In my recent Internet travels I was pointed to a fascinating excerpt from “The Ethical Brain,” by UC-Santa Barbara brain scientist Michael Gazzaniga. In it he discusses the brain’s apparently built-in hardware for integrating new knowledge and input into a unified personal storyline, a congruent sense of self. In many cases new input is dramatically re-interpreted to maintain a prior conviction, or justifications that never existed are simply made up so as to not upset the mind’s self-image.
I put down my beer and said, “Damn! That sounds a lot like the infamous rationalization hamster!”
Over the past thirty years I have been studying a phenomenon that was first revealed during work with split-brain patients, who’d had the connections between the two brain hemispheres severed to relieve severe epilepsy. My colleagues and I weren’t looking for the answer to the question of what makes us seem unified, but we think we found it. It follows from the idea that if the brain is modular, a part of the brain must be monitoring all the networks’ behaviors and trying to interpret their individual actions in order to create a unified idea of the self. Our best candidate for this brain area is the “left-hemisphere interpreter.”Beyond the finding, described in the last chapter, that the left hemisphere makes strange input logical, it includes a special region that interprets the inputs we receive every moment and weaves them into stories to form the ongoing narrative of our self-image and our beliefs. I have called this area of the left hemisphere the interpreter because it seeks explanations for internal and external events and expands on the actual facts we experience to make sense of, or interpret, the events of our life.
Experiments on split-brain patients reveal how readily the left brain interpreter can make up stories and beliefs. In one experiment, for example, when the word walk was presented only to the right side of a patient’s brain, he got up and started walking. When he was asked why he did this, the left brain (where language is stored and where the word walk was not presented) quickly created a reason for the action: “I wanted to go get a Coke.”
The left-hemisphere interpreter is not only a master of belief creation, but it will stick to its belief system no matter what. Patients with “reduplicative paramnesia,” because of damage to the brain, believe that there are copies of people or places. In short, they will remember another time and mix it with the present. As a result, they will create seemingly ridiculous, but masterful, stories to uphold what they know to be true due to the erroneous messages their damaged brain is sending their intact interpreter. One such patient believed the New York hospital where she was being treated was actually her home in Maine. When her doctor asked how this could be her home if there were elevators in the hallway, she said, “Doctor, do you know how much it cost me to have those put in?” The interpreter will go to great lengths to make sure the inputs it receives are woven together to make sense—even when it must make great leaps to do so. Of course, these do not appear as “great leaps” to the patient, but rather as clear evidence from the world around him or her.
Any time our left brain is confronted with information that does not jibe with our self-image, knowledge, or conceptual framework, our left-hemisphere interpreter creates a belief to enable all incoming information to make sense and mesh with our ongoing idea of our self. The interpreter seeks patterns, order, and causal relationships.
Imagine that – dedicated neural circuitry runs away with rationalization even in the face of contradictory evidence because it’s the only way it can deal with a threat to the mind’s identity. By way of example, I’ll cite a discussion from Donlak at Paradigm Shift (hat tip to In Mala Fide):
Adam: Ok, text her this: M or E?
Adam: Don’t worry it doesn’t have to be real – she’ll text back if she’s interested in you, and ask you what you just asked me. Just repeat the question.
Billy: And when she answers?
Adam: Say, yeah, I’ll enjoy M better, good call. Then ignore her texts until tomorrow.
Billy: Why would I ignore them? This is stupid.
Adam: Her hamster wheel will be spinning trying to figure out what you were talking about, she’ll wonder why you’re being so cryptic, she’ll be thinking about you the entire time. She’ll wonder if E or M means girls.
Billy:I don’t want to play games with this girl, I want her to like me for me.
Billy then texts her to go out, to which an hour later she replies that she’s busy tonight. He of course asks her out tomorrow. No reply to his text.
Running game isn’t about not being you, it’s about getting the chance for her to see the real you down the road
This example also brings up a fallacy of game haters, that game or the man who runs it is “fake.” In fact, when used properly to augment a man’s personality, it’s the only thing that can give him the chance to be _real_ – by building social value with people, the traits and quirks of his real personality will be accepted when it’s time to bring them out.
…which is a topic for a critical future post.