Listen to your inner voice - this advice is often given when you need to make a difficult choice or make a decision whose consequences are difficult to calculate. Where did the idea of a wise advisor who lives in our heads and knows more than we ourselves come from? And should you really trust him? This question is answered by one of the strangest theories of the evolution of consciousness, which has recently attracted increasing interest.
The voice that we are asked to trust in a difficult situation does not actually sound in silence, but conducts an “internal dialogue” with us. This is a mental process during which we role-play our thoughts: we ask ourselves questions and answer, blame ourselves and make excuses, joke and laugh. At the level of neurophysiology, internal dialogue is structured in the same way as a conversation with a living person. It involves the same speech centers plus zones that are responsible for ideas about the way of thinking of other people. That is, we don’t just mentally pronounce words, but model someone else’s reaction. The prototype of our “internal interlocutor” is first our parents (usually our mother), and later - people who personify certain qualities (positive or negative) for us. There is an internal dialogue in the left hemisphere; there speech is generated and there it is interpreted. But it was not always so.
Bicameral Mind
Just 3,000 years ago (yes, this is not a typo - back in the days of Ancient Egypt), the speech centers in the brain were distributed differently, says American psychologist Julian Jaynes. The right hemisphere could serve as the generator of internal speech, and the left hemisphere as the receiver. He calls this model of the psyche “bicameral” by analogy with parliament, where one chamber develops laws and the other approves them. Ancient man literally listened with one hemisphere to the other, as if a real interlocutor was addressing him. Unlike us, he did not understand that the voice in his head was his own. He was sure that spirits, gods or dead ancestors were addressing him this way, and he blindly followed their instructions. All this might seem completely crazy if not for two facts.
Firstly, in modern people, the inner voice can also turn into an external one, if for some reason the ability to separate fantasies from real sensations, and thoughts from facts is turned off. Such conditions are described in detail in psychiatry as schizophrenia and paranoia. Second, we all experience a similar “double consciousness” every night in our sleep, as if taking a time machine back to our evolutionary past. Everything we dream is created by our brain. In a dream, each of us is not only a spectator and the main character, but also the author of the script, the director, the scene and the characters. It is we who give them the ability to speak, threaten, stand on their heads or ask for forgiveness. We share our consciousness with them. At the same time, the creations of our mind behave completely independently, often hostile, always unpredictable, and sometimes seem so alive that some people perceive dreams in which the dead appear as real contact.
On the right hemisphere
Now we watch our hands: when something greatly outweighs or overly predominates - for example, too much rational calculation to the detriment of spontaneity and creativity, then there is a need to somehow correct this imbalance, restore balance. Hence the interest in all kinds of “right-brain” activities. It seems that half of Moscow and some other large cities of Russia are passionate about “right-brain” drawing. Trainings on spontaneity and creativity are neck and neck in popularity with time management, seminars “How to make your first million” and “How to find the man of your dreams.”
Such a phenomenon as intuition lives in the same “right-hemisphere” irrational sector. The Internet offers hundreds of links on how to develop your intuition online, without leaving your home and very, very quickly. Because a modern person even needs to develop intuition at a stunning pace and solely for rational reasons: so as not to waste time making decisions, in order to immediately see which game is worth the candle, where to invest money and where to look for the man of your dreams.
One of my good friends, a tough business woman without much sentimentality, but with spiritual needs, believes that yoga and meditation help her get in touch with her intuition. “I need to calm down and listen to the voice of my intuition,” she declares, and another, detailed business plan is already lying on the table in front of her. Surprisingly, the intuition that my friend manages to hear during meditation always agrees with the income plan. But he likes to make adjustments to the expenditure side. I am deeply shocked by such thriftiness, unexpected for an irrational function. On the other hand, nothing surprising: rational people often mistake their secret desires and plans for intuitive insights.
God as a hallucination
So, for more than 200 thousand years since the advent of speech, the life of ancient man was like a mental disorder, an endless dream or a psychedelic trip? Yes and no. Hallucinations were common for him. But they served rather as a guide in conditions of uncertainty. “Only when confronted with a problem that required a new approach or a more complex solution than tradition dictated,” Jaynes writes, “could the nervous tension of having to make a decision trigger the appearance of auditory hallucinations.” Now, to enter such a state, we would need something stronger. Then there were enough figurines, religious buildings and home altars.
On an individual level, the ability to delegate difficult decisions to a “personal god” is a useful strategy for coping with stress. Don’t think, don’t weigh the pros and cons, don’t try to analyze the facts, just trust someone or something you don’t know. On a collective level, there is more. According to Jaynes, civilization is the ability to live in cities where no one knows anyone. The inner voice replaced our means of communication for the creators of the first megacities, helping to overcome disunity and connecting subjects with rulers, and the living with the dead.
