Tag Archives: self

How Do I Matter to Thee, Let Me Count The Ways!

I recently came across an article by Andrew Reece, Martin Seligman, Roy Baumeister, Barry Schwartz et al on Mattering which argued that in work/organizational contexts, action-based mattering is the way to go and it is more associated with feelings of self-efficacy rather than self-esteem. That made me look up the sparse literature on Mattering and I spent a few happy hours down that rabbit hole.

What I am proposing below, however, is my own classification of how someone can matter, after taking into account existing concepts and frameworks.

Why is mattering important? Unless we have a sense that we matter, we may not have any desire to live life fully, or to live life at all. So its very important that we ensure that each person on this planet has a sense of mattering.

What are the different ways one can end up with a feeling that one matters? We can start with action based mattering, a feeling that our actions have impact on the world around us, the form of mattering that Marty et al emphasize in their article. This type of mattering is more associated with the domain of WORK or TASK. If one has healthy forms of this mattering then one believes that one can successfully accomplish tasks and that ‘I have some impact‘; if one lacks this type of mattering then the thought is that ‘I don’t have any impact‘. While the former thought leads to self-assurance or confidence or agency, the latter thought leads to helplessness. On the other hand excessive forms of this mattering, including thoughts like ‘Only I have a vast impact‘ lead to dominance/ dictatorship. While the outcome of this sort of mattering is self-assurance, the process involves having and demonstrating self-efficacy.

The second way one can matter, as per extant literature is feeling based mattering. This type of mattering is more associated with OTHERS and how they perceive us. If one has healthy forms of this mattering, then one believes that others recognize and have respect for him/her and believe he/she is a person of importance. He/she has thoughts like ‘ I am recognized by others‘ ; if one lacks this type of mattering the negative self talk is that ‘I am not recognized by anybody‘. The former leads to feelings of self-esteem while the latter leads to feelings of invisibility/marginalization/ being ignored. Excessive forms of this mattering however are pathological and one has the thought that ‘Only I am recognized by all‘. This has the signature of Narcissism, entitlement and spoiled brats written all over it. While the desired outcome is that of a healthy self-esteem, the process by which this is achieved is by receiving (unconditional) regard by others.

The third way that one can matter is by what I call motive based mattering. This is associated with the domain of WORLD or our LIFE as a whole. The important thing here is whether others are dependent on us or expect some things form us and whether that tenuous link by which others depend on us can provide us with a sense of mattering. This will be most apparent in contexts where people depend on us for some help, say our children, who may, or may not, be technically our dependents. In the healthy forms the self-talk goes that ‘I am needed by someone‘; while in the case where this form of mattering is absent, the talk goes ‘I am not needed by anyone‘ ; the former leads to feelings of being self-responsible, the latter is likely to be associated with feeling useless / redundant. Excessive forms will have the self-talk ‘ Only I am needed by everyone‘ and will have a sense of weariness and delusion associated with it. while the desired healthy outcome in this form of mattering is having a good sense of self-responsibility (responsibility internalized and not conceived of as external like duty), the process by which this is achieved is recognizing that others depend on us.

The last way, as per me, that people, can still feel that they matter is by belief based mattering. This type of mattering is associated with SELF or more specifically how healthy is our self concept. We all have various conceptualizations of how we are as a person. This is independent of whether we are contributing in the external world, whether others respect us or whether others depend on us. Some of us believe in the self-talk ‘ I am worthy, no matter what‘; while others believe ‘I am not worthy at all or was ever‘. The former will lead to mattering characterized by having self-worth, while the latter is characterized by thoughts of inferiority. Excessive mattering of this sort however will be of the form ‘Only I am worthy forever‘ and will be associated with feelings of superiority. The desired outcome of course is believing that you have self-worth, but the process by which you arrive there is self-acceptance.

Again, why is all this important? As you can easily see if anyone loses his sense of mattering and starts believing that he/she is either helpless, ignored, useless or inferior and these feelings accumulate over time and persist than bad outcomes like sub-optimal flourishing are a given and drastic steps like suicide are a possibility. Thus, our immense responsibility to ensure that people around us feel as if they matter.

Make other people matter. Period.

Between the Stimulus and the Response: the four functions of the Mind

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Victor E Frankl

Schematic of an idealized analytical instrument.

