Every day, neuroscientists are revealing who you are and how you function. They have shown that if I electrically stimulated a few millimetres of grey flesh in your mind-meat, I could make you experience love, forget your wife, or think you were talking to God.

But it gets weirder. In the West, we all believe there is one coherent person dominating our brains, directing us as we wander through life. There is You, whole and complete. But we are wrong. The different parts of our brains are locked in a constant electrical war. None of them is in charge. As the neurosphysician Paul Broks puts it: “We are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self – feelings, thoughts, memories – are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot.”

This is why we feel inner conflict all the time. Your amygdyla tells you to run away from the exam; your frontal lobes tell you to stay or you won’t get into university. Decode this brain-science and you decode yourself.

—

(Source: baronjamie, via dalasverdugo)