The more we learn about interoception, the blurrier a third presumed boundary becomes: one between different mental phenomena. For example, you'd never confuse your sense of touch with the act of breathing, right? Well, it turns out that the two are more entwined than you may think. When something is touching your skin, you're more likely to take in information about it as you inhale than as you exhale. This finding suggests that the sense of touch, which is traditionally considered exteroceptive, may be entwined with interoception at a basic level.

Similarly, you'd never confuse your eyesight with your heartbeat, but the way that your brain receives visual information from the world may be yoked to your heartbeat. People are more likely to take in visual information during the period of each heartbeat when the heart relaxes and blood fills the ventricles, and less likely to take in visual information when the heart contracts and pushes blood out into the arteries. The latter is like a brief, recurring, visual blind spot in time.

Such findings have surprising implications for understanding how your brain and body create your mind. They imply, for example, that neither the conventional "visual system" nor the conventional "somatosensory system" is solely responsible for the ability to see and to feel touch, respectively, but both are components of larger, more distributed neural assemblies that produce these sensations-assemblies that include interoception. Traditional boundaries between the phenomena of everyday life such as vision and touch may not be respected by the brain.

Observations like these may have practical implications with profound societal impact. Imagine your heart is racing at 180 beats per minute, so rapidly that your brain cannot properly sample sense data from the retina. What will you see? Your brain will construct your visual experience mainly from its predictions-your beliefs-and may go uncorrected by actual events in the outside world. Now suppose your heart is racing because you're a police officer in a high-pressure situation, and you're armed. It is conceivable that your brain's predictions could lead you literally to see things that aren't present.

But wait, there's more. Vision, touch, and the sensations of your lungs and heart are just a few of the many mental faculties that scientists study. What about the boundary between cognition and emotion? How about the boundaries between different types of cognition (thinking, decision-making, attention) or different types of emotion (anger, sadness, fear, happiness)? For over a century, scientists typically have assumed that the human mind is made up of different types of mental faculties, each arising from its own dedicated psychological process or mechanism, implemented in its own dedicated set of physical causes in the body and brain. But are they?

Recent evidence suggests we should replace this type-based approach with a more holistic one to better understand how your whole brain, in constant conversation with the various systems in your body, creates your mind at any given moment. If we consider the brain circuitry that is important for allostasis and examine its connectivity to the rest of the brain, we see two well-known brain networks (see Figure 2, "Two Vital Networks"). The networks overlap in a set of hubs in the cerebral cortex that serve as the brain's backbone for neural communication and have extensive projections to subcortical regions that control the autonomic nervous system, immune system, and endocrine systems. These networks are implicated in various types of sensation and perception, including interoception, and participate in phenomena as diverse as memory, emotion, affect, language, reward, social affiliation, pain, alcohol craving, stress, mental illness, diabetes, and moral judgments of other people. They also converse with groups of cells, deep in the brainstem, that give rise to neurochemicals-dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine-that help neurons fire and therefore play important roles in attention, learning, and consciousness. Interoception, it seems, may be at the core of mental phenomena that don't seem interoceptive at all.

Even when we focus on individual brain structures, we can learn how interoception dissolves traditional psychological boundaries. Consider the hippocampus, a structure deep in the temporal lobe of your brain that is typically thought to be crucial for certain types of memory. Exciting scientific evidence now indicates that the hippocampus is bathed in interoceptive information and plays a key role in estimating the physiological state of the body. A rodent's hippocampus, for example, receives signals about energy availability in the gut that regulate how much the animal eats in a given meal. But the hippocampus can override these signals, causing animals to eat substantially more food than they otherwise would. Therefore, calling the hippocampus a "memory" structure may be far too limiting.

The impact of interoception reaches far beyond what its conventional definition would suggest. Who would have thought that your heartbeat is linked to what you see and how well you see it? To understand something as fundamental as vision, therefore, we must recognize the importance of interoception. To understand health and illness, and even consciousness and mood, we also must appreciate that metabolism, and therefore interoception, plays a central role. Interoception is a secret ingredient in some of the most important and intimate parts of your life.

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Your brain keeps you alive and well by running a metabolic "budget" for your body. Our authors explain how these budgetary activities, and the bodily sensations they create, suggest surprising connections between brain, mind, body, and world. Your brain keeps you alive and well by running a metabolic "budget" for your body.

