Self Comes to Mind

limited. (In the generation that has grown up multitasking, in the digital age, the upper limits of attention in the human brain are being rapidly raised, something that is likely to change certain aspects of consciousness in the not-too-distant future, if it has not done so already. Breaking the glass ceiling of attention has obvious advantages, and the associative abilities generated by multitasking are a terrific advantage; but there may be trade-off costs in terms of learning, memory consolidation, and emotion. We have no idea what these costs may be.)
    These three constraints (abundance of images, tendency to organize them in coherent narratives, and scarcity of explicit display space) have prevailed for a long time in evolution and have required effective management strategies to prevent them from damaging the organism in which they occur. Given that the making of images was naturally selected in evolution because images permit a more precise evaluation of the environment and a better response to it, the strategic management of images likely evolved bottom up, early on, well before consciousness did. The strategy was to select automatically those images that were most valuable for ongoing life management—precisely the same criterion presiding over the natural selection of the image-making devices. Especially valuable images, given their importance for survival, were “highlighted” by emotional factors. The brain probably achieves this highlighting by generating an emotional state that accompanies the image in a parallel track. The degree of emotion serves as a “marker” for the relative importance of the image. This is the mechanism described in the “somatic marker hypothesis.” 6 The somatic marker does not need to be a fully formed emotion, overtly experienced as a feeling. (That is what a “gut feeling” is.) It can be a covert, emotion-related signal of which the subject is not aware, in which case we refer to it as a bias . The notion of somatic markers is applicable not just to high levels of cognition but to those earlier stages of evolution. The somatic marker hypothesis offers a mechanism for how brains would execute a value-based selection of images and how that selection would translate in edited continuities of images. In other words, the principle for the selection of images was connected to life-management needs. I suspect the same principle presided over the design of primordial narrative structures, which involved the organism’s body, its status, its interactions, and its wanderings in the environment.
    All of the above strategies, I submit, began to evolve long before there was consciousness, just as soon as enough images were being made, perhaps as soon as real minds first bloomed. The vast unconscious probably has been part of the business of organizing life for a long, long time, and the curious thing is that it is still with us, as the great subterraneam under our limited conscious existence.
    Why did consciousness prevail, once it was offered to organisms as an option? Why were consciousness-making brain devices naturally selected? One possible answer, which we will consider at the end of the book, is that generating, orienting, and organizing images of the body and of the outside world in terms of the organism’s needs, increased the likelihood of efficient life management and consequently improved the chances of survival. Eventually consciousness added the possibility of knowing about the organism’s existence and about its struggles to stay alive. Of course, knowing depended not just on the creation and display of explicit images but on their storage in implicit records. Knowing connected the struggles of existence with a unified, identifiable organism. After such states of knowing began to be committed to memory, they could be connected to other recorded facts, and knowledge about individual existence could begin to be accumulated. In turn, the images contained in knowledge could be recalled and manipulated in a reasoning process that paved the way for reflection and deliberation. The image-processing machinery could then be guided by reflection and used for effective anticipation of situations, previewing of possible outcomes, navigation of the possible future , and invention of management solutions .
    Consciousness allowed the organism to become cognizant of its own plight. The organism no longer had mere feelings that could be felt; it had feelings that could be