Church of the Churchless

Pressure is off, according to neuroscience: there's no "real you" to be found

For about 35 years, during the religious phase of my life, the Eastern philosophy I'd embraced had a sort of mantra: self-realization before God-realization. 

Meaning, first we disciples needed to discover our true self as Soul, a drop of the spiritual ocean. Then we could proceed to the next step, becoming one with the ocean of God. Or at least as close to oneness as is possible for a soul-drop. 

The basic notion, which is shared with other spiritual approaches and also some psychological theories, was that there's a "real you" hidden inside each of us. Through meditation, prayer, introspection, therapy, or some other means, the veil that prevents us from knowing who we really are can be lifted.

Supposedly that takes quite a bit of work. It could even be the job of a lifetime, and arguably the most important goal we humans can pursue.

Eventually I began to question that assumption. I resonated with a marvelous 2005 piece from The Onion, a satirical web site, called "Search For Self Called Off After 38 Years." Excerpts:

CHICAGO—The longtime search for self conducted by area man Andrew Speth was called off this week, the 38-year-old said Monday.

“I always thought that if I kept searching and exploring, I’d discover who I truly was,” said Speth from his Wrigleyville efficiency. “Well, I looked deep into the innermost recesses of my soul, I plumbed the depths of my subconscious, and you know what I found? An empty, windowless room the size of an aircraft hangar. From now on, if anybody needs me, I’ll be sprawled out on this couch drinking black-cherry soda and watching Law & Order like everybody else.”

“Fuck it,” he added.

...Since calling off the search, Speth has canceled his yoga classes, turned in his organic co-op membership card, and withdrawn plans to go on a sweat-lodge retreat in Saskatchewan. On Tuesday afternoon, he loaded books by such diverse authors as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Meister Eckhart, and George Gurdjieff into a box labeled “free shit,” and left it outside of his apartment beside a trash can.

...Though hardened and haggard from his long search, Speth expressed relief that it was over. Asked if he had any advice for those who are continuing on their own searches, Speth had two words of advice: “Give up.”

“Trust me—there’s nothing out there for you to find,” Speth said. “You’re wasting your life. The sooner you realize you have no self to discover, the sooner you can get on with what’s truly important: celebrity magazines, snack foods, and Internet porn.”

Well, my own calling-off of the search for my self has taken a different direction. I still buy books, but they are about secular Buddhism and neuroscience, each of which is big on there not being a self to find.

But just like the fictional Speth, I find that giving up on the quest to discover the "real you" inside my head is a massive relief. It's hard to believe that I spent so much time looking for my genuine self when, from my current perspective, all along there never was such a self to find. 

It's similar to looking for my iPhone, only to discover that it's in my pocket -- the obvious difference being that with my phone, there's something to be found, whereas with my self, the thing doesn't exist.

Here's some passages along this line from my current neuroscience/psychology reading, Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind. 

Modularity implies that there isn't one, unified "self" in your head, that there isn't a "real" "you" in there somewhere. The intuition that there is might be useful for various purposes, but if modularity is right, then this intuition is wrong.

...Consider a recent study in which participants were shown pictures of a number of faces, including one picture of themselves, along with a set of pictures of themselves morphed with highly attractive (and unattractive) features that made them look more (or less) attractive. Participants frequently identified one of the faces morphed with the highly attractive features -- the better looking face -- as their own.

Cases like this are called "self-deception" because the subjects seem to believe something they somehow shouldn't, and the thing they shouldn't is, in some way, "good" for them. Here we expect that people see their own faces, not digitally enhanced, every day in the mirror.

Surely we know what we look like. This intuition -- c'mon, you know what you look like -- makes it seem like "we're deceiving ourselves." We really know what we look like, but we're telling ourselves that we're more attractive than we really are. 

I want to be clear that I don't know what the italicized words in that last sentence might mean. I don't know what it means to "really" believe something or who or what is doing the telling or the listening. Indeed, without invoking Buzzy or something like him, expressions like "we're telling ourselves" make no sense.

Using phrases like this is just bad psychology because it implies a little Buzzy, with "real" beliefs, who is communicating with some unspecified something.

...In all of this it doesn't seem to me that there's anything plausibly called "self-deception" going on. This labeling problem stems from the insistence in psychology on the word "self," and thinking of a unified "self" instead of a collection of modules.

As we'll see in the next two chapters, almost any time you come across a theory with the word "self" in it, you should check your wallet. Here, I don't see why being wrong in some systematic way suggests that there's any deception of any "self."

More reasons why I'm liking the modular mind theory

As I continue reading Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, I keep coming across ideas that make me pleased I forked out $16.97 to Amazon. The book is well worth the money.

Here's some additional points from Kurzban that appealed to me.

Press Secretary versus President. Most of us like to think that basically we're in charge of our thoughts and actions. Maybe our emotions also, though they seem more out of our control. In other words, we're the President of the entity we call "myself."

Kurzban has a different view. He says that the conscious aspect of us, which, like an iceberg, is just a small part of the brain's overall functionality, is more like a Press Secretary than a President.

If the modularity view is right, then we should be thinking in terms of dividing up the mind with respect to the functions of the modules that are doing the work, rather than location or age. There is, however, one binary division I favor. 

