People are obsessed with why and they're looking in the wrong place.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Neuroscientist, Psychologist, Professor, Author
These quotes are not new for her. They can be found here,
The woman is doing her level best to bust the myths.
Just before she said the above, she said this:
You don't wanna know why, you wanna know how, and you wanna know what. Why questions can best be dealt with by evolutionary biologists. And some of them don't even touch the why questions. From a scientific perspective, the why question isn't really something that we deal with.
She's talking about the brain here, and in the midst of yet another explanation about how the brain evolved, doing her usual humorous myth-busting and educating.
The brain didn't evolve in layers in mammals. We have nothing in common with lizards and didn't evolve from lizards. The only lizard brain is in a lizard.
The goal is not to feel happy. We live in a world where if we feel bad we think something is wrong. We might be doing something difficult or we might be hearing information that is at odds with what we think, or we might be experiencing uncertainty. And if you think that's bad, your problem is the definition of bad.
There are cultures for whom thinking and feeling are part of the same event. They're not separate and they're not at war with each other. This is an idea that we have in the West and has been increasingly globalized, but it is by no means the only or the best way to think about it.
The idea that any part of your brain is in charge of emotions and any other part is in charge of reason or thinking, and that they are battling it out, is not supported by the available evidence (she's responding to Iain McGilchrist's defense of the hemisphere's of the brain here). It's a super cool ... origin story about how morality evolved in the West, but it's not a story of how brains evolved or how they work according to the best available evidence.
What does this have to do with Why?
Some of us are creatures in search of meaning. We want to know why. My parents gave me the Tell Me Why series when I was a child because I wouldn't stop asking. But those books really answer How questions, like the more current How-Things-Work types of books.
I spent years in every kind of therapy (when mom's a therapist, that's what you do), including psychoanalysis, which tells you how old I am.
At some point, largely due to my mindfulness meditation practice, it hit me that Why doesn't matter. We can create a story about anything. We can spend our lives forever creating stories and meanings to make sense of our lives. But once we experience our nature for what it is, those stories are revealed for what they are—fictions. Constructions born of our need to know Why.
If our Whys are stories, so are everyone else's.
When you listen to Lisa Feldman Barrett or Anil Seth or even David Eagleman and most importantly, when you learn to step into, yet back from, your own moment-to-moment experience, it becomes clear that the biggest impediment to personal development and well-being (forget about happiness—I don't even get that) is the stories you tell yourself. And that's because they don't seem like stories, at least at first. They seem like The Truth. Reality.
Your Reality is a Unique Construction
And by unique, I mean the person you're talking to has a different reality. So what's the function of asking Why in these circumstances? What does it get you?
What To Do Instead
Here are some skillful questions:
What are you experiencing right now, in your mind/body?
What's your feeling tone?
How do you want to feel?
What can you do to feel that way?
Whatever is in your head is just a thought. Thoughts are fleeting if you don't engage them. Even thoughts related to trauma, that have reignited the past, don't have to be true in the present. Lisa Feldman Barrett says, "The brain keeps the score, and the body is the scorecard." But the brain doesn't need to keep the score that way.
Next time, I'll write more about changing your stories or archiving them. I prefer to archive, but you do you.
May ease find you.
mm
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