Big Think - The Quest for the Self or Searching for Selfies?

Selfies are becoming more pervasive and ubiquitous, but what is driving their proliferation? It's not so easy to take the impulse to photograph and share oneself all over social media and narrow it down to a Freudian drive or two.

The Quest for the Self or Searching for Selfies?

by Derek Beres

June 24, 2014

The selfie continues its trajectory as a major form of communication in today’s social media universe. Named the Oxford Dictionary Online Word of the Year in 2013 the selfie has continued its meteoric rise ever since smartphones flipped the camera view. Yet what exactly is it communicating?

To fans of selfies they are something to post every day, a means of saying, ‘Hey, I’m here right now’ or ‘I’m doing this,’ which essentially translates as ‘I’m doing this,’ ‘this’ taking backseat to ‘I.’ Critics take a harsher view: the self-congratulating behavior is seen as obnoxious and egotistic.

Conjuring a neatly bundled set of psychological drives for selfies is not easy. As Psychology Today points out, there is a sense of exploration and identification embedded in the process: you are constantly editing, refining and understanding yourself through the photographic journey. Viewers’ mirror neurons are activated through your lens, creating either a sense of kinship or disgust (both of which are expressed on blogs like ‘The Rich Kids of Instagram.’)

One of the more popular trends that has been the subject of debate is the ‘yoga selfie,’ which received its own NY Times column last year. Bendable women (and a few men) have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for wearing little clothing while performing acrobatic positions. While the curvaceous lines are appreciated by oglers, some yogis see it in a different light: “If you don’t post a beautiful picture of your yoga, it didn’t happen.”

A particularly astute commenter mentioned the following after I posted criticism of the yoga selfie: looking at others in beautiful postures inspires me and gives me something to aspire to. Another mentioned that it had to do with checking form, that they could then see how their alignment looked after snapping the shot. I replied that if that was the case, why post the photo online? If it were all about ensuring that your lower back wasn’t overarching, why would the rest of the world need to know about it? I never heard back.

Science writer Jennifer Ouellette investigated the psychological (among other) mechanisms for creating one’s sense of self in her book, Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. One day a friend noticed her keychain featured the astrological symbol for Taurus. While she has no deep affiliation with astrology, the friend questioned her beliefs in the stars.

She then wrote about how we position objects in our home or office. If someone points a photo outward so that visitors approaching their desk can see it, the picture serves as an ‘identity claim.’ The photo becomes a testament to who the person is and how they want to be represented. This was not the purpose of Ouellette’s keychain.

If the photo is turned inward, not intended for public display, it is a ‘feeling regulator.’ As it turned out, Ouellette’s close friend died at the heights of the AIDS epidemic in the late ‘80s. It was a keepsake from their time together. Feeling regulators are reminders, personal keepsakes. Public display is not the point, even if it’s a byproduct.

This would explain my commenter’s lack of response. If the photo truly served as personal inspiration or alignment tutorial, there would be no reason to post it publicly. It could be saved on the phone, posted on their desktop, or printed and displayed prominently where they practice. Selfie as feeling regulator.

That’s not what happens when selfies are thrown onto social media. They become identity claims: this is who I am. As the Psychology Today article points out, this process is fluid. Selfies shift as the human behind the camera changes, representing stages of development. Feeling regulation, however, will arise from the amount of comments and likes garnered. The pure satisfaction of posting a picture is ultimately a shallow endeavor—it no longer has any personal meaning and becomes all about public response.

In this sense, a 2013 study on happiness and meaning might offer some clues. While happiness is hard to define, researchers “found that happiness is associated with selfish ‘taking’ behavior and that having a sense of meaning in life is associated with selfless ‘giving’ behavior.” It’s the difference between feeling personally satisfied and believing yourself to be dedicated to a cause larger than yourself.

Researchers found that people devoted purely to the pursuit of happiness exhibit the same gene expression patterns as humans struggling with chronic adversity. Their bodies activate a pro-inflammatory response as if a bacterial threat was about to strike. Their constant state of heightened inflammation leads to sickness. Those with a sense of meaning showed no such symptoms.

This makes sense as we often pursue happiness as a means of avoiding loneliness or other threats to our existence. This constant avoidance of darker emotions will be represented in our bodies, as such pursuers are constantly on edge. A lack of happiness implies its opposite, whereas those on a quest for meaning are more likely to accept and endure adversities.

