Another View of Habits and Letting Go

I recently read the book “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain” by David Eagleman. It provided a new way, and perhaps a clearer one, for me to point to features of both habits and the inherent difficulty in mastering “letting go” practices, both of which I have addressed before.

I have postulated that we each are “a focused point of attention” of Being resulting from 13.8 billion years of choices, beginning at the Big Bang with a choice whose intent was something akin to “Let there be light”. This nearly infinite number of choices is represented as instinctual preferences written in our DNA and by the directional nudging we have accepted from family, friends and environments through infancy, childhood and beyond. These all provide a vast multitude of subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, preferences which direct our behavior. Add on to this all of our own current and former conscious choices during this lifetime.

Here are some quotes from the book to initiate another look at habits and “letting go”. (The quotes listed here are not always in the same sequence as in the book; the underlines and bolding are mine).

 “Consciousness is the long term planner…” “…it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.” “When the brain [has] a task that it needs to solve, it rewrites its own circuitry until it can accomplish the task with maximum efficiency.”

The book uses the example of the training it takes for professional tennis players to be good enough to compete at Wimbledon. “They can track a ball traveling at ninety miles per hour, move towards it rapidly, and orient a small surface to intersect its trajectory. And these professional tennis players do almost none of this consciously.”

“This clever tactic accomplishes two things of chief importance to survival. The first is speed. “Automatization permits fast decision making.”  “The second reason to burn tasks into the circuitry is for energy efficiency. By optimizing its machinery, the brain minimizes the energy required to solve problems.” 

  “The key point here is that the specialized, optimized circuitry of instinct confers all of the benefits of speed, and energy efficiency, but at the cost of being farther away from the reach of consciousness.” “…..We are not able to see the instincts that are the very engines of our behavior. These are inaccessible to us not because they are important, but because they are critical. Conscious meddling would do nothing to improve them.”

Though perhaps not every one of them would be considered critical, they have become what I have described, in other posts, as habits and preferences and lie below conscious awareness.

“…most of what we do and think are not under our conscious control.” “Our brains mostly run on autopilot.” “We tend to be blind to the existence of these instincts because they work so well.”

  “Our evolutionary goals (past choices) navigate the structures of our thoughts…”

Example from the book:

 “In a recent experiment, men were asked how attractive they found photographs of women’s faces…in 8”x10” front facing and ¾ profile. In half of the photo’s women’s eyes were dilated. Men were consistently more attracted to the women with dilated eyes. …dilated eyes correlates with sexual excitement and readiness.”

“…. the most automatic, effortless acts – those that require the most specialized and complex neural circuitry – have been in front of us all along: sexual attraction, fearing the dark, empathizing, arguing, becoming jealous, seeking fairness, finding solutions, avoiding incest, recognizing facial expressions.”

Now let’s take a look at how the book sees those instincts (what I call choices that have become preferences/habits) interacting.

“Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.” “…..And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are engaged in chronic battle.”

(The Walt Whitman quote is “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes”)

“There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior.”

 “The main lesson of this chapter is that you are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanisms, a group of competing factions. The conscious mind fabricates stories to explain the sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the subsystems inside the brain.”

 This is a great description of what I’ve previously pointed to as fluid collections, or a blending, of past choices. We corral the multiple perspectives that we are perceiving and can, in a sense, create a single perspective in our momentary articulation of those perceptions. Together these ever-fluid perspectives compile what I have previously referred to as our internal “We”.

“….our thoughts are generated by machinery to which we have no direct access. [We saw that] useful routines become burned down into the circuitry of the brain, and that once they are there, we no longer have access to them. Instead, consciousness seems to be about setting goals for what should be burned into the circuitry, and it does little beyond that.”

Our choices become automated, and disappear into the background, as Nature dictates. Of course, I contend that what Nature dictates is simply a set of choices that we (consciousness in our locale) have made over past eons, so are also a program of “our” design.

“…to know oneself may require a change of definition of “to know”. Knowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and that it has little control over the reality constructed for you.”    A construction of our own making!

Letting go practices

Let me first state that the interplay of “Creation and Appreciation” is a single mechanism, in that we create in order to appreciate what we’ve imagined as our view of the next most perfect potential experience (Beauty). Appreciation is, thus, a “letting go” of the act of creation in order to enjoy its fruits. It is half of the cycle. When it comes to “letting go” practices, as the term is used today, they seem to be aimed at letting go of that which we created that is no longer seen, and are often aimed at specific behaviors that we don’t “prefer”. Most often, in fact, we have no memory of having created the majority of our perspectives or behaviors in the first place because, “..we no longer have access to them”. This is why we do not recognize them as being of our own creation.

Thus “letting go” practices are difficult because we ourselves have commanded the mind, via past choices, to put in place those very things that we now want to distance ourselves from. Our minds have always taken every command and faithfully put it into its creation machinery, as instructed. The commands are now mostly outside of the reach of our normal conscious thinking because, as the book notes, survival dictates that they become “inaccessible to us” for speed and energy efficiency. The entire mechanism to take conscious choices and automate them is so embedded as a survival mechanism that we cannot see it either. “We tend to be blind to the existence of these instincts because they work so well.” Not recognizing the mechanism itself makes it all the more difficult to let go of one particular habit created by that very mechanism.

There are eons of choices and they are all, ultimately, ours. In “letting go”, some aspect of our “multitudes” has grabbed ahold of “the single output channel of our behavior” and is choosing to alter the program. Go ahead. Make a choice.