If the press secretary view is right, then it's reasonable to think that some parts of the mind are going to have design features that are useful in the context of communicating with others. These modules transmit information about lots of more or less mundane things we say or hear on a day-to-day basis like "your keys are on the table," "grades are due on the fifth," or "get that thing out of your nose."

But communication is obviously useful for manipulating what others think in a way that works to one's advantage, and many modular systems in the mind seem to be designed for this purpose. Indeed, I think there is some sense in which the part of you that feels like "you" is, more or less, designed to serve this public relations function. 

It's useful to think of these modules, the ones that we experience, at least in part, as having functions rather like the Press Secretary. These modules, the public relations system of the mind, seem to get certain kinds of information from other bits of your brain and communicate with other people.

If this is correct, then the modules that you experience as "you" can be thought of, at least in part, as more or less a mouthpiece for the organization. "You" are the Machiavellian spin doctor and, as such, only a small part of the sum total of what's going on in your head. "You" aren't the President, the central executive, the Prime Minister, or Buzzy.

Supernatural beliefs are the most spectacular way people are wrong. After being open to the possibility of there being a supernatural realm beyond this universe, I've come to believe that while this is still possible, it is extremely unlikely, given the lack of evidence for it. Kurzban agrees.

I can't quite move on without discussing perhaps the most spectacular way in which people are wrong: supernatural beliefs. Much ink has been spilled on this, pretty much since there has been ink to be spilled, so let me make some disclaimers right up front.

First, I take religion and supernatural beliefs to be objects of scientific study. I'll treat them that way, and so, if you get easily offended by reading about beliefs that are very important to you by someone who thinks you're wrong about them, you might want to skip this section.

Next, I want to be clear that I'm just going to talk about supernatural beliefs, not organized religion or, at least, not any organized religions in particular. By "supernatural" I just mean anything that cannot be explained by natural laws.

And I'm going to assume that all supernatural beliefs are wrong. Before you get too upset, consider that, as Richard Dawkins pointed out, to a first approximation, independent of your particular religious beliefs, so do you.

Most people have only a very small, indeed minuscule, subset of all possible supernatural beliefs. Indeed, they have only a small subset of the supernatural beliefs anyone has ever had. Consider all the supernatural beliefs ever held by anyone, including beliefs about the Greek gods, spirits inhabiting various animals and plants, the effectiveness of rain dances, and so on.

Whatever your particular supernatural beliefs, you must believe that nearly all of them are wrong, not least because many supernatural beliefs are mutually inconsistent. One can't be both a monotheist and polytheist, for example. More broadly, it's a pretty good bet that if you were introduced to virtually all of the world's supernatural beliefs, you would reject most as false.

So, in many respects, the approach I'm taking here makes me pretty much just like you and just like everybody else. We all reject almost every single supernatural belief, holding only to our own, thinking everybody else is wrong. The only way I depart is that I take the view that supernatural beliefs are guaranteed to be wrong because I think everything has a natural explanation.

If one combines the view that supernatural beliefs are wrong with the idea that our minds have evolved to acquire beliefs that are useful, one arrives at the question of why humans' brains seem to have systems that cause them to acquire beliefs that are guaranteed to be false. In this sense, supernatural beliefs are weird. Not only are they all wrong, but historically they've caused people to do all sorts of seemingly odd things, from spending precious time in rituals to destroying property to wearing silly hats.

Many people have tried to answer this puzzling question, and I refer interested readers to some excellent books, including my favorite, Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer. I'm not going to try to answer this question myself. 

Instead, I just want to point out that having true beliefs rather than false beliefs can be especially costly when it comes to the supernatural. In particular, having supernatural beliefs that are not the same as others around you, especially those in power, can be very dangerous. Having unpopular supernatural beliefs can have many unpleasant consequences.

As Steve Pinker put it, "People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true."

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, reportedly off the job as of April 1

Here in the United States, and in quite a few other countries, April 1 is April Fools' Day. That's when people engage in practical jokes and hoaxes, which are sometimes close to believable.

I doubt that the news of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization that I belonged to for 35 years, giving up all of his official duties as of April 1, 2025 is a hoax.

But all I know for sure is that Osho Robbins, who comments occasionally on this blog, emailed me a link to a video that makes this claim.

The two-minute video can be watched on You Tube. I can't embed it in this post, as the person who shared the video disabled that feature. It's in Hindi, so I had You Tube translate the narration into English. It seems accurate, reflecting what Robbins said in his message (he does know Hindi). Below is my transcript of the English translation.

"Baba Ji" is a term of respect for Gurinder Singh Dhillon. VIP means Very Important Person, so VVIP is a Very Very Important Person. "Radha Swami" is a greeting used by members of RSSB. "Satsang" is a spiritual talk.

Radha Swami, Ji, today's video is something special about Baba Ji. As we know that the satsang of Baba Ji in March is going to be the last satsang. After this, Baba Ji will not do satsang. Similarly, another news has come that after March, Baba Ji will not meet any VIP and VVIP minister or any person.

After March, all the responsibilities of the RSSB department will be given to Hazur Ji Jasdeep Singh Gill Ji by Baba Ji. In the crowd of this world, the one who is closest to us is our Baba Ji, our God, our master, whose form we have settled in our minds.

But now perhaps many things are going to change. We have to live in the goodness of that God and follow his orders. It is said we do not look for the Guru, he looks for us. We do not recognize him, he recognizes us.