Schematic of an idealized analytical instrument. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In today’s post I will be drawing heavily from the spiritual traditions of India (Yoga etc), and interested readers are redirected to these excellent sources for more information about the same.

As per the spiritual tradition of India, Mind (or Antahkaran) is made up of four functions or parts. These are Manas, Chitta, Ahamkar and Buddhi. These are typically translated as sensory-motor mind, memory bank, ego and intellect respectively. As an interesting aside, Buddha derives from the common root of Buddhi (budh- to know) and stands for the enlightened one.

Here is a brief description of the four functions:

Manas is ordinary, indeterminate thinking — just being aware that something is there and automatically registers the facts which the senses perceive.

 

The subconscious action, memory, etc., is caused by chitta. The function of chitta is chinta (contemplation), the faculty whereby the Mind in its widest sense raises for itself the subject of its thought and dwells thereon.

 

Buddhi determines, decides and logically comes to a conclusion that something is such-and-such a thing. That is another aspect of the operation of the psyche — buddhi or intellect. buddhi, on attending to such registration, discriminates, determines, and cognizes the object registered, which is set over and against the subjective self by aha?k?ra.

 

Ahamkara — ego, affirmation, assertion, ‘I know’. “I know that there is some object in front of me, and I also know that I know. I know that I am existing as this so-and-so.” This kind of affirmation attributed to one’s own individuality is the work of ahamkara, known as egoism.

There is also a hierarchical relation between these with Buddhi at the top and Manas at the bottom. Now, lets look at each of these more closely.

Manas, or sensory-motor mind, is not just registering stimulus but also responsible for executing actions and may be equated with the sensory/ motor cortical functions of the brain.  It controls the 10 Indriyas (5 senses and 5 action-oriented faculties). Its important to note that Manas is doing both the functions associated with stimulus as well as the response,  though its the first one when it comes to stimulus processing (registering the stimulus)  and the last one when it comes to executing responses/actions ( it blindly executes the action that has been decided / chosen upstream). Of course one could just have a reflex action where a stimulus leads to response, but in majority of human action, there is a space between the two. That space is provided by the rest of the mind functions.

Chitta, or memory-prospecting mind, may be typically equated with the association cortex part pf the brain. Many refer to chitta as the memory or impressions bank, but forget to mention the future oriented part of it. Here is a quote:

The part of the Mind thinking and visualizing the objects, events and experiences from the past or the future (emphasis mine) is called the Chitta and this act is called Chintan.

Its thus evident that Chitta drives Manas not only based on past memories, but also based on future expectations or predictions. From brain studies , we know that the same part of the brain is used for memory as well as prospection.  Chitta using past memories to drive manas (and thus behavior or motivated cognition) I view as being conditioned by classical conditioning processes. Chitaa using future expectations/ predictions to drive behavior and motivated cognition, I view as being conditioned by operant conditioning processes. In many philosophical and spiritual traditions, one of the aims is to get over (social) conditioning. Chitta hinders spiritual awakening by using habits, which is an integral pat of chitta function. The habits are nothing but the conditioning, but again one in stimulus path and the other in response/action path.

Ahamkara, or experiential-agentic self, may be typically equated with consciousness/ conscious and ego-driven self. It knows and say ‘I am’  Conscious entities typically have two functions- experience and agency. It is something it is to be like that conscious entity (experience) and the entity has volition or ability to do things (agency). The concept of self as a conscious entity that has experience (in the stimulus path) and agency (in the response/ action path) is important for this notion of ahamkara. With self comes concepts like real self and ideal self which drive and are driven by experience and agency respectively. The less the discrepancy between the two the better your spiritual growth. An interesting concept here is that of coloring or external decorations- your coloring or how you see your self do lead to downward impact on chitta and manas by contaminating the stimulus/ action.

Buddhi, or knowing-deciding mind, is the final frontier on your path to spirituality.  The typical functions associated with Buddhi are knowing, discriminating, judging and deciding. I think knowing/ discriminating (between stimuli/ actions etc) is a stimulus path function, while judging/ deciding (between actions/ responses/ attending to a stimuli) is a response path function. However I also believe they converge to a great extent here or else we will have a problem of turtles all the way down. Once you start to see things as they are, you are also able to choose wisely. At least that is what the scriptures say and what Boddhisattvas aspire or achieve.

