It's only words

We scientists take pride in being methodologically rigorous. We are very picky about how we design our research projects, collect data, and statistically analyze the findings. But we can be less meticulous about how we interpret what it all means. This shortcoming was expressed well in 1995 by the personality psychologist Jack Block at the end of his career:

I urge the field of personality psychology to resolutely con-front its severe, even crippling, terminological problems. Many of the difficulties that beset assessment derive from the hasty, hazy, lazy use of language. Psychologists have tended to be sloppy with words. We need to become more intimate with their meanings, denotatively and connotatively, because summary labels and shorthand chosen quickly will control — often in unrecognized ways — the way we think subsequently. In part, this problem is inevitable, but we can do much better.

Block's plea to his colleagues could be directed to many areas of psychology and neuroscience, including, of course, studies on the self. Indeed, I believe that, in no small part, confusion about how to characterize, and understand, what and who we are is terminological. Some might say, "Oh, it's just semantics," as if that means it's not important. But it is. Words matter. They dictate meaning and underlie our conceptions. This is especially a problem with the words used in psychology.

The Language of Psychology

Many have noted that psychology is different from the other sciences because it is more dependent on commonsense wisdom handed down through the ages and incorporated into everyday language. For example, in their 1959 book The Language of Psychology, George Mandler and William Kessen noted: "The common language is full of quasi- psychological assertions. . . . The fact that man studies himself and that he has archaic notions which persist in the daily behavior of all men puts a major stumbling block in the path of scientific psychology."

It doesn't matter much if physicists or biologists are lax with their use of common language terms. No one  really believes that words like string in string theory or hedgehog in genetics are accurate descriptions of what they refer to (particles and genes, respectively). They are simply catchy terms that have some metaphorical relation to the real deal. But when we use a mental-state word to name some functional pro cess or circuit in the brain, the mental state is often assumed to be what the function is, or what the circuit does. In other words, the function or circuit inherits the mental-state qualities, and the conceptual baggage, implied by the name.

Kurt Danziger, in his insightful book Naming the Mind, noted that the reason we talk the way we do today about psychological processes is often because long-ago philosophers and scientists with limited or no knowledge of the brain assumed that if behavioral responses and conscious experiences in humans occur at the same time, the conscious experience must have caused the behavior. When ideas are discussed the same way generation after generation, they come to be so natural, so intuitive, so seemingly true, that they go unquestioned. Although scientists are taught from day one not to confuse correlation and causation, they too can mistake the intuitive for the factual.

An example near and dear to my heart, and one that I will discuss later in more detail, is the notion that the feeling of fear is what causes us to freeze or flee in the presence of danger. This bit of folk wisdom, or what is known as folk psychology, does not reflect the way things work in the brain, even though it is the accepted view of researchers and lay people. Don't get me wrong. I am not against folk psychology.  There is a place for folk-psychological mental-state terms. To reiterate an earlier point, they can and should be used to describe mental states like fear and the circuits under lying such conscious states. But they should not be used to describe circuits that control behavior non-consciously.

Explaining by Naming

Another problem that scientists have with vernacular words is reification. Typically, when you choose to study something scientifically, you do so assuming that the thing in question exists as a natural phenomenon in the physical world the way a rock, tree, building, or animal does. If the thing you want to study is not part of the physical world, you can't measure it. The measurement pro cess is what allows you to validate the actual existence of the thing referred to by the name. But sometimes naming gets mixed up with explaining.

In 1620, Francis Bacon wrote, "Scientists should be vigilant . . . and especially should guard against tacitly granting reality to concepts simply  because we have words for them." In short, when we apply names to philosophical ideas or scientific results, we run the risk of reifying them, endowing them with the properties implied by the name we give them.

Consider psychological essences, hypothetical concepts or processes that are assumed to exist as real entities. As Cameron Brick and colleagues put it, "Psychological concepts (e.g., intelligence; attention) are easily assumed to represent objective, definable categories with an under lying essence. Like the 'vital forces' previously thought to animate life, these assumed essences can create an illusion of understanding." Essences are intuitively appealing, in part because they have been handed down culturally over generations. But as thoughtful psychologists have pointed out, such constructs typically lead to theoretical dead ends.

The philosopher Kenneth Schaffner, who specializes in philosophical issues related to psychiatry, suggests that mental disorder constructs (schizophrenia, anxiety, depression) should not be thought of as set in stone, but instead as contingent and changeable, or even dismissible, as knowledge changes. He proposes that we treat disorders not as entities, but as collections of similar prototypes.

