Why You Are Who You Are (It's Your Inner Voice)

By John Kuti

Table of Contents

Language Deficits and the Internal Narrative
Genetic Predispositions and the Unconscious Narrative
The Origin of Unconscious Narrative
The Three Narrative Lines in Life
Heroes
Villains
Ordinary People
You and Your Genetic Predispositions
Cultural Narratives and the Personal Unconscious Narrative
Family Narratives
Developmental Change and the Unconscious Narrative
Human Drives and Personal Narratives
The Four Tensions
Bonding Tension
Bonding Tension and Limerance
Social Tension
Social Tension as Friendship
Greek Love
God, Religion and Social Tension
Religion
Creative Tension
Life Nodes and the Unconscious Narrative
The Marriage Node
Money
Empathy and the Unconscious Narrative
Empathy and the Narrative of Us and Them
Reciprocity And the Unconscious Narrative
Justice and the Unconscious Narrative
Nurturance/competitiveness and the Unconscious Narrative
Competitiveness and the Unconscious Narrative
Death and the Unconscious Narrative
Human Nature and The Unconscious Narrative
Appreciation and Disappointment in Unconscious Narratives
Changing Your Internal Narrative

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Kuti
• Release date: Dec 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005178987

Book preview

WHY YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE

(It’s Your Inner Voice)

By John Kuti

Published by:

John Kuti at Smashwords

© 2021 by John Kuti

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Table of Contents

Language Deficits and the Internal Narrative

Genetic Predispositions and the Unconscious Narrative

The Origin of Unconscious Narrative

The Three Narrative Lines in Life

Villains

Ordinary People

You and Your Genetic Predispositions

Cultural Narratives and the Personal Unconscious Narrative

Family Narratives

Developmental Change and the Unconscious Narrative

Human Drives and Personal Narratives

The Four Tensions

Bonding Tension

Bonding Tension and Limerance

Social Tension

Social Tension as Friendship

Greek Love

God, Religion and Social Tension

Religion

Creative Tension

Life Nodes and the Unconscious Narrative

The Marriage Node

Money

Empathy and the Unconscious Narrative

Empathy and the Narrative of Us and Them

Reciprocity And the Unconscious Narrative

Justice and the Unconscious Narrative

Nurturance/competitiveness and the Unconscious Narrative

Competitiveness and the Unconscious Narrative

Death and the Unconscious Narrative

Human Nature and The Unconscious Narrative

Appreciation and Disappointment in Unconscious Narratives

Changing Your Internal Narrative

When a baby is born it uses every sense to understand the meaning and purpose of what is happening around it. It uses its senses to form unconscious hypothetical conjectures that connect what it sees and hears, smells and tastes and touches with some plausible explanation for what is happening. This sound, that action, this person, that person does this when I do that, does the same thing and makes the same sound, so that a baby makes unconscious hypothetical conjectures about what it’s experiencing until the baby connects a thing with a sound. This person is ma ma. This person is da da. And once the baby realizes it can make the same sound, it realizes the beginnings of language and its power.

Expecting sounds to connect to things and actions is the beginning of a story board of more and more complicated expectations until there are sentences and the foundation of communication. Communication is based on expectation. When we say or do a particular thing, we come to expect a response, and as it is with the language, the brain begins to make unconscious hypothetical conjectures about emotions and behaviour until we start to put together a narrative that gives meaning and purpose to experience. If you see someone throw a ball in the air and catch it a couple of times, and they repeat the action but palm the ball, your brain will actually see the ball as if it's there. And so it is with the narrative of life, the meaning and purpose you see and feel. Your unconscious mind makes hypothetical conjectures about what should happen when the same patterns repeat themselves. The brain is in fact an engine that creates sensory and emotional reality out of expectations. Our language abilities may be the foundation upon which our unconscious narrative comes to exist. It may be that they depend on each other for their very existence, neither could exist without the other. You can’t create a story without language and you can’t create language without a story. Other creatures learn and remember from their experiences creating a basic narrative they can use to anticipate positive and negative experiences, but because human beings develop language, their ability to create narratives to explain the meaning and purpose of experience is exponentially greater. There is literally no story that a human being might not create or even believe, regardless of its touch with reality. We are the storytelling creature, and that begins in childhood and accounts for our unique ability to give meaning and purpose to life in a multitude of different ways and means.