It’s the difference, in yoga parlance, between needing external verification of one’s body rather than moving onto the deeper self-reflective stages where physical representation is nowhere near as important as the emotions and thoughts dealt with during meditation.

I would guess this applies to all selfie taking, although repetition is key. I know few people that haven’t posted a selfie on occasion. It’s a modern extension of the Polaroid: immediate gratification capturing a place in time. If you’re chasing that on a daily basis, however, it’s going to be challenging to know where you ever really are. The quest for public display has trumped the quietude of personal satisfaction.

Photo: Vladimir Gjorgiev/shutterstock.com

Who You Are is an Interactive Process (Big Think)

For years, I have argued both here and elsewhere that our notions of self, identity, and consciousness are misguided. We typically think of them as nouns, as objects we can study and measure. I believe, however, based on my experience as a Buddhist and as a student of neuroscience, that who we are is not a noun, not an object.

From the Buddhist Abhidharma:

Here (in the the Dhammasangani), the human mind, so evanescent and elusive, has for the first time been subjected to a comprehensive, thorough and unprejudiced scrutiny, which definitely disposes of the notion that any kind of static unity or underlying substance can be traced in mind.

Here is more on the Abhidharma from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The mature Abhidharma thus assimilates the analysis of phenomena-in-time-as-constituted-by-consciousness with a highly complex description of the consciousness process, dissolving the causal relations between ordered successions of consciousness moments into the activity of perception.

We are verbs, we are process. It's slightly humorous that it has taken the West almost 2,500 years to catch up with these ancient ideas, but even now this is still a fringe perspective in the neuroscience community.

Last year Virginia Hughes' Only Human blog covered a couple of then-new research findings about consciousness, and concludes that "consciousness, too, is a process — a very slippery one."

Allan Combs has written about Consciousness as a Self-Organizing Process (An Ecological Perspective). In that paper, he offers this definition of consciousness, which is one of the best I have seen anywhere:

Consciousness is perhaps best understood from an ecological perspective in which the ongoing events that structure it are seen as a rich interacting complex of informing cognitive, perceptual, and emotional information subsystems analogous to the interactive energy driven metabolism of a living cell. The result is an organic, self-generating, or autopoietic, system constantly in the act of creating itself.

YES! Consciousness is constantly in the act of creating itself. But we are not aware of this process happening unless we have spent some considerable time in meditation watching the mind. So why is this? Again, Combs:

Informal introspection reveals the overall fabric of conscious experience at each moment to be constructed of a variety of undergirding psychological processes such as memory, perception, and emotion (e.g., James 1890/1981; Combs, 1993b; Combs, 1995b). This idea is consistent with Tart's (1975, 1985) view that states of consciousness, including dream and non-dream sleep, various drug-induced and ecstatic states, as well as ordinary waking consciousness, are formed of unique patterns of psychological functions, or processes, that fit comfortably together to make something like a gestalt. We may suspect that this comfortable gestalt represents an energy minimum from the brain's point of view.

Anyway, all of this is simply food for thought - as is the article below.

Perhaps if we did not see our self as fixed and unchanging, we might more easily change the dysfunctional patterns that disrupt our lives.

Who You Are is an Interactive Process

by David Shenk
December 23, 2013

We study savants - you know, Rainman and people like that - and we think there’s obviously evidence of innate gifts because these guys are obviously born with different sorts of brains. They’re born with these gifts that enable them to remember every calendar date going back to the year 1200 or whatever.

When you actually look at what is going on yes, these people are born with birth defects if that is what you want to call them. Their brains are certainly wired differently. There is no question about that, but it turns out that the actual skills that they acquire then come after that and that we can actually manipulate our own brains.

The word is plasticity. Everyone has heard the term plasticity. There is a difference in quantity between what these savants are born with and what we can do with our own brains. There isn’t really a qualitative difference. We can alter our own brains but we don’t actually develop the skills to do what the guy in Rainman did or these other amazing savants do. Those differences are already in place. It’s the process of developing these skills, not just being born with the skill or the gift.

I'm trying to help people understand that the old notion of innate, the old notion of giftedness, the notion that we are born with a certain quantity of intelligence or a quantity of talent really isn’t there. We’re all born with differences, no question about that. We have genetic differences, but how those genetic differences actually lead to differences in traits - that’s a dynamic process that we are all very much involved with on the family level, as parents, as kids ourselves, culturally, in terms of nutrition and the environment. Everything we do and everything we are is an ongoing interactive process, which affects how those genes are then subsequently going to be turned into the traits that work for us and against us.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock


by David Shenk

Kahneman's System 1 & System 2 Thinking - A Primer

From Big Think, this is a brief primer on Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 thinking, as outlined in his excellent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

The author of this piece feels it necessary to claim a couple of limitations to the system 1 and system 2 model, namely that it's "light on evolution." However, this is a misdirection.