“Who were these gods who controlled ancient people like robots and transmitted their messages through them? These were voices inside - their instructions were heard by the heroes of the Iliad as clearly as Joan of Arc and as some current patients with epilepsy and schizophrenia. The gods were a way of organizing the work of the central nervous system.” Julian Jaynes
Does this hypothesis have scientific basis? Julian Jaynes' book The Birth of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was published in 1976. In addition to ancient texts and artifacts, he relied on the revolutionary experiments of Roger Sperry, who, back in the 1960s, showed that surgically separated hemispheres of the brain begin to behave like two different personalities. Since then, new data has accumulated. Anthropologist Brian McVeigh supplemented Jaynes's examples with a wealth of archaeological evidence that the religiosity of all known early civilizations was implicated in hallucinations. And modern MRI studies have confirmed that auditory hallucinations are indeed associated with activity in the speech areas of the right hemisphere. (A detailed list of them is compiled on the website of the Julian Jaynes Society.) But noted Jaynes admirer, philosopher Daniel Dennett, believes that the main value of his “amazing and crazy” theory lies in one “bloody wonderful idea.”
How to hear your inner voice
Some people try to hear themselves through yoga and meditation, others achieve a state of trance. But everything can be made simpler. Use one of the psychological techniques:
- Divide a sheet of paper into three columns.
- In the first column on the right, write down all your desires at the moment.
- In the column on the left, write down the desires and thoughts that conflict with the desires from the first list.
- Re-read both lists.
- Invite yourself to discuss what you have written. If you want, write down the dialogue (in summary or in full).
- Now try on everything from the right list. What gives you positivity and warmth? What does your inner voice respond positively to? These are your true desires.
- Place the letter “I” next to such desires.
- If some desire does not respond warmly to you, then think about whose it is. Perhaps this was imposed on you by your mom or dad. Place the letter M or P next to it.
- Do the same with the left list.
- If you see a contradiction between your remaining desires from the first and second columns, then write down the middle ground between the conflicting elements in the middle column. If you understand that your desires are blocked by the desires of your parents (other people), then feel free to refuse the second one.
Do this exercise in complete silence. Choose a time and place where you can talk to yourself calmly, where nothing and no one will distract you.
Old hardware - new software
There are many mysteries in the history of our species. One of them is the dramatic acceleration of scientific and technological progress in the last 2000 years. Major inventions of antiquity (the boat, the bow and arrow, sewing needles) were accomplished at a rate of about once every 10,000 years. And then - as if someone had turned on the afterburners - humanity in a short time covered the path from the wheel to Tesla and Hubble. At the same time, the structure of the human brain has remained virtually unchanged over the past 50,000 years. Jaynes's theory provides a possible solution.
The reason is not the hardware evolution, but the software revolution. We didn't change the hardware. Taking advantage of the plasticity of the brain, we simply downloaded new software onto it, which turned out to be more effective. To do this, it was necessary to add one option to our consciousness - the ability to separate: fantasies from reality, thoughts from facts, our “I” from other “I”, the inner voice from the order from the outside. How technically did this happen? Jaynes suggests that the main stimulus was the creation of writing. By being able to record the voice in one's head, one was able for the first time to think about its orders instead of blindly following them. And he realized that this voice belonged to himself. The split consciousness became united. But not immediately and not completely.
“We are in the process of transitioning to a new mentality. Everywhere we are still surrounded by remnants of our “bicameral” past: our presidents swear an oath to long-silent gods, placing their hands on texts written down by the last people who heard divine voices.” Julian Jaynes
After the release of a new system, there are always those who want to stick with the old, time-tested software. Until now, people are trying to simulate duality of the psyche with the help of religious rituals and practices. Even people who are far from religion, in a situation of uncertainty, are tempted to entrust the decision to “external forces” - cast lots, tell fortunes, act on a whim.
Pros of dialogues
A conversation with yourself can become a rehearsal for some event. For example, if you have important negotiations coming up and you are nervous about it, you can mentally play out your role and the roles of other participants. Then it will be easier in real negotiations.
By talking through the situation within ourselves, we better understand what is happening. This helps to cope with emotional experiences and reduce stress.
When we doubt something, we internally encourage ourselves: “Come on! You can!" That is, we motivate to overcome difficulties. And when we overcome, we give ourselves praise, increasing our self-esteem.
