But here’s what you do have, Thinking Brain. You may not have self-
control, but you do have meaning control. This is your superpower. This is
your gift. You get to control the meaning of your impulses and feelings. You
get to decipher them however you see fit. You get to draw the map. And this
is incredibly powerful, because it’s the meaning that we ascribe to our
feelings that can often alter how the Feeling Brain reacts to them.
And this is how you produce hope. This is how you produce a sense that
the future can be fruitful and pleasant: by interpreting the shit the Feeling
Brain slings at you in a profound and useful way. Instead of justifying and
enslaving yourself to the impulses, challenge them and analyze them. Change
their character and their shape.
This is basically what good therapy is, of course. Self-acceptance and
emotional intelligence and all that. Actually, this whole “teach your Thinking
Brain to decipher and cooperate with your Feeling Brain instead of judging
him and thinking he’s an evil piece of shit” is the basis for CBT (cognitive
behavioral therapy) and ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy) and a lot
of other fun acronyms that clinical psychologists invented to make our lives
better.
Our crises of hope often start with a basic sense that we do not have
control over ourselves or our destiny. We feel victims to the world around us
or, worse, to our own minds. We fight our Feeling Brain, trying to beat it into
submission. Or we do the opposite and follow it mindlessly. We ridicule
ourselves and hide from the world because of the Classic Assumption. And in
many ways, the affluence and connectivity of the modern world only make
the pain of the illusion of self-control that much worse.
But this is your mission, Thinking Brain, should you choose to accept it:
Engage the Feeling Brain on its own terms. Create an environment that can
bring about the Feeling Brain’s best impulses and intuition, rather than its
worst. Accept and work with, rather than against, whatever the Feeling Brain
spews at you.
Everything else (all the judgments and assumptions and self-
aggrandizement) is an illusion. It was always an illusion. You don’t have
control, Thinking Brain. You never did, and you never will. Yet, you needn’t
lose hope.
Antonio Damasio ended up writing a celebrated book called Descartes’ Error
about his experiences with “Elliot,” and much of his other research. In it, he
argues that the same way the Thinking Brain produces a logical, factual form
of knowledge, the Feeling Brain develops its own type of value-laden
knowledge.^32 The Thinking Brain makes associations among facts, data, and