The Self Illusion

9

Why You Can’t See Your Self in Reflection

When I was a graduate student working on visual development in very young babies some 20 years ago, I studied how they move their eyes. Babies don’t speak, but their eyes are windows into their brain. Where they look and for how long, reveals what their brain is paying attention to. Where is the self in this decision? If you think about it, for the most part, we do this unconsciously. But who is moving our eyes? Who decides? Does a newborn have a self in control? Working with newborn babies, sometimes only minutes old, I never really asked this sort of question. I was more concerned what newborn babies looked at.

It seemed obvious to me that babies look at things that they can see most clearly and that this is determined by what is out there in the world to look at. As far as I was concerned, it seemed unlikely that they had models of the world already encoded in their brains that predicted where they would look next. Rather, at the very beginning, everything must be driven by what existed already in the environment to be seen. It is the properties of the external word that compete for the attention of the eye movement systems in the baby's brain. There was no need for a self in control. Newborns don’t really make decisions about where to look. Rather, the brain mechanisms they are born with have evolved to seek out information from the external world and then keep a record of those experiences. It was this early insight into the mind of an infant that opened my eyes to the self illusion.

As the brain develops, it builds up more complex models of the world–expectations about where and what should happen. We develop an increasing flexibility to apply those models to understand and make predictions. Twenty years ago, I appreciated that development was the integration of internal mechanisms working in conjunction with information in the world. That fundamental principle works all the way up the nervous system from simple eye movements to the full repertoire of human thoughts and behaviours – the same activities that give rise to the self. This is why the self is an illusion. It did not suddenly manifest one day inside our head on our second or third birthday. It has been slowly emerging – sculpted out of the richness of human activity and interaction. Our self is a product of our mind, which in turn is a product of our brain working in conjunction with other brains. As the brain develops, so does the self. As the brain deteriorates, then so must the self.

Why did we evolve the self illusion? Like every other illusion our brain generates, it serves a useful purpose. If you think about the “I” and the “me” that we usually refer to as the self, it provides a focal point to hang experiences together both in the immediate here and now, as well as to join those events over a lifetime. Experiences are fragmented episodes unless they are woven together in a meaningful narrative. This is why the self pulls it all together. Without a focus, the massive parallel processing in our brain means that we would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of computations if we ever had to deal with them individually, Rather, we get a summarized headline that relates all the outputs from these unconscious processes. Sometimes we can delve into the details of the story a little more closely if we scrutinize the content, but very often much of it is hidden from us.

The self illusion depends on stored information that has been acquired during a lifetime. These are our memories that are constructed as we interpret the world. That interpretation is guided by mechanisms that seek out certain information in the world but also by those around us who help us to make sense of it all. In this way we are continually shaped by those around us. As the species with the largest proportion of life spent as juveniles dependent on others, human children are particularly evolved for social interaction and much of what our brains compute appears to be dedicated to socially relevant information. In the absence of social interaction early in development, children can be permanently socially disabled even though their intellect may be intact. Certainly, the formative years leave a legacy of how we interact with others for the rest of our lives. It is through this social interaction with others that we construct our sense of identity and ultimately our sense of self.

We have not evolved to think about others as a bundle of processes. Rather we have evolved to treat others as individual selves. It is faster, more economic and more efficient to treat others as a self rather than as an extended collection of past histories, hidden agendas, unresolved conflicts and ulterior motives. Treating humans as selves optimizes our interactions. We fall in love and hate individuals, not collections. We cannot abandon our morality simply because we decompose the individual self into its myriad of influences. Punishment and praise is heaped on the individual not on the multitude of others who shaped the self. Those who reject the notion of a self in control of destiny, lead sadder, less satisfying lives. Those who embrace the self illusion feel fulfilled and purposeful.

