The search for self

A child’s environment is the single most significant determinant of his adult self

Most of us will live our lives in autopilot mode — sleep-walking through it all as did our ancestors. That’s just how our brains are built, or have evolved. We spectate, yet we barely internalise. Our responses to external stimuli are mostly trained and programmed — habits of the mind, you could say. And so, we scurry along, spinning endlessly the hamster wheel of life. But if we pause for a moment, step back, and take a satellite view of ourselves, the picture should cause our jaws to drop. Just imagine Earth from a distance — a spinning globule pulsating with life. Now zoom in a little, past the cloudy veil, till the biosphere begins to emerge. Notice the landscape, overlaid with intricate networks and structures betraying human artefact at its finest; winged metal objects dotting the skies, steam engines negotiating vast tracts of land, small wheeled objects zipping along Byzantine tracks, giant steel towers communicating with satellites roving across the stratosphere — if this all weren’t real, one could be forgiven for mistaking it all for one potent hallucinogenic trip.

Yet, we scarcely register any of this. Occasionally, we do step out of the matrix, delighting, if only briefly, in that wonted state where there is no worry or care, before being dragged right back in by the lasso of fear — the fear of missing some deadline, or a lingering bill payment, or some such irritant.

The truth is our brains have not yet evolved enough to take it all in without helplessly surrendering to the next thought or irrational fear hogging the mind’s resources. Though we no longer live in hunter-gatherer packs, we haven’t fully shed the cognitive baggage of our savage past. We still carry highly active limbic systems — the brain’s alarm circuitry which alerts us to danger. As Christopher Hitchens in his characteristic wry tones once said, our pre-frontal lobes are too small and adrenalin glands too large. It is true the cave-man had to be hyper-sensitive to danger; for him death was literally around the corner — a crouching predator lying in wait. Basking in the transcendental pleasures of life, back then, was also guarantee for an abbreviated one. But are we still waylaid by crouching predators? The closest most of us can come to danger in today’s metropolitan reality is getting a speeding ticket. And yet a cop trailing us triggers in us the same fear the predator evoked in the poor caveman. It seems, over time, our threat levels have reduced considerably, yet our trigger responses to them haven’t evolved much. Our fight or flight dial hasn’t fully adjusted to life outside the African Savanna. It does appear to be the case that we may have advanced too quickly in the preceding centuries for our ape brains to have kept pace.

Complicating things still further is the fact that our consciousness has two brain states: conscious and subconscious. And though we mistakenly assume it’s the conscious brain we use the most, in reality we only use five per cent of it; the rest is handled by the subconscious brain. Recent experiments reveal how our subconscious brain produces a thought or reaches a decision even prior to the conscious brain becoming aware of it. This is fascinating; it implies that our decisions, beliefs and judgment are, for the most part, derived from programmed habits, instincts and reflexes we developed early on in life. Why? Because unlike the conscious brain which is rational and creative, the subconscious brain is emotional and habit-based. It relies on primal impulses and intuitions, coded, in large part, into the brain during early childhood. Put simply, we carry our childhood demons — our anxieties, fears, resentments — way into our adult lives, without being consciously aware of them.

A child’s environment, then, is the single most significant determinant of his adult self. Hence the famous maxim: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

Some would argue it’s our immutable genes — to which we are hostage — which affect our personality the most. That we are victims of heredity. This line of thinking is now deeply contested by our growing understanding of epigenetics — the effect genes have on us depends on our environment. In Biology of Belief, Dr Bruce Lipton expands on this theme and explains how cells respond to external changes in their membranes.

Aside from the matter of decisions and instincts, understanding the brain may be our only hope to grasp the great mystery that is the ‘self’, the mysterious feeling of ‘I’ that is the thinker of our thoughts — the ghost in the machine. For millennia, this question of what the ‘self’ is and where it resides has tormented philosophers and intellectuals alike; coming alive, if only in the abstract, in the writings of the Sufi mystic, the gyrating trance of the whirling dervish, the lotus calm of the Buddhist monk, the psychedelic reverie of the native Shaman, and so on.

What we do know, however, is that there is no singular self we can wholly identify with. At best, we are pools of contradictions, not discreet boxes of ego. We’re more emotional than we are rational. Our instincts, intuitions and habits of mind are the primary tools with which we sculpt our reality. We are cognitive misers, we prefer consensus over reason, bias over fact, convention over conscience. Independent thought scares us; the invisible predator in the mist still haunts our primate brain. So we stick with the herd, forming our little bubbles, singing our national anthems, worshipping our respective deities, moving happily in lock-step with the rest of the parade. But marching where exactly? No one really knows.

The good news is we can reach into our subconscious through mindfulness, meditation and therapy, and untie some of the knots which stand in the way of our better selves. We can set our evolutionary clocks right, through culture and education, and through a shared understanding that what we call morality is far more complicated than the binaries of good and evil, that it is in the mind where genes, environment and tradition will write the script that the body will later obey. And we can hope that all this will ultimately lead to a revision in our current conception of retributive justice — in all its moral, theological and legal dimensions.

Ultimately, it will be in the peeling back of the mysteries of the mind that we will discover more about ourselves and the greater reality of which we are a small, yet significant part. A reality which begs to be unveiled, if only we paid more attention. As a wise man once said, nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 15^th, 2016.

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