Authors: Rudolph E. Tanzi
It’s good to be aware, but self-awareness is even better.
I am angry
gets you only so far if your aim is to control your anger. Knowing where your anger comes from adds the component of self-awareness. It allows you to see a pattern in your behavior. It takes into account
that past outbursts haven’t worked out so well. Maybe a spouse has left you in the past, or someone called the police. Once you bring in self-awareness, reality shifts. You start to take control; the power to change is dawning.
Awareness irrefutably penetrates the animal world. Elephants gather around a baby elephant that has died. They linger there and even return to sites of past deaths a year later. They huddle close to the mother who has lost her calf. If empathy means anything outside our human definition of it, elephants appear to empathize with one another. For all we know, a tiny hummingbird migrating thousands of miles from Mexico to Minnesota may be aware of what route it is taking, including visual signposts, the movement of the stars, and even the earth’s magnetic field.
But we ascribe self-awareness only to ourselves. (This pride of possession may topple, however. When a dog is being scolded for peeing on the carpet, it looks for all the world as if it is ashamed. That would be a self-aware response.) We are aware of being aware. In other words, our level of self-consciousness transcends simple learning and memory in the brain.
Reductionist neuroscience does not explain how consciousness can allow us to separate ourselves from the activity of the brain. Reductionism gathers data and uncovers facts. In his research, Rudy wears a reductionist hat, since his primary field is Alzheimer’s and the genes linked to that disease. But reductionist neuroscience doesn’t explain who is actually experiencing the feelings and thoughts. There is a gulf between awareness and self-awareness. “I have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s” is a statement made from awareness; someone who is unaware would not notice that something is going wrong with their memory. “I hate and fear that I have Alzheimer’s” comes from self-awareness. So the facts of the disease embrace all three states—unconsciousness, awareness, and self-awareness—without explaining how we relate to those three
states. The brain is just doing what it’s doing. It takes a mind to relate to that.
Of course, this “awareness of being aware” is also made possible by the brain. We do not claim to know, in reductionist terms, where awareness and self-awareness might be located in brain maps; they are likely not confined to one specific region. No one has solved this puzzle yet. While the brain produces feelings and thoughts that you identify with, super brain calls upon your ability to be the observer, or witness, who is detached from the thoughts and feelings delivered by the brain.
If a rage-aholic cannot stand back and observe what is happening when he has an outburst, then his anger is out of control. He is unconscious of where it comes from or what to do about it until a degree of detachment enters the picture. In brain scans, various centers in the cerebral cortex light up or grow dim, depending on whether someone has control over their emotions. But for many people, perhaps most, the thought of detachment from their emotions triggers a scary vision of a sterile, bland existence, devoid of passion.
But emotions change depending on how you are.
Unconsciousness:
In this state, the emotions are in control. They rise spontaneously and run their own course. Hormones are triggered, leading too often to the stress response. If indulged in, unconscious emotions bring a state of imbalance in the brain. The higher decision-making centers are weakened. Impulses of fear and anger then have no controller. Destructive behavior may result; emotional habits become wired into fixed neural pathways.
Awareness:
In this state, the person is able to say, “I am feeling X,” which is the first step toward bringing X into balance. The higher brain offers judgment, putting the emotion into perspective. Memory tells the person how this emotion worked out in the past,
whether for good or ill. A more integrated state follows, with higher and lower circuitry of the brain adding their input. When you stop being out of control emotionally and can say, “I am feeling X,” you’ve reached the first step of detachment.
Self-awareness:
When you are aware, you could be anybody. But when you are self-aware, you become unique. I am feeling X turns into What do I think about X? Where is it taking me? What does it mean? Someone who is angry can stop there, with almost no self-awareness. An irritable boss who chews out his subordinates year after year is certainly aware that he gets angry. But without self-awareness, he won’t see what he is doing to himself and to others. He might come home one day and be flabbergasted that his wife has walked out. Once self-awareness dawns in you, the questions you can ask about yourself, about how you think and feel, have no limit. Self-aware questions are the keys that make consciousness expand, and when that happens, the possibilities are infinite.
Emotions are not the enemy of self-awareness. Every emotion plays its part in the whole; they are needed to attach meaning to events. Being emotional makes a memory stick in the mind. It’s much easier to remember your first romantic kiss than to remember the price of unleaded gas that same night. Because they are “sticky” in this way, emotions are not detached. But detachment becomes part of the larger picture; it allows you to step back from your emotions (which is why every first kiss doesn’t lead to a baby). This may sound coldly clinical, but detachment has its own joy. Once your experiences are not so sticky, you can transcend them to reach a higher level of experience where all of life is meaningful. By being mindful of your thoughts and feelings, you start creating new pathways that register not just anger, fear, happiness, and curiosity but all the spiritual feelings of bliss, compassion, and wonder. Reality making has no upper limit. When we assume that
reality is a given, what we’re really accepting isn’t the world “out there” but our own limitations “in here.”
How Ego Interferes
If self-awareness does have an enemy, it’s the ego, which seriously constricts your awareness when it steps beyond its appointed function. That function is vital, as a glance at the brain immediately shows. While billions of neurons are remodeling trillions of synapses in an always evolving neural network, your ego leads you to believe that all is static and calm in your skull. This is not the case. Without a sense of constancy, you would be exposed to the brain’s tumultuous process of reshaping itself as it responds to every experience you have, waking, sleeping, or dreaming. (The brain is highly active as you sleep, although much of this activity remains mysterious.)
Once new experiences have registered on the brain, your ego assimilates them. You are the
I
to whom new things are happening, adding to a storehouse of pleasure and pain, fear and desire that has been building up since infancy. Knowing that the brain’s remodeling is always having an effect is important, even though your ego gives the illusion of constancy.