We meet the guru when God takes pity on us and helps us to meet him. When he draws a line on our forehead, the Guru looks at this line, accepts us as his own and adopts us. Our own efforts have no meaning. 

Meeting with the Guru is only possible through Guru. We have been blessed by God, may Baba Ji's blessings continue to remain on all of us like this. Radha Swami Ji.

A couple of comments about the video.

First, it's interesting that on February 22 of this year I wrote a blog post called "Photos of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, with rich and political people." And now it appears that as of April 1, Dhillon "will not meet any VIP and VVIP minister or any person." Hey, maybe the blog post caused Dhillon to back off his fondness for spending time with wealthy, famous people.

Second, as I said in a September 2024 blog post, "Let's make sense of the strange RSSB guru succession episode," this is the first time in the history of RSSB that a guru has given up his duties to a successor while still alive. If the video is correct, Jasdeep Singh Gill, who has been the guru-in-waiting, will take off his spiritual training wheels as of April 1 and become the one and only RSSB guru.

This doesn't make any difference to me or the vast majority of other humans. But it will be a big deal to the RSSB faithful, especially those who were initiated by Gurinder Singh Dhillon and now have to figure out how to relate to Jasdeep Singh Gill.

The conscious "you" isn't your self any more than unconscious parts are

The good news keeps on coming from my reading of Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind. 

In my previous post I talked about how Kurzban persuasively argues that the modular view of mind shows that there isn't a singular "I" inside our cranium, just a multitude of "We's." This makes our human nature hugely more interesting than if each of us were a single entity. 

As the poet Walt Whitman said:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Most of us try so hard to be consistent, dependable, trustworthy. But rarely (except for crazy people like those who visit this blog) do humans dive deeply into the question, Who, exactly, is the "I" that can be consistent, contradictory, or possess any other quality?

Usually it simply is assumed that the conscious being who seems to reside somewhere behind the eyes and in front of the back of our head, and who can speak so confidently about how "I did this," "I believe that," "I feel good," and other self-related declarative utterances is the CEO in charge of the brain's goings-on.

That assumption is called into question not only by ancient Buddhism, but by modern neuroscience. There are many ways to view the nonexistence of the self, some spiritual and some scientific. Kurzban, a psychologist, approaches the self, or lack thereof, from the standpoint of science.

He starts off his Who is "I"? chapter with a reference to a Disney attraction that I'd never heard of before, probably because I've never visited Florida's Disney World, just California's Disney Land.

Kurzban said that he used to work at Disney World's Cranium Command. The attraction premiered in 1989 and closed in 2007. The basic notion is described by Kurzban:

Cranium Command is based on the whimsical idea that inside each person's head is a little person called a Cranium Commando, a specially trained brain pilot who sits at a control center and directs the action of the person whose brain it is.

In the preshow, the (literally) animated General Knowledge tells us that someone at HQ has assigned our hero, Buzzy, a small -- even by Cranium Command standards -- pilot, the job of operating "the most unstable craft in the fleet": a twelve-year-old boy. This particular craft is called Bobby.

In the rest of the chapter Kurzban describes how Cranium Command gets some things right, and some things wrong. Bobby is shown going to the principal's office and admitting that he started a food fight.

But the audience is given the very strong sense that it was Buzzy -- after consulting with both the left and right hemispheres [of the brain] -- who made the decision to tell the truth. In this way Cranium Command gets at the idea that there must be lots of modular systems -- functional parts of the mind -- that are not accessible to consciousness. 

So, if we understand Buzzy to be a modular system -- rather than a whole brain -- he's not unlike the systems that we visited earlier, making decisions that are not available to consciousness. "Bobby" -- whatever you take that to mean -- can't talk about how Buzzy made his decision because of the way Bobby works.

This illustrates an important point about the relationship between modularity and consciousness. Let me put it like this: The way that "Bobby"-- whatever that might mean -- doesn't seem to know exactly how he decided to confess to the principal is basically the same way that split-brain patients can't say why they pointed to a shovel -- the part of the brain that's doing the talking just doesn't have access to the relevant information. 

The final section of the chapter addresses head-on the question, So who are "I"?

If everything I've said to this point is right, your brain, which consists of a large number of modules, has some modules that are conscious, and many, many more that are not. Many of the ones that are nonconscious are potentially very important, processing information about the sensory world, making decisions about action, and so on.

If that's right, it seems funny to refer to any particular module or set of modules as more "you" than any other set. Modules have functions, and they do their jobs, and they interact with other modules in your head. There's no Buzzy in there, no little brain running the show, just different bits with different roles to play.

What I take from this -- and I know that not everyone will agree -- is that talking about the "self" is problematic. Which bits, which modules, get to be called "me?" Why some but not others? Should we take the conscious ones to be special in some way? If so, why?

If you do think there's a sense in which there's a "self" in your head somewhere, that's OK, but it seems to me that at minimum it's clear it can't be Buzzy or anything like him. It can't be a little person in your head seeing what "you" see, hearing what "you" hear, and making the decisions "for" you. 

If there's a "self," it has to be some part or parts of your brain, because that's all we have to work with... In the end, if it's true that your brain consists of many, many little modules with various functions, and if only a small number of them are conscious, then there might not be any particular reason to consider some of them to be "you" or "really you" or your "self" or maybe anything else particularly special.

The modular view of mind says there is no "I", just a contentious "We"

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the being each of us calls "I" didn't really exist, at least not in the way most people think it does, as a coherent unified self? 