I'm sure Kahneman would be first to proclaim that system 1 developed far earlier in our evolution than did system 2. Even today much of our daily survival is taken care of by the system 1 brain, while the system 2 brain is engaged probably around 10% of the time (at best) for most people.

Kahneman's Mind-Clarifying Strangers: System 1 & System 2

by Jag Bhalla
March 7, 2014

Feeling is a form of thinking. Both are ways we process information, but feeling is faster. That’s the crux of Daniel Kahneman’s mind-clarifying work. It won a psychologist an economics Nobel. And strange labels helped.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman wrestles with flawed ideas about decision making. “Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational…Second, emotions…explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.” But research has “traced [systematic] errors to the… machinery of cognition…rather than corruption…by emotion.”

Kahneman sidesteps centuries of confusion (and Freudian fictions) by using new—hence undisputed—terms: the brilliantly bland “System 1” and “System 2.” These strangers help by forcing you to ask about their attributes. System 1 “is the brain’s fast, automatic, intuitive approach, System 2 “the mind’s slower, analytical mode, where reason dominates.” Kahneman says “System 1 is...more influential…guiding…[and]...steering System 2 to a very large extent.”

The measurable features of System 1 and System 2 cut across prior categories. Intuitive information-processing has typically been considered irrational, but System 1’s fast thinking is often logical and useful (“intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition”). Conversely, despite being conscious and deliberate System 2 can produce poor (sometimes irrational) results.

Kahneman launched behavioral economics by studying these systematic “cognitive biases.” He was astonished that economists modeled people as “rational, selfish, with tastes that don’t change,” when to psychologists “it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable.”

Kahneman’s potentially paradigm-tipping work has limitations. It is light on evolution, e.g focusing on numerically framed decisions discounts that we didn't evolve to think numerically. Math is a second nature skill, requiring much System 2 training (before becoming a System 1 skill). Also, we evolved to often act without System 2 consciously deciding (habits are triggered by System 1). Indeed cognitive biases might be bad System 1 habits rather than built in brain bugs. And cognitive biases have two sources of error, the observed behavior and what economists suppose is “rational.”

Those limitations aside, whenever pondering cognition, bear in mind the distinct traits of System 1 and System 2. Mapping mental skills (and the mini-skills they consist of) onto those labels can clarify your thinking about thinking.

~ Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions.

Joseph LeDoux - How the Brain Creates Flashbulb Memories and How Memory Can be a False Witness

From Big Think's In Their Own Words series, here are two brief and excellent articles by neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (Center for Neural Science at NYU), author of The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (1998) and Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (2003).

In the first article he describes how the brain creates "flashbulb memories," which he defines as a neuronal event more than a brain event:

As information go through a brain system, if that information is significant, it will form a lasting trace as a result of the release of the transmitter. The other things that are going on at that same time will form a trace, a connection between the active neurons and that will stay in the brain in the form of what we then experience as memory later.

In the second article he gives a brief overview of how his lab has learned to disrupt memory consolidation by injecting a protein synthesis inhibitor directly into the amygdala of a rat. This provides a theoretical pathway for preventing traumatic events from becoming PTSD.

How the Brain Creates Flashbulb Memories

by Joseph LeDoux
December 24, 2013

Whenever we have a memory about some experience, it turns out that there are probably a lot of different systems in the brain that are being activated. Sometimes, as scientists, we talk about memory systems. I think that’s a misnomer because if you think about what memory is, it’s really plasticity in the nervous system. It’s the ability of neurons in the brain to change and neurons in every part of the brain that we’ve looked at have this capability of changing or to become plastic when their experiences change.

From the point of view of the neuron, an experience is the arrival of neurotransmitters being released by another neuron. So, what that does is it changes the way that neuron responds. Across many such events like that in the brain, a memory is formed, or multiple memories are formed. So, it’s really inappropriate to talk about memory systems because almost every system in the brain forms memories.

The way I like to think about it is memory is a feature of neurons rather than a function of brain systems. As information go through a brain system, if that information is significant, it will form a lasting trace as a result of the release of the transmitter. The other things that are going on at that same time will form a trace, a connection between the active neurons and that will stay in the brain in the form of what we then experience as memory later.

