Mind: A Collection Of Mental Functions

With these simple definitions—thinking, thoughts, and minds—it makes sense to think in terms of lots of minds and lots of thoughts interacting in an orchestrated way to allow us to function at the biological level, various unconscious levels, and various conscious levels. These various minds, or modules, as Ornstein identifies them, all cooperate— or fail to—to make us what we are. A third key principle to keep in mind is that these multiple minds are always at work all the time, doing their jobs simultaneously. While we’re thinking “consciously”—usually verbally or logically—our nonconscious thinking processes are feeding information from all levels, offering it to the gatekeeper modules that admit new information into our awareness. Where do hunches come from? Where do great new ideas come from when they flash onto our mental view screens? The creative thinking concept of incubation, for example, depends on this “behind
the scenes” mental activity; we consciously think about a problem or a situation for a certain amount of time, and then we move on to think about other things. But other mindmodules may go to work on the problem below the level of our awareness. Then, suddenly, seemingly without invitation, an idea flashes into our consciousness that gives us the solution we were seeking. Careful study of the varieties of mental process suggests more and more strongly that what we call the “conscious mind”—or just “the mind” to most people—is more like a projection screen than a functioning computer. So much of our real thinking goes on at precognitive and non conscious levels, that it often seems that the viewing screen of consciousness simply displays the results of what the other minds are doing at any particular moment. If we think of a mind or a mindmodule as a collection of mental functions and recognize that we have many mindmodules processing information for us simultaneously on multiple levels, it’s intriguing to wonder about how these modules manage to get along.Who’s in charge? According to psychologist and researcher Michael Gazzaniga, none of them are. Gazzaniga and other researchers argue—to the dismay and consternation of many of their colleagues—that the human biocomputer may not actually have an “executive module.” There may not be a single master program in control of our thinking processes. In his research with split-brain patients, described above, Gazzaniga presented tasks that placed the two separated hemispheres in competition with one another.
For example, by flashing an image to the left half of each visual field of the subject’s eyes (using a divided viewing device), he could make it known to the right hemisphere without allowing the left hemisphere to know what it was. In normal, undivided people, the information would immediately cross over to the left hemisphere, through the corpus callosum, and the left hemisphere would activate its speech center to name the object. With the split-brain subjects, however, the right hemisphere would recognize the object, but the information could not pass over to the left hemisphere. Consequently, the subject’s left hemisphere, having control of speech and believing that it was the “real” brain, would claim not to know what the object was.
But if the image was presented to the right half of the visual field, traveling through the cross over optic circuit to the left hemisphere, the subject could easily name it, because the same hemisphere that controlled speech received the information. From his research with split-brain subjects over about a decade, Gazzaniga arrived at, and began to promote within the scientific community, a very provocative proposition. He argued that our brain-mind systems are composed of multitudes of processing modules, and there is no “master module,” no “executive mind.” Further, he contended, our left brains are home to a specialized module he called the “interpreter” module, which might also be called the “explainer.” The function of the interpreter module, according to Gazzaniga, is simply to explain why we just behaved the way we did.
His theory touched off an explosion of argument and theorizing among brain researchers, and well it might. Gazzaniga’s proposition has four parts, all of them distressing to the conventional “free-will” model of human mental process:
1.That we have no executive module—“No one is really in charge,” as he says;
2.That our behavior arises out of impulses not known to consciousness;
3.That our “explainer” module simply makes up reasons for our
behavior, after the fact, so to speak; and
4.That what we call our “values” are simply the explanations we give for our behavior, and not the causes of it. Gazzaniga’s proposition has been the subject of debate and theorizing in the psychological community for almost two decades, and the discourse becomes ever more complex and intricate. We certainly can’t resolve it here, but it does seem that the multi-mind, modular
concept of the biocomputer’s organization has merit. In later chapters we’ll frequently refer to this modular aspect of the human mental process and capitalize heavily on the idea of mindmodules as normal components of our information processing biosystem.