I think so, though I realize this is a disturbing thought to those who depend on the "I" hypothesis to give their life meaning. Given my Buddhist proclivities, I view the situation much differently. 

The way I see it, the "I" I've considered myself to be for most of my life is the cause of many problems.

For example, anxiety, because "I" wants things to go the way "I" want them to go, and it worries me when they don't. Dissension, because "I" reacts defensively when my opinions are challenged by someone else. Isolation, because "I" feel like I'm separate and distinct from the world around me.

That's why I've always enjoyed books and teachings that undermine the notion of a unitary self commonly referred to as "I." And why, in line with this, Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind is appealing to me so much.

The Amazon listing gives a good overview of the book, whose back cover says that "Robert Kurzban is associate professor of psychology and founder of the Pennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania." 

We're all hypocrites. Why? Hypocrisy is the natural state of the human mind.

Robert Kurzban shows us that the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's design. The human mind consists of many specialized units designed by the process of evolution by natural selection. While these modules sometimes work together seamlessly, they don't always, resulting in impossibly contradictory beliefs, vacillations between patience and impulsiveness, violations of our supposed moral principles, and overinflated views of ourselves.

This modular, evolutionary psychological view of the mind undermines deeply held intuitions about ourselves, as well as a range of scientific theories that require a "self" with consistent beliefs and preferences. Modularity suggests that there is no "I." Instead, each of us is a contentious "we"--a collection of discrete but interacting systems whose constant conflicts shape our interactions with one another and our experience of the world.

In clear language, full of wit and rich in examples, Kurzban explains the roots and implications of our inconsistent minds, and why it is perfectly natural to believe that everyone else is a hypocrite.

Early on, Kurzban addresses the notion of our various selves.

Because of the way evolution operates, the mind consists of many, many parts, and these parts have many different functions. Because they're designed to do different things, they don't always work in perfect harmony.

The large number of parts of the mind can be thought of as, in some sense, being different "selves," designed to accomplish some task. This book is about all these different selves, some of which make you run, some of which make you lazy, some of which make you smart, and some of which keep you ignorant. 

You're unaware of many of them. They just do what they're designed to do, out of sight and, as it were, out of mind.

This book is about how all of these different parts of mental machinery get along or, occasionally, don't get along, and it's about how thinking about the mind this way explains the large number of contradictions in human thought and behavior.

It explains why we are conflicted, inconsistent, and even hypocritical. Understanding the whole of human behavior requires understanding all of the large number of different parts that produce it. These parts are called modules. 

Kurzban relates the familiar story told in many neuroscience books about split-brain patients who had the connection severed between the brain's left and right hemispheres, sometimes to deal with epileptic seizures that couldn't be prevented any other way. 

Various experiments have been done with split-brain patients, one of which is described in the book. I found a summary of the experiment via some Googling.

In Michael Gazzaniga's split-brain research, a patient was shown a chicken claw to their left hemisphere (controlling the right hand) and a snow scene to their right hemisphere (controlling the left hand). The patient correctly pointed to a chicken with their right hand and a shovel with their left hand, but when asked to explain, the left hemisphere, lacking knowledge of the snow scene, fabricated an explanation based on the chicken claw, stating the shovel was for cleaning the chicken shed. 

I liked Kurzban's comment on this experiment, which I've never seen expressed this way before.

What did "the patient" think was going on? Here's the thing. There's no such thing as "the patient." There's no real answer to the question because "the patient" is two more or less disconnected hemispheres. You can only ask about what individual, distinct, and separated parts think. The question asking what "the patient" sees is bad, and the answer is meaningless.

(Questions can be bad in many ways, for example by assuming a condition contrary to fact, like the infamous "Have you stopped beating your wife?") Here, asking what "the patient" believes assumes there's one, unitary patient who can have a belief about something. If I'm right about the ideas here, then a lot of intuitively sound questions like this one will turn out to be at best problematic and at worst incoherent.

Meaning, the modular brain hypothesis, which has a lot of evidence backing it up, is in line with the more dramatic findings regarding split-brain patients. Kurzban writes:

In this book, I present arguments and evidence that the human mind -- your mind -- is modular, that it consists of a large number of specialized parts, and that this has deep and profound implications for understanding human nature and human behavior. 

One important part of this is that modules, because they are separated from one another, can simultaneously hold different, mutually contradictory views, and there is nothing particularly odd or surprising about this. Such an idea is perfectly continuous with the material we've already visited in this chapter, and, indeed, with the rest of the biological world.

...An important consequence of this view is that it makes us think about the "self" in a way that is very different from how people usually understand it. In particular, it makes the very notion of a "self" something of a problem, and perhaps even quite a bit less useful than one might think.

In contrast, one idea that is very useful is the idea that if our mind consists of a large number of modules, then it needs one module to speak for the whole. In chapter 4, I introduce the notion that if you like the metaphor of your mind as a government, then "you" -- the part of your brain that experiences the world and feels like you're in "control" -- is better thought of as a press secretary than as the president.

We impose meaningfulness on the world through our stories

Yesterday my increasingly buggy blogging service, Typepad, kept generating a "503" error message all day long, so I wasn't able to write a post for one of my other blogs. I just did that, composing "My fall into a creek shows why doing one thing at a time makes sense." 

