While our stories of others center on who they are, we are much more generous to ourselves in our interpretation of our own actions. When it comes to our self-attributions, we skew the other way, and overascribe our behavior to the external situation around us, to what’s happening to us. If we’re doing something that annoys someone else, then that person is annoyed only because he or she doesn’t understand the situation that’s forcing us to act that way. This tendency is called the Actor-Observer Bias, and it’s one of a number of human-reasoning biases that fall into a category called self-serving biases, because they serve to explain away our own actions in a way that props up our self-esteem.

These biases lead us to believe that your performance (whether good or bad) is due to who you are—your drive, or style, or effort, say—which in turn leads us to the conclusion that if we want to get you to improve your performance we must give you feedback on who you are, so that you can increase your drive, refine your style, or redouble your efforts. To fix a performance problem we instinctively turn to giving you personal feedback, rather than looking at the external situation you were facing and addressing that.

And by the way, if you think about it, much of the world of work is designed this way—it’s designed for Those Other People, who need to be told what to do (hence planning instead of intelligence), whose work needs aligning (hence goals over meaning and purpose), and whose weaknesses put us all at risk (hence the deficit thinking we saw in the last chapter, instead of the focus on distinctive abilities). One of the inconvenient truths about humans is that we have poor theories of others, and these theories lead us, among other things, to design our working world to remedy or to insulate against failings that we see in others but don’t see in ourselves.

There is a logic behind human conduct, although it does not reveal itself through conventional reasoning skills.

This brings me to the psychoanalytic perspective and its major advantage over other approaches, namely, its ready acceptance that humans are motivated, for the most part, by factors far beyond their conscious awareness.

The neural embodiment of self, it seems, is extremely robust. Every perception, every action, every thought, every utterance seems to bear the mark of the individual’s experience, of his value system, of all that is peculiar to him. In Gerald Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection (as in Esther Thelen’s work on the development of cognition and action in children), we find a rich account of how neuronal connectivity may be determined by, literally shaped by, the individual’s experience, thoughts, and actions no less than by all that is hardwired and biologically given. If individual experience and experiential selection so determine the developing brain, we should not perhaps be surprised that individuality, self, is preserved for so long even in the face of diffuse neuronal damage.

A funny thing happens to people in a community of truth. Somebody has a thought. The thought is like a little circuit in their brain. When someone shares a thought and others receive it, then suddenly the same circuit is in two brains. When a whole classroom is considering the thought, it’s like the same circuit in twenty-five brains. Our minds are

intermingling. The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls these circuits loops. He argues that when we communicate, and loops are flowing through different brains, we are thinking as one shared organism, anticipating each other, finishing each other’s sentences. “Empathy” is not a strong enough word to describe this intermingling. It is not one person, one body, one brain that marks this condition, Hofstadter argues, but the interpenetration of all minds in ceaseless conversation with each other.

Consciousness is larger than what most people accepted as reality. I didn't know better.