It's a Jungle in There: How Competition and Cooperation in the Brain Shape the Mind Read Online Free Page B

“Go for it,” and then some other voice chimes in: “No, don’t!”
    To whom do these voices belong? To you, of course, yet they seem to come from different individuals within you—a brave you, a cautious you, a you who triumphs, a you who trembles. It’s hard to tell which you is the real one. The chorus of voices makes you feel like you’re not one person but many. The truth is, you are many. You are a
population
.
    Abandoning the idea that you’re a single self may be disconcerting. Can you decide anything if you’re not one person? The answer is that you can, because populations do so all the time. In elections, populations decide who will be mayor, governor, or president. In the market, populations decide things too. At the time of this writing, it was stylish for female students at my university to wear shorts that had the word “Pink” brandished in large letters across their behinds (not that I noticed, of course). A while ago, Penn State students proudly carried the word “Aeropostale” across their sweaters. Earlier, Tommy Hilfiger was the
nom de style
. Fashions are decided through collectivedecision making. Neither Tommy Hilfiger, Amy Aeropostale (a name I made up), nor Paula Pink (another name I made up) issued edicts decreeing that everyone should wear their brands. The students decided collectively that those were the styles they’d favor. 15
    You, too, as an individual perched on a precipice or on some less scary site, make decisions that reflect your collective activity. That this is so can become clear to you introspectively. In midair, having decided to leap, you may feel strangely like a witness to your own resolve. “I’m flying across the ravine,” you may say to yourself in a kind of out-of-body experience. “If I’m aloft, I must have decided to jump.” In this brief avian moment, you may even be reminded of René Descartes’ famous declaration, “I think, therefore I am.” In your case, given where you are at the moment—in midair, flying from one cliff to another—you may say, “I jumped, therefore I decided.”
    This is a strange way to make up your mind, of course, but for better or worse it’s how you do so. If you go one way or the other, over the cliff or back from whence you came, you made up your mind. There’s no escaping that conclusion. Still, if you remain undecided in the midst of the action itself, then it feels like what you did was heed the outcome of a referendum rather than enact some clear-headed decision you made like the decisive captain of a ship.
    These considerations suggest that it may be illusory to say you’re one coherent being. You’re not. You’re
many
beings. Your mental interior is inhabited by mental gnomes all living in your neural ecosystem. The motto of the United States,
E pluribus unum
(
Out of many one
), applies to you, just as it does to the USA. 16 You’re a plurality. When you think, you engage in group-think. When you act, you act on behalf of untold numbers of beings within you who function in ways that may or may not happen to ensure their own survival.
    This view of yourself as a population made up of beings, none as intelligent as you but collectively comprising you with no one in charge, is the view of cognition I wish to advance in this book. I hope you, all of you, will find the perspective useful.

2

Darwin and the Boss
    Declaring that your mind doesn’t have a head honcho can be scary. It violates your sense of self, your sense that you’re an individual. Seeing yourself as a conglomerate of self-interested imps rather than a clear-headed captain of your own fate can leave you feeling disoriented. Where’s your compass? How do you know which way to go? 1
    If you think it’s scary to fire your own mental guy or gal in charge, think what it must have been like for Charles Darwin, the hero of the story to come, who suggested that no chief executive is needed to explain the formation of species, including the species