When Rudy and his wife Dora were raising their daughter Lyla, they decided that in her first year of infancy, Lyla would never be left to cry alone and unattended. Other parents criticized this decision, saying it would spoil the baby and turn Dora and Rudy into sleepless zombies, but they kept the promise they’d made to themselves. For Lyla, as for all of us, infancy lays the basic foundation of the neural network. Although the process takes place out of sight, a worldview is being shaped, and years later whenever a new experience of pleasure or pain occurs, it will be compared to the old ones before it finds its place in memory.
Dora and Rudy wanted to provide Lyla’s brain with a basis of
happiness, security, and acceptance, not discontent, abandonment, and rejection. Of course this approach required more work than attending the baby when it cried. But in infancy, a baby’s whole world is her parents, and as she grew up, Lyla would have a deep-seated reason to view the world as accepting and nurturing. The world isn’t fixed. It exists as we experience it and absorb it into our worldview. So the objection that Lyla would be unprepared for harsh reality wasn’t valid. Like all of us, she will face the world according to the picture she has built up in her brain. (Lyla has turned out to be a very happy toddler who radiates the love she has been receiving.)
The ego is absolutely necessary for this function of integrating all kinds of experiences, but it is prone to go too far.
Egotism
is the common term for extreme self-centeredness, but that’s not the issue here. Everyone is caught in a paradoxical situation with the ego. You can’t function without one, but making everything personal can turn into ego delusion. “I, me, mine” overrides every other consideration. Instead of having a point of view and strong personal values (the good side of the ego), the egotist winds up defending his biases and prejudices just because he holds them (the bad side of the ego). The ego pretends to be the self. But the true self is awareness. When you shut out any aspect of experience by saying “That’s not me” or “I don’t want to think about it” or “This has nothing to do with me,” you are excluding something from your awareness, building up an ego image rather than opening up to the endless possibilities of reality making.
Such narrow-mindedness comes at the price of reduced or imbalanced brain activity, which can be seen in brain imaging. New experiences equal new neural networks. They cause remodeling, which keeps the brain healthy. By contrast, when people tell themselves
I don’t show my emotions
or
I don’t like to think too much
, they shut down regions of the brain. The ego makes these rationalizations to constrict a person’s awareness, which in turn constricts brain activity. Consider how some males equate
I am a man
with
A man doesn’t show his emotions
. Leaving aside the rich existence that emotions provide, this attitude runs counter to evolution. The brain uses emotions to serve our instinctive needs, geared at ensuring survival. You must use your emotions to empower your passion for reaching personal goals. You must utilize your intellect to strategize, and finally you must detach your awareness to acquire the sobriety needed to achieve those goals. In other words, you need to cycle between the passion generated by your fears and desires and the rational thoughts associated with self-control and discipline. Charles Lindbergh had to possess drive and enthusiasm to attempt a record-breaking flight over the Atlantic, while at the same time being cool and objective enough to handle his plane while in flight. We are all like him.
The brain is fluid and dynamic. But it loses its balance when it is ordered to ignore or change its natural process. When you constrict your awareness, you constrict the brain and freeze your reality into fixed patterns.
EGO BLOCKS
TYPICAL THOUGHTS
THAT CONSTRICT YOUR AWARENESS
I’m not the kind who does X.
I want to be in my comfort zone.
This will make me look bad.
I just don’t want to; I don’t need a reason.
Let somebody else do it.
I know what I think. Don’t try to change my mind.
I know better than you do.
I’m not good enough.
This is beneath me.
I’m going to live forever.
Notice that some of these thoughts make you look bigger while others make you look smaller. But in all of them, an image is being defended. The ego’s true function is to help you build a strong, dynamic self (there will be more about how to do so in a later chapter), but when it intervenes to protect you unnecessarily, it is masking fear and insecurity. A middle-aged man who suddenly buys a red sports car might be feeling insecure, as could a middle-aged woman who pays for plastic surgery when the first crow’s-feet appear around her eyes. But defending your ego is much subtler than that: the defenses we put up generally escape our notice. Instead of moving forward in the project of reality making, we wind up fortifying the same old reality that makes us feel safe. For some people self-importance is safe; for others it is humbleness. You can feel small inside and disguise it with an outward bravado, or you can take the same feeling and paper it over with timidity. There’s no set formula. If you close off certain experiences, you don’t know what you’re missing.
But individual experience counts less than the brain’s amazing agility in receiving, transmitting, and processing experiences. If you don’t participate, the things you refuse to see will still affect you, but the effect will be unconscious. We’ve all known people who showed no grief when someone close to them died. Grief still had its way, but everything went on out of sight, an underground skirmish that continued despite the ego deciding “I don’t want to feel.”
Reality making is reciprocal. You make it, while it makes you. At the neurobiological level, excitatory neurotransmitters like glutamate are engaged in a constant yin-and-yang balancing act with inhibitory neurotransmitters like glycine, as your emotions and intellect play out the dance that creates your personality and ego. All of this provides you with a sense of who you are and what your response to life is at any given moment. Moreover, from your time in the womb, every sensory experience creates synapses, which consolidate your memories, laying down the foundation of your neural network. Those earliest-forming synapses were shaping you. Think
of your response to a common household spider. Theoretically, you can have any response, but in reality your response is ingrained, and it seems natural once you have wired it in.
Spiders disgust me
, or
Spiders don’t bother me
, or
I’m deathly afraid of spiders
—they are all personal selections that you have shaped but that also shape you. That’s completely natural. The problem arises when the ego intervenes and turns a personal response into a fact:
Spiders are disgusting, spiders are harmless, spiders are frightening
. As statements of fact, these remarks are completely unreliable; they have turned a personal judgment into an “objective” reality.