No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up to Buddhism (The No Self Wisdom)

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The point of both the original and workbook is that most of us rely so heavily on the left cerebral hemisphere's constant use of language, categorizing, and story-telling that we miss out on experiencing the world through our right cerebral hemisphere, which connects us to our body's movement through the world and our feeling of wholeness and connectedness to everything. Without the ability to identify patterns, we can’t assert that “cat” is a real word which means something but that “adjks” is gibberish. These stories are usually not the actual cause of our state and, therefore, being aware of this helps us manage our response to our own thoughts in a more enlightened way.

According to the teachings in Buddhism, Taoism, and certain schools of Hindu philosophy, our true essence lies far beyond the limitations of the thinking mind. Well, the best and simplestway to articulate its function is to say that if the left brain is our language center, the right brain is our spatial center.And what happens when that pattern-making skill is directed inward, toward that concept of our self? It’s as if contemporary neuroscience and psychology are just now catching up with what Buddhist, Taoist, and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism have been teaching for over 2,500 years.

While various neuroscientists have made the claim that the self resides in this or that neural location, there is no real agreement among the scientific community about where to find it—not even whether it might be in the left or the right side of the brain. In addition, Niebauer offers great insights on how we build our ego based on verbal processing (both speaking out loud and thinking within our heads), which leads to neglecting our right brain. An interesting and easy to understand book for anyone wanting to find out more about how the mind works. When we remember or recollect, we are putting together a story of what we think happened, not witnessing or replaying what happened.

But when you look for that little “self” control chamber we all imagine is up there, it simply can’t be found; there is no “self” component of our brain. You know what left-brain consciousness feels like because you’re feeling it right now, as you read this. For example, until this connection was disrupted, scientists relied on either brain damage or indirect methods to test for differences between the left and right brain. Before we get into that, however, and before we take a close look at exactly how this illusion of selfhood is created, let’s take a moment to review how the brain works.

The author was inspired to study the physical link between the brain and our actions after the death of his father, and he ended up becoming a neuropsychology professor. But in the worst case scenario, your brain’s penchant for creating patterns can result in needless suffering.

Our character, our personality, is not just the story we tell ourselves about us: it’s the version of our story that has the most support from our community. Of course, if you pursue this line of questioning enough, you’ll come to the realization that there really is no innate, specific quality that unites all chairs under the umbrella of “chairness. Well, according to Buddhism, the problem is that that illusion of self causes us long-term psychological damage.