The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self (32 page)

In both ecstatic seizures and the use of psychedelic drugs, one of the most intriguing effects is the change in the perception of time. Recall Prince Myshkin’s words in
The Idiot:
“I feel then as if I understood those amazing words—‘There shall be no more time’”; or
Zachary Ernst’s and Albéric’s sense that time slowed down during their seizures. Bud Craig’s model provides an explanation.

In Craig’s model, the anterior insula integrates interoceptive, exteroceptive, and the body’s state of action to create a “global emotional moment” once every 125 milliseconds. It’s these global emotional moments strung together that give us a continuous sense of self, even though the moments themselves are discrete, he argues. It’s like watching a movie—even though the cinema screen is displaying twenty-four discrete frames per second, we perceive a seamless continuum. A hyperactive anterior insula could potentially generate these global emotional moments faster and faster, leading to a subjective sense of time dilation. This is not unlike a high-speed camera shooting hundreds or thousands of frames per second—when played back at normal speed, we get to see everything in slow motion, as if time has slowed down. Craig also posits that
the anterior insula might have a buffer that can hold a few such global emotional moments—a few that have just passed, the immediate present, and a few that are predicted to come. If you think of yourself as a series of such global emotional moments spanning decades, then the buffer is like a small window a few seconds wide. This is, of course, entirely unproven—but the idea gets to the heart of what philosophers are debating when it comes to those who say there is a self and those who say there isn’t. For example, philosopher Dan Zahavi’s notion of a minimal self necessitates the presence of a mental structure that can hold in place a few moments of subjective experience—past, present, and future—to construct the subject of experiences. Could the anterior insula be providing this mental structure? It’s an intriguing speculation at this point.

If the anterior insula is predicting future states, then it helps explain yet another commonality between ecstatic auras and
psychedelic experiences, which is the feeling of certainty, as if everything is the way it should be. This fits well with the predictive or Bayesian brain hypothesis, which we encountered in the context of autism and depersonalization disorder—the idea that our perceptions may be the brain’s best guess as to the causes of sensations, something it needs to do in order to minimize surprise and maintain the body in homeostatic equilibrium.

Here, the hypothesis is that the insula is a key brain region involved in predicting the most likely cause of the various external and internal sensory signals it integrates. If the prediction error is small, we feel good; if it is large, we feel anxious. And anxiety is the brain’s way of getting the body to respond—something is not quite right, and action is necessary. But like anything else, even this prediction error signal generator can go awry.

On one hand, it can lead to chronic anxiety or neuroticism.
In 2006, Martin Paulus and Murray Stein argued that chronic anxiety is the result of a malfunctioning anterior insula, as it constantly generates higher than normal prediction errors.
Picard posits that the opposite may be happening in ecstatic seizures. The electrical storm in the anterior insula may be disrupting the mechanism, resulting in few or no prediction errors. As a result, the person is left feeling as if nothing is wrong with the world, that everything makes sense, generating a feeling of absolute certainty.

Anil Seth agrees that this is a viable hypothesis. “In some ways the phenomenology of ecstatic seizures is the opposite of pathological anxiety,” he says. “You have this sense of complete, peaceful certainty, [whereas] anxiety is a pathological visceral uncertainty about everything as reflected in bodily state.”

It’s uncanny how these feelings of serene certainty, heightened
awareness, and a slowing of time also underpin accounts of mystical experiences. Picard’s patients certainly attributed religious meaning to their seizures. “Some of my patients told me that though they are agnostic, they could understand that after such a seizure you can have faith, belief, because it has some spiritual component,” she says. “Probably some people with mystical experiences actually had ecstatic seizures.”

This brings us to the curious paradox about such experiences: the subject has a heightened self-awareness of oneself and one’s environment while simultaneously feeling as if the boundary between oneself and the world has dissolved, leading to a feeling of oneness.

What’s happening? In his book
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi provides some clues. Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as “
joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life.” And flow encounters a similar paradox: the
loss of self-consciousness. As Csikszentmihalyi puts it, “
One item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention, because in normal life we spend so much time thinking about it: our own self. Here is a climber describing this aspect of the experience: ‘It’s a Zen feeling, like meditation or concentration. One thing you are after is the one-pointedness of mind. You can get your ego mixed up with climbing in all sorts of ways and it isn’t necessarily enlightening. But when things become automatic, it’s like an egoless thing, in a way.’”

