Lesson 11: The Why Module

Let's explore the neural circuitry responsible for your autism.

You don’t have to be an expert to know that people with autism don’t get to speak about their own experiences. Until very recently, autism has largely only been understood through the prism of the experience of parents and as a list of observations that mostly [non-autistic] medical professionals have made and assigned meaning to.
    .Hanna Gatsby, Guardian interview

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Let’s take a careful look at the biological origins of our dark gift: the Why module.

In this article, we’ll break down the basic operation of the Why module in your brain. It’s unfortunate that autistic folks are burdened with the need to learn a smattering of neuroscience just to understand who we are and why our lives are so different from our non-autistic neighbors—but as far as burdens go, it ain’t the worst.

I’ll try to make the Why module as accessible and easy-to-grasp as possible without dumbing things down. But, look, it’s still a lesson about brains. It’s learning something real about the world and yourself. And it will pay off handsomely by endowing you with increasingly penetrating intuitions about why you think the things you think and feel the feels you feel. . . and why other folks think and feel so differently than you.

The Why module is your most important brain module for making decisions. The Why module determines—get ready for it—why you should take a particular action:

I will walk in the woods because it makes me feel peaceful. I will text that attractive stranger because they make me excited. I will strive to become the top salesperson next month because I desire the recognition. I will fly to the Space Station because I long to escape the heavy bonds of gravitation. The Why module furnishes the Why in all your decisions, trivial and epic.

The Why module also makes you conscious of why you are doing something—aware of the feeling that motivated you to make your choice.

Though the Why module reaches its greatest sophistication in <ahem> Homo sapiens, it’s also present in the brains of all animals with backbones—including our primate cousins. There’s a Big Important Reason I want to focus on the monkey Why module rather than the human Why module in this article, though that Big Important Reason won’t be revealed until future articles—after you acquire basic familiarity with how the Why module works. Patience, pilgrim. But don’t worry, the monkey Why module works the same as the human Why module.

In this lesson, we’ll examine how the monkey Why module handles a familiar dilemma:

I’m hungry! Should I schlep across the dangerous jungle for some sweet tasty bananas? Or just eat the boring old turnips in the dirt in front of me?

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The Why module is designed to choose between competing options in your mind. What sort of options? Any sort!

Which food to eat. Which person to hire. Which kung fu move to perform. Which idea might provide a more profitable direction for marketing your detergent. Your Why module’s Sacred Appointed Task is to select which object, person, activity, or goal to pursue next.

Let’s get down and dirty. Biologically, every “option” evaluated by the Why module consists of two parts. (Two forms of interlaced neural activity.)

1. A THING to be chosen as an option. Bananas, or Joey, or justice, or a new show on Netflix.

2. A FEELING associated with the thing. The “why” itself. The bananas are yummy. Joey is sexy. Justice is urgent. The Netflix trailer looks intriguing.

Whenever the Why module evaluates a THING (an object, person, activity, or goal) proposed by another module, it constructs an option by pairing together the THING with a FEELING. Each option is a THING-FEELING pair.

To choose between options, your Why module constructs and compares THING-FEELING pairs. Such as Delicious Bananas and Boring Turnips.

The Why module is a momentous achievement in the evolution of purpose on Earth because it endows all backboned creatures—that is, all “monkey minds” on the third rung of the ladder of purpose—with the power of deliberation. This sets vertebrates apart from invertebrates, which do not possess Why modules or any neural modules at all. Bumblebee minds (on the second rung of the ladder of purpose) are impulsive. They do not compare and contrast. A bumblebee mind evaluates an option (Delicious Feces!)—then immediately acts upon that evaluation without considering other options. The Why module empowers turtles and turtledoves and taxi drivers to consider different possibilities before taking action.

Enough setup. Let’s see how the Why module works.

Below is a step-by-step walkthrough of how the Why module handles the turnips-or-bananas dilemma in two different contexts: When a monkey is hungry and when a monkey is well-fed.

The name of our monkey is Monica.

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Let’s imagine Monica is ravenous. She hasn’t eaten all day.

She knows there are turnips in the dirt nearby. Her What and Where modules remind her that the nutritious tubers are available and where to find them.

Her What module sends “turnips” to her Why module as a potential option for evaluation.

Next, the Why module evaluates the THING: turnips. The module draws upon two sources of information to decide how to feel about the turnips: their inherent value and their contextual value. This distinction is very important. The turnips’ inherent value is how Monica generally feels about turnips. “They’re edible but bland and nothing to get whooped up about.”

The turnips’ contextual value depends on the situation. Right now Monica’s physiological context is hungry. The contextual value of the turnips is, “They will satisfy my hunger just fine.” Monica's Why module combines the inherent value and contextual value of the turnip to form a FEELING about the turnip option.  The feeling is, turnips would be okay at satisfying my ravenous hunger.

This THING-FEELING pairing—“Mildly desirable turnips”—becomes Option A in Monica’s Why module.

But though Monica feels conscious desire for the turnips, she does not instantly act upon this feeling! This is why monkeys are more reflective than cockroaches: because a Why module empowers a mind to deliberate instead of react.

