You Are Who You Are By Default

That is, you are who you are by the brain’s default mode network. A recent Science News article gives some insight on the nature of mysterious sameness, particularly here, at the end of the report:

Once people reach adulthood, activity in the network is fairly consistent from person to person, with some slight differences between the sexes and in older versus younger people, Williamson and his colleagues wrote in a 2008 paper in NeuroReport.

This consistency in the network from person to person is remarkable, especially considering what its function is supposed to be. Everyone’s brain is thinking different thoughts while in the default mode, Fair says, and yet all healthy brains in default mode look essentially alike.

Such fundamental issues are among the puzzles of the default network remaining to be solved. “Nobody has really figured out what it is and what it does,” Williamson says. “But somebody will.”

“Nobody has really figured out …”? Well, I have a theory (of course). The perception of difference (the feeling) is rooted in emotion, not the intellect. In other words, the sensation of difference originates deeper down in amygdale, not in the cerebral cortex where all the ‘action’ seems to be. The cortex produces the illusion of difference, and in humans, assigns names to the differences; the amygdale make that illusion (the named) feel real!

Thus, those researchers end up thinking the differences they see between people’s thoughts are more real than they are. If, on the other hand, the apparent differences are really just that, apparent and not real, then one would expect to see everyone’s default mode network very similar, as is the case.

One obvious example of this lies in the ideal of ‘god’. The mysterious feeling is the same in us all, but just think of all the different words people use to differentiate their experience from other people: God, Buddha, Monad, Yahweh, Allah, Krishna, Christ, Oneness, Omnipresence, Supreme Being, The All…

The belief in the difference can be so deep as to cause us to kill one another in the name of our favorite Name for the mysterious sameness feeling we all share in common. It is ironic, eh?