The Dalai Lama has said that Buddhism and science are deeply compatible and has encouraged Western scholars to critically examine both the meditative practice and Buddhist ideas about the human mind. A number of scientists and philosophers have taken up this challenge. There have been brain scans of meditators and philosophical examinations of Buddhist doctrines. There have even been discussions of Darwin and the Buddha: Do early Buddhist descriptions of the mind, and of the human condition, make particular sense in light of evolutionary psychology? This course will examine how Buddhism is faring under this scrutiny. Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people? All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Modern Psychology and the Self
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Aus dem Kurs von Princeton University
Buddhism and Modern Psychology
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Does Your Self Exist?
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Robert WrightVisiting Lecturer
Religion Department and the Center for Human Values
So now we're going to shift to some new terrain.
We're going to move from ancient Buddhist thought to modern psychology.
And by modern psychology I mean psychology starting
roughly in the second half of the 20th century.
But we're going to stay focused on something we
were looking at in the context of Buddhist thought,
which is what to make of this thing that we call the self, what if anything it is.
And we're going to see some experimental evidence that the thing
we think of as the self the, the conscious me, the
thing I think of as running the show, may not be
running as much of the show as we think it is.
We may be attributing more power to it than it really deserves.
Now, in a way, this idea goes back to pre-modern psychology.
Because of course, Sigmund Freud became famous for saying that,
you know, that, our behavior is actually controlled to a
considerable extent by all these unconscious forces, and the conscious
mind isn't as in charge as we think it is.
So broadly speaking, you could say that the experimental evidence we're
about to see is an affirmation of a Freudian world view, but
I want to emphasize broadly speaking, because when you look at specific ideas
that Freud came up with about how exactly the unconscious mind influences.
The, the conscious mind in behavior and, and what the dynamics of that are.
Some of those ideas don't look very good in light of modern thought.
And also, though Freud was very skeptical about the power of the
self, some psychologists today would say he really wasn't quite skeptical enough.
Freud had basically, a three part model of the mind.
There was the id, which harbors these dark animal impulses.
There was what he called the super ego which corresponds more or less to
the conscious, and then in the middle of things was the ego, the self.
And it's true that he emphasized that the self
isn't as in charge as it thinks it is.
But he did put it right there in the middle.
And he did attribute some autonomy to it.
Some independent power to it.
And there, there are psychologists who especially in light
of some of the experiments we're going to look at.
Would say that even that model gives kind of, too much credit to the self.
And some of these psychologists are working on a model of, of the mind
which we will come to which really has no place for the self at all.
Okay, now in the, kind of modern history of
doubt about the power of the self, there is
one set of experiment that really are kind of
the landmark and these are known as the split-brain experiments.
You may well have heard of them, especially if
you've taken an introductory psychology course, they've gotten a
certain amount of publicity, and they're certainly very memorable,
because in a way, they have some very strange results.
Now these experiments involve people whose hemispheres the,
the two halves of their brains had been disconnected.
Most of us have something called the corpus
callosum, a bundle of fibers that connects the two
halfs, halves of the brain, but these people had,
had their's surgically severed in most cases to control
seizures, and when, when this procedure was first
done, you know, it seemed kind of miraculous because
it didn't seem to have much effect on behavior,
aside from controlling the seizures, which is kind of surprising.
You'd think that something connecting the two halves
of the brain, is this really important thing.
Who knows what'll happen if it gets cut.
Well, not much noticeable happened.
But then in the 1960's, some researchers,
in particular, Michael Gazzaniga came up with a
kind of experimental apparatus that got split-brain
patients to behave in some pretty strange ways.
Now, to understand what he did you have to understand first
of all that the way the brain works, information in the left
half of the visual field, enters the right hemisphere and information
on the right half of the visual field enters the left hemisphere.
I don't know why natural selection did it that way.
I don't think I would have, but that's the way we're set up.
So, it's possible, if the two halves aren't
connected, as in these patients To put information
in one side of the brain that just stays there and doesn't go to the other side.
So, for example, one kind of thing they did is
they would flash a word like nut in the left half
of the visual field, which means it entered the right
half of the visual field of the hemisphere, the right hemisphere.
And the way they could tell that it didn't get to the left
hemisphere is they would say to the patient, what word do you see.
And the patient would say, I don't see a word.
