In the past year I have been reading more and more about one important consequence of evolution: how our brains work and how we think. There has been in the past three or four decades an explosion of the new sciences of the brain and of consciousness and of how evolution has shaped the adapted mind, most of which I knew nothing about.
The best introductions I have found to this field are Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate, Michael Gazzaniga’s The Mind’s Past, and Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, all mind-blowing (pun intended) surveys of what we now know about how evolution has shaped our brains, our conscious life, and the categories with which we view the world.
All these experts seek to debunk the idea that we are born mostly as blank slates and that society and culture imprints us. We are also nature’s children, our minds a miracle of millions of years of successful adaptation to dangers and selective environments and not just stamped-out copies of cultural influences.
For starters, the conscious mind, or consciousness, is truly a tiny part of our existence. Most of the brain’s workings, perhaps 98 percent, are simply out of sight, unconscious.
By unconscious I don’t mean repressed or shoved down as Freud had it but simply beyond our ken and awareness, automatic, silent, omnipresent, the gift of millions of years of evolution. We catch a glimpse of this when we awaken after miles and miles of driving without thinking or awareness, suddenly coming to in a far different stretch of highway. But it’s far, far more than this.
The importance of this silent and unconscious brain is beautifully captured in Guy Claxon’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less.
The unconscious or the undermind as Claxon terms it plays an enormous if mostly hidden role in our lives and is often acutely observant of small clues and hints about the behavior of other minds and the world around us. Indeed, the ability of we humans and a few of the higher primates to more or less accurately gauge what others are thinking and plotting, to simulate other minds so to speak and to imagine states of affairs that only might occur, confers enormous evolutionary advantage and likely accounts for the sharp increase in our brain size.
The conscious mind plays a smaller and more focused role than we think, and is often playing catch-up with the goings on down below. Gazzaniga opens one chapter with “By the time we think we know something…the brain has already done its work.” The brain covers for this “done deal” aspect of brain-mind functioning by making it appear that what has already occurred is occurring now.
What is consciousness for? As far as I can tell, the function of consciousness was originally to alert us to the challenges and dangers of the environment but it has evolved to organize a private narrative of our personal experience, to assure ourselves that we are in control and to ask our uniquely human question, “What is it all about?”
Gazzaniga says that we have a section of the left brain called the “interpreter” or “the spin doctor” that tries to put our experience in a more coherent story or narrative format and to ask questions of its self.
Like most story writers, the spin doctor embellishes and fills in the gaps with many fictional details both in our memories and in our rationalizations for present conduct. The spin doctor also is the seat of reasoning, or the ability to ask why questions when things go wrong. While the spin doctor or the interpreter operates outside of consciousness it seems to be the primary facilitator of the workings of consciousness. The interpreter is likely where our strange idea of “having” a self originates.
Despite the contributions of consciousness, the undermind, or the “Shadow” as Gazzaniga terms it, is the senior partner in our mental affairs.
Gazzaniga says of our unconscious brain, “The Shadow Knows.” Indeed, there is evidence that even our voluntary actions begin in the unconscious instead of consciousness.
One cognitive scientist, Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, has tried to show how evolution sheds light on why religion arises everywhere and why. Another, George Lakoff has applied the cognitive sciences to contemporary politics (Moral Politics: How Conservatives and Liberals Think) and to philosophy (The Embodied Mind).
For me, the most important consequence of these new sciences lies in how it sheds light on some of the most mundane features of our everyday life.
Take thoughts, the scads of thoughts that run through our minds all day long, the internal chatter that seems everyone’s experience. It turns out that we take thoughts far too seriously. Thoughts come after the deal has gone down and they often have little to do with what’s really going on.
Buddhists have long argued that thoughts are something like clouds; they float in and out of our mind and seem to vanish. When we seize on them, when we try to make more of them than they really are, or when we try to drive them away, we are asking for trouble.
Gazzaniga says that the conscious mind trying to control the brain is something like “a harried playground monitor, a hapless entity charged with the responsibility of keeping track of multitudinous brain impulses running in all directions at once.”
The Buddhists argue that much of our suffering comes from acting on, or otherwise being tyrannized by our internal mental chatter, and the new sciences of the brain-mind would seem to agree. Other Buddhists warn that we should beware of being bossed around by the “stories” about ourselves that we carry in our heads: stay out of the story, they tell us and pay attention to what’s actually happening right now.
But the most important lesson might be in learning the simple power of awareness: coming to appreciate the power of the whole body in answering critical questions instead of the conscious mind or the intellect.
Psychologists like Ernest Gendlin, in Focusing, his powerful little book published decades ago teaches therapists and patients how to ask the body “what’s going on” and to how to learn the skill of waiting patiently and attentively for the answer. The Zen Buddhists term this skill, “asking the abdomen.”
Everything I read in the new cognitive sciences says this is the path to the embodied intelligence of the future.
The Shadow knows.
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