That post includes a mention of my recent post here about human cognition being amazingly slow, so it's worth a read. You also can see photos of an attractive creek that runs through our rural property.

Plus our electricity is off at the moment, owing to some downed power lines in our neighborhood. (We have a Generac whole house generator, so are doing fine, pretty much.) So I'm going to take the easy way out with this blog post and simply share a passage from Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, that I found interesting.

This passage follows a story from Wright about how he was on a meditation retreat where construction work was going on in the building, causing loud noises from buzz saws and other equipment. At first that bothered Wright a lot while he was meditating. But eventually he was able to simply listen to the construction sounds without thinking thoughts like, "This is really annoying." The passage starts with his speaking with a leader of the meditation retreat.

So I pressed her on what precisely was meant by the term [formless]. She confirmed my suspicion that it didn't mean that the physical world doesn't exist or that we are devoid of structure. Tables exist, buzz saws exist.

After a few minutes of conversation I felt I got her gist. I asked, "So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?" She answered, "Exactly."

I hasten to add that this doesn't mean we live in a meaningless universe. Deeply embedded in Buddhist thought is the intrinsic moral value of sentient life -- not just the value of human beings but the value of all organisms that have subjective experience and so are capable of pain and pleasure, of suffering and not suffering. And this value in turn imparts value to other things, such as helping people, being kind to dogs, and so on. Moral meaning, is, in that sense, inherent in life. 

But the point Narayan was making is that, as we go about our day-to-day lives, we impart a kind of narrative meaning to things. Ultimately these narratives assume large form. We decide that something we've done was a huge mistake, and if we had done something else instead, everything would be wonderful.

Or we decide that we must have some particular possession or achievement, and if we don't get it, everything will be horrible. Underlying these narratives, at their foundation, are elementary narrative judgments about the goodness or badness of things in themselves.

So, for example, if I start spinning a long narrative about how coming to this meditation retreat was a huge mistake, and I'm always making mistakes like this, and so on, there are a number of questionable premises on which this story rests. 

There's the premise that, had I not gone on this retreat, whatever I did instead would have gone swimmingly, whereas for all I know, I would have been run over by a bus. There's the premise that having a few painful experiences this week means the retreat was on balance bad for me, whereas in fact its long-term effects are unknowable.

And at the base of this narrative lie the most basic kinds of premises: simple perceptual judgments such as "This buzz saw sound I hear while trying to meditate is bad." And this kind of meaning, which seems so firmly embedded in the texture of things, isn't, in fact, an inherent feature of reality; it is something we impose on reality, a story we tell about reality.

We build stories on stories on stories, and the problem with the stories begins at their foundation. Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, a tool for examining our stories carefully, from the ground up, so that we can, if we choose, separate truth from fabrication.

Human cognition is amazingly slow, about 10 bits per second

I came across a fascinating article in the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, "Brains produce thoughts surprisingly slowly." (Online title: "The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace.") You can read the article via this PDF file.
Download The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace | Scientific American

Often you hear that the human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe with its 80 billion or so neurons tied together with trillions of interconnections. That may be, but this impressive product of evolution works much slower than the smart phones most of us carry around. The article starts off with:

The brain is sometimes called the most complex machine in the known universe. But the thoughts that it outputs putter along at a trifling 10 bits per second, the pace of a conversation

People often feel that their inner thoughts and feelings are much richer than what they are capable of expressing in real time. Entrepreneur Elon Musk is so bothered by what he calls this “bandwidth problem,” in fact, that one of his long-term goals is to create an interface that lets the human brain communicate directly with a comp­uter, unencumbered by the slow speed of speaking or writing.

If Musk succeeded, he would probably be disappointed. According to recent research published in Neuron, human beings remember, make decisions and imagine things at a fixed, excruciatingly slow speed of about 10 bits per second. In contrast, human sensory systems gather data at about one billion bits per second.

This biological paradox, highlighted in the new study, probably contributes to the false feeling that our mind can engage in seemingly infinite thoughts simultaneously—a phenomenon the researchers deem “the Musk illusion.” Study co-author Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, says that “the human brain is much less impressive than we might think. It’s incredibly slow when it comes to making decisions, and it’s ridiculously slower than any of the devices we interact with.”

Of course, this doesn't diminish the importance of what we humans have been able to create and accomplish: cathedrals, air travel, quantum physics, art of all kinds, novels, movies, microwave ovens, the scientific method, and so much more. 

In fact, those accomplishments seem even more impressive now that the researchers have been able to accurately estimate the processing speed of the human brain.

Meister and Zheng collated data from research across different fields, including psychology, neuroscience, technology and human performance. They used this information—from the processing speed of single neurons to the cognitive prowess of memory champions—to run many of their own calculations so they could make comparisons between studies.

From research spanning nearly a century, they found that human cognition has repeatedly been measured as functioning at between about five and 20 bits per second, with a ballpark average of around 10 bits per second. “This was a very surprising number,” Zheng says. Based on this finding, she adds, she and Meister also calculated that the total amount of information a person can learn across their lifetime could comfortably fit on a small thumb drive.

Human sensory systems such as sight, smell and sound, in contrast, operate much faster, the authors found—at about 100,000,000 times the rate of cognition. “When you put these numbers together, you realize there’s this huge gap,” Meister says. “From that paradox comes interesting new opportunities for science to organize research differently.”