Now, here's the explanation for that.
In most people, it's the left hemisphere that houses the language
faculties, so that's the half of the brain that does the talking.
So that's the half of the brain that was reporting that it saw nothing.
But, they had a way of determining that the word nut had made it
into the right hemisphere, because the right
hemisphere controls the left hand, just as the
left hemisphere controls the right hand, and they found that if they let the
patient rummage through a box of objects, the left hand would cease upon a nut.
Okay, even though you ask the patient.
What word do you see?
The patient say's I don't see a word.
There clearly is somewhere that the, the presence of that word registers,
and then in turn motivates a behavior, the seizing of the nut.
Now this is kind of strange when you think about it, because, you know, ordinarily
if a word enters your brain, it enters this conscious field
and, and if it influences you to do something, you think of
yourself as deciding to kind of do something in response to the information.
And you can share the information with the
world, right, you can talk about what you've seen.
In this case that's not what's going on.
The, the person can't talk about the, the information and,
the person seems to be not conscious, but here not conscious of the
information, but here we have to be careful, because we really have
no way of knowing that the right brain is not itself conscious.
We know that the conscious left half of the brain didn't see
the word, but there is no way for that half of the brain
to know whether the right brain is actually experiencing things subjectively
and the right brain can't say, so we don't really know and it's funny.
People have different intuitions about this.
Some people tend to say, well of course it's
conscious, the right, the right brain is going to be conscious.
So it was conscious before they cut the brain in half, right?
So naturally there's going to be some consciousness there.
Other people find it weird, almost creepy, to think that you
know, if you're identifying with the left half of the brain.
You're the thing that does the talking as usual, to
think that there's somewhere in your body, some conscious being
that you can't communicate with, inhabiting the same body, that's,
that strikes some people as very strange and very paradoxical.
Okay, there was a second finding from these split-brain experiments that,
that adds a, a kind of, a second dimension of strangeness.
If you flash an instruction on the left
visual field, so it enters the right brain,
like it's, you say walk, the person will
follow it, the person will get up and walk.
And then if you ask the person, where are you going?
Remember the answer is going to come from the left brain, which doesn't
know the correct answer as to why it got up and started walking.
And the left brain tends to come up with an answer.
The, the person will say something like oh, I'm
going to get a soda, and apparently, we'll believe it.
That is, the left brain will believe the
story even though it was fabricated on the spot.
And that's kind of strange when you think about it.
Then there was a third finding that is a
little more complicated than, than these, these first two.
This involves kind of both halves of the brain
at the same time and, and both hands.
So what they did was, they presented to
the left hemisphere the image of a chicken claw.
And the right hemisphere saw a picture of a
kind of a wintry scene with a lot of snow.
And then they let both hands choose from among a number of pictures.
And the hand associated with the left hemisphere, which had seen the
chicken claw, chose a chicken obviously, you know reasonably enough, and the
hand associated with the right hemisphere, which had seen the winter scene,
the snowy scene, chose a snow, a snow shovel, which also makes sense.
And then they asked the person, okay, why did you make these choices?
And remember the answer's coming from the left brain.
And, and the person ,first says, well the
chicken claw goes with the chicken, and, that's you
know, the left brain knew both of those
things, knew about the chicken and the chicken claw.
And then the person looks down at his hands, and
see's that one of the hands unbeknown to the left hemisphere has
chosen a shovel and says,
well, you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.
So the person came up with this, with this story that makes sense.
You know, it's coherent it's, it's just not true.
Okay, so what's the main take away from that set of experiments?
I would say, two basic things.
First of all those experiments suggest but don't prove by any means that the
conscious self is capable of greatly over
estimating the amount influence it's exerting on behavior.
Secondly, the experiments suggest, but again
don't prove, that the conscious self can
promulgate and apparently believe wildly untrue stories
about the actual motivation of the person.
Now, the reason I say suggest, but not prove, is that, remember, these were not
anatomically normal, so we're not really seeing
the conscious self work as it's normally wired.
The findings are certainly very suggestive, but it's hard to
conclude much with confidence about the self as it normally exists.
The most we can say is, is that this
left hemisphere which some people do think is the
seed of consciousness and does seem to be the
seed of language at least in, in most people.
that, that is capable of these kinds of, of delusions.
At least when it is, when it is severed from the rest of the brain.