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Your Brain Didn’t Evolve to Think. Here’s What It Does Best 🧠

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Kim Mills: When you're angry or do something impulsive, that's your reptilian brain in action, right? And if you talk yourself out of that impulsive act or gain control over your wrath, that's your neocortex at work, isn't it? And those emotions you feel, such as grief when a loved one dies or joy at the birth of a child, those are just things that happen to you in reaction to events in your life, correct? And they're universal across cultures, aren't they? Well, maybe not. What if emotions are things that our brain constructs to make sense of the signals it gets from our body and from the world around us. What if the way you think about your brain and how and why it functions is just plain wrong. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

Our guest today is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. Dr. Barrett has spent more than three decades studying emotion. Her research has helped to develop the idea that the human brain creates emotions by predicting rather than reacting to what happens in the world around us. She's published more than 240 scientific papers and is also a prolific science communicator, writing articles and books about brain science for the general public. Her two most recent books are How Emotions Are Made, published in 2017, and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, which came out in November.

Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Barrett.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Kim.

Mills: I want to start with an idea that opens your new book, which is that the main purpose of the brain is not to think, but to regulate our bodies. This may seem counterintuitive or come as a surprise to some of our listeners. I'm wondering, can you explain how you came to this conclusion and why it's so important?

Barrett: I actually started with the question of why do we even have a brain. That blob of meat between your ears is the most expensive organ that you have in your whole body. And so why do we even have a brain? And so what I did was I went back in the literature and I looked in the literature on evolutionary neuroscience to a time when animals on the earth didn't have brains and looked at the evolution of the brain and found some really remarkable evidence that brains evolved under the selection pressure of predation. So during the Cambrian period, animals learned to hunt one another deliberately and eat each other. And it's not that animals didn't eat each other before then, but there was very little evidence of actual hunting. And so under the selection pressure of hunting, what happened is that bodies got bigger and required much more coordination of internal bodily systems, because animals without brains don't have very much going on inside.

They have some internal coordination, but not very much. And they really have no sophisticated senses to speak of-that is, they don't see, they don't hear, they don't smell. They really don't know very much about the world outside their own bodies. And what you see under predation is that bodies get bigger, senses evolve and brains appear. And if you look at the anatomy of the brain, what you see is that at the core of the brain, even at the core of the cerebral cortex, are the regions that are regulating the systems of your body, your immune system, your metabolism, endocrine system, your autonomic nervous system and your skeletal muscle system. And the networks in the brain that are responsible for remembering and thinking and seeing even are actually involved in regulating the body. And so the bottom line is that we do think, and we do feel and we do see. But we do those things in the service of regulating the systems of the body.

Now we don't experience every feeling of gratitude or sadness, every hug we give, every insult we bear as having anything to do with the body, but it does. And the reason why this is important is that many of the things that we think of as mental, illnesses like depression and anxiety, or even just things like seeing or thinking, actually have important aspects to them that are related to the body. So depression, for example, in addition to being a mental illness and having immune functioning problems is also a metabolic illness, actually. And that's why it's important that we understand, it really starts to break down the boundary between the mental and the physical. And so we can understand, for example, that all mental disorders actually have basic physical processes that are in disarray and also things we think of as physical illnesses, like cardiovascular disease and so on, actually have mental aspects to them, which are really important to understand.

Mills: So a few moments ago, you talked about the brain being the most expensive organ. What do you mean by that?

Barrett: Metabolically speaking, your brain costs you 20% of your metabolic budget. That's more than your heart. That's more than your lungs. That's more than your liver. It's a very expensive organ to keep running. All those little neurons and so on. It's really expensive, actually, metabolically speaking. And it turns out that metabolic efficiency is a major selection pressure, not just on any species that's alive, it's true. But also it's important for the evolution of any species. It's also important for your health, mental and physical. If you have metabolic dysregulation or things are not running as efficiently metabolically, and I'm not just talking about circulating glucose or something. That's one very small part of a very large complicated system. If your energy regulation is not proceeding in a metabolically efficient way, you will get sick.

Mills: And are our brains more expensive than other mammalian brains? I mean, we have this big hunk of meat up there.

