Self Comes to Mind

compete for conscious treatment, but it does not succeed because, for a variety of reasons, the pelicans are so interesting to me, meaning valuable. Reward nuclei in regions such as the brain stem’s ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, and the basal ganglia accomplish the special treatment of the pelican images by selectively releasing neuromodulators in image-making areas. A sense of ownership of the images, as well as a sense of agency, arises from such feelings of knowing. At the same time, the changes in the sensory portals have placed the object-to-be-known in a definite perspective relative to me. 11
    Out of this global-scale brain map, core self states emerge in pulselike fashion. But suddenly the phone rings, and the spell is broken. My head and eyes move reluctantly but inexorably to the receiver. I get up. And the whole cycle of conscious mind-making starts anew, now focused on the telephone. The pelicans are gone from my sight and from my mind; the telephone is in.

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The Autobiographical Self
     
Memory Made Conscious
     
    Autobiographies are made of personal memories, the sum total of our life experiences, including the experiences of the plans we have made for the future, specific or vague. Autobiographical selves are autobiographies made conscious. They draw on the entire compass of our memorized history, recent as well as remote. The social experiences of which we were a part, or wish we were, are included in that history, and so are memories that describe the most refined among our emotional experiences, namely, those that might qualify as spiritual.
    While the core self pulses away relentlessly, always “online,” from hint half-hinted to blatant presence, the autobiographical self leads a double life. On the one hand, it can be overt, making up the conscious mind at its grandest and most human; on the other, it can lie dormant, its myriad components waiting their turn to become active. That other life of the autobiographical self takes place offscreen, away from accessible consciousness, and that is possibly where and when the self matures, thanks to the gradual sedimentation and reworking of one’s memory. As lived experiences are reconstructed and replayed, whether in conscious reflection or in nonconscious processing, their substance is reassessed and inevitably rearranged, modified minimally or very much in terms of their factual composition and emotional accompaniment. Entities and events acquire new emotional weights during this process. Some frames of the recollection are dropped on the mind’s cutting-room floor, others are restored and enhanced, and others still are so deftly combined either by our wants or by the vagaries of chance that they create new scenes that were never shot. That is how, as years pass, our own history is subtly rewritten. That is why facts can acquire a new significance and why the music of memory plays differently today than it did last year.
    Neurologically speaking, this building and rebuilding job occurs largely in nonconscious processing, and for all we know, it may even occur in dreams, although it can emerge in consciousness on occasion. It makes use of the convergence-divergence architecture to turn the encrypted knowledge contained in dispositional space into explicit, decrypted displays in the image space.
    Fortunately, given the abundance of records of one’s lived past and anticipated future, we do not need to recall all of them or even most of them, whenever our selves operate in autobiographical mode. Not even Proust would have needed to draw on all of his richly detailed and long-ago past to construct a moment of full-fledged self-Proustiness. Thankfully, we rely on key episodes, a collection of them actually, and, depending on the needs of the moment, we simply recall a certain number of them and bring them to bear on the new episode. In certain situations, the number of summoned episodes can be very high, a true flood of memories suffused with the emotions and feelings that first went with them. (One can always count on Bach to bring about such a situation.) But even when the number of episodes is limited, the complexity of memoranda involved in structuring the self is, to put it modestly, very large. Therein lies the problem of constructing the autobiographical self.
Constructing the Autobiographical Self
     
    I suspect that the brain’s strategy for constructing the autobiographical self is as follows. First, substantial sets of