So, how can we study anatomically normal people?
Well, it's, it's a little, it's harder to come up
with such exotic results, as we saw in the split-brain experiments.
But psychologists have managed to establish that people are
sometimes not conscious of the actual motivation of their behavior.
And that they may actually kind of come up with stories
about the actual motivation when they don't know the real motivation.
So a kind of classic in this field is a study
that was done several decades ago by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson.
It involved pantyhose, four pair of pantyhose
that were arrayed in front of people
for them to examine the way a shopper would examine pantyhose, and one thing
they found is that people had a strong tendency to choose, when asked which
was their favorite pair of pantyhose to choose the pair on the far right.
For whatever reason, people tend to do that in that kind of set up.
The people weren't aware that that was influencing their judgement because
when they were asked, well, why did you make choice, all
the people who had chosen the one on the far right
didn't say, well, because it's the one on the far right.
They came up with other reasons, they
would talk about the texture of the pantyhose,
or you know, I like the way it's slightly more opaque than the other pantyhose.
But, in fact, all the panty hose were identical.
They we're the same brand, same model.
So, you know [UNKNOWN] subjects hadn't been told this,
but clearly these people were kind of straining to
come up with a reason for having done what
they had done for a reason they didn't understand.
Now a lot of experimentation, has been done on unconscious
motivation or motivation that we're not aware of using subliminal techniques.
That is, presenting information in a way that does
not enter the conscious mind, but still does influence behavior.
typically, you would flash the information so briefly on a screen
say, that the person is not aware of having seen it.
But sometimes it does influence behavior.
One study in particular that I think is worth talking about.
Now, subjects were brought in, and they were told, here's a hand grip.
The harder you squeeze it, the more money you're going to make.
And on each trial, it will be randomly determined, whether what you earned.
Whether the maximum payoff was a penny or a, a, pound.
This is in England, okay, so it's a penny or a pound.
A pound is of course a whole lot more than a penny.
Now, as the subjects looked at the computer screen.
Where they were going to see a guage of
how forcefully they were, they were squeezing the grip.
Before they gripped, the, the grip, a pattern appeared on the screen.
It was just a, a kind of, abstract, circular pattern.
For a fraction of a second, but long enough to see and then that would be
replaced in the, in the same circumference by an image of a coin it would be either a
penny or a pound and then that would
be replaced again by the pattern that was initially
there, so the image of the coin was
sandwiched in between the two appearances of this pattern.
And in some of the trials, it was done subliminally.
With the, the coin was shown so briefly that
there was no conscious awareness of having seen the coin.
What they found in, in those cases is that even when people weren't aware of having
seen the coin, when the pound was shown, the people did tend to squeeze the grip.
Harder, so, first of all, there was, there was that influence.
Again, evidence that, that unconsciously things we're
not aware of can, can influence our motivation.
But there's another interesting dimension to this study because it was a
brain scan study and they were scanning a part of the brain.
That's associated with motivation and emotion and they found two things
first of all they found that when they did leave the coin up their long enough
for it to inter consciousness so people actually aware of whether they had
seen a penny or a pound then what they found in this brain region.
Was that it got more active when a pound was shown than when a penny was shown.
Okay, this is when they're actually conscious of, of the, of seeing the coin.
And, and they did squeeze harder in the case of seeing the pound.
What's interesting to me is they, they found the same asymmetry.
In the case of, of the subliminal presentation of the coin.
So when people aren't aware of having seen the coin,
they aren't consciously aware of it, that same brain region shows
that asymmetry that is, when the pound is shown, there's more
activity in that brain region than when the penny is shown.
Now what this suggests, and this is just
one interpretation, but it's plausible and interesting, is that
maybe, you know, that the conscious perception just
doesn't matter at all in a situation like this.
In other words, the real motivational action
is happening there in the physical brain.
And the more activated this particular region gets,
the harder the person is going to squeeze the grip.
This region gets activated, sends a signal to squeeze the grip.
And in some cases, the person becomes conscious of, of the activity in
the brain, because it's that strong, or it lasts that long or whatever.
And in those cases, the person may kind of, in
a sense, become aware of the motivation and even own it.
The person may say, and I don't know
[UNKNOWN] if, you know, in this experiment, they
didn't ask this question apparently, but the person
could conceivably say, well you know, I felt.
