the sense of self, now and back then - part two

The temporary dislocation of the continuity of my ordinary self (see last post) may relate to what neuroscience seems to be telling us: that the ego, the strong sense of myself as a continuing presence, is re-constructed "as we go along," continuously. There is no solid place inside all this flux and change that is "me." "Me" is part of the flux. But that's OK, because out of the flux comes a pretty useful thing: the illusion that "I" is separate from everything else. Well - useful in a social sense, but not actually accurate.

(I don't know what the pretty patterns mean either, but it shows different areas of the brain lighting up, as different patterns of neurons fire, re-making "me" by the moment.)

I think that's what the unusual, alienating, dislocating state of mind I referred to in the last post comes from. Without any analysis on my part, and certainly with almost no understanding, my mind sets aside the usual clatter and chatter and exists in the present.

Although mindfulness meditation methodology has no doctrinal, religious content, it derives from Buddhist meditation practice. And maybe that's because it was Buddha who had the insight (revelation, nirvana, whatever you like to call it) that the self is an illusion - at least, the self as we usually inhabit it.And he did so once he'd given up starving himself and pursuing asceticism and bodily denial because it proved futile. He just meditated, and out of that came his enlightenment, his insights into human suffering and the nature of the self.

Understanding that the self as we usually think of it and feel it - i.e. as a constant entity - is an illusion, and living with that understanding, in the reality of the present moment, seems to yield great benefits. Even the NHS recognises that now. 

So there you are - from 12-year-old oddness through Buddha and neuroscience to the NHS. I have linked it all up for you.

 Is that my Nobel Prize you're holding? Oh no, it is Nurse Ratched with my medications....

mindfulness and neuroscience

In our culture, which is rich in benefits derived from rational thought and scientific innovations, we often need "proof" that something apparently unrelated to science is actually "true."

(The quotation marks above are a get-round the issues that arise if we pretend that "proof" and "true" are unarguable constants. You could use "evidence gathered from observation and rational thought" but it's a mouthful, and you could use "valid," but enough already with the quibbles.)

It's a generation since an article in the "Scientific American" identified the sort of brain-waves generated by Transcendental Mediation, to more-or-less show that TM makes a difference. (Provided you could afford it!) 

Since then, what we now call neuroscience can observe the brain in action via MMR scans. ('n stuff. I kind of, y'know, like, don't really know what I'm talking about here on the technology, so I'll move on.)

The point for me is that neuroscience can show us the brain, in action, in different states. It can show us the brain doing its normal stuff, dealing with one concept, fantasy, worry, memory etc after another, in that linked way that passes for normal thought. It can show us the concentrated attention that comes from doing a focused task. And it can show us a different state, which is that of meditation, specifically the mindfulness meditation derived from Zen Buddhist techniques.

I'm going to quote heavily from an article I learned of from Kathryn, for which, many thanks. A click on the title above should lead you to the article, but if it doesn't, I've put the URL below. (The article is four years old, so no doubt much more has been done since, but it's a useful summary.)

"This question of ‘I’ needs to be answered experientially. It has to be investigated and directly perceived; thinking and analysis cannot reach an answer. One way this can be done is through meditation, observing the process of experience and discovering that this ‘I’ is nothing more than the very clinging to one thing, then to another; grasping at what is desired, rejecting what is disliked; taking credit, pride, blame and shame; judging self and other; constructing a self-narrative; re-running memories; pre-occupation with future possibilities. This ‘I’ arises only with the thought process, but it happens so habitually that we begin by mistaking it for who we really are. Is there an ‘I’ apart from this clinging to things? What happens if we let go of it?"

The answer seems to be that there is no one thing that is the Self, "I," the ego. "I" am a construct, continually rebuilt, continually changing. 

"On the basis of all this, it has been hypothesised that what is usually happening when we are ‘at rest’ is in fact not rest, but self-referential thinking and processing. Anyone who has ever meditated will have first hand experience of this, because when you start to meditate, you begin to notice how busy the mind is with an endless series of loosely associated thoughts, memories, plans, daydreams and thoughts about these thoughts. " 

This is the stuff we fondly refer to as "I." It's essential, of course, it's part of what our brains do, part of what my mind is. But is isn't a fixed thing; we are continually re-making our sense of self.

"So what happens when we let go of the ‘small self’? Preliminary findings from neuroscience are consistent with what we know from spiritual masters and what we find through experience. There is no thing which is the self. There is a process of thinking and analysis of experience. It is not even continuous: its aura of continuity is, I suspect, part of the image created in the present moment, but the process in fact comes and goes. Through training it is possible to taste a mode of experience without this companion. This habitual tendency can be weakened, and an alternative selfless mode of experience inhabited. The ‘selfing’ process itself can be observed objectively, and its insubstantiality seen."

Meditation, and the mindfulness approach is the simplest way in I've come across. It provides a context for the sense of self; it can create a distance from "me," and this distance creates in turn a greater calm. It can lessen suffering (pain, depression.) It can increase our sense of belonging in this life now, yet ease our anxiety about who we are and why we have to die. 

And I may have gone about before, but: this isn't snake-oil; it's not The Answer to Life; it's not a cult. It fits your life and mine. It's as spiritual or as practical as you want it to be.

And the neuroscientists seem to be telling us that it's, er....obervable, and verifiable.


http://www.selfknowledgeglobalresponsibility.org/skgrj/issue-2/dr-niels-detert-self-knowledge-today

Simon Baron-Cohen on empathy and evil

Just finished a short book on a huge subject: evil. "Zero Degrees of Empathy" by  Simon Baron-Cohen, who is a psychology professor, and an authority on autism. The book is right along the boundaries of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. 


