At the danger of overextending the metaphor, if we were able to see the world during our eye movements, we would become nauseous because it would become unstable and we would experience motion sickness. The world would smear as the visual input stimulated the neurons that process the light. Here, too much information can be a bad thing. So our brain protects us from the true nature of the situation. Maybe this is why we do not see the cognitive illusions that create the self. Cognitive dissonance protects us from ruminating over failed goals, positive biases keep us motivated, free will gives us grounds for praise and blame, decision-making gives us the illusion of control. Without these cognitive illusions, we would not be able to function because we would be overwhelmed by the true complexity of the hidden processes and mechanisms that control us. And that, in the end, is a good thing.
What of the future of this self illusion? It’s unlikely to disappear. It is an evolved adaptation after all, but it may have to change. Currently the world’s population is just over seven billion. Within the next generation, the United Nations estimates that the majority of us will be living in a megacity – metropolitan areas with a density of at least 2,000 people per square kilometre and at least ten million inhabitants. The expansion of the internet means that the majority of the world’s population will have the potential to communicate with each other. Instantaneous language translation is just round the corner that will further erode another barrier to communication. These developments are a far cry from the Serengeti savannahs where our ancestors first appeared. One can speculate how changes will impact upon the individual’s identity, but it would seem that in an ever more crowded future, we are going to need a pretty strong sense of self to survive.
Notes
Prologue: The Reflected Self
1. N. Dietrich, The Amazing Howard Hughes (London: Hodder Fawcett, 1972).
2. The notion of the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ comes from William James’s Principles of Psychology (Henry Holt & Company, M. 1890).
3. P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
4. G. Strawson, ‘The self’, Journal of Consciousness, 4 (1997), 405–28.
5. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, part 4, section 6.
6. D. Parfit, ‘Divided minds and the nature of persons’, in C. Blakemore and S. Greenfield (eds), Mindwaves (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987 pp.1a–26).
7. D. Chalmers, ‘Facing up to the problem of consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3 (1995), 200–219.
8. D.C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co, 1991).
9. C. H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York, NY: Scribner’s, 1902).
10. D.T. Gilbert and P.S. Malone, ‘The correspondence bias’, Psychological Bulletin, 117 (1995), 21-38.
1 The Most Wondrous Organ
1. F. A.C. Azevedo, L. R. B. Carvalho, L. T. Grinberg, J. M. Farfel, E. E. L. Ferretti, R. E. P. Leite, W. Jacob Filho, R. Lent and S. Herculano-Houzel, ‘Equal numbers of neuronal and non-neuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain’, Journal of Comparative Neurology, 513 (2009), 532–41. This is the most recent analysis of the human neural architecture. They estimated that there were eighty-five billion non-neuronal cells and eighty-six billion neuronal cells.
2. C. E. Shannon, ‘A mathematical theory of communication’, Bell System Technical Journal, 27 (1948), 379–423 and 623–56.
3. Binary code was first introduced by the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz during the seventeenth century. Binary code works well because it works with only two states of ‘on’ and ‘off’, which is ideally suited for electrical systems.
4. E. Ruppin, E. L. Schwartz and Y. Yeshurun, ‘Examining the volume-efficiency of the cortical architecture in a multi-processor network model’, Biological Cybernetics, 70:1 (1993), 89–94.
5. M. Abeles, Corticonics: Neural Circuits of the Cerebral Cortex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
6. M. A. Arib, The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
7. The number of atoms in the observable universe is estimated to be around 1081. I am indebted to Dan Wolpert for providing me with this bizarre mathematical comparison.
8. W. Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
9. P. MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role of Paleocerebral Functions (New York, NY: Plenum, 1990).
10. Azevedo et al. (2009).
11. J. Atkinson, The Developing Visual Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
12. B. M. Hood, ‘Shifts of visual attention in the human infant: A neuroscientific approach’, in L. Lipsitt and C. Rovee-Collier (eds), Advances in Infancy Research, vol. 9 (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1995), 163–216.
13. A. Diamond, ‘Neuropsychological insights into the meaning of object concept development’, in S. Carey and R. Gelman (eds.), The Epigenesis of Mind: Essays on Biology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 433–72.
14. F. Bertossa, M. Besa, R. Ferrari and F. Ferri, ‘Point zero: A phenomenological inquiry into the seat of consciousness’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 107 (2008), 323–35.
15. P. Rakic, ‘Intrinsic and extrinsic determinants of neo-cortical parcellation: A radial unit model’, in M. H. Johnson, Y. Munakata and R. Gilmore (eds), Brain Development and Cognition: A Reader (2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 57–82.
16. Y. Brackbill, ‘The role of the cortex in orienting: Orienting reflex in an anencephalic human infant’, Developmental Psychology, 5 (1971), 195–201.
17. A. J. DeCasper and M. J. Spence, ‘Prenatal maternal speech influences newborns’ perception of speech sounds’, Infant Behavior and Development, 9 (1986), 133–150; J. A. Mennella, C. P. Jagnow and G. K. Beauchamp, ‘Prenatal and postnatal flavor learning by human infants’, Pediatrics 107:6 (2001), E88; P. G. Hepper, ‘An examination of fetal learning before and after birth’, Irish Journal of Psychology, 12:2 (1991), 95–107.
18. M. H. Johnson, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
19. J. L. Conel, The Postnatal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex, Vols I–VIII (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939–67).
20. W. T. Greenough and J. E. Black, ‘Induction of brain structures by experience: Substrates for cognitive development’, in M. Gunnar and C. Nelson (eds), Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology: Vol. 24. Developmental Behavioral Neuroscience (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum (1992)), 155–200.