To me this increasingly fine-grained control of what we perceive and how we act , from the gross actions and perceptions of manas to the discriminating decisions of buddhi are very intuitively appealing and also appear to be grounded in psychological and neural processes.

Mindfulness (Buddhism based) has become all the rage nowadays, yet if we look at the spiritual traditions of India, perhaps while Yoga defined as Chitta vritti nirodaha (or “Yoga is the silencing of the modifications of the mind”) does refer to being in the present (here-and-now) and not to be disturbed by the perturbations of chitta (memories of past or expectations of future), one also needs to go beyond just Chitta vritti, to addressing the Ahamkara coloring and finally to try achieving the Buddha nature where there is little disparity in doing and being. (Mindfulness) Meditation needs to move beyond being curious, non-judgemental  and in the present to where one doe shave a judgement function, but one that is perfectly attuned.

Splitting the self : “me” and “I”:

The influential psychologist William James was...
Image via Wikipedia

ResearchBlogging.org
I came across this study article today by Farb et al, that talks about two distinct neural networks in the brain that are involved in self-reference. To be fair, the networks are somewhat blurred and overlap in naive people, while in people who practice mindfulness meditation, the networks are more distinct and non-overlapping. My interest was piqued as I am a keen follower of default-brain network , which has been implicated in self-referential thinking and this article seems to at one point argue that the narrative self viz ‘me’ is grounded in default brain network, while the experiencer ‘I” has some other nearby related areas as the neural substrates.

But first let us clarify what we mean by ‘me’ and ‘I’. For this I would like to quote form a Gallagher article:

Ever since William James (1890) provided a catalogue of different senses of the self, philosophers and psychologists have been hard at work refining and expanding the possible variations of this concept. Supplementing James’ inventory of physical self, mental self, spiritual self, and the ego, Neisser (1988), for example, suggested important distinctions between ecological, interpersonal, extended, private, and conceptual aspects of self. More recently, reviewing a contentious collection of essays from various disciplines, Strawson (1999) found an overabundance of delineations between cognitive, embodied, fictional, and narrative selves, among others. It would be impossible to review all of these diverse notions of self in this short paper, so I have focused on several recently developed approaches that promise the best exchange between philosophy of mind and the other cognitive sciences. Because these approaches move in divergent theoretical directions they should help to convey the breadth of philosophical analysis on this topic. They can be divided into two groups that are focused, respectively, on two important aspects of self.

A first approach involves various attempts to account for a ‘minimal’ sense of self. If we strip away all of the unessential features of self, the intuition is that there is a basic, immediate, or primitive something that we are still willing to call a self. This approach leaves aside questions about the degree to which the self is extended beyond the short-term or ‘specious’ present to include past thoughts and actions. Although identity over time is a major issue in the philosophical definition of personal identity, the concept of the minimal self is limited to that which is accessible to immediate and present self-consciousness. Non-philosophers have found that certain aspects of the minimal self are relevant to current research in robotics. Furthermore, aspects of the minimal self that involve senses of ownership and agency in the context of both motor action and cognition can be clarified by neurocognitive models (developed to explain pathologies such as schizophrenia) that suggest the involvement of specific brain systems (including prefrontal cortex, SMA, and cerebellum).

A second approach involves conceiving of the self in terms of narrative, a concept imported into the cognitive-science context by Dennett (1991) , but one which may have a more complex significance than indicated in Dennett’s account. The narrative self is extended in time to include memories of the past and intentions toward the future. It is what Neisser refers to as the extended self, and what Dennett calls a ‘nonminimal selfy’ self. Neuropsychological accounts of episodic memory or loss of memory can help to circumscribe the neurological underpinnings of the narrative self.

If you haven’t guessed by now, the minimal self is ‘I’: the doer , experiencer experiencing the immediate present; the narrative self is ‘me’ -an entity stretched in time and living as much in past and future as in the present. The study authors delineate the same as follows (note that they too start with William James reference):(* references removed)

Since William James’ early conceptualization, the ‘self ’ has been characterised as a source of permanence beneath the constantly shifting set of experiences that constitute conscious life. This permanence is often related to the construction of narratives that weave together the threads of temporally disparate experiences into a cohesive fabric. To account for this continuity, William James posited an explanatory ‘me’ to make sense of the ‘I’ acting in the present moment . Recently, progress has been made in characterizing the neural bases of the processes supporting William James’ ‘me’ in the form of ‘narrative’ self-reference , highlighting the role of the medial prefrontal cortices (mPFC) in supporting self awareness by linking subjective experiences across time . The mPFC has been shown to support an array of self-related capacities, including memory for self-traits , traits of similar others , reflected self-knowledge , and aspirations for the future . As such, cortical midline processes may be characterised as supporting narrative self-reference that maintains continuity of identity across time .

