فصل 06

PART II

SELF-AWARENESS

6

THE INNER RUDDER

Football, basketball, debate, you name it—the big rival to my high school in the Central Valley of California was in the next town down Highway 99. Over the years I’ve gotten friendly with a student from that other school. During high school he wasn’t much interested in studies—in fact, he almost flunked out. Growing up on a ranch on the outskirts of town he spent a lot of time alone, reading science fiction and tinkering with hot rods, his passion. The week before he was to graduate, a car sped past from behind as he was making a left turn into his driveway, smashing his small sports car to bits. He almost died. After recuperating, my friend went to the local community college, where he discovered a calling that riveted his attention and mobilized his creative talents: filmmaking. After transferring to a film school he made a movie for his student project that caught the eye of a Hollywood director, who hired him as an assistant. The director asked my friend to work on a pet project, a small-budget film. That, in turn, led to my friend getting a studio to back him as director and producer of another small film based on his own script—a movie that the studio almost killed before its release, yet which did surprisingly better than anyone expected. But the arbitrary cuts, edits, and other changes the studio bosses made before releasing that movie were a bitter lesson for my friend, who valued creative control of his work as paramount. When he went on to make a movie based on another script of his own, a big Hollywood studio offered him a standard deal whereby the studio financed the project and held the power to change the film before its release. He refused the deal—his artistic integrity was more important. Instead my friend “bought” creative control by going off on his own and putting every penny of his profits from the first film into this second project. When he was almost done, his money ran out. He went looking for loans, but bank after bank turned him down. Only a last-minute loan from the tenth bank he implored saved the project. The film was Star Wars. George Lucas’s insistence on keeping creative control despite the financial struggle that it entailed for him signifies enormous integrity—and, as the world knows, it also turned out to be a lucrative business decision. But this decision wasn’t motivated by the pursuit of money; back then ancillary rights meant selling movie posters and T-shirts, a trivial source of revenue. At the time, everyone who knew the film industry warned George against going out on his own. Such a decision requires immense confidence in one’s own guiding values. What allows people to have such a strong inner compass, a North Star that steers them through life according to the dictates of their deepest values and purposes? Self-awareness, particularly accuracy in decoding the internal cues of our body’s murmurs, holds the key. Our subtle physiological reactions reflect the sum total of our experience relevant to the decision at hand. The decision rules derived from our life experiences reside in subcortical neural networks that gather, store, and apply algorithms from every event in our lives—creating our inner rudder.1 The brain harbors our deepest sense of purpose and meaning in these subcortical regions—areas connected poorly to the verbal areas of the neocortex, but richly to the gut. We know our values by first getting a visceral sense of what feels right and what does not, then articulating those feelings for ourselves. Self-awareness, then, represents an essential focus, one that attunes us to the subtle murmurs within that can help guide our way through life. And, as we shall see, this inner radar holds the key to managing what we do—and just as important, what we don’t do. This internal control mechanism makes all the difference between a life well lived and one that falters. SHE’S HAPPY AND SHE KNOWS IT

The scientific test for self-awareness in animals is, in theory, simple: put a mark on their face, show them a mirror, and observe whether their actions indicate they realize that the face with the mark over there reflects their own. Actually doing such a test for self-awareness in elephants is not so simple. For starters, you need to build an elephant-proof mirror. Try an eight-foot-by-eight-foot acrylic reflecting surface glued to plywood supported by steel framing, and bolted to the concrete wall of an elephant enclosure. That’s what researchers did at the Bronx Zoo, where Happy, a thirty-four-year-old Asian elephant, lives with her two hulking friends, Maxine and Patty. The researchers let the elephants get used to the mirrors for a few days. Then they put a large white X on the head of one or another of the elephants to see if she would realize she had a mark there—an indication of self-recognition. There’s a further complication when it comes to testing elephants. They “groom” themselves by taking mud baths and spraying dust all over themselves with their trunks. That adds a fair amount of debris to their skin, upping the odds that what we humans think of as a prominent mark might be trivial—just more of the usual detritus—to an elephant. And, indeed, Maxine and Patty paid no attention to their X. But the day Happy got the big white X on her head she went over to the mirror and spent ten seconds looking at herself, then walked off—rather like humans when we glance in the mirror before going out to start our day. She then repeatedly felt around the X with the sensitive tip of her trunk, signifying self-awareness. Only a highly select few in the animal kingdom have passed this test, including some varieties of apes and chimps, and dolphins (in an aquatic adaptation of the test). These species, like elephants, are among the handful of animals whose brains harbor a class of neurons some neuroscientists believe are uniquely essential for self-awareness. Named for their discoverer, Constantin von Economo (and called VENs for short), these spindle-shaped neurons can be double the size of most brain cells and have fewer branches—though much longer ones—connecting to other cells.2 Their size and spindle-like shape give VENs a unique advantage over other neurons: the signals they send travel faster and farther. And their main locations in areas that connect the executive brain to the emotional centers position them as personal radar. These areas light up when we see our reflection in the mirror. Neuroscientists see them as part of the brain’s circuitry for our sense of self at every level: of “this is me,” of “how I feel now,” and of our personal identity. THE BRAIN’S MAP OF THE BODY