The rich information relayed by our senses also contributes to a false notion that we register the massive amount of detail and contrast all around us. But that’s “demonstrably not true,” Meister says. When people are asked to describe what they see outside the center of their gaze, they “barely make out anything,” he adds.

Because our eyes have the capability to focus on any detail, he continues, “our mind gives us the illusion that these things are present simultaneously all the time,” even though in actuality we must focus on specific visual features to register them. A similar phenomenon occurs with mental ability. “In principle, we could be having lots of different thoughts and direct our cognition in lots of different ways,” Meister says. “But in practice, we can have only one thought at a time.”

For me, that was the key takeaway of this article -- that my brain, your brain, and everybody's brain can only do one conscious thing at a time. So when people claim that they can multitask, such as watch television and also send text messages, actually they are switching between the two activities, not doing both at the same time. 

Meister and his co-author Jieyu Zheng, a doctoral candidate in neurobiology at Caltech, also highlight in their paper that our brain can do only one thing—slowly—at a time. Even if Musk managed to hook his brain up to a computer, Meister says, he still wouldn’t be able to communicate with it any faster than he could if he used a telephone.

...Another important unanswered question, Meister says, is why the human brain can do only one thing at a time. “If we could have 1,000 thoughts in parallel, each at 10 bits per second, the discrepancy wouldn’t be as big as it is,” he says. Why humans are incapable of such mental multitasking is “a deep mystery that almost nothing is known about.”

Since I'm a big fan of mindfulness, I already was doing my best to do one thing at a time. Now I know that not only is this feasible, it's the only way my brain operates. But the illusion of multitasking remains, such as when I think that I can jot something down on the pad of paper I carry around in my car, while simultaneously being able to drive safely.

After reading this article, now I'll be more inclined to just do one thing at a time, even if I feel like I'm capable of doing several things. However, the article doesn't speak about whether physical actions and mental cognition obey the One Thing at a Time rule.

For example, typically I read a magazine while I'm brushing with an electric toothbrush. I can read at the same time I'm brushing my teeth. But I wouldn't be able to add numbers together while reading. It might well be that physical actions, which I'm aware of via perceptions, are easy to do while thinking of something else because our sensory systems are hugely faster than our cognition. 

Theory of mental modules made me feel better about my many failings

I love it when after reading something in a nonfiction book, it doesn't just make sense to me intellectually, but deeply touches me emotionally. 

That's how I felt after reading a chapter in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True book, "How Thoughts Think Themselves." Before describing the wonderful feeling I had, I'll share some of the intellectual side of Wright's message -- which is based on a blend of Buddhist teachings, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. 

He says this about the theory of mental modules in relation to mind wandering:

Though the trains of thought that carry you away from direct experience can take you to lots of different places, pretty much all of those places seem to lie within the province of one of the sort of mental modules I've already described.

Which is to say, modules that make perfect sense in evolutionary terms: modules that deal with attracting mates, keeping them, enhancing your status (which means denigrating rivals), taking care of kin, tending to your friendships (which includes making sure that they're reciprocal and that you're not getting exploited), and so on.

...When your mind is wandering, it may feel like, well, like your mind is wandering -- like it's strolling along the landscape of modules and sampling them, indulging one module for a while, then eventually moving on to another one.

But another way to describe it is to say that, actually, the different modules are competing for your attention, and when the mind "wanders" from one module to another, what's actually happening is that the second module has acquired enough strength to wrestle control of your consciousness away from the first module.

Far be it from me to insist that you accept one of the other of these ways of looking at mind wandering. For now I'd just make two points: (1) Psychologists who adhere to the modular model of the mind tend toward the second view -- the idea that the conscious you isn't choosing modules so much as being commandeered by modules that have prevailed over competing modules and thus, as Gazzaniga put in in chapter 6, "won the prize of conscious recognition."

(2) If you do go on a Vipassana meditation retreat and slowly, haltingly, get better at focusing on your breath, you will probably lean increasingly toward the second hypothesis: it will seem more and more like your mind isn't wandering within its own terrain so much as being hijacked by intruders.

Wright describes a conversation he had with noted Buddhist meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein. Wright says about Goldstein:

He seemed to be saying that thoughts, which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self. This, in turn, seemed consistent with the idea that modules generate thoughts outside of consciousness and sometimes inject them into consciousness.

Wright speaks with Goldstein about viewing thoughts as akin to going to a movie theater and getting absorbed in what's happening on the screen, quoting Goldstein: 

And then we sit back and see these are just pixels of light projected on a screen. Everything we thought is happening is not really happening. It's the same with our thoughts. We get caught up in the story, in the drama of them, forgetting their essentially insubstantial nature.

This passage was key to the emotional insight I had:

Escaping this drama -- seeing your thoughts as passing before you rather than emanating from you -- can carry you closer to the not-self experience, to that moment when you "see" that there is no "you" in there doing the thinking or doing anything else, that moment when what seems like a metaphysical truth is unveiled.

But, as we saw in chapter 5, some people say that the Buddha's original not-self teaching is best seen not as a metaphysical truth but as a pragmatic strategy: regardless of whether a self exists, by jettisoning parts of what you think of as your self, you clarify your view of the world and become a better and happier person. And this pragmatic strategy of not-self, no less than the metaphysical discovery of not-self, would seem to be furthered by the kind of perspective Goldstein was describing.

