Science catches up with Buddhism

I’ve glimpsed a few reports recently that suggest that neurologists are coming to the same conclusions as many Buddhists, so it shouldn’t have surprised me to see an article reporting these in the popular press. A couple of weeks ago TIME Europe ran a cover story on the brain, and one of the articles was Stephen Pinker’s The Mystery of Consciousness:

ANOTHER STARTLING CONCLUSION FROM the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive “I” that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

There is nothing called ‘me’ that calls the shots, nothing other than body/brain and environment. This thing we call ourselves is a simply manifestation of all these causes and conditions, and perhaps in some ways we’d be better off letting it go.

Why does this I appear? Well some people think they have the answer…