The Emotion Machine

such trait is our knack for inventing new Ways to Think.

Romanticist: You claim that our finest distinction is thinking—yet perhaps we are even more unique in our richness of how we experience things. There’s the joy of turning one’s intellect off, to enjoy a sunset or listen to birds, or to sing or do a spontaneous dance in delight of the sense of being alive.

Determinist: People use words like ‘spontaneous’ to make themselves feel that they aren’t constrained. But perhaps that sense of enjoying ourselves is merely a trick that some parts of our brains use to make us do what they want us to do.

In any case, I doubt that we ever stop thinking entirely, because thinking refers, at different times, to a huge range of intricate processes.

Citizen: If our everyday thinking is so complex, then why does it seem so straightforward to us? If its machinery is so intricate, how could we be unaware of this?

That illusion of simplicity comes from forgetting our infancies, in which we grew those abilities. As children we learned how to pick up blocks and arrange them into rows and stacks. Then as each new group of skills matured, we built yet more resources on top—just as we learned to plan and build more elaborate arches and towers.

Along with this, in those early times, we assembled the towers of aptitudes that we describe with words like minds. But now, as adults, we all believe that we have always been able to think—because we learned those skills so long ago that we cannot recall having learned them at all.

It took each of us many years of hard work to develop our more mature ways to think—but whatever records remain of this have somehow become inaccessible. What could have made us all victims to that “amnesia of infancy?” I don’t think this is simply because we ‘forgot.’ Instead, I suspect that it’s largely because we kept developing new, better techniques for representing both physical and mental events—and some of these methods became so effective that we abandoned the use of our previous ones. Now, even if those old records still exist, we no longer can make any sense of them.

In any case, the result of this is that now we all think without knowing how we think—and we do it so fluently that we scarcely ever ask about what thinking it is and how it might work. In particular, we like to celebrate grand accomplishments in the sciences, arts, and humanities—but we rarely applaud—or ask questions about—the marvels of everyday, commonsense thought. Indeed, we often see thinking as more or less passive, as though our thoughts just “come to us” and we say things like, “It occurred to me” or ”A thought entered my mind,” instead of, “I just made a new idea.” Thus we talk as though we don’t deserve any credit for our ideas, and we scarcely ever wonder about what chooses which subjects we think about.

One of the wooden doors in my home bears scratches made more than a decade ago. Our dog Jenny is gone but the scratches remain. I notice them only a few times a year, though I pass by that door several times every day.

Every day you encounter great numbers of things, yet only a few of them ‘get your attention’ enough to make you ask questions like, “What is that object and why is it here,” or “Who or what caused that to happen?” Most times your thinking proceeds in a smooth, steady flow in which you scarcely ever reflect on how you get from each step to the next.

At yet other times, your mind seems to wander without any sense of direction at all. First you might dwell on some social affair, then you reflect on some past event; next you’re beset by a hunger pang, or the thought of a payment that’s overdue, or an impulse to fix the faucet-drip, or an urge to tell Charles how you feel about Joan. Each item reminds you of something else until some mental ‘Critic’ cuts in with, “This isn’t getting you anywhere,” or “You must try to get more organized.”

However, there are certain times when your thinking is much more aim and direction. This happens when you are pursuing a certain goal, but encounter an impasse or obstacle like, “I can’t pack all this into this box—and besides, that would make it too heavy to lift.” Then you may stop to deliberate: “It looks like this will take several trips, but I don’t want to spend that much time on this.” Much of this chapter will discuss the idea that such recognitions of obstacles play critical roles in controlling our higher levels of thinking.

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This chapter will develop the idea that each person has many different ways to think. One could ask why we have so many of those, and one answer would be that our ancestors lived through a host of varied environments, each of which required ways to deal with different conditions and constraints. Then, because we never discovered one uniform scheme that could meet all our needs, we retained large parts of that collection of methods for coping with different situations.

Generally, we do not seem to be much aware of switching among all those ways to think. Perhaps this in large part because we all have that sense of having (or being) a Single Self—so one rarely asks a question like, “What prevents any part of my mind from seizing control of all the rest?” (Such accidents must have happened to many individuals in the course of human history—but their genes failed to propagate because they lacked enough versatility.) The result was that, over eons of time, our brains evolved a good many different ways to avoid the most common kinds of mistakes, while still staying able to adapt to a series of new environment; this is how evolution works; each species evolve at the edge of some zone between the safeties they know and the dangers they don’t.

Psychiatrist: That safety-zone can be narrow indeed. Most of the time, most minds function well, but sometimes get into various states in which they can scarcely function at all—and then we say that they’re mentally ill.

Physiologist: Surely most such disorders have medical causes—such as traumatic injuries, or chemical imbalances, or diseases that damage our synapses.

Programmer: Perhaps, but we should not assume that all such disorders have non-mental causes. When a ‘software virus’ infects a computer and changes some data on which it programs depends, the hardware is not damaged at all, but still there are serious changes in how it behaves.

Similarly, a new destructive goal or idea—or a change in one’s Critics or Ways to Think—could gain control of so much of a person’s resources and time that it could affect multiple realms of knowledge and thought—and thus spread like a mental malignancy.

Sociologist: Perhaps it’s the same on a larger scale, when the notions of a sect or cult include ways to discern potential recruits, in whom its ideas and belief will propagate.

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§7-1. What selects the subjects we think about?

What selects what we’ll think about next, from among all our various interests—and how long will we persist with each? Let’s consider a typical, everyday incident:

Joan needs to write a project report, but has not made much progress on it. Discouraged, she sets those thoughts aside and finds herself roaming about her house with no particular goal. She