In my probably crude and clumsy summary: he seeks to demonstrate that low or non-existent empathy provides pathways that can (it doesn't always) lead people to carry out acts we call "evil." 


It is possible, he says, to show that certain common circuits in the brain are fired when we are being empathic. (That's the neuroscience - it's easy to follow in general though a bit demanding for your present reviewer in the detail.) People with zero degrees of empathy don't fire up these circuits when shown material that does create responses in the  circuits in people whose empathy capabilities are in better shape.


He also discusses the degree to which zero empathy can be caused by the environment (especially the early environment, of course) and the degree to which genes are involved.


He brings in the way that even normally empathic brainwork is disrupted or shut down by stress, fear, hunger, etc, and looks at the way people do appalling things when they have been convinced that "they," the others, are less than human, not worth as much as they themselves are.


He is looking for an explanation of human evil, other than a religious one, and he is not content simply to see it as "the problem of evil." I suppose some of his broad and general statements are obvious enough - when someone does something dreadful to someone else, he (less often she) is suffering from a permanent or temporary breakdown in empathy. Well, yes, it's hard to stab someone, I would guess, if you are empathising with them. 


But his absolute emphasis on empathy, and his location of it in the way the brain works, struck me as a new and invaluable insight, based on research and careful thought. If he's right, the depths of human cruelty are not caused by an additional phenomena that most of us don't have most of the time: evil. It's actually caused by a lack of something most of us do have to some degree most of the time: empathy.


The author champions empathy as a civilising treasure to be nourished and cared for. He writes of the "pot of gold" that is the empathic personality that develops in a child who is well supported, loved and properly cared for.


My further thought is this: if adults accept and truly live with the fact of their own mortality, if they see life as a precious and singular event, then perhaps that state of being encourages empathy. From empathy comes compassion - not only in a general way, but also for this person here and now.


If the fact of your own death has never truly occupied you, then perhaps that makes it easier to make light of another's well-being, and perhaps their life too. 


"Send not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." And at once I am linked to common humanity. It is difficult for me consistently to commoditise people, to see them merely as agencies towards what I want to do, to objectify them entirely, if I know that their bell is also tolling for me.

Mortality and ME part 1

I suppose every individual has their own unique attitude to the fact that we are not immortal. Nevertheless, in a future post I'll try to categorise, no doubt in a banal and simplistic way, some of the attitudes I've come across, and I expect you have too. I think there some discernable types. Here, I'm after trying to say something useful about the ego, the sense that I am ME, and how that relates to mortality awareness.

The neuroscientsts, the experimenters and the writers therefrom (eg Damasio, Greenfield, Blackmore)tell us that it looks as though my (our) consciousness, my sense of being my unique self, my separate identity, is not a thing that sits inside my head and is added to or altered. They can't find "me"ness in there - maybe they will one day, though it doesn't look like it. It seems that our sense of a conscious self, separate from the world and different from everything else and everyone else in it, this "me" consciousness, is not one thing in the brain, but is continually created and re-created using all sorts of bits of brain inter-relating like mad.

So the ego itself is a construct, a set of processes. (Bear with me please, I'll get back to death and all in a bit.)It switches off, or at least winds down, at various times - obviously, or I'd never sleep, never be unaware of myself. My sense of a permanent thing that is ME is, in a scientific sense, an illusion. Not that I don't have an ego, but that it's a construct, not a permanent thing. It shifts, bends, dissolves, re-forms.

OK. If you say so. But it's still a powerful thing. I think it was TS Eliot who said that only those with a strong ego know what a relief it is to escape from it for a while. Something may be no less "real" and powerful to me because it is an illusion. Take the fact that to me Gloria M is an elegant, lively, fun-loving tolerant 42-year old, whereas in fact she's probably a grumpy old bag with attitude and many more years than that. My Gloria M's an illusion, but it works well enough, some of the time...

We escape our egos through total absorption in something, or someone, else. Late Beethoven quartet, sex, worship, being in the "mosh" pit at Glasto (to get down and dirty with the kids for a moment..)and meditation. One of the interesting things about meditation is that most people find it difficult to stay awake, even if they're not actually very tired, and yet they need to, because although sleep is an escape from the ego, meditation works because it is an escape whilst we are still awake. Very different effect.

The ultimate escape from ME-consciousness is of course - death. You may feel there is a permanent you that escapes from the body and goes on to an afterlife.I don't like polarising people's beliefs unnecessarily, but on this one we will have to differ, I'm afraid. (That's why I'm a humanist minister not an Anglican etc minister.) But in any case you might agree that a soul is not the same as an ego. OK - so: death is the end of ME-consciousness.

Gulp. That's all a bit stark, isn't it? We may be rational and "scientific" about it, talk about and indeed feel that death is essential, no life without it, all life must end, etc, but my ME-consciousness is not best pleased about that. Psychologist Dorothy Rowe says that above all we fear the dissolution of the self, actually more than we fear death itself. That seems to me to fit in with what the neuroscientists are telling us - the ME-awareness is a construct, and since we need it for a lot of our living, we will do a lot to protect it so we can construct it anew whenever it's needed. So naturally we fear death as the end not just of my life, but of ME.

Long blog posts are wearying to read, so if you're still with me, thanks, I'll pick this up soon.