Why is it so difficult to see through the illusion? The answer may have something to do with reflections in one form or another that have popped up throughout this book. Think back over all the examples:

• Babies and animals recognizing themselves in mirrors

• Brain-damaged adults with mirror misidentification

• Mirroring behaviour of others

• Mirror-touch synaesthesia where some actually feel another’s pain

• Mirror neurons that map one mind directly onto another

• Not stealing candy or cheating when there is a mirror in the room

• Guards wearing mirror shades to dehumanize prisoners

• Looking in the mirror for self affirmation

What is it about a mirror that is so central to the notion of the self? When we look at the mirror we see the outward appearance of our self but we believe that the image is simply the outer shell of the body we occupy. We believe there is so much more to our self on the inside. This is what we feel and know. Others cannot have access to this inner self and so they are forever cut-off from knowing our true self. But what if we have got it the wrong way round? What if we are a looking glass self that is created by the environment about us – an environment that is predominantly populated by others?

Consider all the different influences that there have been on your life up to this point in time from your parents, your schooling, your hobbies, your first adult relationships, your spouse, your children, your job, your colleagues, your political views to every other sphere of influence that has touched your life. Imagine how they have impressed upon you. Like the illusory square we saw the in the Prologue, our self is constructed just like the imaginary white circle you can plainly see in Figure 13.

You only exist as a pattern made up of all the others things in your life that shape you. If you take each away, ‘you’ would eventually cease to exist. This does not mean that you do not exist at all but rather that you exist as the combination of all the others who complete your sense of self. These are the memories and experiences that shape you. The problem as we have seen, however, is that these memories are not always that reliable and so the self that is constructed is not necessarily an accurate or consistent version. It is continually shifting and reshaping as the contexts change. We are so willing to accommodate others that we adapt to each role in a continuous, dynamic, shape-shifting ballet.

Figure 13: The self illusion is an emergent property from the cluster of external influences

This visual metaphor also makes a fundamental point about the nature of reality and illusion. The shape of ‘you’ may be an illusion but our brains use illusions to recreate the world. Everything is processed and abstracted with the brain putting in a large amount of effort to organize, interpret and fill in missing information based on past experience. For example, we know that there are circuits of the brain that are firing as if the illusory circle in the diagram was really there. That’s why you see the invisible circle. What this means is that the brain considers the arrangement and decides that the only sensible explanation for the way each sphere seems to be missing a piece is because of the ‘you’ circle in the middle. In other words, the brain hallucinates the experience of ‘you’ by stimulating its own neural circuits to create that impression. It may be an illusion but it is real as far as the brain is concerned. It’s not magic – it’s just basic neurophysiology resembling how the pattern-seeking structures of the brain prefer order and create explanations.

So why can’t you see that you are a reflected self? For one thing, that view is inconsistent with the narrative that our brain generates. Many of our thoughts and actions that we think reflect our self are not what they seem. We believe we have freedom to choose but in many instances, the choices occur in the absence of any deliberation and often under the influence of others. We are so dependent on the maintaining of our social inclusion that we readily conform to the will of the group. Because we are our brains, which create our sense of self, we have no privileged access to this invisible process from an outsider’s perspective.

One final mirror demonstration may leave you convinced that we are blind to how our brain creates our experience. Take a good hard look at your self in a mirror. Focus your gaze on your left eye and have a good look at it. Now switch and focus your gaze on your right eye. Notice anything odd? If you alternate your focus of gaze from the left eye to the right eye and back again, you cannot see your own eye movements from the left to the right and back again. Your eyes are moving – you just cannot see them move. Ask someone else to do the same thing. Now you can easily see their eyes moving but, like you, they cannot see their own movements in the reflection in the mirror. This is because our brains deliberately wipe out the visual experience of seeing the world every time we move our eyes. You may be surprised to discover that you are effectively blind for about on average two hours on every waking day but you would never know this.

This simple biological quirk is just one of the many different ways that our brain hides its true operations from our consciousness. We think we see a stable visual world but, in fact, it is constructed every time we move our eyes. In fact, unless you are paying close attention, we could switch objects in the world and you would never notice the change. This is because we assume that the world is stable but that is an illusion. The self is the same. We cannot be aware of the underlying processes that create it and yet we feel it is coherent. You never see that you are a reflection of the others around you because you cannot easily see how you change. And we don’t easily see our self switching from one to another until it is pointed out to us by those around us or we recognize that the context has changed.

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.