the one you feed

There’s an old story in which a grandfather tells his grandchild that there are two wolves inside each of us that are constantly fighting. One is anger, fear, greed, and all our most harmful impulses. The other is kindness, generosity, humility—our compassionate instincts. The grandchild asks “Which wolf will win?” and their grandfather answers “The one you feed.”

In Why Buddhism Is True, Robert Wright describes almost this exact situation in neurological terms:

the modular model of the mind holds that, in a sense, there are a number of animals in your mind, modules that have a certain amount of independence and sometimes struggle with one another for dominance. What’s more, I’ve just suggested that, as with animals, the behavior of modules is shaped by positive reinforcement. If they keep getting rewarded for something, they’ll do it more and more.

The different modules are competing for your attention, and when the mind wanders from one module to another, what’s actually happening is that the second module has acquired enough strength to wrestle control of your consciousness away from the first module.

In more detail:

Modules think thoughts. Or rather, modules generate thoughts, and then if those thoughts prove in some sense stronger than the creations of competing modules, they become thought thoughts—that is, they enter consciousness. Still, you can see how, while observing the mind during meditation, it can seem like thoughts think themselves, because the modules do their work outside of consciousness, so as far as the conscious mind can tell, the thoughts are coming out of nowhere.

What is this mechanism of the “strength” of thoughts Wright refers to which allows some thoughts (or through them, mental modules) to capture our attention?

When your mind is wandering—when your default mode network is running the show—how does the network decide which module gets to propel its thought into consciousness at any given time?…

So far as I can tell, the best candidate for that honor is feelings. Of all the thoughts engaged in subterranean competition at a given moment, maybe the thought that has the strongest level of feeling associated with it is the one that gains entry into consciousness… After all, feelings are judgments about how various things relate to an animal’s Darwinian interests, so from natural selection’s point of view feelings would make great labels for thoughts, labels that say things like “high priority”, “medium priority”, “low priority”.

Though Wright caveats “I don’t want to suggest that this is a consensus view within psychology.”

He then describes how mindfully observing the thoughts and urges which these competing modules bring to consciousness, rather than trying to push them away, can lead to their diminishment:

That apparently is what addiction is. A rat learns that if it passes the bar, a food pellet comes out. One of your modules learns that if it generates the urge to light up a cigarette, it will get some nicotine. This comparison puts a finer points on the difference between fighting the urge to smoke and addressing the urge mindfully. Fighting the urge is like pushing the rat away every time it approaches the bar. This works in the short run: if the rat can’t press the bar, no food pellet will come out, and maybe after a while the rat will even give up on approaching the bar. Still, whenever the rat is allowed to get near the bar, it will press it because it has seen nothing to indicate that if it passes the bar it won’t get food. Addressing the urge mindfully, I’d say, it’s like arranging it so that when the rat presses the bar no food pellets come out. The urge, the thing that’s analogous to pressing the bar, is allowed to fully form yet it doesn’t get reinforced, because your mindful inspection of it has deprived it of its force, And so broken the connection between the impulse and the reward. Over time, after the urge has blossomed again and again without bringing gratification, the urge ceases and desists.

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