It doesn’t take much to imagine that the special abilities of the prefrontal cortex, whenever they happened to finally come together over the long course of evolution, made our species dramatically different — outrageous, really. To be able to represent our thinking symbolically and then embed these symbols inside one another like mental Matryoshka dolls, we became beings able to efficiently create, organize, and recall enormous amounts of complex information for still more revision. Without our ability to gather together systems of symbols and connect them in elaborate, nested patterns like this, there would be no language or alphabets, no Hamlet, Faust, or “Moby Dick,” no laws of thermodynamics, no science, music, or architecture, no kabuki theater, sculpture, renaissance art, or anything else that has made the great, expansive construction project we call human culture possible. It enables minds to meld, hearts to bond and ideas to be shared, bent and shaped by many other minds, with fascinating results.
What does any of this have to do with talking to ourselves? In addition to helping us convey what we Homo sapiens feel and think to one another, it makes it possible for you to explain what you feel and think to yourself. In fact, it makes your “self ” possible, and that may be the most stunning illusion our brains have managed to pull off over the past 50,000 years — maybe the most stunning ever. The ability to create the ultimate symbol: you. Which takes us back to the question we asked at the beginning: Who are “you,” anyway?
To answer that question, keep in mind our ancestors lived and died for millions of years as members of troops consisting of 20 to 50 individuals who counted on one another every day for their survival. Living in a situation so intensely social required keeping the motives and relationships of everyone around them straight; continually recalibrating shifting agendas, relationships, alliances, and power struggles. (Do office politics come to mind?) Evolution would have favored those in the troop who used their symbol-making talents to effectively track those relationships. Maybe Goog tended to be aggressive; Targ, helpful and friendly; Moop, well organized and smart. Symbolizing would have helped our predecessors to slot others into categories so they could successfully deal with them in ways they saw fit, depending on their own personalities and circumstances.
Perhaps it was then that the prefrontal cortex reached a plateau where it could not only fully symbolize others but manage the one last thing that made us fundamentally different from all other primates and humans that had come before us, or even evolved with us: symbolize ourselves. With that, everything changed, radically. Because when we could make emblems of ourselves, it meant that we could also begin to embed our symbolic alter egos among all the other symbols we had created around us. We could conceive of guiding our own behaviors, like a chess player moves his pieces on a chessboard. We began, entirely inside of our minds, to foresee what we might do, before we did it.
We could imagine. That, in itself, represents a remarkable leap, but it made still one more leap possible. The moment we consciously direct our actions within a scenario that we have imagined, it means we have purposefully made choices. With the invention of a symbolic “you,” intention and free will were born.
This makes “you” an illusion, but an extremely useful one, because it is this capacity that makes all of us self-aware, uniquely creative, and capable of taking control of our own fates, at least more than any other creature ever has. It has transformed us not merely into an animal that can explore a life not yet lived and imagine a future we yearn for, but one that can take hold of those dreams and make them come true, choice by choice. It creates an enormously powerful force in your life, this second you with whom you stay in constant touch and who diligently and deeply influences your every feeling, thought, and choice.
So the voice in your head that is talking to you? It’s you. But the person that is listening isn’t, not precisely. It’s a symbol you have created, the ultimate illusion.
This article is excerpted from “Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived.” Chip Walter is an author, former CNN bureau chief, screenwriter, and award-winning documentary filmmaker.
This article was originally published in Brain World Magazine.