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Even arguing with yourself can be beneficial! This allows you to see the situation from all sides and ultimately come to the right decision.
Mindfulness as a Debugging Tool
In the TV series Westworld, inspired by the theory of Julian Jaynes, this model is projected onto the evolution of humanoid biorobots. Anthony Hopkins's character explains to his assistant Bernard that their artificial intelligence was designed in such a way that, in a situation of choice, they would perceive the programmed commands as prompts from an invisible interlocutor, and over time, perhaps, they would learn to distinguish his voice from their own and modify their program themselves. We've already done this. But by evolutionary standards, we downloaded new software quite recently. For now we are all beta testers. Therefore, we need to constantly catch bugs and send regular reports to the developer, that is, to ourselves. This debugging tool is called “mindfulness.” In its simplest form, it really is about listening to your inner voice. But not in search of answers, as the people of antiquity did, but in order to understand whether he really belongs to us or is simply repeating someone else’s opinion. As a result, we will finally say goodbye to the good old “bicameral” world - with its romantic gods and miracles that camouflage prosaic causes and consequences. But at the moment of a difficult choice, we will less and less often have to flip a coin or follow inexplicable impulses similar to someone else’s will.
The body knows
And there is also bodily intuition. It is developed in many businessmen, athletes and... criminals. This is the case when they say: “I feel it with my spinal cord,” “I smell it with my skin.” Such intuition is also often associated with danger - any kind, be it physical or, for example, financial. They say that the famous financier Soros always experienced back pain before something wrong began to happen on world markets. And a repeat offender sometimes refuses a planned operation only because of a feeling of danger that suddenly arises at a certain moment. In four cases out of five, such fears turn out to be unfounded. My classmate, who successfully passed the scary place on the bus, also apparently felt something was wrong in her body. “I became so lazy to get up that I decided: I’ll get off at the next stop,” she recalled.
There is also professional intuition, which is developed, whether you like it or not, by any person who has spent ten to fifteen years in his profession. An experienced editor almost always knows which author will be good, and which one will most likely fade away after a couple of texts. A doctor with 20 years of experience can see the picture of the disease without any tests, and a good car mechanic, barely looking at your car, is ready to name all the current problems. This intuition is the result of experience, which is updated and instantly produces the right decision.
Any of the listed intuitions is suitable for developing another, missing one, which for some reason you really need in your household. But it would be good to understand - what do we want from her? What help?
Sixth sense or third eye
Scientists often give primacy to the “sixth sense” to the right half of the brain, which is considered creative. Inspiration lives there and thanks to it we take completely illogical actions in life. In this hemisphere, all our “experience”, feelings and thoughts are collected in the subconscious.
But the left hemisphere is responsible for logic, and it analyzes all actions and makes its decision. Our voice of “reason” lives there, which most people follow, and it drowns out the voice of “intuition”.
Therefore, it is worth developing both halves of our brain, this is what all successful people do. Give your body time to teach you to recognize this “inner voice,” especially if you are learning to develop intuition on your own.
✔️ Advice. Start by using your right and left hand when writing. For example, write a question with your right hand and an answer with your left hand. Over time, new “neural connections” will begin to appear in your brain, and then the voice of “intuition” will begin to give clues.
A spoon of tar
However, some people manage to tell themselves unnecessary things. And then the constructive dialogue turns into destructive. Here are just a few examples of how NOT to talk to yourself.
Getting hung up on negative thoughts: constantly scolding yourself, blaming yourself, criticizing, whining, complaining about life, considering yourself the most unhappy person in the world. This is a direct path to depression and neurosis. After all, you undermine self-confidence and put yourself in the position of a victim.
Endlessly “chew” the events of days gone by: “Oh, why did I do that then! Because of this, everything went wrong!” What's the point of poking around in the past? He is no longer there. Such thoughts distract you from the present. Life passes by, and with it new acquaintances, work, opportunities.
Overreflect and withdraw into yourself. It takes a lot of strength and energy. In addition, instead of solving pressing problems - enrolling your child in a music school, making repairs, cleaning the apartment - you live in an imaginary world.
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Parsing dreams
If meditation is not yet available, and all thought processes do not stop in a tired brain, you can turn to the subconscious, which also tries to convey to everyone the voice of the inner self. The easiest way to understand what is happening in the subconscious is through the interpretation of dreams. Moreover, it is not necessary to read dream books or remember the interpretation of the dreams of the great and terrible S. Freud, who saw sexual overtones in everything, it is important to understand what the images from dreams mean specifically for you. If you have a problem remembering dreams, you can put a piece of paper with a pen right next to your pillow and, as soon as you wake up, write down at least a couple of lines about what was happening in your own reality. Then it will be easier to restore the entire chain.