You know, when I saw the coin it, you
know I, I, I obviously decided to squeeze harder.
I felt motivated so I squeezed harder.
But maybe the, the conscious experience of seeing the
coin actually didn't add anything to the motivation at all.
And all the action is in the, the strictly physical machine.
This interpretation of the findings is not one
that the authors of the paper themselves put forward.
The did emphasize that as they put it, consistently,
the same basal forebrain region
underpinned subliminal and conscious motivation.
But they didn't get into the various
possible interpretations of, of that really interesting fact.
Now before we finish up this lecture, I want to
bring up one more finding from this split-brain stuff.
There's a kind of experiment you can do with people, where you show them
like dozens of pictures, and the pictures tell a kind of coherent story like.
Guy gets up in the morning, gets ready to
go to work, goes to work, and then, you show
them a second bunch of pictures including a lot
of the ones you, you showed them the first time.
But, also including some other ones.
And you ask them, with each picture is this, was this in the original group?
Did we show you this the first time around?
And there's two kinds of new pictures that have been added to the series.
One is pictures that, that weren't shown to the
person but make sense and fit into that plot line.
So it would be a different picture of the same guy getting ready to
go to work or a different picture of him driving to work or something.
And then, there are also pictures that don't
make any sense in terms of the narrative.
The guy's out playing golf.
He's going to the zoo or something like that.
Now, what happens with anatomically normal people whose,
whose brain hemispheres are still connected, is they
say you know, the, the, the, pictures that
are obviously don't fit, they, they easily reject.
You know, no, he wasn't at the zoo, no he wasn't playing golf.
But, a fair number of the pictures that make narrative sense that fit into
the storyline they'll say yeah, yeah, I saw that, even though they in fact didn't.
Now, when they do this with split-brain patients, they
find that the left brain does that same thing.
Does what an anatomically normal person would do.
But when they, when they show these pictures to the right brain
and then, and then have the, the, the right brain kind of discard
pictures in the second round that weren't part of the first round, what they find
is that the right brain is, you know, strictly accurate.
It not only discards the pictures that obviously don't fit, it also discards the
pictures that make narrative sense, but weren't
part of the original series of pictures.
So what this suggests is, first of all,
the right brain is, is, is about literal truth
and, and, and detailed orientation, it sees in the
trees but not necessarily the force whereas the left
brain is more about kind of the gist of the story, the overall plot line and it
may even be willing to live with a certain
amount of embellishment, if the embellishment fits the story.
And, that makes sense in a way because the left
brain is after all responsible for telling stories to the world.
It generates the language.
It's the part of the brain that is going to say,
well I saw a guy you know, he got up, he went
to work, and so on, and the main thing is that
you get the story line more or less right, and it's coherent.
That's much more important than paying attention to
every single detail as you observe the guide.
The main thing is to have a story to tell that's more or less true.
Okay, and so it, in that sense, it, it makes sense
that the, the left brain focuses on the overall plot line.
But remember, the left brain doesn't just tell stories about other people.
About a guy who got up and went to work.
The left brain also tells stories about ourselves to the world.
It, it, it does kind of, the presentation of
ourselves to the world through what it says about us.
And, and what it says that implicitly reflects upon us.
And you know, we've already discovered that the left brain is
capable of, apparently, of buying into massive fabrications.
So you know, it's worth exploring a
little more, what kinds of stories in anatomically
normal people, we do tell about ourselves, and how true the are, or are not.
And in the next lecture we're going to do some of that.
We're going to look at our presentation of ourselves.
The stories we tell about ourselves.
How true are they, or aren't they.
And it's going to turn out that, that subject ties into a much
large subject that we're going to spend most of the next lecture on.
And that subject is this emerging theory of the mind, that I eluded to earlier.
That a growing number of pyschologists are buying into.
And this is a theory of mind called the Modular Theory of the Mind.
And some versions of it have no place at all for the self.
At least not, in anything like the way we've normally conceived of the self.
So, you know, if you ask the question, well wait, if the
Buddhists are right, you know, there are deeds, but there is no doer.
There are thoughts, but there is no thinker then, then, how do the deeds get
done, what decides what deeds get done, how do the thoughts get generated.
Well, the theory we're going to talk about in the next lecture is
the best candidate I'm aware of in modern psychology for answering that question.
So I'll see you next time.
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