Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

In line with the growing field of social cognitive neuroscience, Dunbar is correct in arguing that the human brain has evolved specialized capacity and processing capability dedicated towards social functions. We know this because why else would humans have evolved into the species that spends the longest proportion of their lives as children dependent on adults? The simple answer must be that as a species we have evolved a strategy to pass on as much information as possible from one generation to the next through our storytelling and instruction. Our ability to communicate means that our offspring can know more about the world they are to embark on by listening to and learning from others without having to rediscover everything for themselves. In short, our extended human childhood means that we do not have to reinvent the wheel with each generation.

Baby Bat Brains

Now that you know the basic architecture of the developing brain is one designed to learn from others, I expect you are wondering what it must be like to think like a baby. To answer that, let’s consider this problem from the perspective of what it must be like to be an animal.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel 42famously asked, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Most of us with vivid imaginations can contemplate being much smaller, having fur and even wings (who has not dreamed of being able to fly?), but we cannot really know what it is like to be a bat. A bat would not have the mind of a human, because its brain is different and so you cannot use your human mind to experience being a bat. As a bat, you would not be able to see in the way that humans do because your vision is so poor. You would have to rely on echolocation, which is why bats squeak when they fly as a way of mapping out the air space in front of them and identifying tasty insects to eat. A bat probably has more in common with a dolphin than a bird. The list of differences goes on, but the point is that you can never know what it would be like to be a bat for the simple reason that you have a human brain and a mind. The same applies to human babies.

The developmental psychologist John Flavell once said that he would trade all his degrees and honours to spend five minutes in the mind an infant – just to experience what it must be like to be a baby again. 43That would probably be a waste of his academic accolades. Just think about it for a moment. How could you see inside the mind of another person let alone a baby? Human babies have human minds but those minds are very different to one that we could appreciate as adults. If you had an adult mind inside the body of a baby, it would not be the same as thinking and experiencing the world as an infant. You would have to abandon all the knowledge and reasoning that you have built up as an adult. You would have to think like a baby. So you would not have an adult’s mind thinking like a baby. You would be a baby. As much as we might try, we can never get a true sense of what it is to have the mind of an infant. Every parent falls for this trick. When we stare at our infants in their cribs, we try to second-guess what they are thinking. We try to imagine what it must be like to be them, but for all our wishful thinking, they might as well be a bat.

An infant’s mind may be very alien to us but it is one that will eventually become an adult mind. Nature has built into humans the capacity to learn and to learn very quickly from others. It is not only doting adults who focus their attention on their offspring; each baby is wired to pay attention to others. It’s how our species has evolved a remarkable ability to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next and no other animal on the planet can do this as well as humans. But do babies know who they are? Babies have conscious awareness but does a baby have a sense of self yet? We cannot know for certain but I suspect not. Beginning the process of creating the self illusion requires early social interactions.

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The Machiavellian Baby

The development of the child’s personality could not go on at all without the constant modification of his sense of himself by suggestions from others. So he himself, at every stage, is really in part someone else, even in his own thought.

James Mark Baldwin (1902)

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Hitler was one – so was Mother Teresa. Every monster or messiah has been one. We were all babies once. We have all been cherub-like angels, blameless and innocent of any crimes and, in most cases, the apple of someone’s eye. But somewhere along the way, some of us lost our innocence. Some of us became evil. Some of us became good. Some of us became bankers. However we turned out, we all discovered our sense of our self along the way. How did that discovery happen?

People used to think that the infant’s mind was completely empty at birth, and then filled up with information from the world around. The eighteenth-century English philosopher, John Locke, described the mind of a newborn infant as a blank piece of paper upon which experience would write itself. 2William James, the nineteenth-century American philosopher, thought the newborn’s world was a chaotic jumble of confusion. 3Both were wrong in assuming that a baby has no built-in abilities and that all experience is total chaos. Natural selection has been busy creating human brains ready for certain information. Like your laptop computer delivered through the mail, babies come with a brain operating system that has evolved to learn certain things about the world and ignore other stuff that is not of use to them. And the most important things to a human baby are other humans. Human infants are wholly dependent on others and, as mentioned, spend the longest proportion of their lives in this state of dependency compared to any other species. Why?

Approximately 250,000 years ago, a few thousand Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa aided by a brain that was sophisticated enough to adapt to new environments, but also one that had evolved the capacity for the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. We were born to learn. Long before writing and the Internet were invented, humans had the capacity to communicate with each other in ways that no other animal could. With communication came an explosion in technology and skills. This was not information in our genes but rather knowledge gleaned from others. Our parents, and their parents and their parent’s parents before them, had thousands of years of knowledge passed down from each generation. That’s why every newborn baby does not have to start from scratch. This is such an obvious fact about human civilization that we often forget that we are the only animals on this planet that retain skills and knowledge that we pass on to our offspring. Other animals can learn about their environments but no other animal has the human capacity for acquiring thousands of years of experience within a lifetime.

The best way to tap into that knowledge is to pay attention to others, which is why humans spend so much time as children. Other species that spend comparatively longer periods as juveniles also end up smarter than their cousins who reach adult maturity more quickly. For example, crows are a remarkably clever family of birds that are capable of solving many more complex problems that behavioural bird experts throw at them compared to other birds, such as chickens. After hatching, chickens are up and pecking for their own food much faster than crows, which rely on the parent bird to bring them food in the nest. However, as adults, chickens have very limited scavenging skills whereas crows are much more flexible in foraging for food. Crows also end up with bigger and more complex brains, which is why they are sometimes referred to as the ‘feathered apes’ because they are as clever as chimpanzees. Their extended fledging period enables them to develop intelligence. Across various animals, childhood has been compared to the research and development phase of the life cycle. 4Those species that spend longer in R&D end up with a larger repertoire of skills and not surprisingly, also end up the most sociable.