Interesting reading on consciousness and human behavior

Last fall I read a fascinating article, "Everyday Fairytales," about confabulation, a disorder in which people make up stories which are detailed and logically cohesive. The stories may contain elements of truth, and people telling such stories have no intention to deceive anyone and apparently believe them themselves.

The article went on to explore the idea that the disorder may be an extreme case of something that everyone does on a daily basis, namely making decisions at a subconscious level and then rationalizing their choices at a conscious level. An excerpt:

There is certainly plenty of evidence that much of what we do is the result of unconscious brain processing, and that our consciousness seems to be interpreting what has happened, rather than driving it. For example, experiments in 1985 by Benjamin Libet of the University of California in San Francisco suggested that a signal to move a finger appears in the brain several hundred milliseconds before someone consciously decides to move that finger. The idea that we have conscious free will may be an illusion, at least some of the time.

Even when we think we are making rational choices and decisions, this may be illusory too. The intriguing possibility is that we simply do not have access to all of the unconscious information on which we base our decisions, so we create fictions upon which to rationalise them, says Kringelbach. That may well be a good thing, he adds. If we were aware of how we made every choice we would never get anything done - we cannot hold that much information in our consciousness. Wilson backs up this idea with some numbers: he says our senses may take in more than 11 million pieces of information each second, whereas even the most liberal estimates suggest that we are conscious of just 40 of these.

Today's Washington Post has an article, "Behavior May Suggest We're Not Only Human," which explores the possibility that a lot of human behavior isn't as unique to our species as we would like to think:

The idea that human behavior -- not just our physical bodies -- may have long evolutionary antecedents raises complicated questions about human agency and about how much of what we do and think is hard-wired. It is one thing to say we have eyes because our ancestors had eyes, but should we also credit our evolutionary predecessors for our highly complex social and political arrangements?

As I contemplate this all, the takeaway for me is this: it's all very good to claim that we have free will; it's quite another to exercise it. We all have the capacity to choose freely and with mindfulness, yet it's quite easy to never avail ourselves of that potential. Exploring what it means to be human requires an acceptance of our limitations and a bold willingness to embrace our ability to transcend. We are simultaneously rooting in the mud and reaching for the stars... it's where we choose to focus which awakens our humanity.

AFTER WRITING THE ABOVE I meditated, and the thought that came to mind is that growing and developing as a human being requires that we train ourselves not only at the conscious level but also at the unconscious. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I suspect that meditation is one path to accomplish it.