two Is

MIND GAMES

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THE MULTIPLE I’S

Dr. Michael Gazzaniga suggests taking it a step further. Yes, there are two streams of consciousness, he agrees, but there are several control systems in our brains. He calls them ‘the controllers’.

How many ‘controllers’ do we have in our brains?

Numerous neurologists suggest that there are probably as many as sixteen! This is extraordinary, there are sixteen channels of brain activity, each one fighting to lead the menagerie. The ‘hunger controller’ wants to make the decisions, the ‘emotion controller’ fights him and the ‘pain controller’ is ready to take over in a split second. Sixteen ‘controllers’ are fighting within you at any given moment, while two ‘I’s’ provide two different streams of awareness.

In other words, each one of us is making our decisions ‘by committee’.

CONSCIOUSNESS

In every single second of every day, millions of nerve endings from all over the body are sending signals to the brain. Tor Norretranders in his book, The User Illusion, reveals that there are over eleven million signals - thus 11 million bits of information - going into the brain every single second. But scientists who hooked up the brain found that most people respond to only 40 bits per of information per second! This is our consciousness: we are aware of only 40 bits of information out of the 11 million bits of information flowing into our brain every waking second of our lives. But why? Why doesn’t the brain use more of the bits of information available?

Scientists say it is because we need to make decisions. Too much data would be too confusing, resulting in fear, anxiety and inability to react. So, to avoid this possibility, the brain simply ignores or rejects all of the data that does not fit into the neat little predictable and controllable picture of reality that the individual needs. In other words, we accept only the inputs that allow us to keep our picture of the world intact.

This is amazing: scientists are telling us that the brain rejects 11 million bits of information and keeps 40 bits, so that the picture of reality that it has of the world is more ‘orderly’ than the picture the entire 11 million bits produces.

Brain researcher Tor Norretranders says: ‘Consciousness is not about information, it is about eliminating information so that the world around us remains predictable’.

Imagine a puzzle made up of over 11 million pieces; then imagine having only 40 pieces of the puzzle in order to decide what the entire picture of the puzzle is?

That is us, the ‘reality’ that our brain tells us we live in is based on only 40 pieces out of 11 million. What are the chances that we really know what is going on around us every second of every waking day?