Introduction
I used to know who I was, and it used to be important to me. But slowly, overtime, I’ve been losing that strong sense of identity I used to have – replacing it with, well, nothing. It’s a strange feeling to describe, perhaps detachment is the best way of expressing it – but without a word to describe it I don’t think I can adequately communicate the experience. My emotional highs have become progressively lower, but at the same time my emotional lows are less frequent and milder. My past hobbies, achievements and values often seem like they belong to another, unrelated person, and my focus is generally on the immediate present, as opposed to memories or future dreams and ambitions. There is at times even an almost existential sensation, as though my consciousness is just on a sightseeing trip through the world. Anger is the major exception, and this may be why I gravitate to reading about topics that infuriate me, as it can be enjoyable to immerse myself in a more visceral emotion. I’m not sure if this is a positive or negative development, but a series of books on Neuroscience, Psychology and Buddhism have given me an interesting viewpoint and framework for understanding my own experiences.
Table of Contents
Let’s Start with Buddhism
I never set out to explore or research my changing sense of identity, but for some reason I recently read books on Buddhism, Neuroscience and Psychology that all presented effectively the same framework regarding consciousness and identity, but from very different perspectives. I wanted to synthesis these insights and use them to understand my own experiences.
I started by getting an introductory book on Buddhism and mindfulness. I’d never explored mindfulness before, and the motivation was that I wanted to manage stress better. I am not normally stressed, but I’d recently started my own business, and keeping up with the high workload and responsibility was starting to take a toll. I was feeling physically ill when clients asked me to take on a new job, which was a clear sign that I was getting burned out. Still I needed to win the work and get my business off the ground, so not taking on the work wasn’t really an option. Hence, I decided to try mindfulness, to see if I could alter my physiological reactions to stressful situations.
Before being able to practice some basic meditation, I needed to understand the basic ideas behind Buddhism. As someone raised in a highly individualistic Western society, the hardest concept to get my head around was the idea of ‘no self’. Like most Westerners, I intuitively assume that there is a distinct consciousness that represents my identity, who I am. But ‘no self’ teaches that this is an illusion, that your thoughts are sporadic and arise seemingly at random from your mind, and that if you close your eyes and try to focus on your thoughts, they slip away like the flowing water of a river. You cannot find your consciousness, and indeed, a common meditation technique is to clear your mind and to try and simply observe the sporadic, often nonsensical thoughts as they blip into existence. The goal of this meditation technique is not to ignore these thoughts, but rather to recognize their existence and to then allow them to disappear. This is much harder than it sounds, as it’s very easy to recognise a thought and to suddenly be led into a daydream. Personally, I found this did produce the strange experience of being a third-party observer to my own thoughts, and this experience, along with learning about the concept of no-self in more depth, gave me a self-reinforcing framework to accelerate my weakening sense of identity. I hadn’t yet realized that just learning a concept could be a powerful way of making it a psychological reality in my brain, but that book was coming soon.
How Emotions are made and the power of concepts
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the book ‘How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of The Brain’ by Lisa Feldman Barrett. She’s a psychologist working in the field of emotional research, with the aim of understanding how human emotions come into being. Her book presents an alternative theory to the classical view of emotions, which is still the dominant hypothesis in the field of emotional research.
The classical view of emotions postulates that emotions are hard wired, universal experiences that all people experience. It also proposes that specific emotions are generally associated with specific areas of the brain, such as fear being associated with the amygdala. In the classical view, we share basic emotions with animals, as humans and animals evolved to have emotions to help guide our survival.
However, Lisa Barrett argues that the scientific evidence doesn’t support the classical view. She claims there is no human emotion which is found in all cultures across the world, and she cites examples of various tribes that do not have a word or even the concept of fear, anger and happiness. Without delving into a full book review, I think she offers compelling evidence that the classical view is simply wrong.
Instead she presents a variety of scientific studies in favour of her theory, which is a constructionist view of emotions. In this theory, emotions are not innate to people, but are largely learned concepts. We are born with two basic feeling, pleasant/unpleasant and low arousal/agitated. The constructionist viewpoint does not argue that we only have these two simple emotional axes, but rather that most of our more sophisticated emotions are learned from our culture and society.
For example, if a culture had no equivalent concept of depression, then a person from that culture could feel a state of unpleasant and low arousal, but they would be more likely to interpret this feeling as being physically unwell, and would potentially experience none of the strong emotional symptoms (both physiological and psychological) that someone raised in a Western culture would have.
Your brain gets sensory input from your eyes, ears and internal nerves. It has to interpret all of this information and then decide how to regulate your actions and your body. Its simply not possible for your brain to interpret the vast amount of information coming at it in real time, it just doesn’t have the computation power. So instead it takes short cuts by quickly recognizing key pieces of information in your environment, and then runs a simulation of how you’ve previously responded to similar scenarios.