Even though there is a loss of self-consciousness, Csikszentmihalyi adds, “
the optimal experience involves a very active role for the self.” That’s the paradox. The climber, for example, is intensely aware of every aspect of his body and the mountain face, and yet is claiming the cessation of some aspect of his self. In Csikszentmihalyi’s view the “loss of self-consciousness does not involve a loss of self, and certainly
not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness
of
the self. What slips below the threshold of awareness is the
concept
of self, the information we use to represent to ourselves who we are.”

So, it is the self that knows and obsesses about itself—the reflective, narrative, autobiographical self—that recedes, while the minimal, embodied self is fully present and engaged. “It is phenomenologically interesting that you can have these coexisting experiences of heightened self-awareness and heightened connection [with the world],” Seth told me. “To me that sort of implies that the experience of the division between the body and the world is perhaps more generally labile and flexible than we often assume.”

A few millennia ago, a monk made the point that not only is the division between self and others flexible and labile but that there is no such thing as a self; if we were to go looking for a self that underpins our experience of “I,” “me,” and “mine,” we’d find nothing, and it’s our attachment to this false notion of an enduring self that’s the cause of human suffering, This brings us to a place where I began my journeys for this book—Sarnath, India, where the Buddha, as the legend goes, gave his first sermons after he understood the nature of the self. We will end where it all begins, when we simply ask ourselves: “Who am I?”

EPILOGUE

T
he city of Varanasi gets its name from the rivers Varuna and Asi. Both rivers empty into the Ganga—India’s longest and most sacred river. Varanasi’s famous ghats—steps that descend to the riverbank—stretch along a crescent, from where the Varuna meets the Ganga on the northern end to where the Asi joins the river farther south. The city too meets the Ganga—the steps of its ghats leading pilgrims and ordinary folk alike down to the water’s edge.

Near the confluence of the Varuna and the Ganga is a place called Rajghat. The Archeological Survey of India has, over decades, unearthed the remains of an ancient city in Rajghat, some of which date back to the sixth century BCE. Legend has it that around this time a monk, a former prince, crossed the Ganga, reached Rajghat, and then walked a distance of six miles or so to Sarnath, where he gave his first-ever sermon. The monk, who was in his mid-thirties, came to be called the Buddha.

The walk from Rajghat to Sarnath in the Buddha’s time may have
been idyllic. When I visited, it was monsoon season. The villagers advised me against walking the mud path. I took to the road in an auto-rickshaw. India spilled over onto the road from Rajghat to Sarnath—shops selling handwoven wicker baskets, terra-cotta urns and jars, stone tiles, and the obligatory government-licensed liquor. A young boy—about three or four years old—was trying to fly a kite, but the length of the string was hardly enough to get the kite off the ground. Somewhere midway through the journey, after we crossed the
purana
(“old” in Hindi) bridge, the road changed from asphalt to one paved with stones—making for a bone-jarring ride in the auto-rickshaw, its tiny wheels catching every gap between the not-so-closely-spaced stones. Fetid pools of rainwater lined the road; cars and buses squelched their way through, creating a muddy mess. I couldn’t help feeling that the walk might have been better.

When the road reached Sarnath, everything quieted down. It was back to smoother asphalt. The trees lining the roads were old, and sat well amid the region’s history. I felt an anticipation approaching a sacred place, but that was jarred by the sight of a garish temple festooned with bright flags, and a larger-than-life statue of the Buddha sitting cross-legged, facing other similarly sized statues of his disciples. Plaques of black granite, each etched with words from the Buddha’s sermons, in the languages of Buddhist countries worldwide, surrounded the seated figures.

Later in the afternoon, I went to the quiet environs of the Deer Park nearby, and sat beside the Dhamekh Stupa, a staggering Buddhist reliquary nearly 100 feet wide at the foundations and 150 feet tall, its base clad in stones bearing inscriptions. The top half of the stupa was layered in brick. The word “Dhamekh” is derived from Pali, the language of the Buddha’s time, and means the “beholding of the dharma,”
the essence of which was preached by the Buddha in his first sermon at the Deer Park.