Narrative self-reference stands in stark contrast to the immediate, agentic ‘I’ supporting the notion of momentary experience as an expression of selfhood. Most examinations of self-reference ignore mechanisms of momentary consciousness, which may represent core aspects of self-experience achieved earlier in development and may have evolved in earlier animal species. Indeed, little is known about whether the neural substrates underlying momentary self-reference are one and the same, or distinct from, cortical midline structures supporting narrative experience. One hypothesis suggests that awareness of momentary self-reference is neurally distinct from narrative self-reference and is derived from neural markers of transient body states, in particular, right lateralised exteroceptive somatic and interoceptive insular cortices. In the present study, we examined this thesis.

In short using fMRI, they tried to find the different hypothesized neural networks underlying the two senses of self and did find evidence for clear segregation in those practicing mindfulness meditation. Their methodology however, is not fool proof and this they themselves note in their conclusions. Here are their findings:

Consistent with a theory of self-reference as mentalising, linguistically mediated and of higher order executive origin , participants engaged midline prefrontal cortices and a left lateralised linguistic-semantic network (inferior lateral PFC, middle temporal and angular gyri) during NF (narrative focus: ‘me’ condition). Demonstrating a default bias towards NF as previously revealed in ‘resting’ mind wandering states , relatively restricted reductions in the cortical midline network were found when attention was explicitly directed towards a moment-to-moment EF (experiential focus: ‘I’ condition) in novice participants with little training in this form of self-reflection. These individuals revealed increased left lateralised prefrontal-parietal activations during EF likely reflecting greater task-related linguistic processing that has been shown to be associated with decreased medial prefrontal recruitment .

nsm030f3

So what they found was that a part of default network was engaged in ‘me’ condition; while task-related areas were recruited in “I” condition and appropriate task-related suppression of some part of default network observed. This effect was with naive subjects, but with those trained in mindfulness meditation, they observed a sort of double dissociation:

Following an intensive 8 week course in mindfulness meditation, during which individuals learn to develop the capacity to monitor moment-to-moment experience, EF resulted in a pronounced shift away from midline cortices towards a right lateralised network comprised of the ventral and dorsolateral PFC, as well as right insula, SII and inferior parietal lobule. Consistent with a dual-mode hypothesis of self-awareness, these results suggest a fundamental neural dissociation in modes of self-representation that support distinct, but habitually integrated, aspects of self-reference: (i) higher order self-reference characterised by neural processes supporting awareness of a self that extends across time and (ii) more basic momentary self-reference characterised by neural changes supporting awareness of the psychological present. The latter, represented by evolutionary older neural regions, may represent a return to the neural origins of identity, in which self-awareness in each moment arises from the integration of basic interoceptive and exteroceptive bodily sensory processes. In contrast, the narrative mode of self-reference may represent an overlearned mode of information processing that has become automatic through practice, consistent with established findings on training-induced automaticity.

To me this sounds interesting: If I had to stretch my neck and relate this to autism and schizophrenia , I would say that based on earlier coverage on this blog: Schizophrenics have a higher default brain activity and perhaps try to spin too much of a narrative. Perhaps they are the ones that would best benefit with mindfulness meditation trainings to calm their default ‘me’ and activate the ‘I’ also at relevant times. On the opposite side, one is all too aware of the here-and-now feeling of self that many autistics have- a direct and immediate perceptual relation with world. Perhaps, they too can benefit from some for of mindfulness meditation by learning to use the default brain network too at times – letting teh mind wander and spinning a tale (however fictional) about themselves.

Farb, N., Segal, Z., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., & Anderson, A. (2007). Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2 (4), 313-322 DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsm030
Gallagher, S. (2000). Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4 (1), 14-21 DOI: 10.1016/S1364-6613(99)01417-5

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