Team of Rivals

The computer scientist, Marvin Minsky, has suggested that minds work via the society-of-mind framework, writes David Eagleman in his awesome book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain:

“Minsky suggested that human minds may be collections of enormous numbers of machinelike, connected subagents that are themselves mindless.”

Eagleman takes that framework further and says it “runs on conflict”! Different parts of the brain don’t always agree and don’t work cooperatively:

“As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something.”

Perhaps it’s based on how evolution works:

“Biology never checks off a problem and calls it quits. It reinvents solutions continually. The end product of that approach is a highly overlapping system of solutions – the necessary condition for a team-of-rivals architecture.”

Eagleman cites the Stroop test as Exhibit A for this view. Here’s the test:

“Name the color of the ink in which a word is printed… (e.g.) JUSTICE written in blue letters… Couldn’t be easier… But the trick comes when I present a word that is itself the name of a color… I present the word BLUE in the color green. Now the reaction is not so easy.”

Your reaction is either outright wrong or significantly slower, right?

“This belies the conflict going on under the hood.”

Interesting, but wouldn’t we notice the strain of the contradictory signals in our heads? Not always. After all, isn’t this the far more common experience?

“Incompatible ideas will result in one side or another winning out: a story will be constructed that either makes them compatible or ignores one side of the debate.”

A final example of the team-of-rivals architecture is the urge to reveal a secret:

“One part of the brain wants to reveal something, and another part does not want to.”

This clash leads to interesting behavior:

“A friend might think ill of you… This concern about the outcome is evidenced by the fact that people are more likely to tell their secrets to total stranger; with someone you don’t know, the neural conflict can be dissipated with none of the costs.”

The Internet facilitates this release via a site called postsecret.com “where people go to anonymously disclose their confessions”! As with all things interesting, all answers leads to other questions:

“An open question is why the receiver of the secret has to be human – or human-like, in the case of deities. Telling a wall, a lizard, or a goat your secrets is much less satisfying.”