Let’s take a situation where you’re driving down the road and you have an accident. You hit your head on the steering wheel and you hit it really hard and the horn gets stuck on and so you hear this loud and annoying noise while you’re bleeding, in pain. It’s really awful and terrible. And then a few days later, you hear the sound of a horn. That sound will go to various parts of your brain simultaneously. When it goes to a part of the brain called the hippocampus, it will remind you of the situation that you’re in, that you were driving, that you had an accident, that you were with John and Peg. But it won’t have the emotional impact unless it also goes to a different part of the brain called the amygdala, which instead of reminding you of the details of the event, will trigger emotional responses in your brain and body. The responses in the body will feed back to the brain, and all of that activity in the brain will give rise to what we call the emotion.

So there are really two different memories, one cognitive and one emotional. They are stored and represented in different brain systems. Again, it’s not that that memory is a function of those systems, but is a feature of the neurons in those systems that allow the system to do its job better.

So, let’s take the case of say, the visual system. It allows us to see the world -- the auditory system allows us to hear the world, the motor system allows us to move in the world. All of these systems are plastic, so plasticity is a feature that allows the visual system to remember what you saw last time so you can see it a little better the next time or the motor system to perform a response better the next time because you’ve done it the previous time. So, again, we want to think of plasticity as a feature of neurons rather than a function that a system is performing.

So, back to the fear example: the sound of the horn goes to one part of the brain, the amygdala, and gives rise to the emotional response into the other part of the brain, the hippocampus, and gives rise to cognitive representation. So, we call this the hippocampal memory, a memory about the emotion, whereas the amygdala memory we call the emotional memory itself. Now these two things happen simultaneously. The amygdale memory is triggered unconsciously. It doesn’t have to be aware of the stimulus in order for that to be triggered. Hippocampal memory is probably triggered unconsciously as well, but you become aware of the memory when it’s triggered because that’s what a hippocampal memory does, it creates a representation of the conscious experience.

But that conscious representation now is going to be amplified by the emotional arousal that is taking place. It’s going to create a new emotional memory, or new memory about emotion that’s going to have that kind of emotional stamp on it. It’s the interaction between cognitive systems and emotion systems in the brain that create what’s called flashbulb memories, which are very vivid strong memories of a particular experience. So, everyone in New York in September 11, 2001, knows what they were doing just as every person my age in November of 1963 remembers the assassination of John Kennedy.

It used to be thought that these flashbulb memories were more accurate than other memories. But new research has shown that these flashbulb memories are not more accurate, they’re just more vivid. So the accuracy is kind of suspect and one of the consequences, or one of the implications of that is that, memories are constructed, or reconstructed when they’re retrieved. And at that point of retrieval, the memory has the opportunity to be changed. And that’s one of the main topics we’ve been working on lately.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock

* * * * *

How Memory Can be a False Witness

by Joseph LeDoux
December 26, 2013

A good example of the way memory changes during the retrieval process is a situation where someone goes to court to testify about a crime that they witnessed. On the day of the crime they gave their summary of what happened to the police, so there’s a police record. And then when they go into the court, they talk about something in a completely different way, which it turns out happens to match what they read about in the newspaper.

When they read the newspaper, what they did was updated their memory about the experience. Then in the future, when you retrieve that memory, it’s hard to distinguish what actually happened and what you’ve incorporated since then through other kinds of experiences.

This is now a well-known phenomenon. Each time a memory is taken out, the opportunity is there for it to be changed. This is an updating process and normally it’s a useful thing. If you meet somebody at a party and he’s a nice guy, but then you find out he’s an axe murderer or something like that, you have to immediately change your memory of that person, so you’ve updated it. But there are other ways the memory gets updated as well. In a lab we conditioned a rat to be afraid of a tone. So, the next day, the rat hears the tone and he freezes, because that’s how rats express their fear of the stimulus. But immediately after presenting that tone, we gave the rat a certain kind of drug - which I’ll explain below - and we tested the rat the next day, and the memory was no longer present, or at least can’t be accessed. So, what’s going on?

It’s been known for a long time that memory formation or memory consolidation requires the synthesis of new proteins in the part of the brain that are forming the memory. Researchers discovered that if you block protein synthesis after retrieval you can also disrupt the stability of the memory later. But that idea got lost in the late ’60’s and didn’t stick around. What stuck around was the idea that memories are consolidated and once they are consolidated, each time that you take it out, you take out that same trace over and over again.

