All the ways in which the human body actually functions are astonishing, and for the most part, completely overlooked by all of us. The brain is where my interest first started, and since learning about it, whenever I’m curious about a part or process of the body, I do a quick Google search to try to figure out what the hell is going on. I wanted to start sharing what I learned to shed light on how mind blowing these processes and functions are, and how completely oblivious we are of them. Today we’ll start where I started, with the brain, and I hope to explore more aspects of the human body and mind in the future.
–
The brain is incredibly complex and there’s so much interesting, crazy stuff going on in it, that it’s hard to know where to start. Neuroplasticity and cognitive biases are two of my favorite areas, but there’s something else that’s seemingly straightforward, yet baffling, that I want to highlight here. I learned about this probably a year ago and it’s only really hitting home now.
This seemingly simple, scientifically proven fact is:
The brain decides before “I” decide.
That seems obvious. Of course decisions arise from our brain, that’s where all thought processes come from. More specifically put, the unconscious mind decides, then the conscious mind, or “I”, decides. The distinction is important, as we’ll see. Your brain decides, then you decide. The more you think about it, the more questions arise.
Before we go on, a quick distinction between the unconscious and conscious mind. The unconscious mind does things automatically, without the need to even be aware of it happening. Our breathing and our digestive system are two examples of this unconscious process. We don’t need to focus on or even think about these things for them to run properly. The unconscious mind also contains desires and fears that we may not be consciously aware of, but nonetheless direct us. The unconscious mind is completely inaccessible to our conscious mind. The conscious mind is actively thinks or acts. It plans our dinner later that night and what ingredients we want to use, it chooses between two movies, it lifts the barbell for another rep. Our conscious mind makes decisions. Or so we think.
In Sam Harris’s book Free Will, he makes the case that we do not truly have free will. One of his main arguments for this point is that through scientific lab studies, “fMRI techniques show that our brains indicate the choice we are going to make 700 milliseconds before we are aware that we are going to make the choice.” These conscious decisions that we feel we came up with, that we’ve decided on, were actually made by our brain, milliseconds before, unbeknownst to us.
700 milliseconds might not seem like a lot of time, but the fact remains that the brain makes a decision that is completely unconscious to us, THEN, milliseconds later, we consciously seem to “come up with it”. But “I” didn’t actually “make” the decision. As Harris lays out, “the intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness. Rather it appears in consciousness. As does any thought or impulse that might impose it.”
All sorts of thoughts and questions sprout from this one clear fact. Our idea of free will is certainly different than how we think of it, if it exists at all. It distinctly shows the power of the unconscious mind over the conscious mind; the unconscious mind decides, then makes it appear that the conscious mind has chosen. We have all of these unconscious thoughts, feelings and desires, which we are completely unaware of, until the unconscious decides to almost plant them in our conscious mind, making us feel that we determined it. It helps explain why it’s so hard to change a habit or escape from an addiction that we so clearly, consciously want to change, because they are rooted deeper, not in the conscious, but in our unconscious. It casts questions over the nature of consciousness itself and the power and control we assume we have over our lives.
This is a tricky one to wrap our heads around. Like I said, I learned about this a year ago, but only after recently reviewing a summary of the book, did the subject sort of click it in my mind. Sure, “I”, this human body that is Sam Post, is still making the decisions, but it’s not necessarily coming from the “I” I imagined it was, that conscious self I identify as. It’s coming from another layer in, the unconscious part of my mind that I, nor anyone else, has access to. So who the hell is running the show that is ourselves? The better question might be, what shapes the unconscious mind and what determines it’s desires and feelings that prompt our actions and behavior?
The genes we are born with determines a lot, anywhere from 20-50%. But once born, our environment, our conditioning, how and where we were raised, and much more, all form and shape our unconscious mind. And the really interesting part, and the hopeful part, I think, is that it is possible to change our unconscious mind, even if we can’t access it directly. It can’t done by our conscious thinking. It can only done by taking action and by changing our behavior in the real world first.
This is where I think Sam Harris’ argument against free will starts to show it’s cracks. While thinking about change and consciously desiring it does very little to impact our unconscious mind, directly changing our behavior in the real world has a much more powerful effect. This is where the principles of habit change, or the concept of “fake it till you make it”, comes in. By forcing yourself to do something enough times, even if it’s at first uncomfortable or challenging, you’ll eventually form a habit, or put another way, a behavior that doesn’t need to be directed by your conscious mind. The behavior becomes automatic. It has become a part of your routine and can be done without even thinking about it. One example would be learning how to drive a car. At first it seems very complicated and hard, but after enough experience, it seems to take very little conscious will power to get where you’re going.
Harris’ argument to this would be, well, this person that eventually changed, had whatever factors already set in place that allowed them to change in the first place. His genes or his brain had the capability to do so, and it finally did. That seems a bit to deterministic to me, and for an atheist like Sam Harris, it just seems to run too close to what others might call “fate”. But he is much smarter than me. That’s just the way I choose to look at it now, maybe because it’s more comforting and encouraging.
All of this has gotten me much more interested in the unconscious part of our mind, that we all basically ignore, understandably so, because we aren’t even aware of it in the first place. We literally can’t be aware of it, until we start to pay closer attention to and examine our thoughts, actions and behavior. The unconscious mind and it’s importance has appeared countless times throughout my reading, from great thinkers like Carl Jung to Joseph Campbell and beyond, and I’m only now feeling like I’m able to grasp what it actually means. After reviewing Free Will’s book notes, I found another book James Clear summarized titled Strangers to Ourselves, and it helped clear up some of the confusion I had. I ordered that book and can’t wait to dive in. Maybe I’ll return to this topic after I learn more. But for now, I think this simple fact, that there’s a lag between the unconscious brain deciding, and then ourselves feeling the conscious decision, is more than enough to ponder. At the very least, maybe it can make us a little more thoughtful, or questioning, or simply awed, the next time we’re making a decision, whether it’s what we’re having for dinner, or what we want to do with our lives.