I was shielded from the afternoon sun by the stupa; its shade seemed to still the mind. I let myself imagine a time, 2,500 years ago, when a thirty-five-year-old monk preached his radical message of no-self.

Recall the allegory of the man we encountered in the prologue—he who had his body parts replaced by those from a corpse. When the man asked a group of Buddhist monks whether he existed or not, they put the question back to him: who are you? To which the man replied that he wasn’t even sure he was a person.

The monks pointed out to him that he had begun realizing that the “I”—his self—is not real. Sure, he had begun doubting whether he existed or not, but the truth is that he had always lacked a self. There was no difference between his old body and his new one, they told him. The feeling “this is my body” was brought about by the aggregation of elements that constituted the body. The man saw the truth of it and was liberated in the Buddhist sense of the word—he was freed of all attachment to things illusory.

I must admit that in 2011, when I visited Sarnath, pondering the Buddhist idea of no-self was intellectually daunting. A lot of what I understood by the term “self” remained an intuition—the kind that we all have about ourselves. What did “no-self” mean when confronted with the intuitive solidity of one’s self? When it comes to theories of the self, the target of inquiry is a self that has a perceived unity. There is the unity to everything one is and perceives in any given moment. My sense of being in a body, owning the body, feeling as if I am the
agent of my actions, the feeling that everything I perceive is being perceived by me—all of this has a feeling of coherence. There is a single entity that is the subject of experiences, and all the experiences are being had by
me
. This is what philosophers call synchronic unity.

There is also a feeling that this entity endures over time. When you recall your childhood memories, they feel like your memories, and the emotions and perceptions they beget feel like they belong to you. The same is true if you imagine yourself in the future. While we know that we have grown up and changed over time, we have the feeling that underlying all that is the same someone or something, maybe changing, evolving. Philosophers call this diachronic unity.

Both synchronic and diachronic unity were used to argue for the existence of a self very effectively by philosophers of the Nyaya tradition in India (
nyaya
means “logic”), whose earliest texts date back to 200 BCE. Where synchronic unity was concerned, they argued that there must be a self that could collate the various sensations (touch, sight, and hearing, for example) and create a unified perception.

Their position on diachronic unity was more persuasive. They argued that in order for memory to be coherent—meaning that whenever I recall something, it feels like
my
memory—there must be a self. This was a claim that relied on the argument that I cannot recollect your memories and you cannot recall mine. So, if there is no self, then the memory of a past event cannot be recalled as belonging to whoever or whatever is doing the recalling. For memory to function as it does, there must be a self, went their argument. “I’m
not
a big believer in the self, but I think that is the most solid argument that can be made for the self,” Georges Dreyfus, a philosopher and scholar of Tibetan Buddhism at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, told me.

So, broadly speaking, philosophers and neuroscientists fall into two camps: those who claim the self is real and those who say it’s not. The big question for them is this: is there an entity that exists that can be called the self, which gives rise to this synchronic and diachronic unity? One hard-nosed way of thinking of the self is to ask whether it can exist independent of all else—as a fundamental part of reality, giving it a unique place in the basic categories, or ontology, of things that make up reality—a self that could not be explained away as being constituted of things with a more basic ontological status. Often, this type of ontologically distinct self is what’s being denied by those in the no-self camp—and it’s rather easy to do so. No wonder, then, that the pro-self camp thinks it’s a straw-man argument.

The experiences of the people in this book, who are suffering from what can be called
maladies of the self
, as well as the neuroscience that explains their experiences, bring us partway to some answers. Aspects of the self that seemingly give us both synchronic and diachronic unity—our narrative, our sense of being agents of our actions and initiators of our thoughts, our sense of ownership of body parts, our sense that we are our emotions, our sense of being located in a volume of space that is our body and possessing a geometric perspective that originates behind our eyes—all of these can be argued as comprising the self-as-object. These properties can be thought of as constructed. The question is whether there is a constructor—or merely the appearance of a constructor.

