Let's move on to a common topic in meditation, neuroscience, and Westworld: the brain, consciousness, and the self. Last time we talked about feelings, this time we're going to talk about emotions and desires. Many popular psychology books on the market divide people's subjective consciousness into two parts, emotions, desires and ideals, and logic. Many books will warn us that emotions and desires are sometimes destructive and will ruin your life. It needs to be controlled using later rational and logical functions in your brain. Some books also provide a more detailed explanation for the dualism of emotion and rationality. For example, emotion and desire are the functions of the early evolutionary reptile brain, which is characterized by rapid response but poor flexibility and plasticity, close to automatic. mechanism. Rationality and logic are the functions of the newly evolved human neocortex, which is characterized by requiring more time for careful thinking, but with strong plasticity. So we should use the rational part of our brain to monitor and manage the emotional part of the brain, and not let the low-level functions of the brain do whatever they want. These theories or stories sound very real, and fit the human tendency to prefer a simple black-and-white dualism, but is this really true? Let's take a look at how Westworld plays out the relationship between emotion and reason. There are many robot "receptionists" in the Westworld "playground". Most of the robot "receptionists" lack self-awareness, but the robot Dolores created by Arnold already has self-awareness. The incident triggered conflicts and quarrels between Arnold and Robert, and in the end Arnold used his own death to try to prevent Robert from opening Westworld to the outside world. Arnold created Dolores with an emotion and used this emotion as the cornerstone of Dolores' self-personality, and when Robert created Bernard in Arnold's image, he also used a grief emotions as the cornerstone of his self-awareness. Are emotions really the cornerstone of self-awareness? Really, this has been proven by neuroscience research. I don't know if Jonathan Nolan read Damasio's book when he wrote the show, but his account of self-awareness and emotions fits Damasio's theory very well. Antonio. Damasio's original work was to follow a few patients with specific brain injuries. He found that some patients with brain injury were completely unable to live a normal life and had no sense of responsibility, so they could not adapt to any job, get along with others normally, or adapt to married life, and eventually ended their lives in loneliness and despair. When Damasio initially gave these brain-injured patients an intelligence test, they found that their intelligence level was within the normal range, and they could understand other people's thoughts, but they just couldn't make normal work and life decisions. They can't stick to their original decisions, so it looks like they're slouching and lacking in responsibility. When Damasio conducted further research, he found that the cognitive abilities of these patients were not damaged, but the brain tissue responsible for emotions was damaged, which means that these patients had no emotions. According to the power of popular psychology, the brain in charge of emotions and desires is the original reptile brain, and the brain in charge of rationality and logic is the new cerebral cortex of human beings, then it means that the brain will work by reason from now on, and completely get rid of the various love and hate. This kind of emotion, isn't that a good thing? No, Damasio's research found that when a person loses emotional function, he also loses the inner drive to do things, and he can't make decisions and act according to decisions, and life will be very bleak and miserable. Damasio's scientific research proves that the views in Westworld are correct. Emotions are the cornerstone of self-awareness. The self cannot function without emotions. It is emotions and desires that provide us with the driving force for everything we do. Many times reason is not enough. It's only after these drives drive you to complete the task that you jump out and explain. The reason we feel like our decisions are made with rational thinking is because we have a very powerful defense attorney and screenwriter in our left brain who weaves our every action into a self-explanatory story that makes us feel like we are We are manipulating everything that happens in our bodies. Another neuroscientist, Michael. Scientific research by Gazzaniza confirms this. Gazzaniga's earliest studies were in split-brain patients whose tumors had been removed from the corpus callosum, which connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and he found something interesting. Gazzaniza found that the neuronal organization that interprets behavior in the human brain is located in the left hemisphere. In normal people, the left and right hemispheres are connected by the corpus callosum, but for patients whose corpus callosum was removed, images presented only to the right hemisphere could not be transmitted to the brain. Left brain, but the left brain can still make up all kinds of reasons to explain. For example, if you show a picture of a shovel to the left eye, the left hand will pick up the shovel, but if you ask a split-brain patient why your left