Are our lives controlled by our unconscious brain?

David Eagleman
Baylor University

Few issues in "nonduality" raise as much resistance as "free will" and "being in conscious control".  An excellent PBS series, "The Brain with David Eagleman", created by neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman, explores many critical issues at the frontiers of neuroscience, including "What is Reality?", "What Makes Me?", "Who Is in Control?", "How Do I Decide?", etc.  Here's the episode on "Who Is in Control?".

"Conscious control is an illusion…"

“Almost every action that you take, and every decision that you make, and every belief that you hold - these are driven by part of your brain that you have no access to.   We call this hidden world the “unconscious”.   And it runs much more of your life than you would ever imagine.” 

 “All of that conscious 'you' makes up the smallest bit of the activity in your brain.  The conscious 'you' thinks it’s the captain of the ship, but in truth it’s nothing more than a stowaway. Even our actions that we think are intentional are unconscious, automatic.”

Baseball pitches are over 90 mph and reach the batter in 0.4 second, before the conscious “you” can register what’s going on.  “I strike the ball without thinking and only become aware of what’s happened after the event”. 

 

Drinking coffee, your brain automatically senses, calculates and controls the position of the cup, how hot it is, if it is level, where your lips are, etc., completely hidden from your conscious awareness with bundles of specialized neurons in the cerebellum. 

Ian Waterman
Walking w/conscious effort

Just walking down the street is an amazingly complex operation which is done seamlessly.

Ian Waterman (9:45 – 12:22) lost this ability to do this @ 19 so now he walks w/conscious effort, operating his body like a puppet master.   As Ian described, “An amazing loss.  An astounding facility the body has.  You just don’t know what it is until it goes.”

Dr. Eagleman vs Austin Naber
in cup stacking race

Watching Austin Naber (12:45 – 16:48), a “Champion cup stacker” perform, his EEG brain activity is almost unmeasurable compared to that of Dr. Eagleman’s.   Austin has now “carved the structure of the cup stacking into his neurons” so it happens rapidly and efficiently.   

As Eagleman describes, “As we learn new skills they change the structure of our brain and it moves from software to being the hardware”, hard-wired into the brain…automatic, unconscious and energy efficient, like driving a car w/o any memory of how we got there, “unconsciously”. 

 

This capability permits some extreme feats.  Dean Potter (19:16 - 23:24)  free climbs, solo, w/only his hands and feet…a moment’s hesitation or stray thought could spell disaster.  As Potter says, “My most pinnacle moments are when I completely go away consciously and I find myself at the top of the rock, like blackout.  I don’t know what happened.”   

Dean Potter free climbing

As Eagleman describes, this is “’flow”, known “to meditation experts, to elite athletes, to professional musicians” when totally immersed in their skill.

Dean Potter free climbing

Potter continues, “My perception is heightened, what I’m seeing is much clearer... I stop thinking about what I’m doing and I just do."  

"We all have chatter when we are thinking about all the things in our life…things that, really, don’t have to do with where we’re at…The reason I’m doing all of these things isn’t to climb the rock - it is to enter the heightened state.   So it doesn’t matter what I’m doing if I can enter that heightened state I’m happy.” 

Most of the time we aren’t aware of the decisions made on our behalf.  If you’re holding a warm cup of coffee, you’ll describe a closer relationship with your mother than if you’re holding an ice coffee.   In a foul-smelling environment, you make harsher moral decisions.  Sitting next to some hand sanitizer makes your opinions more conservative because it reminds you of “outside threats”.  Most of the time your brain runs on autopilot.

  

Consciousness can provide a unique vantage point when you encounter something unexpected, and serves as a way for our massively complex system to hold up a mirror to itself.  It has made us the most successful, and dangerous, species on the planet.

Our brains get built, beginning w/our genes, which have an enormous behavioral influence.   As Eagleman states, “For example, half of us carry a particular gene which increases our chances of committing a violent crime by 882%.  Most prisoners carry these genes, as does almost everyone on death row.  We call these genes the ‘Y Chromosome’…if you’re a carrier, you are called “male”.

However, genetics is only part of the story as some genes play no role until they are “expressed”/activated by your environment.  The family, neighborhood, culture, etc. in which you find yourself builds your brains, steers your behaviors and defines much of what we can become.  There are no decisions that can be made independently of your history. 

Prof. Alvaro Pascual-Leone’s (Harvard Medical School) research (45:51 – 49:18 ) demonstrates that there is nothing recorded in brain activity that points to something ascribed to “free will”.   Alvaro uses Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to induce a current in the cortex of the brain to initiate involuntary movement. 

By targeting certain areas, Alvaro could make participants change their minds.  As one participant said “I seemed to have changed my mind at the last second, I’m not sure why.”  

TMS was causing the movements and yet many were convinced that they had made choices with their own free will, even when looking at the evidence which proved otherwise.  They were certain they had done it, demonstrating just how good the conscious mind is at fooling itself.  

  

If we don’t have free will, what would that mean for our lives?  Well, in practice predictability is impossible.  Dropping a single ping pong ball on 150 other balls, it is possible to very accurately predict where it will land.  But as it begins to trigger other balls, soon it becomes impossible to make any prediction about how the balls will end up. 

As Eagleman continues, “Your thoughts, feelings, and decisions emerge from the innumerable, ongoing interactions in your brain, causing billions of times more interactions every second than do these 150 ping pong balls.   In your whole life, it never stops.”  

As each person’s individual brain is imbedded in a world of other people’s brains, the neurons of every one on the planet, fire, interact and influence each other creating a system of unimaginable complexity.  Even with predictable rules, it will always be impossible to know exactly where any of us are going. 

Eagleman concludes, “Our conscious minds play a much smaller role in our lives than we once imagined.  Everything from what we do, to who we are, is orchestrated by the unconscious brain…The human brain is nature’s perplexing masterpiece.  It’s the most wondrous thing we’ve discovered in the universe and it’s us.”