For example, if you’re at a funeral, then your brain could consciously try to understand how the body is meant to react to this complex social situation, or it could short cut this by remembering that the body is meant to be sad, lacking appetite, feeling slightly nauseous and being close to the point of crying. These physiological symptoms are quickly and easily called into action by your brain because you’ve learned the concept of sadness from our culture. The emotions you feel when sad can only be felt by someone who has learned the concept of sadness. If your culture doesn’t have the concept for an emotion, then you can’t experience it.
I know the above is somewhat hard to get your head around, but one of the key takeaways is that our experienced emotions are largely driven by the emotional concepts we’ve learned. Once a concept has been learned, our brain can now experience this emotion.
But how does this tie back to the idea of no-self in Buddhism? When I learned about no-self I spent both time and energy trying to consciously understand and experience it. I now have a concept (all be it an unrefined one) for no-self, and just by having this concept I have made it more a part of my psychological reaction to situations. It isn’t the sole cause of my decreased emotionality, but solidifying the concept has made it become a more innate emotional reaction in my day-to-day life.
It’s All a Simulation – Neuroscience and Memories
Not to sound too much like a conspiracy theorist, but the world is just a simulation. I don’t mean that your entire lived experience is just a program running in a supercomputer, rather your brain is the simulating machine that creates your reality. ‘Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How it Shapes Us’ by Charan Ranganath is a neuroscience book that will make you question the reliability of your memories, which are at the bedrock of your personal identity. While it’s focused on summarizing the latest scientific research in the field of memory, a lot of its core ideas were similar to ‘How Emotions Are made’.
The author argues that when it comes to memories, the normal analogy between human brains and computers just doesn’t work. If our brains were like an Apple Mac, they would record and save all of the information coming from your eyes and ears, and you’d be able to access a perfect copy of events exactly as they occurred.
But the brain has no where near enough processing power to even make sense of all the visual information coming at it right now, yet alone to store all of this. To get around the lack of storage space for all our memories, brains don’t actually store memories, they simulate them.
For example, I’m sipping I nice glass of whiskey while writing this. My brain has learned the concepts that represent a glass, whiskey and computer. My brain will likely break down this memory into just a handful of distinct elements, such as drinking whisky and typing on a laptop. If this is a regular way for me to spend a Sunday evening then my brain will likely store no other details, and I’ll very likely struggle to remember this evening writing session in the future. If it’s a rare and unusual experience for me, then my brain is likely to remember more details and it will be easier for me to remember.
Importantly, when I come to remember this event, there is nothing to remember other than the tiny number of details that were recorded. My brain will simulate, based on experience, all of the other details. But when and where you decide to remember an event can cause the details you store to change. Say I’m remembering my days of drinking whiskey and writing blogs with a friend, but they are adamant that I always drank beer. My memory can be changed by their suggestion, and the next time I simulate this memory I’ll be recalling a different beverage. And the effects that cause this memory distortion can be more subtle. If I recall writing blogs as a hobby while in a warm cosy environment, then I’m more likely to remember it with that warm cosy feeling associated to the memory (simulation) next time.
Conclusion
Much of my identity is built on memories. But my memories are not a solid point of reference on which I can rely on. Buddhism and meditation practice shows me that there is not a consciousness that you can easily identify, and emotional science suggests that my emotional experiences are largely culturally learned reactions – just a by product of my brain attempting to save computational power by using simulations as shortcuts. What am I to make of all of this?
I think a major reason I’ve become less emotional as I get older is because I’ve built up a large base of mental concepts about the world. My reading and study have been heavily focused on trying to understand the world, and my mental concepts create my expectations, which are generally fairly accurate. I do not have unrealistic expectations of more than ten people ever reading this blog, so I won’t be disappointed when I look at my web statistics. Likewise, I’ve now skied and rock climbed quite a lot, and I know it’s enjoyable. I’m no longer shocked by how amazing the experience is, so I don’t feel the same highs when doing the activities I love.
Not feeling a strong identity about who I am based on memories or a cultural belief that there is even such a thing as a definable identity is also quite liberating. In the past I was extremely competitive, and I would have gauged a significant amount of my identity and personal happiness based on how I was performing at my work and hobbies compared to my friends. I simply no longer care, as the idea of having an identity which is in some way defining is no longer a concept used by my brain for understanding the world.
I think constantly reading about scientific and global topics can change the mental concepts you use to view the world. I believe rampant consumerism is terrible for the world, and the reality of just about every paid experience is that it’s end goal is to sell you something you probably didn’t need. This causes me to see the negatives in a lot of activities, and I think I deal with this by mentally disconnecting myself from the experience, creating an internal sense that I’m just an observer.
I don’t think my changes in mental state are a bad thing. I do sometimes feel sad that I don’t seem to have the same ranges of emotions, but my mental framework also no longer places such a high value on emotions. The concepts I value most are understanding, moral view and action and an intrinsic love of physical exercise and movement. The importance of emotions is itself a social construct.