It’s clear that even when these aspects start falling apart, there is still a self-as-subject—what philosophers would call a phenomenal subject—that is consciously experienced. There is still an “I” that is suffering from schizophrenia, is depersonalized, is dealing with autism, is ecstatic, disowns body parts, has out-of-body experiences,
loses its narrative, and even denies its own existence. Who or what is that “I”?

A similar approach to getting at the essence of the self was poetically illustrated by Adi Shankara, an eighth-century Indian philosopher and theologian of the Advaita (non-dualist) tradition. His poem, called “Nirvana Shaktam” (the song of liberation in six stanzas), begins with these lines:

I am not the mind, nor the intellect, nor any entity that identifies self with the ears, tongue, nose or the eyes; Not even perceived by space, earth, light or the wind.

Each stanza of the poem ends with an answer to the question: who am I? This answer becomes the refrain, building up toward a forceful final stanza. Keeping aside the Advaitan answer for now, the poem’s power comes from its assertions of what I am
not
—I am not my mind, my intellect, my body, my senses, my emotions, I am neither virtue nor hatred, I am not my wealth or my relationships, I wasn’t even born.

Who am I?

It’s this “I” that lies at the heart of the self-versus-no-self debate. What do we make of this self-as-subject, self-as-knower, the experience of subjectivity? Where does that come from? Is there a self or not?

The Buddhist answer—regardless of which of the numerous traditions of Buddhism you pose this question to—is
no
: there is no such thing as a self. If you were to go looking for it (via introspection and meditation), Buddhism argues, you’d arrive at the insight that the self is impermanent, fluctuating, and its perceived unity an appearance.

Within the Western philosophical tradition, eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume is often quoted for his words:
“
When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” It’s commonly argued that Hume falls into the no-self camp (though philosopher Galen Strawson thinks otherwise, as he argues in his book
The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity
).

Philosopher Daniel Dennett also belongs to the no-self camp: “
Each normal individual of this species makes a
self
. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds and, like other creatures, it doesn’t have to know what it’s doing; it just does it. . . . Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us.” Dennett says the self “
is the same kind of thing as a center of gravity [in physics], an abstraction that is, in spite of its abstractness, tightly coupled to the physical world.” Any physical system has a center of gravity—but it’s not a thing, but a property of the system. There is no one atom or molecule that makes up the center of gravity; nonetheless this mathematical abstraction has real consequences. The self, says Dennett, is the center of
narrative
gravity: a “
fiction, posited in order to unify and make sense of an otherwise bafflingly complex collection of actions, utterances, fidgets, complaints, promises, and so forth, that make up a person.”

In one sense, the Buddhists, Hume, Dennett, and many others could be categorized as
bundle theorists
: the self, with its perceived unity at any given moment and over time, is “
entirely fabricated from the bundle of discrete mental phenomena.”

Thomas Metzinger is also a no-self theorist. We have already encountered his position. He posits that an ongoing biological process,
rooted deeply in the body, gives rise to a representation—a self-model—of the organism in the brain. The contents of this dynamic self-model include everything from the body and its emotional state to sensations and thoughts. The content of your self-model makes up everything you can consciously experience about yourself. Crucially, the conscious self-model is transparent, which means that we don’t experience the self as a representation, even if intellectually we believe (and can maybe someday prove) it to be so. “It is a very robust, reality-rendering mechanism,” Metzinger told me. To him, the experience of being a phenomenal self—the self as subjectively experienced—comes from being conscious of the interactions between the self-model and the world-model. Metzinger’s ideas do away with the self as being an entity or a thing that would persist outside of the living brain. But the exact neural processes that could give rise to the subjectivity as modeled by Metzinger are yet unclear.

Another perspective comes from Antonio Damasio. Recall his framework of the protoself, the core self, and the autobiographical self: these components comprise the self-as-object. To this he adds a self-as-knower or self-as-subject—some neural process in the brain that gives us the experience of the self as something that knows itself, and gives the mind subjectivity: “
When the brain manages to introduce a knower in the mind, subjectivity follows.” To put it simply, the self-as-knower makes us conscious. Philosopher John Searle, in his critique of Damasio’s
Self Comes to Mind
, argued that this is circular reasoning: “
The self is introduced to explain consciousness, but if it is to explain consciousness we cannot assume that the self is already conscious.”