Intelligence is an excellent example of how naming and measuring lead to reification. In the late nineteenth century, Francis Galton proposed that intelligence, like height or weight, is some-thing you have and that it varies in degree – so it can be measured. Tests were designed, resulting in an intelligence quotient (IQ). Intelligence came to be thought of as an inherited factor, and was sometimes used, as Galton did, to promote eugenics and other racist ideas. Eventually, IQ tests, like many standardized tests, were shown to be culturally biased. There is no measurable entity in a person that constitutes their intelligence. Some have suggested that intelligence is nothing more than what an intelligence test measures, which is, in the end, a decision based on someone's ideas about what intelligence is. If intelligence does not exist in de pen dent of its measurements and the way it is talked about, it is not a thing. It is an abstraction, one that reflects a variety of cognitive, emotional, social, and other skills. One acts "intelligently" because one's skills combine in a certain way that is useful for solving some problem or problems, not because the skills are products of the amount of intelligence they possess. It's important to understand the variability of these skills across individuals and their effects on mental and behavioral pro cesses, but not because they collectively implicate an actual entity in the brain called intelligence.

Recent studies have shown that dynamic, temporary coalitions of neural networks emerge when  people perform tasks related to capacities measured by intelligence or personality tests. The way to think of  these networks is not in terms of entities in the brain that make one intelligent or give one a personality. Instead, the networks simply reflect the activity of under lying pro cesses that are engaged when one performs the tasks in question. This is weak rather than strong emergence at work.

Agent Provocateur

Terms like self and personality have played an important role in helping to organize facts about certain aspects of mind and behavior. The problem occurs when we objectify self or personality as entities with agency, things within us that control what we do.

When we assign agency to an entity within us, it allows us to credit our self for our achievements and blame our self for our failures. But suppose one's failure to be a better pianist is due to tiny defects in the bones in one's hands, or in the nerves that move the muscles that control the bones. Or suppose one's success as a chef is due to an unusually acute sense of smell. Consider, too, that if one works  really hard at something, the self is usually credited, and if one does not put as much effort into a task, the self is typically blamed. But suppose the hard worker, because of personal circumstances, had the luxury of spending more time on the task, whereas the other did not. These are traits, characteristics of the person. But the person as a  whole does not deserve the lion's share of the blame or the credit for these outcomes resulting from biological, circumstantial, or social factors.

This is not to say that one never personally deserves credit or blame. The point is instead that there is no singular self-agent that is charge of what we do. As I will discuss later, there are many levels of behavioral control in the brain, and most are not under the direction of one's self- conscious mind. And for those that are under conscious control, we don't need to refer to a self to explain that control.

Our most common uses of self involve personal (I, me, him, her, they, it) or reflective (myself, himself, herself, themselves) pronouns that occur with adjectives (self-assured, self-aware, self-inflicted, self-hating) or nouns (conscious self, narrative self, social self, spiritual self). Each of  these uses is nothing more than a description of an individual, or of features of an individual. None involves an entity that is in control of that individual. If I say, "I ate the cake myself," I don't mean that some entity called Myself is the thing that ate the cake. I am just pointing out that the person I refer to as I, as opposed to some other person, ate the cake. The self is just a nickname, a description, we apply to systems in us that do things.

The self, in short, boils down to the cognitive capacities that monitor your body and  mental states, and that use memories of who you are in relation to your pre sent needs, expectations, capacities, and limitations to make predictions about how to act. Since, by definition, it is you (your brain and body) that is doing all this, calling on a self to explain what is being done is redundant, and hence unnecessary. You are your self, and your self is you.  There is no other entity to find inside you. It's just you in there because your self is simply an idea you construct about who you are. The pioneering cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner nailed it:

"Self is a perpetually rewritten story. What we remember from the past is what is necessary to keep that story satisfactorily well formed. When new circumstances make the maintenance of that well-formedness sufficiently difficult, we undergo turning points that clarify or "debug" the narrative in an effort to achieve clearer meaning."

The wedge I am driving  here is between the poorly understood, over-aggrandized, notion of the self as an agent in charge, and the concrete, mundane psychological and neural processes that do the stuff the self is said to do. Thinking of  these processes as being  under the control of the self is not only unnecessary and redundant, but also scientifically counterproductive.

I don't mean to imply that we lack conscious agency, so-called  free will. Instead, I am saying that much of our behavior control occurs non- consciously, including a good deal of behavioral control misattributed to a conscious self. We desperately need a clearer understanding of which kinds of behaviors are controlled consciously versus non-consciously. I will argue that viewing behavioral control in terms of our realms of existence provides that understanding.

Personalized Bodies and Brains

Our bodies and brains are personalized. No one else has your exact genetic makeup nor the exact epigenetic events that make your body, including your brain, unique. And no one else has your psychological uniqueness, or what Carl Rogers referred to as one's personal perspective. This you- ness is obviously shaped by "your past"; by memories you have formed living your life. Distinguishing what is yours from what is not yours with a word like your personality adds nothing. Every thing in your brain and body is already yours.

A personalized brain and body, one might say, has a personality. That's fine, if by personality you mean a description of you. But once you make personality something more, an entity in charge of what you do, you are reifying an essence that does not other wise exist.