What is "You"?

I read a book a year or so ago: The Self Illusion – why there is no “you” inside your head by Bruce Hood.

It’s fascinating to think – how does a lump of tissue and electrical and chemical signals translate into “you”! Of course the answer is we don’t really know!

We really do know a lot about the structure and functions of the brain – the areas that are involved when we see, when we move our fingers to type, when we make decisions. We know a lot about the electrical and chemical processing. But how does that translate into “consciousness” or a sense of self?

In a TED talk I watched Anil Seth talk about a coffee cup. There is no doubt that the coffee cup exists. It has a physical presence and he makes the point that if he were to throw it at someone it would hurt!

BUT the coffee cup is “red”. I looked at it and thought – yes it is. But – the thing is, the only thing that is certain in a physical sense is the wavelength of the light bouncing off the cup.

The light photons enter my eye and hit the cones on the retina - a signal goes to the back of my head and I say “Red”. But that’s only because when my eye has sent that signal to my brain before I learned to interpret that combination of signals as red!! The brain interprets the world and what is happening through our sensory organs and constructs our “reality”, which isn’t real…

Confused yet!? So what I think RED looks like might be different to what you think RED looks like.

If that doesn’t blow your mind enough then consider memory.

We have different types of memory – memory for events and memory for facts.

* What happened at that meeting

* The capital city of France

And here’s the thing.

When I am at the meeting I am constructing my own narrative. I watch, listen and signals pass to my brain. And these will be interpreted and coloured by all sorts of things, such as:

* How I am feeling – tired/hungry

* Relationships with others in the room

* Unconscious bias

So already that’s probably entirely different to how anyone else at the meeting, and then it gets stored as a memory. Then again, our memory isn’t that great either, we filter again when we recall the memory.

Side note: hope I am never relying on a jury to find me innocent in a court case as witness statements are notoriously unreliable, and that’s not even taking into account people deliberately lying!

The point of this article was really just to set you thinking (because we don't really have answers) and to realise that we all have a different world that we live in, because we construct it in our heads. So whether you are talking to a prospect, or crafting a message for social media – remember – it will be viewed in different colours depending who’s looking at it!

A final quote from Anil Seth “We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful for us”