What happened to me was, suddenly I realized -- not intellectually, but intuitively and emotionally -- that I am not the person who has made so many mistakes, had so many failures, caused pain to so many people that I disappointed or let down. 

UPDATE: Below I struggled to explain the feeling I had. Here's a one-sentence version: As my mind conjured up thoughts about the past and future that were filled with images of deserved praise and blame, in a flash it struck me that there was no one within my skull who deserved applause or boos, just the happenings of an impersonal modular mind. 

I'm not that person because I'm not really a person at all, at least in the sense of being a person who is a solid self, who is a single entity no matter my age: 5, 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, 65, 75. Or 76, my current age. I've always looked back on my life and thought, "How was I capable of doing so many negative things?" Which has an inescapable mirror image, "How was I capable of doing so many positive things?"

Suddenly I felt that the answer to those questions is simple, and wonderfully reassuring. Because I am not a solid self or single entity. Just as my body is made up of many physical organs, my mind is made up of many mental modules akin to how Wright describes them in Why Buddhism is True.

When my mind has either led me astray, or put me on a positive path, a self named Brian wasn't responsible. Unconscious inclinations leading in different directions -- positive/negative, loving/hateful, productive/unproductive -- battled it out beneath the surface of my awareness. Eventually one module (not a great term, but I'll stick with Wright's language) won out in that subterranean conflict and placed thoughts in my conscious mind that led to actions.

This realization was deeply moving. I felt like a great weight had been lifted from my psyche. I no longer looked upon my successes and failures as emanating from me, because there really isn't such a singular Me. There have been many Me's, and there will be many more. 

Whenever I've gotten super angry, or super loving, or super resentful, or super grateful, that's a new temporary Me coming into being. Right now a writer Me has risen to the fore. Soon a hot-bath-loving Me will take over. I'm composed of multitudes that bubble up from unconscious depths to become conscious story-tellers and actors for a while.

Yes, there is a certain continuity to my existence, because I remember some of what this mind and body have experienced over the years, and many of my attributes don't change drastically with every new manifestation of Me. 

It just felt really good, and still does, to realize that, as Wright says in his book, the thoughts and resulting actions that either have made me feel proud or ashamed actually have not been produced by a conscious Me, but were directed from unconscious depths toward whatever sort of Me was ascendent at any particular time.

I realize this probably doesn't make a lot of sense. I wish I could describe it better. But a hot bath awaits.

For Buddhism, taking the "red pill" means more than just mindfulness

It's been quite a while since I've watched The Matrix. You know, the movie where really real reality is very different from how things appear to those trapped in illusion -- which in this case is being confined in a pod, hallucinating that what you're dreaming is actually true.

Robert Wright starts off his Why Buddhism is True book by using the red pill/blue pill choice in The Matrix as a metaphor for what Buddhism seeks: the truth about life.

The prison is called the Matrix, but there's no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix ultimately is. The only way to get the whole picture, says Morpheus, is "to see it for yourself." He offers Neo two pills, a red pill and a blue one. Neo can take the blue pill and return to his dream world, or take the red pill and break through the shroud of delusion. Neo chooses the red pill.

That's a pretty stark choice: a life of delusion and bondage or a life of insight and freedom. In fact, it's a choice that's so dramatic that you'd think a Hollywood movie is exactly where it belongs -- that the choices we really get to make about how to live our lives are less momentous than this, more pedestrian. Yet when that movie came out, a number of people saw it as mirroring a choice they had actually made.

The people I'm thinking about are what you might call Western Buddhists, people in the United States and other Western countries who, for the most part, didn't grow up Buddhist but at some point adopted Buddhism.

At least they adopted a version of Buddhism, a version that had been stripped of some supernatural elements typically found in Asian Buddhism, such as a belief in reincarnation and in various deities. This Western Buddhism centers on a part of Buddhist practice that in Asia is more common among monks than among laypeople: meditation, along with immersion in Buddhist philosophy.

(Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism -- that it's atheistic and that it revolves around meditation -- are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don't meditate.)

Interesting. I'm definitely attracted to the Western form of Buddhism, since I like this philosophy (in Asia it is a religion) because it fits with my attraction toward atheism and meditation. This reminds me of a difference I observed between American and Indian members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a spiritual organization headquartered in India and led by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years.

On the whole we Americans were more interested in the fine points of the RSSB teachings and the meditation practice we'd been taught than the members of RSSB with an Indian background -- who seemed more devoted to the person of the guru and often meditated little if at all, being more concerned about seva, or volunteer service on behalf of RSSB and the guru.

There's no right or wrong here, just different ways of approaching spirituality. For Wright, a Western Buddhist, this gets at the question of how deeply committed someone is to truly upending their current view of reality versus merely improving our life without such a drastic change of perception. He notes:

Using meditation this way, as a purely therapeutic device that doesn't deeply change your view of reality, is a perfectly fine thing to do. It's good for you, and it will probably be good for the world.

But Wright goes on to say:

Still, using meditation this way isn't, by itself, taking the red pill. Taking the red pill means asking basic questions about the relationship of the perceiver to the perceived and examining the underpinnings of our normal view of reality. If you're thinking seriously about taking the red pill, you'll be curious as to whether the Buddhist view of the world "works" not just in a therapeutic sense but in a more philosophical sense.

So what is it that distinguishes a "red pill" approach to Buddhism? Not an easy question to answer. Wright offers up some hints in this passage.