“Life” examples of tips from intuition
Remember your cases. Often, for example, my inner voice warns me about “traffic jams,” but I stubbornly move in the wrong direction and end up in a traffic jam. And then I reproach myself for “why not use” this hint that was in my head.
And recently, a friend of mine told me that before his wedding he lost his passport and could not find it. Then I found him, got married, and many years later still got divorced. That was the hint. We ourselves often do not notice such hints and calls from the Universe.
You can also give an example about D.I. Mendeleev, who dreamed of his periodic table. But you understand that she couldn’t dream “out of the blue,” this is a direct continuation of the work of the subconscious.
✔️ Advice. To do this, many psychologists advise writing “morning pages.” The technique is quite simple. Prepare 5-6 sheets of A4 paper and a pen in the evening, and place them near the bed. Woke up in the morning and without getting out of bed, take these sheets of paper and start writing everything that comes to your mind. There is no need to evaluate what is written, connect it with something, or think about something. Here you just need to write and that’s it. Then you can get up and go about your business.
You can return to these sheets in the evening or in a few days, perhaps some important hint for you will appear there. This will only happen if you train your intuition yourself.
Awakening intuition and caring for the inner Child
Remember that your inner Child needs acceptance, even if at the moment he manifests himself only with endless grievances and claims to the world. When he feels protected and cared for by your “older” ego states, he will open up a resource of intuitive knowledge for you: free and happy, your inner Child will tell you about your deepest desires and aspirations.
Give up the authoritarian attitudes of your controlling Parent and “switch” to the figure of a caring Parent: give yourself more support and understanding. Let your Parent allow you to go beyond the boundaries and try something new and unusual - because children love experiments so much. And your healthy role model of the inner Adult will help your Child to boldly discover new facets of creativity and not be afraid of failures.
A strong connection with the ego state of the inner Child is direct access to developed intuition. You can also develop your intuitive abilities using special exercises.
What is "ego"?
Ego is one of the central concepts in the theory of psychoanalysis, which was introduced by Sigmund Freud in the process of studying the structure of human personality. He defined it as a part of the mental apparatus responsible for analyzing our reality, a sense of personal identity, and also for satisfying basic human needs: having food, providing shelter and a safe environment. In other words, the ego ensures our comfortable existence in the physical and social world.
American psychologist and psychiatrist Eric Burn, author of the best-selling book “Games People Play,” believed that the ego should guide us amid the dangers of the outside world. In the concept of transactional analysis he created, which you have probably heard about, he identified three ego states: Parent, Adult and Child.
The internal ego state of the Parent takes control and care of our personality; it dictates to us the rules of behavior and social norms, prohibitions and permissions. You will probably recognize the voice of the controlling Parent (“you can”, “you can’t”, “remember”) and the voice of the caring Parent (“it’s okay”, “try again”, “I’m with you”). We inherit this model from our relatives and other persons in authority for us; it is their relationship with us in childhood that determines whether our Parent’s voice will be controlling or caring.
The ego state of our Adult is formed on the basis of our own lived experience. An adult thinks objectively and rationally, he is able to make independent, situation-appropriate decisions and abandon stereotypes imposed from outside. The inner adult will confidently say: “I can handle it.”
The ego state of the Child is experienced through feelings; it is extremely subject to internal impulses. Spontaneity, love of life, spark of creativity, hot temper, stubbornness, capriciousness - all these are manifestations of our inner Child. In moments of joy, he will cheerfully exclaim: “How great!”, “I like it so much!” But during difficult periods, the voice of the inner Child will sound plaintively: “It’s so hard for me, help me,” “Leave me alone, I’m not going to do this!”
Intuition and your inner Child
Eric Byrne also made significant contributions to the concept of intuition. In his work “On Intuition,” he defined it as the accumulation of information through “sensory contact with an object, and the actor cannot explain to himself and others how he comes to his conclusions.” He gives the main role in the development of intuition to the inner Child - it is in this ego state that our sixth sense manifests itself most clearly. Our inner Children are spontaneous and spontaneous, guided by a sudden “I want!” and are ready to immediately change the decision made only on the basis of a sudden impulse - this is how intuitive knowledge expresses itself.
However, it is worth remembering that the critical and dominant attitudes of our two other ego states, Parent and Adult, can suppress a trusting and vulnerable Child. In this case, he becomes complex, overly shy and unsure of himself, and in such a situation we are no longer able to hear the voice of our intuition.