Barrett: Yes, they are. Yes. When you look at primates, let's say relative to other mammals, primates do have bigger brains relative to their body size than other mammals do. And humans have bigger brains. But I would say that the size of the cerebral cortex is not any bigger than you would expect for a primate who has a brain of our size. So it's not like our cerebral cortex is so big relative to the rest of our brain. It's just we have a big brain relative to our body size. And our cerebral cortex is as big as you might expect for a creature who has a brain of our size, but there's some genetic upregulation in the human brain that makes it more expensive to run, in particular layers of the cerebral cortex that have to do with our ability to... so you could say compress information, summarize information from multiple sources so that we can do things like abstraction.

Mills: What might be a surprising point to some people in your book, I think I alluded to it a little bit in the introduction, is the way that many of us were taught about the brain is wrong. So a lot of our listeners for sure remember learning that there are three parts of the human brain. You've been asked this a million times. We think there's the lizard or reptilian brain that controls our basic bodily functions. There's the emotional brain and then there's the rational brain, the neocortex, that's the pinnacle of evolution and makes us supposedly superior to other animals. But you say this is incorrect. So where did the idea of a triune brain come from and how do we know that it's wrong?

Barrett: Okay. So I got to say, I'm happy to talk about it. I have been asked about this a lot, but I'm so happy to talk about it because it's one of the most pervasive modern myths in science. It's not even wrong, is what I would say, Kim. And I also have to say that this is not my research, right? I don't do research on this topic. Although I do research on brain organization and its relevance for psychological functioning. And I do research on the structure and function of tissue that is called limbic, but it's not called limbic because it's about emotion. It's really more about the anatomical structure of the tissue. But let me just say that the idea of a triune brain, a brain in three layers really can be... I've traced it all the way back to Plato.

Mills: Wow.

Barrett: Because Plato talked about the soul or the psyche, which is not exactly the same as a mind, but for present purposes, it's close enough. You talked about the human psyche is having three parts, one part for instinct, one part for emotion, which he representatives with beasts, right? Two horses, and then a charioteer, which is human rationality, which obviously controls the beast. And so right there, you have this idea of an inner beast and a rational part, and they're in constant battle for control of the chariot of your behavior. That's basically the idea.

And so fast forward, like a couple of thousand years, and we're in the era of modern neuroscience, like in the mid-20th century, and you have scientists using the best tools available to them, which is the naked eye or maybe some not so powerful microscopes with some dyes. And you look at a lizard brain. Now the lizard brain looks like it has a set of parts. And then you look at a small mammal brain like a rat and you're, oh look it looks like there's some extra parts there. And then you look at a human you're like, oh wow, definitely a really big extra part there. And so the idea that really grew out of this, that comes from Paul MacLean-who was a neuroscientist in Boston, actually, where I live-in the 1940s is this idea that lizards have circuitry for instincts. And then layered on top of that evolved the limbic system, limbic meaning border, which is really old cortex, considered to be old cortex that borders these lizard parts, which is where emotions live. And then layered on top of that is the new part of the cortex, the neocortex, which is where rationality lives, the pinnacle, as you say, of evolution.

And so there are a couple of things wrong with this view. One is that evolution, we aren't the pinnacle of anything. Evolution didn't aim itself at us, to use, paraphrase wording from Henry Gee the paleontologist. And animals are well adapted to their niche. If a species still is around, after a couple of hundred thousand years or longer, then it means it's well adapted to its niche. And other animals have some pretty miraculous abilities to do things that we don't have, frankly, and that we endow our superheroes with. So yes, it's true. We can do some pretty amazing things as humans, but other animals can do very amazing things like grow back limbs -

Mills: Yeah, we can't fly.

Barrett: Yeah. We can't fly. We can't grow back limbs. We definitely can't grow new neurons in most of our brains, whereas other animals, there are animals who can do all of those things or each of those things, right? But more importantly, the evidence from molecular genetics, when you peer in deep into the cells, the molecular structure of cells, and you look at the genes deep within, what you see is really clear evidence that brains did not evolve like sedimentary rock, or what I think of it as, you've got this deep animal beast, like inner ancient beast, and then what evolved on top of that was rationality like icing on an already baked cake.

