6 Quotes by Bruce Hood

Defaulting to the self in explanations of human behavior enables us to draw an abrupt stop in the chain of causality when trying to understand thoughts and actions.

Our self illusion is so interwoven with personal memories that when we recall an event, we believe we are retrieving a reliable episode from our history like opening a photograph album and examining a snapshot in time. If we then discover the episode never really happened, then our whole self is called into question. But that’s only because we are so committed to the illusion that our self is a reliable story in the first place.

You only exist as a pattern made up of all the others things in your life that shape you. If you take each away, “you” would eventually cease to exist. This does not mean that you do not exist at all, but rather that you exist as a combination of all the others who complete your sense of self.

This is true for many species. For example, birds of species that flock together have comparatively larger brains to individuals of those species who live more isolated lives.

Most have no memory of self before their second birthday and, even then, the memories from around that time are fragmented and unconnected. It’s not that you have forgotten what it was like to be an infant – you simply were not ‘you’ at that age because there was no constructed self, and so you cannot make sense of early experiences in the context of the person to whom those events happened.

When did this game of life become so unfair that we blame individuals rather than the circumstances that prevent them from achievement? This is know as the fundamental attribution error in human reason. When other people screw up, it’s because they are stupid or losers, but when I screw up it’s because of my circumstances.