Who are you? What’s going on deep inside yourself? How do you understand your own mind? The ancient sages had big debates about this, and now modern neuroscience is helping us sort it all out.
When my amateur fascination with neuroscience began, roughly two decades ago, the scientists seemed to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where in the brain different functions were happening. That led to a lot of simplistic shorthand in the popular conversation: Emotion is in the amygdala. Motivation is in the nucleus accumbens. Back in those days management consultants could make a good living by giving presentations with slides of brain scans while uttering sentences like: “You can see that the parietal lobe is all lit up. This proves that …”
But over the past several years the field of neuroscience seems to have moved away from this modular approach (each brain region has its own job). Researchers are more likely to believe that the brain is a network of interconnected regions. They are more likely to talk about vast and dynamic webs of neurons whose connections link disparate parts of the brain.
Luiz Pessoa, who runs the Maryland Neuroimaging Center, recently offered a metaphor that helps a layman like me understand what’s going on. In an essay for Aeon, he asks us to imagine a flock of starlings swooping and swirling in the sky. No single starling organizes this ballet, yet out of the local interactions between all the starlings a coordinated dance emerges.
As the brain is trying to navigate through the complex situations of the day, it is creating what Pessoa calls “neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions,” which, like a murmuration of starlings, “forms a single pattern from the collective behavior.”
This makes sense to me. Life is really complicated. To deal with a million unexpected circumstances, you wouldn’t want a brain filled with just a few regions doing just a few jobs. You’d want the brain to be able to improvise a vast number of networked ensembles that would dynamically affiliate and thus coordinate sensible responses.
Pessoa’s metaphor inspired me to try a little thought experiment. Imagine that you are a teacher and you look out at your classroom and see each of the students in your class as a flock of starlings. Their brains are not empty vats to be filled with information. Their brains are not computers that impersonally churn through calculations. Rather, each student is an ever-changing swirl of thoughts, fears, feelings, desires, impulses, memories and body sensations that interact to form a single mind that guides the student through the events of her day.
If you saw people this way, I think the first thing you’d notice is how much individual variation there is. If you see kids’ minds as a vat to be filled up, or if you conceive of the brain as a kind of computer, then every vat and every computer is kind of the same. But if kids are swirls, then every swirl has its own distinct set of motions — its own personality, its unique dance.
And yet our educational system is standardized. As Todd Rose writes in his excellent book “The End of Average,” when we grade or sort people, we measure them according to a few criteria, and then we rank them along a single continuum. Some people are A players, some are B and some are D. The message is: Be just like everybody else but better.
But if you see people as flocks of starlings, you’d see just how dehumanizing such sorting systems are. If you wanted to coach, teach or treat a flock of starlings, you wouldn’t be content with factory-style, one-size-fits-all approaches. You wouldn’t want to rank people along a single scale. You’d want personalized education, personalized medicine, personalized management techniques.
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The second thing you’d notice, I think, is that change is the human constant. In our culture we have a tendency to essentialize people, to pick a few labels or traits that supposedly capture who they are. But flocks are always in motion. A person who is extroverted at home might be introverted at synagogue. A stock trader who is overly aggressive in a bull market may be overly cautious in a bear market.
Behavior is more about if-then signatures. If I’m confronted with this context I tend to respond with this mental swirl and that action, but if I’m in a different context I’ll respond with a very different swirl. If we saw people as starlings, I think we’d pay more attention to how good each person is at changing and adapting and less on supposedly permanent traits.
Third, I’d think you’d notice that the categories we use to understand people get in the way of actually understanding them. We divide mental activity into categories like perception, reason, emotion, desire, action. This fits well with the modular view of the brain. Vision takes place in the back of the head; reason takes place in the front.
But if you see people as a set of swirls, you are confronted with the fact that all these different mental activities are intensely interconnected as part of a single holistic process. The emotions you feel influence what you see just as much as what you see influences what you feel. The divisions between these mental categories begin to dissolve away. As Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist, wrote in her book “How Emotions Are Made,” “emotions are not, in principle, distinct from cognitions and perceptions.”
Finally, if we embrace the flock of starlings metaphor, then we can dump one of the more unfortunate metaphors we in the West have relied on to understand the mind. This metaphor, going back to ancient Greece, holds that reason is a wise charioteer and the passions — emotions and desires — are the stallions who pull the chariot. In this fable, reason is the calm, sophisticated smart guy, while the emotions and desires are dumb, primitive beasts. People lead good rational lives when they use reason to suppress and control the passions.
This chariot metaphor rests on an overly positive estimation of the power of pure reason and an overly negative view of the passions. The fact is that your emotions are not primitive and dumb. Positive emotions encourage risk-taking. Awe encourages you to broaden your focus beyond your narrow self. Sadness encourages you to change your way of thinking.
Your desires are not dumb, either. They tell you what is worth valuing and where you should go. Your body also contains its own form of wisdom. Cortisol increases vigilance. Adrenaline prepares the body for quick and decisive action.
As Annie Murphy Paul writes in her book “The Extended Mind,” “Recent research suggests a rather astonishing possibility: The body can be more rational than the brain.”
If we wanted to step back and look at the whole mind, we’d say — to the extent that we can even separate these faculties — that reason, emotions and desires are just different resources people draw upon to help make judgments about what to do next. Each faculty has its own strengths and weaknesses, and life goes best when a person coordinates all the faculties in one graceful swirl.
Your job as a conscious person is not to be a dominating, rationalist charioteer. It’s to read the judgments that your emotions, desires and body are sending you, act on them when their judgments are appropriate and redirect them when they are getting carried away.
Some people are so misled by the charioteer fable that they don’t cultivate or use all their faculties. They are so smitten with their own high intelligence that they don’t pay attention to their own emotions and desires, or to the signals their guts are sending them. This is why phenomenally smart people often do astoundingly stupid things.
The conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species and assigns itself the leading role. But the view of humans as swirls of starlings shines proper attention on all those deeper processes we should rely on every second, even though they may emerge from underneath the waterline of conscious awareness.
One of the nice things about modern neuroscience is that it reminds us of all those deeply subjective processes that make us fully human — the way we assign value to things, the way we yearn to be better than ourselves, and our potential, when everything is going well, to move gracefully on the pilgrimage of life.
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