What Psychology Major Didn’t Teach Me
This living business can get tricky. We may sit atop the evolutionary scale. It may be that we are most on the blink by too often getting in our own way. We need to act on the world as it is, but we filter experience through our own perspectives and feelings.
We are all the main stars of our own movies, and everything in the world is just co-stars. It’s human nature to experience it all through the lens of how it affects us personally. This slanted sense of reality has a name, the egocentric bias.
Social psychologists say our tilt to egocentricity is deeply ingrained because it helps us maintain a coherent narrative of the events in our lives. The more we personalize experiences, the more relevant they are to us — and only relevant memories stick around over the long term. These memories are all we have and all we are; they’re the foundation of our identity.
As a graduate of psychology, psychology has taught me so many lessons. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that there’s still so much that we don’t understand. I remember I learned a documentary when people first started studying psychology, they used to examine the shape of each other’s heads as a way to determine a person’s personality.
They’d look at the lumps and bumps and map out an explanation of why someone was smart or happy or mentally ill. Now we have MRIs and CT scans, we run tests, design models, and make conclusions. We know what happens in our brains when we kiss someone, or when we’re scared, or when we cry. We try to solve the puzzle of who we are using science and statistics. But in the end, all of these tests and machines still can’t really tell us what makes us human.
I wanted to understand every single thing about the world. I needed to know why we were here, how our minds and bodies worked, what comprised our souls, and what happened when we died. I really, really needed to know what happened when we died. But I’ve figured out that the more I’ve learned, the less I know. I’ve accepted that these mysteries are actually a huge part of what makes life worth living.
We seek out spirituality and religion because humans inherently search for the answers to questions we can’t answer. We want to feel connected to something greater than ourselves, just to feel a little less alone in an overwhelmingly enormous universe.
Take fall in love for example. Falling in love is an evolutionary necessity, our hormones are what make us feel like we need someone in our lives, and we decide to spend our life with a certain person because they fit what we’ve been conditioned to think is attractive. But there’s no test to figure out why you met this person at a coffee shop on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Call it coincidence or call it fate, but we can’t run a set of analyses to find the real answer.
Maybe someday we’ll run a test and find out with 95% certainty or more that what we think is the human soul is just a chemical reaction happening right in the center of our brains. If we do, I don’t want to know. I’m not here to know what souls are we made of. I’m just here to figure out what makes mine happy, to find ways to connect with other souls, too. I think that’s why we’re all here.
Well, life does not begin one day when you figure out every answer, it is a constant unfolding.
One day, you just wake up and realize it.
With love,
R