The new research that my lab helped rejuvenate in the year 2000 was about manipulating the memory after the rat experiences the retrieval process. So, we gave the rat the tone, and then we blocked protein synthesis after retrieval, rather than after learning. And when we do that the memory is eliminated just as well after retrieval as it’s prevented from being acquired.

So, the unique feature of our experiment was, we were able to do this in the side of the brain where the memory is being formed and stored, which in the case of fear, memory is the amygdala. So, because we did all of the basic work of figuring out all of those circuits, we could go in and put a tiny amount of a protein synthesis inhibitor in the amygdala. And that’s important because you can also do this experiment by giving the protein synthesis inhibitor systemically to the whole body, like if you take a pill, that goes into your body and reaches your brain and does all the stuff, but it’s going everywhere and that’s why many drugs have side effects. So, if you take an anti-anxiety drug, it not only relieves anxiety but it would make you sleepy, it might alter your sex drive, etc.

What we’re doing here is avoiding one of the bad consequences of protein synthesis inhibitors which is that it makes you nauseous and sick and so forth if you take it systemically. And it is pretty toxic, so you would never give a drug like that to a human. This is only something you can do in an animal experiment. So, the protein synthesis inhibitor in our studies was put directly in the amygdala and we avoid all of those side effects and negative consequences since it’s a tiny amount and it doesn’t affect the rest of the body.

When we do that, the rats the next day don’t freeze to the tone. They don’t remember that the tone is now dangerous. So this has triggered a whole wave of research now on the possibility of using this as a treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because, theoretically we can have the people come in, remember their trauma, give them a pill and the next time the cues about the trauma come along, they won’t have the emotional response to it.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock

David Eagleman - Unsolved Mysteries of Neuroscience: The Binding Problem

This brief article comes from Big Think's In Their Own Words series of posts. Big Think interviews experts who are either at the top of their fields or disrupting their fields. This blog presents key ideas from the experts in their own words.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman is author, most recently, of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2011). For more on what we do NOT know about the brain, see his 2007 article in Discover Magazine, 10 Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain.

Unsolved Mysteries of Neuroscience: The Binding Problem

by DAVID EAGLEMAN
JUNE 16, 2013

The binding problem is when you look at what's happening in the brain, you find there's a division of labor. You have some parts of your brain that care about vision, some about hearing, some about touch. And even within a system, like vision, you have parts that care about colors, parts that care about orientations, parts that care about angles. And how this all comes together so that you have a unified perception of the world is one of the unsolved mysteries in neuroscience.

We’re not aware of that division of labor. Everything seems like it’s perfectly unified to us. So this is still something we’re all working on.

One thing that's very clear to us now, though, is that vision is not like a camera. It’s not like light signals hit your eye and work their way up to the top and they move up some hierarchy and then they get seen. Instead, vision is all about internal activity that's already happening in your head and there's a little bit of data that comes up these cables and modifies or modulates that activity. But, essentially, all you're ever seeing is your internal model of what you believe you're seeing out there.

So this is a very different viewpoint from what is presented in college textbooks on vision. In other words, even the textbooks need to catch up on what we already know about how perception actually works.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock


by DAVID EAGLEMAN

Big Think: The Cosmic Perspective

From Big Think, 4 articles on taking a cosmic perspective.

The Cosmic Perspective

by BIG THINK EDITORS
THE BIG IDEA FOR SATURDAY, MAY 25, 2013

Science can be depressing. The more we learn about ourselves and our relationship to the universe, the smaller we get. And yet, if we feel depressed, Neil deGrasse Tyson argues in today's lesson, that is the product of an unhealthy ego.

Having a cosmic perspective should strengthen and empower you, Tyson says. Even as you feel smaller, you are simultaneously bigger as well. So how can this perspective be applied to your life? In his Mentor workshop, Tyson teaches us how to recognize and seize big opportunities, set lofty goals that keep you challenged and growing and much more.  

PERSPECTIVES  

1.A Cosmic Perspective is Empowering, Not Depressing 

JONATHAN FOWLER AND ELIZABETH RODD, Big Think Mentor  

2. The Power of Cosmic Thinking 

DANIEL HONAN, Re-Envision  

3. Time Pretzels, Cosmic Music, and the Theory of Everything 

MICHIO KAKU  

4. Andrew Cohen Explains Cosmocentrism 

ANDREW COHEN