The most basic division in Buddhism is between the Theravada school and the Mahayana school. My own meditative tradition, Vipassana, derives from the Theravada lineage. It is within the Mahayana lineage (to which Quang Due belonged) that you find the most radically based conception of illusion.

Some Mahayana Buddhists even subscribe to a "mind only" doctrine that, in its most extreme incarnation, dismisses the things we "perceive" via consciousness as, pretty literally, figments of our imagination. This strand of Buddhist thought -- the strand that most obviously resonates with the movie The Matrix -- isn't dominant within Mahayana Buddhism, much less within Buddhism at large.

But even mainstream Buddhist thinkers accept some version of the concept of emptiness, a subtle idea that is hard to capture in a few words (or in many words) but certainly holds, at a minimum, that the things we see when we look out on the world have less in the way of distinct and substantial existence than they seem to have.

And then there is the famous Buddhist idea that the self -- you know, your self, my self -- is an illusion. In this view, the "you" that you think of as thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, and making your decisions doesn't really exist. 

If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together -- the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness -- you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.

Evolution doesn't care if feelings are true, just that they are good for us

In a recent post, "No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality," I noted that evolution doesn't care about truth, just about whether genes are passed on to the next generation. Of course, this is just a manner of speaking, since evolution isn't about caring or not-caring.

This goes against one of the primal facts about evolution: that species prosper not because they possess a greater grasp of reality, but because they are adept at passing on genes, organisms being well suited to the environment in which they find themselves.

After writing that, I came across a mention of Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, in another book that I was reading. That spurred me to pull Wright's book off of the Buddhism shelf in my office bookcase and start re-re-reading it. 

(Often I can tell how many times I've read a book by the different highlighting colors in it, as I used to bounce back and forth between various colors; now I favor yellow almost exclusively.)

Heraclitus famously said “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” For me this applies to re-reading books. They seem fresh every time I do this, because while the book has stayed the same, unlike a river, I've changed.

Now that my daily meditation consists of guided meditations from Zen master Henry Shukman via his The Way app on my iPhone, I figured that I should remind myself why Buddhism is true, according to Wright. 

Early on in his book, page 6 to be precise, Wright -- who has written a book about evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal -- talks about why pleasure always fades (a basic tenet of Buddhism) from the perspective of evolution.

Here's the basic logic. We were "designed" by natural selection to do certain things that helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation -- things like eating, having sex, earning the esteem of other people, and outdoing rivals. I put "designed" in quotation marks because, again, natural selection isn't a conscious, intelligent designer but an unconscious process.

Still, natural selection does create organisms that look as if they're the product of a conscious designer, a designer who kept fiddling with them to make them effective gene propagators.

So, as a kind of thought experiment, it's legitimate to think of natural selection as a "designer" and put yourself in its shoes and ask: If you were designing organisms to be good at spreading their genes, how would you get them to pursue the goals that further this cause? 

In other words, granted that eating, having sex, impressing peers, and besting rivals helped our ancestors spread their genes, how exactly would you design their brains to get them to pursue these goals? I submit that at least three basic principles of design would make sense.

1. 1. Achieving these goals should bring pleasure, since animals, including humans, tend to pursue things that bring pleasure.
   2. The pleasure shouldn't last forever. After all, if the pleasure didn't subside, we'd never seek it again; our first meal would be our last, because hunger would never return. So too with sex: a single act of intercourse, and then a lifetime of lying there basking in the afterglow. That's no way to get lots of genes into the next generation!
   3. The animal's brain should focus more on (1) the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you'll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence. You might, for example, start asking what the point is of so fiercely pursuing pleasure if the pleasure will wear off shortly after you get it and leave you hungering for more. Before you know it, you'll be full of ennui and wishing you'd majored in philosophy.

If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure.

Natural selection doesn't "want" us to be happy, after all, it just "wants" us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

In another chapter, "When Are Feelings Illusions?," Wright provides useful advice about how to tell when a feeling is productive in a broader sense than how natural selection views productive -- basically as doing things that keep us alive long enough to pass on our genes to the next generation.

I certainly could relate to his examples.

Like getting angry at a driver who is following me too closely, even though it is unlikely that I'm in any danger from him (such drivers are usually men, in my experience). I'm reacting as natural selection intended when someone threatens my life. Except in modern times, our lives rarely are truly threatened by other people. They just irritate us.

So my feeling of anger is an illusion of sorts. It isn't a reflection of how the world truly is, but as how my feelings believe it is, since evolution favors feelings that aided in survival more than feelings that reflected truth.

Of course, Wright points out that some feelings do indeed reflect the truth about reality. If I jump at the sight of a large snake, that's a good thing, as some snakes are poisonous. (I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California where rattlesnakes were common and jumping at the sound of a rattle was a very good thing.)

Obviously, this chapter hasn't been a blanket indictment of human feelings. Some, maybe most, of our feelings serve us reasonably well; they don't much distort our view of reality, and they help keep us alive and flourishing.

My attraction to apples, my aversion to grasping knife blades and scaling skyscrapers -- all to the good. Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation -- inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don't, and trying to free yourself from the grip of the ones that don't.

And I hope you can see why this is difficult. It's in the nature of feelings to make it hard to tell the valuable ones from the harmful ones, the reliable from the misleading. One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally "designed" to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively.