The Real Me and the Real You

My main purpose in my social media is to help you make better sense of the world and your life in it. I do this primarily by sharing my scientific understanding and my personal experiences. My social media (just two blogs, here and here, and video channel) have now had over 900,000 visits. The main traffic is from search engines. This means that most of my readers are not followers but are finding my work because they are searching for insights not about me but about the topics I write about. And that is just the way I like it.

Perhaps the most fundamental question we have about ourselves and the world is, who am I? This question is of interest not just to me, but to whoever might read this essay.

What, exactly, is the real me? There is no easy answer to this question. Each of us consists of at least two general things: the self that we want to be, and the self that we are subconsciously.

Over the first of these we have a measure of control. We can control what we think, the decisions we make, the kinds of interactions we have with people, the things we say. This is generally the self that we present to the world. Some people think this is a false face, merely an image of what we want people to think about us. But we all know it is much more than this. It is the self that we want to be, not just how we want to appear.

Over the second of these we have less control. We can generally control what we say, but sometimes we blurt things out before we have a chance to think about them. Curses, for example, come from a different part of the brain than regular speech. Most of us cannot control our dreams, either. When we experience things that make us angry or lusty, our heartbeats and breathing become more rapid, and there are other physiological responses that I do not need to tell you about, even if we try to calm ourselves down. These things make up the self that we do not want to be, not merely the things we wish to keep hidden.

Over some things, we have an intermediate level of control. For example, my blood sugar is high, enough for me to require medication but not drastic intervention. I cannot completely control it. It is my cell membranes that do not absorb enough of it from my blood. The main thing I can do is to eat less sugar. Medication and eating less sugar has reduced my blood sugar down from the crisis level it used to be. Blood sugar level is the result both of things I can control and things I cannot.

I suggest that the real me, and the real you, are the first of these two. They are the most highly developed systems in our evolutionary history. The second “self” has an ancient origin that goes back at least to the origin of the vertebrates. At least, I think so. Do fishes get angry?

Another way of dividing ourselves up into the selves we want and the selves we hide is to consider the things over which our DNA has direct control. Our DNA does not control everything about our bodies. It controls the structure of our brains, nerves, muscles, bones, and systems such as the digestive system. It controls, basically, everything that is within our epidermis and mucous membranes. But it does not control what is outside of our bodies, which includes the things that are in our digestive system.

The contents of our intestines includes not just the partially-digested things that we have decided to eat (which is under our conscious control) but also trillions of bacteria and other microbes. We cannot control what those microbes do. They metabolize, to get energy and nutrients for themselves, and eject their wastes into our intestines. These wastes include carbon dioxide (odorless), methane (odorless), and hydrogen sulfide (the smell of farts). Though we can to a certain extent influence their timing, neither we nor our DNA can control our farts. The cosmos inside our intestines is a wild world over which we have no control other than diet (yogurt helps) and medicine.

And our digestive system responds not so much to us—our nervous system, or even our DNA—as to the wild world in our intestines. When the bacteria in the food produce a lot of gas, they expand the intestine. Local nerve networks take care of what happens next. Intestinal nerves detect the expansion, then cause the smooth muscles around the intestine to start contracting, which will push the food and the farts along further down the line. One result is that when a fart is on the way, you can’t stop it. Another result is that when you gotta go, you gotta go. Your brain can control the muscles at the end of the line, the sphincter muscles, to try to hold it in, but success is not guaranteed.

So another view of yourself is that the real you is what the DNA controls, and the secret you is what your bacteria do.

So when an honest biographer says, regarding the subject, which might be you or me, “he or she tells the true story, warts and all” (maybe farts and all), this is not really being honest. Warts are caused by viruses, and farts by bacteria. Your honest biography would be what your DNA does, and what you decide to do, rather than by the random, uncontrollable activities of your bacteria or your subconscious mind.

The bacteria and subconscious mind are not always bad. Having written what I just wrote, and living a more relaxed life, both the products of the real me, have an effect on what my subconscious mind and even my bacteria do.

I hope this helps. And tell your bacteria that I said hi.

Once again, I posted this essay on my science blog. But for this religion blog I can add, you are not responsible for your subconscious urges, but only for what you do in response to them. God help us.

Are We All Deluded?

Sam Kean’s new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain As Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery, is a gold mine of stories about the weird things that our brains can make us do, everything from cortical blindness to alien hand and walking dead syndromes. In people with cortical blindness, the eyes and optic nerves work fine, but the portion of the brain that consciously interprets vision is impaired. The brain has a whole separate set of nerves that process the emotional response to vision, however; people with cortical blindness can therefore smile in response to another person’s smile even though they cannot consciously see it. In alien hand syndrome, a person cannot recognize their own hand—usually the left one—as being part of his or her own body; and in walking dead syndrome, the person cannot recognize the body itself as his or her own.

Perhaps most important, although not the most interesting story in the book, was the experiment that demonstrated that our brain’s conscious decision to do something occurred after the subjects had begun to do the action. That is, the brain’s decision was actually a post-hoc rationalization. This calls into question the entire concept of free will. It appears that we choose to do something only after our subconscious minds have decided to do that thing. Of course, this does not mean we have no conscious control over ourselves. Our conscious minds can prevent us from doing the things we have started to do; that is, however much free will is called into question, self-control is certainly real. As the author says, we may not have free will, but we have free won’t. Also, our conscious minds can create a general pattern of thought that, while it may not control every individual action, certainly influences our general behavior.

The main point of all these fascinating stories is, in the author’s own words: “But if the history of neuroscience proves anything, it’s that any circuit for any mental attribute—up to and including our sense of being alive—can fail, if just the right spots [of the brain] suffer damage…your actions, your desires to act, and your conviction of having acted can all be decoupled and manipulated.”

I have, through reading this book, come to understand myself better. Temporal lobe epilepsy includes the experience of auras that are religious in their effects and intensity—religious delusions. While religion does not consist only of delusion, it has been stimulated by delusion. Famous religious figures, such as the Apostle Paul, Mohammed, and Joan of Arc, and writers such as Dostoevsky to whom religion was of overwhelming importance, showed symptoms of epilepsy. Though I do not have epilepsy, I have some symptoms that suggest my right temporal lobe might be hyperactive in something of the same way as certain epileptics. For example, throughout my life I have had experiences of religious ecstasy. I also have to take an anticonvulsant medication that is prescribed, in higher dosage, to epileptics. And I have a mild case of polygraphia—the compulsion to write everything down, all day every day—that some epileptics also have. Finally, there might be a genetic basis for this; my paternal grandfather was religiously crazy. Somehow just knowing this makes me feel more comfortable inside my skin.

Kean’s book, like the books of Mary Roach, show that the best modern science writing is based on stories and are written to be fun. Filled with fragments and imprecise language, this book would make some science editors howl, but is exactly the kind of book that would make anyone want to learn more about science. This is the kind of science book that I have not yet written myself.

The feeling I bring away from Kean’s book is liberation. I feel no need to blame myself for feeling or believing things that may be outrageous, nor do I have to blame others for theirs. What we need to do is to override anything outrageous that our minds manufacture. The idea that we choose our beliefs rationally seems to be entirely wrong, even though reasoning is a contributing factor. As a scientist and educator, I feel liberation, because I do not need to actually convince or convert anyone to my way of thinking. What I need to continue doing is to provide information and opportunity that will allow my students and my readers to convert their thinking, should that prove possible. If I continue to provide information about the world and its history, humans and their history, and continue provoking new thoughts, I have done my entire job.