After being diagnosed with the liver cancer that was to take his life a few years later, Steve Jobs gave a heartfelt talk to a graduating class at Stanford University. His advice: “Don’t let the voice of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”3 But how do you hear “your inner voice,” what your heart and intuition somehow already know? You need to depend on your body’s signals. You may have seen the rather bizarre image of a body as mapped by the somatosensory cortex, which tracks the sensations registered by various areas of our skin: this critter has a tiny head but huge lips and tongue, teeny arms but giant fingers—all reflecting the relative sensitivity of nerves in various body parts. Similar monitoring of our internal organs is done by the insula, tucked behind the frontal lobes of the brain. The insula maps our body’s insides via circuitry linking to our gut, heart, liver, lungs, genitals—every organ has its specific spot. This lets the insula act as a control center for organ functions, sending signals to the heart to slow its beat, the lungs to take a deeper breath. Attention turned inward toward any part of the body amps up the insula’s sensitivity to the particular area we’re checking on. Tune in to your heartbeat and the insula activates more neurons in that circuitry. How well people can sense their heartbeat, in fact, has become a standard way to measure their self-awareness. The better people are at this, the bigger their insula.4 The insula attunes us to more than our organs; our very senfeeling depends on it.5 People who are oblivious to their own emotions (and also—tellingly, as we’ll see—to how other people feel) have sluggish insula activity compared with the high activation found in people highly attuned to their inner emotional life. At the tuned-out extreme are those with alexithymia, who just don’t know what they feel, and can’t imagine what someone else might be feeling.6 Our “gut feelings” are messages from the insula and other bottom-up circuits that simplify life decisions for us by guiding our attention toward smarter options. The better we are at reading these messages, the better our intuition. Take that tug you might sometimes feel when you suspect you’re forgetting something important just as you’re leaving on a big trip. A marathon runner tells me of a time she was on her way to a race four hundred miles away. She felt that tug—and ignored it. But as she continued on down the freeway, it kept coming back. Then she realized what was tugging at her: she had forgotten her shoes! A stop at a mall that was just about to close saved the day. But her new shoes were a different brand from the ones she normally wore. As she told me, “I have never been more sore!” Somatic marker is neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s term for the sensations in our body that tell us when a choice feels wrong or right.7 This bottom-up circuitry telegraphs its conclusions through our gut feelings, often long before the top-down circuits come to a more reasoned conclusion. The ventromedial prefrontal area, a key part of this circuitry, guides our decision making when we face life’s most complex decisions, like who to marry or whether to buy a house. Such choices can’t be made by a cold, rational analysis. Instead we do better to simulate what it would feel like to choose A versus B. This brain area operates as that inner rudder. There are two major streams of self-awareness: “me,” which builds narratives about our past and future; and “I,” which brings us into the immediate present. The “me,” as we’ve seen, links together what we experience across time. The “I,” in stark contrast, exists only in the raw experience of our immediate moment. The “I,” our most intimate sense of our self, reflects the piecemeal sum of our sensory impressions—particularly our body states. “I” builds from our brain’s system for mapping the body via the insula.8 Such internal signals are our inner guides, helping us at many levels, from living a life in keeping with our guiding values to remembering our running shoes. As a veteran performer at Cirque du Soleil told me, for their grueling routines Cirque performers strive for what she called “perfect practice,” where the laws of physical motion and rules of biomechanics come together with timing, angles, and speed, so you get “more perfect more of the time—you’re never perfect all of the time.” And how do the performers know when they’re nearing perfection? “It’s the feeling. You know it in your joints before you know it in your head.”