hand is holding the shovel, their left brain cannot see the picture just now (the left eye and the left hand return to each other). The right brain is responsible, while the right eye and right hand belong to the left brain), but there will be a reason, such as taking a shovel to shovel dirt on the ground. Many scientific studies have proved that the dualism of emotional rationality in popular psychology is completely nonsense. Our self-awareness is based on the driving force provided by various emotions and desires. It is just a contest between the inner driving force generated by this emotion and desire, and the rational consciousness part is at most a defense lawyer for the post-event result of the contest. So not all books with "psychology" in the title are scientific, stop being fooled by pseudoscience, you can throw them all away now. Not only neuroscience tells us the powerful power of emotions, but there is such a passage in Buddhist scriptures: "In the past, my mind was free to do whatever I wanted, and I marched with my hobbies. The Buddha likened our emotions to wild elephants, out of control, and if you have experience in meditation, you know this metaphor is very apt. I used to try to use zazen to suppress the emotions that have been generated, but because of my manipulation mistakes, the more I tried to suppress the entanglement of emotions, the more the events and emotional reactions that triggered the emotions kept replaying in my mind, no matter what I thought. Can't stop. Later I read more about meditation and learned that the best way is not to try to suppress emotions but to observe your emotions from a third-party perspective and allow them to arise and dissipate on their own. You can think of yourself as the ocean. Your emotions and desires are like waves that come and go, and come and go. You can't control the waves to make them happen, and you can't control the waves to make them disappear. After all, we are only mortals, not Buddhas, and we can't "conquer this mind" yet. When you get used to seeing yourself and your emotions this way, you gain a sense of liberation because you realize that there is no point Performance controls emotions and desires, and you are driven to make every decision in life by emotions and desires that can replace and suppress another emotion and desire. When I understood that my emotions and desires could not be suppressed, my temper was much better than before, because I gradually mastered how to use one emotion to replace and suppress another, instead of trying to use rationality as before. Stop your negative emotions. To give a real life example, many of us take weight loss as a game of controlling desire (eat) with reason (don’t eat), which turns weight loss into a game of cat and mouse, always trying to control and exhaustion Cycle between efforts, and your rationality is always the loser. In fact, losing weight is just a PK between two emotions and desires, one is the desire to eat delicious food, and the other is the desire to become thinner and make yourself look better. This should be a contest between the two desires. So if someone really wants to lose weight, it is not to use reason to control their desire to eat, but to constantly strengthen the desire to pursue a better self-image, because only desire and emotion can replace and suppress another desire and emotion. . In conclusion, most of the representations formed in our brains generate a strong or weak emotion or desire, and it is these emotions that influence our behavior and decisions, and we think our decisions are purely rational, which is purely a hallucinations in the brain. Our life experiences give us different intensities and priorities of our various emotions and desires, and it is the intensities and priorities of these emotions and desires that make up our character or temperament, which is the cornerstone of our character. The desire for something, but the desire to constantly strengthen the pursuit of a better self-image, because only desire and emotion can replace and suppress another desire and emotion. In conclusion, most of the representations formed in our brains generate a strong or weak emotion or desire, and it is these emotions that influence our behavior and decisions, and we think our decisions are purely rational, which is purely a hallucinations in the brain. Our life experiences give us different intensities and priorities of our various emotions and desires, and it is the intensities and priorities of these emotions and desires that make up our character or temperament, which is the cornerstone of our character. The desire for something, but the desire to constantly strengthen the pursuit of a better self-image, because only desire and emotion can replace and suppress another desire and emotion. In conclusion, most of the representations formed in our brains generate a strong or weak emotion or desire, and it is these emotions that influence our behavior and decisions, and we think our decisions are purely rational, which is purely a hallucinations in the brain. Our life experiences give us different intensities and priorities of our various emotions and desires, and it is the intensities and priorities of these emotions and desires that make up our character or temperament, which is the cornerstone of our character.
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