Most of your life you don't live in the world. You live in his retelling.
This retelling is written in your head continuously. From the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep. Sometimes even in a dream.
Neuroscientist Markus Reichl first saw this system in fMRI images in 2001 - and named itpassive mode network. Default Mode Network. The part of the brain that is activated precisely when you are “doing nothing.”
Reichl showed what no one had seen before: the brain does not rest in silence. In silence, he turns on the internal generator. Memories, replaying conversations, plans, worries, playing out scenarios that will never happen.
Up to twenty percent of your body's total energy goes into this work.
And everything that this work produces is what you consider to be yourself.
There is more than one voice inside you. Six.
When you say “I”, it seems to be one thing. Whole. Familiar.
Modern mental science has long abandoned this illusion. Dan McAdams showed that "I" is a story that a person tells about himself, and this story is rewritten every day. Richard Schwartz inInternal Family Systemsproved that within one person there are dozens of subpersonalities working with their own roles. Thomas Metzinger, in his work of the last twenty years, goes even further: the brain buildsself-made- an internal idea of oneself - and takes this model for a real subject.
Carl Jung wrote the same thing in the 1920s, just in different words. Daniel Kahneman - others.
They all show one thing: what you call yourself is, at a structural level, a construct. Very stable, very familiar - but a construct.
The mental self is divided into six layers. Not because there are exactly six of them. Because this is a working breakdown - each layer corresponds to a proven functional area of the psyche and can be downloaded through speech.
- Conscious- what you declare when you are asked who you are.
- Implicit- something that turns on before you even think about it.
- Social- versions of yourself for different people.
- Historical- conclusions that you made about yourself as a child and forgot what you did.
- Projective- images of the future that control the present.
- Existential- what remains at the deepest point.
They work simultaneously. All six. And most of them you didn't choose.
The voice is faster than the censor
When you write, you edit. Between the impulse and the recording, the censor manages to interject: “this sounds stupid,” “it’s not worth it,” “what if they read it.” The text is an already filtered version.
The voice is faster than the censor.
Eugene Gendlin, a student of Carl Rogers, developed the method in the 70sfocusing- a bodily-verbal practice in which a person says what he feels before he has time to understand it. Gendlin showed: the body knows before the head. And knowledge comes out through speech - not through writing.
The phenomenological tradition, from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, has achieved the same thing. Modern studies of speech patterns show: the very act of speaking out internal experience reduces physiological stress, rebuilds neural connections, and opens up access to material that cannot be obtained through text.
Therefore, the six I's are best seen not in a diary, but in living speech - somewhere between words, in pauses, in what breaks through before you have time to control.
Most of the content of your I am not you
In 1976, Richard Dawkins introduced the conceptmeme- units of cultural information that are copied from brain to brain and are subject to the same laws as genes: replication, mutation, selection.
Susan Blackmore at workThe Meme Machinetook this idea to its logical conclusion: man is the carrier of memes. In many ways, it’s their car.
Memeplex- a stable group of memes that are copied together. Religions, ideologies, corporate cultures, parental attitudes - these are all memeplexes.
And this is where the uncomfortable begins.
“I’m not one to give up” is a memeplex about achievement inherited from culture. “A real man / a real woman should...” is a social memeplex parasitizing on your social self. “If I don’t achieve this by so-and-so years, my life is meaningless” is a memeplex parasitizing on the projective.
Daniel Dennett, in his work “From Bacteria to Bach and Back,” analyzed in detail the main property of memeplexes: they are optimized for their own survival, and not for the well-being of the host. Therefore, what lives in your head is not the most true ideas and not the most useful for you - but the mostreplicatively successful.
And the most replicatively successful ones are the ones you don’t notice.
They are thought viruses - memeplexes that absorb your cognitive and life resources without returning them in your favor. And most of them you consider yourself.
It can be seen
Six selves work simultaneously, in the background, without your permission - and for most of your life you do not talk to them directly. They speak for you.
But if you pull them out - each separately, by voice, for an hour and a half - a blueprint appears for the design. You can see where the speech is live and where it is memorized. Where do you talk about yourself in the first person, and where do you avoid it to the last. Where the same memeplex breaks through in three blocks out of six, without noticing itself.
This is the moment when the autopilot becomes visible. Not disconnected is a different conversation and a different step. Simply visible.
And when the autopilot device is visible from the outside, for the first time you have a choice: which of the six “I”s will you continue, which will you let go, and which will you hear for the first time.