The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [69]
Here a plausible explanation for the link between patternicity, creativity, and madness presents itself. We are all pattern seekers, but some people find more patterns than others, depending on how indiscriminately they connect the dots between random events and how much meaning they put into such patterns. For most of us, most of the time, our error-detection networks (the ACC and the PFC) weed out some but not all of the false patterns we pick up through association learning, and we lead moderately creative (but not world-changing) lives, dealing with our various superstitions that come from false patterns that slipped through our pattern-detection filters. Some people are ultraconservative in their patternicity, see very few patterns, and are not very creative, while others are indiscriminate in their patternicity and find patterns everywhere they look; this may lead to creative genius or conspiratorial paranoia.
The Neuroscience of Agenticity
This process of explaining the mind through the neural activity of the brain makes me a monist. Monists believe that there is just one substance in our head—brain. Dualists, by contrast, believe that there are two substances—brain and mind. This is a very old problem in philosophy dating back to the seventeenth century when the French philosopher René Descartes put it on the intellectual landscape, with soul the preferred term of the time (as in “body and soul” instead of “brain and mind”). Broadly speaking, monists assert that body and soul are the same, and that the death of the body—particularly the disintegration of DNA and neurons that store the informational patterns of our bodies, our memories, and our personalities—spells the end of the soul. Dualists contend that body and soul are separate entities, and that the soul continues beyond the existence of the body. Monism is counterintuitive. Dualism is intuitive. It just seems like there is something else inside of us, and our thoughts really do feel like they are floating around up there in our skulls separate from whatever it is our brains are doing. Why?
We are natural-born dualists, argued Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom in his book Descartes’ Baby. Children and adults alike, for example, speak of “my body,” as if “my” and “body” are two different entities. We revel in films and books that take such dualisms as their themes. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis a man falls asleep and wakes up as a cockroach, but his personality is intact inside the insect. In the film All of Me, the soul of Lily Tomlin battles with the soul of Steve Martin for control of his body. In Freaky Friday, mother and daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan) trade bodies with their essences unbroken. In Big and 13 Going on 30, the characters’ essences leapfrog ages with, respectively, Tom Hanks getting immediately younger and Jennifer Garner growing instantly older.
“In fact most people around the world believe that an even more radical transformation actually takes place,” Bloom explained. “Most people believe that when the body is destroyed, the soul lives on. It might ascend to heaven, or descend to hell, go off into some sort of parallel world, or occupy some other body, human or animal. Even those of us who do not hold such views have no problems understanding them. But they are only coherent if we see people as separate from their bodies.”27
In one among many experiments Bloom recounted, for example, young children are told a story about a mouse that gets munched by an alligator. The children agree that the mouse’s body is dead—it does not need to go to the bathroom, it can’t hear, and its brain no longer works. However, they insist that the mouse is still hungry, concerned about the alligator, and wants to go home. “This