The Mind's Past

The Mind's Past, by Michael S. Gazzaniga (1998)

This little book (200 pages) attempts to take the reader on a tour through the latest developments in cognitive neuroscience. Ultimately, The Mind's Past highlights the importance of narrative in constructing the conceptual self. It's fair to say that the book succeeds in rousing interest in the subject, though it's also fair to say that Gazzaniga is not a gifted science popularizer. At times it is hard to know whom the book is written for - layperson or expert. There are some instances where Gazzaniga makes no concession to a popular audience, and other times when he seems to oversimplify. At no time are we in doubt as to his opinions of his fellow scientists, however, as he goes out of his way to praise or criticize.

Gazzaniga also makes no effort to disguise his disdain for psychology as a scientific endeavor. “The grand questions originally asked by those trained in classical psychology have evolved into matters other scientists can address ...Psychology itself is dead.” What Gazzaniga means by this stance is that classical psychology actually leads nowhere because “the answers don't point to a body of knowledge where one result leads to another.” On the other hand, cognitive neuroscience focuses on the biological mechanisms which cause the brain to enable the mind to perceive reality and construct the “fictional self.”

Gazzaniga is at his most interesting when he explores the notion of the “interpreter”, a mechanism in our left brain which “creates the illusion that we are in charge of our actions and does so by interpreting our past.” Through a cursory explanation of key experiments in cognitive science, Gazzaniga shows how the left brain is involved in the persistence of personal narrative. The interpreter's job is to conflate events and weave a meaningful story around those events. This is fascinating stuff. It seems that the need to construct narrative is deeply rooted in the brain. But why, and to what purpose?

As an evolutionist, Gazzaniga repeatedly asks the question “What's it for?” in his approach to explanations. Ultimately the brain's purpose is to increase chances of reproductive success. Everything else is frosting on the cake. The purpose of the constructed self, and the purpose of memory, says Gazzaniga, is ultimately to localize things in space. Memory helps us remember where we stored food, where base camp is, and where we saw the desirable mate. Memory is notoriously self-serving, however, and quite false by nature. “As we spin our tale, calling on the large items for the schema of our past memory, we simply drag into the account likely details that could have been part of the experience.” Memory is by nature unreliable. While the right brain “regurgitates” the literal story, the interpreter (located in the left brain) “remembers the gist of the story line and fills in the details by using logic, not real memories.” The findings bear heavily on false memory syndrome, especially in children, where experiments have shown that 58 % of children claimed that at least one of the false events presented to them in an experiment happened to them, and 25% produced false narratives for the majority of them!

The substantive difference between our species and animals is our ability to reason. All sorts of animals can engage in associative learning, which allows them to make connections, say, between eating something and getting sick, in order to avoid doing it again. What humans do is to take it one step further, asking “Why did that plant make me sick?” “Sustained syllogistic reasoning, the capacity to state a major premise, then a minor premise, followed by a deductive conclusion, is what our species alone can do.” This ability to reason has huge payoffs for our species in helping us to make predictions about the future. Where it fails us is in attempting to interpret large sets of meaningless data, superimposing a spurious narrative which gives comfort to our false sense of self, making us feel in control when we aren't.

Gazzaniga does not venture into metaphysical territory, but the import of recent findings in cognitive neuroscience certainly lend themselves to all kinds of speculations. If, as Gazzaniga says, our right brain is a mechanism which lives entirely in the present, refusing to interpret its experience to find deeper meaning, and the left brain always comes up with a theory for things, even at the expense of superimposing a false theory to replace randomness, what does this mean about meditative states? When we meditate, are we somehow suppressing the left brain, allowing our conceptual self to dissolve in order to experience the immediacy and primacy of experience which the left brain normally denies us? Someday we might know. Our interpreter asks “how infinite numbers of things relate to each other and gleans productive answers to that question,” leading inevitably to the question “Who is solving these problems?”. The simple and not quite accurate answer to that question is “I am.” The conceptual self which the interpreter creates reinforces our notion of centrality, thereby providing a glue that holds our story together. The accuracy of our story is not the point; the imposition of a narrative notion of self is. Ultimately these narratives of our past pervade our awareness. To be aware of the limitations of our brains and the way brain and mind relate is to be empowered to transcend those limitations.