Brains didn't evolve that way. They just didn't. That's the evidence. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years and yet hasn't managed to percolate its way into, not just into the public sphere, but into psychology textbooks. Like, yeah, anytime you read that the amygdala and other parts of the limbic system, which I would put in scare quotes because there is no limbic system in your brain. Anytime you read that the amygdala or the limbic system is being regulated by the prefrontal cortex, that is a phrasing which rests on this old really mistaken idea that you have this inner beast lurking inside your brain, which is constantly in battle with your more sensible rational self.

And that the outcome of your-When your rational side wins, you're healthy and moral. And when your inner beast wins, you're either-If your inner beast wins because you didn't try hard enough, then you're not moral. And if your inner beast wins because there's something wrong, then you're sick. That's just a morality tale, but it doesn't reflect actually the biology of how we got these miraculous brains to begin with.

Mills: You make another really interesting point in your new book that I think is another myth busting point. I think a lot of people have the sense that parts of our brains go dormant from time to time when we're not using them. And I think what you're saying is neurons are firing all the time. Maybe you can explain a little bit about how that works and why.

Barrett: So if you look back in the history of how neurons were discovered and how they were studied, like in the 1950s, for example, one way to study the properties of a neuron was to take a big squid neuron, like literally take it out of the brain and lay it out on a table. And when you lay out a single neuron on a table then you can see, because these are really giant squids have very-they have a neuron that you can see with the naked eye, as I understand it-it's dormant. And then you have to stimulate it with electricity to get it to produce an action potential down at the axon. And this is very convenient and consistent with the idea that-the stimulus response idea that has really been around in psychology really since the inception of psychology, right?

So psychology as a field was a field of full mental philosophy until the mid-19th century when philosophers and neurologists and physiologists started to use the methods available to them from the physiology lab and from patients with lesions to try to search for the physical basis of the psychological categories that were in mental philosophy. So the physical basis of memory, the physical basis of emotion, the physical basis of perception and so on. And the idea was that, the brain is stimulated, the mind is stimulated by something in the world and then maybe some processing goes on inside. And then there's a response. So it's stimulus response jazzed up. This was very consistent with what happens when you look at an individual neuron, lying on a table, it's dormant and you have to stimulate it in order for it to fire.

But that is not how neurons work when they are actually in situ with other neurons bathed in chemicals and oxygen and so on. Neurons are constantly talking to each other. Your brain is basically having a conversation with itself throughout your entire life. And that's ongoing, and information from your body and information from the world merely modulate that ongoing activity. And that is the way the brain works. It's only to say, and therapists know this-they use different words, but it's exactly the same idea-that the brain is running a model of the world, an internal model of the world. That's not quite right. The brain is a model and it's a model of the body as it receives information from the world. So we don't model the world. We model the information that arrives to our sensory surfaces, like our retinas and our cochlea and so on and so forth. And all of the sensory services inside our body.

And the brain is receiving this information. And it's attempting to make sense of it so that it knows what to do next to keep itself alive and well. And it's using past experience to make these guesses. So what you see and what you hear and what you smell and what you taste and so on and what you feel in your body, because you don't really feel anything in your body, you feel everything in your brain, everything is felt in your brain. You see in your brain, you don't see in your eyes, you hear in your brain, you don't hear in your ears. Everything you experience and everything you do is a combination of what's in the world and in your body, because from your brain's perspective, that's outside the skull, right? So what's in the world, what's in the periphery. And what's in the past that your brain re-implements as the present.

Mills: Let's turn to your work on emotion, which is also fascinating. And one of the big ideas that you've developed is that emotions aren't things that happen to us, but they're something that our brain constructs. Explain that.

Barrett: Well, yeah.

Mills: In 25 words.

Barrett: So what goes along with this idea that we're born with these ancient circuits, right-buried deep inside our brain hardwired already-there is this idea that emotions happen to you. Something happens in the world, like you see a snake and it triggers fear. And then fear produces this whole cascade of events. You make a particular facial expression, your heart rate goes up, maybe you freeze or you run. And the idea is that this is universal with everybody in the world. And for everybody who has a neurotypical brain, who has these circuits, which are derived from ancient mammals or were involved in hunter-gatherer societies in Africa or whatever. There are different versions of it. And I'm painting a, you might want to say as a straw man sort of a description, but you can add bells and whistles and nuances.

But the basic idea is that emotions are universal. They have a single set, anger has a single set of features. Maybe it has some variation, but not so much variation that you can't recognize it in someone's face or in their body or in their body movements or in their voice or whatever. And all I can say is, I know it feels that way. It feels that way to me, too, when I get angry, when I feel gratitude or any rush of emotion to me feels exactly the same way as it feels to you. But that is not how the brain works. And that is not what the evidence shows. I mean, so the evidence shows really clearly, it couldn't be clearer, frankly, that emotions are not universal. What is universal however, is that the human brain is constantly constructing experience.

It's constantly trying to make sense of the world around and the body, or actually, I would say, it's trying to make sense of what's going on inside the body in relation to what's going on around us outside in the world. And it's doing this using past experience and it's always doing this. So the way I would say it is like this, the evidence to me suggests very strongly that your brain receives sense data from the world, sights and sounds and smells and so on. And it receives sense data from the body. And so when there's a loud bang or a tug in your chest, your brain receives that information as the outcomes of some set of causes. But what caused that loud bang? Is it a car backfiring? Is it somebody slamming a door? Is it a gunshot? What's happening? What caused that tug in your chest? Is it anxiety? Is it that you overate that you have heartburn from eating a too rich of a meal? Is it the beginning of a heart attack? Your brain actually doesn't know. It only receives the outcomes. It has to guess at what the causes are.

This is called an inverse problem. You know what the outcome is, you don't know what the cause is. And so your brain has one other source of information available to it. And that is past experience, memory. So it's not like you walk around consciously remembering things in order to perceive the world. Your brain is constantly remembering, meaning it is constantly reassembling bits and pieces of past experience in order to make sense of what's going on in the body, in relation to the world so that your brain knows what to do next.

Because frankly, if a loud bang is a door slamming, you would do something different in a particular situation than if it was a gun fire, if it was a gunshot. And so what your brain is-if you were to anthropomorphize a bit, you'd say, what your brain is constantly doing is it's asking the question, what is similar in my past? What is similar to what this sensory array looks like and what caused it, and what did I do about it and did it work? Now in psychology, things that are similar to one another are category. So your brain you could say is constructing categories. It's a category construction organ. It's constantly using the past to construct categories to make sense of the present in order for the purposes of guiding action and regulating metabolism. But we also know that a representation of a category is a concept.

So you could say also that what the brain is doing is it's doing concept generation. Ad hoc concept generation. Your brain is constantly remembering, reassembling past experience as concepts that are tailored to the specific situation that you're in to make sense of what your body means in that particular situation so that it knows what to do next to keep you alive and well. And that's what emotions are. Emotions are just when your brain uses past experiences of emotion to make meaning of the present and guide action.

Mills: If emotion is something that our brain creates, then can we will ourselves to feel emotions differently? I mean, how much control do we actually have over our emotions?

Barrett: Well, I would say that we definitely can, but it's much harder to do then actually, sometimes we make it out to be, and every client that every therapist has ever had knows this to be true. It's actually very, very hard to do. And also what it means is that what control looks like doesn't only happen in the moment when a person wants to change how they feel. So one thing I haven't done is made the distinction between affect and emotion. And that's a really important distinction in the science that we do. Emotions are easier to change.

Affect is not as easy to change in the moment. So let me back up a little bit and explain that distinction. And then I will answer your question. Your brain is always controlling your body and your body is always sending sense data back to your brain. And for the most part, we are not aware of all of those sense data to the same degree that we're aware of sights and sounds and smells and things. At least I hope you're not. If you are aware of what's going on inside your body, I feel really bad for you because it means that you've got a whole drama unfolding there. And if you're aware of it, that means that you're probably in significant discomfort and I'm really sorry.

But what evolution has done is made available that information to us as affect, as simple feelings. I feel pleasant, I feel unpleasant. I feel worked up, I feel calm. I feel comfortable. I feel uncomfortable. So your brain is regulating your body 24/7. Your body is sending information back to your brain 24/7 and you feel affect 24/7, regardless of whether you're emotional or not. You feel affect. Affect is universal. Now what affective features are associated with different things is not necessarily universal always, but affect is universal. The ability, the capacity to have that affect is universal and most likely all mammals and many vertebrates, probably maybe all vertebrates and maybe even some invertebrates can also feel affect. That's an interesting morass of confusion there, but it's interesting to talk about and think about. But I would say affect is definitely not a human-specific ability.