In his Ted talk, Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo&t=2s Anil Seth, a British professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, describes how the brain is a prediction device that integrates sensory experience to create conscious reality. He says it is our predictions that generate the reality that we see, hear and feel. He describes five different aspects of self that we unconsciously generate from within; the bodily self, the perspectival self, the volitional self, the narrative self, and the social self. Each of these is seamlessly integrated into the experience we call consciousness, and yet most of those different selves also exist and are generated unconsciously prior to our conscious experience. He says that consciousness is really a hallucination we generate from within and those hallucinations that we share with others are what we call reality. He does not describe the narrative self, but we propose that the narrative self is the integrative function that gives meaning and purpose to the others.

Our minds create realities from the stories that we create out of the patterns of action, reaction and observed behaviour, giving rise to all our thoughts and emotions. The human mind has an unconscious narrator that uses all our senses to literally make sense of this world. And without that unconscious narrator we wouldn't have consciousness as we know it. We would be like animals with awareness, but absolutely no sense of the meaning and purpose of life.

Peter Halligan Hon Professor of Neuropsychology at Cardiff University and David A. Oakley Emeritus Professor of Psychology at UCLA. have done experiments to show that consciousness actually operates below the level of awareness. They propose that it's not our conscious thoughts and feelings that make us who we are. Their idea is succinctly expressed in one quote..All this may leave one wondering where our thoughts, emotions and perceptions actually come from. We argue that the contents of consciousness are a subset of the experiences, emotions, thoughts and beliefs that are generated by non-conscious processes within our brains.

This subset takes the form of a personal narrative, which is constantly being updated. The personal narrative exists in parallel with our personal awareness, but the latter has no influence over the former.

The personal narrative is important because it provides information to be stored in your autobiographical memory (the story you tell yourself, about yourself), and gives human beings a way of communicating the things we have perceived and experienced to others.

This, in turn, allows us to generate survival strategies; for example, by learning to predict other people’s behaviour. Interpersonal skills like this underpin the development of social and cultural structures, which have promoted the survival of human kind for millennia. So, we argue that it is the ability to communicate the contents of one’s personal narrative –– and not personal awareness – that gives humans their unique evolutionary advantage. (The quote originally appeared on The Conversation and was published November 22, and 2017)

Language Deficits and the Internal Narrative

One of the best ways to understand the nature of the brain and consciousness is the study of people who are different from the norm. There are people whose internal narrator is very different. In an article in the Guardian on October 21, 2021 Sirin Kale wrote about such people. She described a person that has an internal narrator that presents as two Italians shouting at each other in reaction to her own thoughts and feelings. These arguments are about her major life decisions, and strangely enough only happen in the kitchen surrounded by food.

A man named Justin has no inner narrator. He describes his mind is a tiny little island surrounded by a sea of emptiness. When I am alone and relaxed, there are no words at all, he says. There’s great pleasure in that. He can easily while away an hour without having a single thought. Unsurprisingly, Hopkins sleeps like a baby.

Dr Helene Loevenbruck of Grenoble Alpes University’s laboratory of psychology and neurocognition is one of a handful of neuroscientists in the world who has studied the inner voice. She explains that it is created in a network of different areas in our brain, including the inferior parietal lobe, the inferior frontal gyrus and the superior temporal cortex.

In order to understand how the inner voice works, you need to understand how human thought translates into action. Whenever we do any action, our brain makes a prediction of the sensory consequences of that action, says Loevenbruck. Say you want to fetch a glass of water.Your brain sends the appropriate motor signals to your hand, but it also generates a sensory prediction of the command, she says. Before you’ve even picked up the glass, your brain has made a prediction of what the motor command will do, which means you can correct for mistakes before you make an error. This system is very efficient, and it’s why humans can do so many actions without making errors."

The same principle applies with human speech. Every time our mouths move to form a word, our brain is simultaneously generating a predictive simulation of that speech in our brain, to correct for error. The current understanding of inner speech is that we do the same as in overt speech – make predictions in our mind of what we will say – but we don’t actually send the motor commands to our speech muscles, Loevenbruck concludes. This simulated auditory signal is the little voice we hear in our brain.

Loevenbruck explains that, for the most part, we hear what she terms inner language. But not always. You can have expanded and more condensed forms of inner speech, she says. "People may experience them as abstract representations of language, without sound … some people say