And sometimes when we're making meaning of the sensations and the affect that goes with it, sometimes we make episodes of emotion by again, creating categories or concepts on the fly. In fact, there's a convenient term called a conceptual category, which means that the concept, that knowledge is what makes a bunch of things similar to each other in a category, because a bunch of things can be similar to each other by virtue of their function, not by virtue of what they look like or smell like, or sound like or taste like.

And many things that we deal with in life are categories of that sort, and infants learn those kinds of categories in the first year of infancy, they're called abstract categories where, what the similarity that draws the instances together are not perceptual. They are functional. That is, they serve some kind of function. And this is something I talk about in Seven and a Half Lessons. And so affect is hard to change because you don't have volitional control over your heart or your lungs, and-you do have volitional control over your breathing, and you can try to practice breathing in order to calm your heart and control your heart and so on and so forth.

Mills: But you can't stop your blood from flowing.

Barrett: No. And so you can't. It's really, most people can't speed their heart up just by thinking about it. And so affect is actually really hard to change without drugs, like in the instant. And that's really often why people use drugs, both prescription chemicals and unprescribed chemicals, because they're attempting to relieve discomfort or distress, which is affective in nature. But you definitely can change how you make sense of affect and the sensations that give rise to it. And but they're, I would say in the moment, for example what would James Gross and others call, reappraisal is just, you could think of it mechanistically as your brain is re-categorizing the set of sensations, is recategorizing what they mean. That is, it's conjuring a different category, a different concept to make sense of those sensations and therefore give rise to a different action.

So in the moment you can do that very deliberately, but sometimes even that is really, really, really hard to do. And one way to have more control over your emotions, in addition to just keeping, making it easier for your brain to regulate your body, which is like get enough sleep, eat healthfully, surround yourself with people who care about you and who you love and have good relationships with. In addition to those things, you can learn and practice re-conceptualizing, that is changing the categories that your brain can make easily. So it's like exercise, or like driving. First of all, it is like exercise because it's very effortful to do this. And so it's like an investment in a healthier you, but it is also like driving where at first it's really hard, but then when you practice it really a lot, it gets easier and pretty automatic.

So you can take anxiety and turn it into determination or exhilaration even. You can take anger and turn it into awe. The affects stays the same, but the meaning is what's changing. And if you practice in advance, you're seeding your brain to be able to do this much more automatically. So for example, I'm skeptical by nature but there is research to show that gratitude and compassion and all are very good for your nervous system and therefore for your mental health. And right down the hall from me is a colleague who studies gratitude and the importance of gratitude. So I'm like, okay, fine. All right. I'll try it. And so I set myself the task of, gratitude I was already on board with, but awe was a trickier one. So I thought, all right, I'll try to cultivate a sense of wonder for five minutes every day where I'm a speck and therefore my problems are a speck, and let's see if I can do it.

And sure enough it was hard at first, but I did it, just like I learned to hold a plank for a minute or two, whatever. And eventually it became really easy. And now I can switch in and out of that particular state, my brain can make it easily when I need it and give my nervous system-if you're a speck for a minute, your problems are too a speck for a minute, and that gives you a break for a minute. And that changes how you breathe and it changes how you comport your body and it changes what you do next.

So a lot of the things that we know by different names, we misunderstand the mechanistic way in which they occur, right? So appraisal or reappraisal is a description of something that happens. It's not an explanation of the process that produces it. And by understanding how your brain works, you can generalize that process and start using it in new other ways. So for example, you can learn other emotion concepts from other cultures that don't exist in our culture, but that might be really useful for helping you to make sense of your affect and the sensations that give rise to it so that you can broaden the repertoire of actions that you can potentially take. And we know from the wonderful work of George Bonanno, that flexibility is the key to resilience in any situation, even a really stressful one. And so that's a way you can control your emotional life, cultivate your emotional life, architect your life, architect your experience in a way that is before the heat of the moment.

Mills: So what are the big unanswered questions in your field and what are you working on now?

Barrett: Oh my God. Well, I have a lab of 25 full-time people and 100 or so undergraduate researchers. So we have many, many questions that we are trying to understand. But one thing we're trying to understand for example is, the name for your brain sensing your body is called interoception. And usually interoception is studied as your awareness of your physical sensation. Are you aware of your heartbeat? But that's really a very small part of what interoception is. Your brain is estimating the state of your body. It's modeling your body, basically. And most of that state estimation is happening outside of your awareness at all completely. You just have no awareness of it. And so that's a question we're really interested in. Not the question of like, are you aware of your heartbeats. But how well is your brain actually tracking what's happening in your body?

Because one cause of depression, for example, could be that your brain has a mistaken model of your body. And there's some disconnect there. So that's one thing that we're really mechanistically trying to work out. Another is, in the way that we understand somethings, that we think something first and then we act, or we think something first, and then we feel something. So we go in and we try to tinker with how people think in order to change how they feel and what they do, but actually the way the brain works is that your brain prepares your actions first and your experiences derive from that. It's not the other way around. And this is also something that I explain in both books actually. And there's a very strong likelihood that what's happening is not that you think bad things, and then you feel bad, more like you feel bad, and that leads your brain to think bad things.

So it could be that there are problems with the way that your brain is modeling your body, or literally problems with your body. For example, maybe your mitochondria are not as effective as they need to be. And that could be a source of depression. That could be a source of this disconnect. Your brain is attempting to model your body. Your body's not functioning well in this really subtle way that you would not be aware of, but maybe you'd just be aware of feeling bad. And that that is actually what's driving those negative thoughts. Not the other way around.

To me this seems first of all, very plausible from a neuroscience standpoint. And what it means is that when we go in and we get people to change how they think in order to change how they feel, what we're doing is actually just breaking a cycle. We're not changing the cause of the problem. We're just interrupting an ongoing cycle. And again, I would say there are real lessons there about things that you might want to do differently if this is-It's not that what we're doing is bad, it's just that there might be additional things that we might want to think about doing for treating mental illness.

Mills: Well, it just sounds amazing the work that you're doing. I really appreciate taking the time to speak with me today. And I highly recommend, I mean maybe I shouldn't say this, but I think your new book is very accessible and a great read. So I appreciate the time that you've taken. Thank you.

Barrett: Thank you. Thanks. Thanks very much.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. That's speakingofpsychology, all one word, @apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.

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Speaking of Psychology: Your brain is not what you think it is, with Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD

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Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, discusses myths about the brain, the theory that it evolved not to think but to control our bodies, and her research on how emotions are not something we experience, but things that the brain creates in order to make sense of the signals it receives from the world.

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Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

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Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality."

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Anil Seth: How your brain invents your "self"

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Who are you, really? Neuroscientist Anil Seth lays out his fascinating new theory of consciousness and self, centered on the notion that we "predict" the world into existence. From sleep to memory and everything in between, Seth explores the reality we experience in our brains -- versus the world as it objectively might be.

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Highlights

Allostasis - brain-centered predictive regulation - starts with a hypothalamic clock that synchronizes clocks in every tissue.

On this diurnal cycle of metabolic variation, the brain superimposes an episodic rest-activity cycle that coordinates change in key systems (respiration, heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, and physical activity).

The brain predicts upcoming needs for food, water, salt, warmth, or cooling and satisfies them by adjusting physiology and behavior to prevent errors that would require homeostatic correction.

The brain rewards a better-than-predicted result with a pulse of dopamine, thereby encouraging the organism to learn effective regulatory behaviors.

Although the concept of allostasis was proposed some 30 years ago, doubts persist about its precise meaning and whether it is useful. Here we review the concept in the context of recent studies as a strategy to efficiently regulate physiology and behavior. The brain, sensing the internal and external milieu, and consulting its database, predicts what is likely to be needed; then, it computes the best response. The brain rewards a better-than-predicted result with a pulse of dopamine, thereby encouraging the organism to learn effective regulatory behaviors. The brain, by prioritizing behaviors and dynamically adjusting the flows of energy and nutrients, reduces costly errors and exploits more opportunities. Despite significant costs of computation, allostasis pays off and can now be recognized as a core principle of organismal design.

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Allostasis: A Brain-Centered, Predictive Mode of Physiological Regulation

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Allostasis - brain-centered predictive regulation - starts with a hypothalamic clock that synchronizes clocks in every tissue. On this diurnal cycle of metabolic variation, the brain superimposes an episodic rest-activity cycle that coordinates change in key systems (respiration, heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, and physical activity).

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Are you a spectator to reality? Or are you its creator?

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Signals from the environment, such as those detected by your sense organs, have no inherent psychological meaning. Your brain creates it.