In this case, Monica evaluates a second edible option: bananas.

Monica’s What and Where modules remind her that bananas are also available to eat, though they are located on the far side of the jungle, where monkey-eating chimpanzees lurk.

The What module sends “bananas” to the Why module as a second potential option to evaluate. Monica loves sweet, juicy bananas, so her Why module assigns the bananas an inherent value of “highly desirable.” But context matters, too, and the Why module recognizes that acquiring the bananas will be dangerous and laborious. That’s a lot of effort, risk, and delay for a hungry monkey. Thus, the Why module assigns the bananas a contextual value of “highly dangerous and daunting.” The Why module integrates these two valuations—highly desirable and highly daunting—and establishes a final FEELING for the bananas: “meh.” Or, in monkey tongue, “I’m too damn hungry to go schlepping through the muggy jungle for a banana!”

Option B is created: Meh bananas.

Now comes the truly extraordinary achievement of the Why module: this highly sophisticated neural module holds both THING-FEELING pairs at the same time, enabling the Why module to compare the two options: Mildly Desirable Turnips and Meh Bananas. In particular, it compares the motivational intensity associated with each option.

In this case, the mild desire for easy-to-acquire turnips outweighs the reluctance to pursue hard-to-get bananas—and the Boring Turnips option wins out!

After a winner-take-all dynamic within the Why module selects a winner, the Why module resonates on the winning option, a neural dynamic that alerts the rest of Monica’s brain that one of the food options getting kicked around is the best choice, because it earned the greatest motivational intensity. Monica becomes conscious of the winning option. She is conscious of the winning thing itself (turnips!) and also conscious of the feeling associated with the thing (a little bland but gonna fix our hunger fast!)

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Let’s consider another context, a situation where Monica is well-fed. (Maybe she ate a lot of turnips for breakfast this morning.) Once again, her Why module will process the same options as before—bananas and turnips.

The inherent value of each option doesn’t change. Turnips are still bland, bananas are still delicious. But now the contextual value of each option has changed.

If Monica isn’t hungry, there’s no motivation to dig up unappetizing turnips. But now perhaps the exciting thought of treating herself to some scrumptious bananas will motivate her to brave the far side of the jungle for a special indulgent snack.

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Now you know the basic operation of your Why module, which works the same in all primate brains. So how does this knowledge help you understand autism and your own unique Self, pilgrim?

In a healthy human brain, whenever a “social” option is presented to the brain—a bawling infant, tottering grandfather, wheel-spinning gerbil, tranquil Buddha, investigative Scooby-Doo, contemptuous Marvin the Talking Android—the Why module automatically cranks up its inherent value to the max, causing the social option to feel “Scrumptious!” or possibly “Scrum-diddly-umptious!” Thus, whenever a social option is compared to a “non-social” option in a healthy Why module, the social option usually wins out.

And now we arrive at our Shakespearean tragedy. Our autistic Why module.

When our autistic Why module processes social options, it does not boost their inherent value or endow them with extra feeling. It treats them the same as “non-social” options. Consequently, the context of the choice exerts an outsized effect on our decision-making, compared to decision-making in non-autistic brains (which are heavily biased to choose “social” options regardless of context.)

Here on the Dark Gift, we’re fond of saying that the difference between autistic folks and non-autistic folks is what we do when we walk into a room with a bell, a book, a candle, and a stranger. Non-autistic folks reliably choose to focus on the stranger. Autistic folks might instead focus on the bell, book, or candle—or possibly the stranger.

Now we can break down this maxim further. An autistic person will focus on the stranger if the context is right. If the context is, “I’m in the mood for music!” then an autistic person will likely focus on the bell instead of the stranger. A non-autistic person in the mood for music will probably be too concerned about the presence of the stranger in the room to ignore them.

If the context is, “Where is this strong odor coming from?” or “I just heard someone smashing through my living room window!” or “My mom keeps telling me I need to try to focus on other people more. . .” then an autistic Why module will probably choose the “stranger” option to focus on.

As we learned in the series of articles about superminds, much of the human brain’s extensive social circuitry—especially the circuitry governing shared attention, including speech and body language—is activated by the Why module’s motivational prioritization of people in the environment.

And now we can develop some intuition about how our faulty Why module drives a mental feedback loop that, over time, makes it harder and harder for autistic folks to focus on other people. From birth, our quirky Why module chooses non-human options more often than human options, which causes the feelings associated with non-human options to naturally develop and intensify over time, which makes it more likely we’ll be motivated to choose non-human options over human options in the future.

In other words, if you chose to focus on the bell—and ended up luxuriating in its melodious chime—you will be more likely to choose the bell again next time it’s proffered in a context where you must choose between the bell and people. By the same token, non-autistic Why modules that focus on people naturally get their social options reinforced, so over time it becomes harder and harder for non-autists to choose non-social options without some contextual motivation.

This simple difference in one of our most evolutionarily recent neural circuits creates a monumental difference in the way that autistic and non-autistic folks engage with the world. It contributes to the disconnect between autistic minds and non-autistic minds that grows more divergent over time, as non-autistic folks’ social choices get emotionally strengthened by their pristine Why module, while autistic folks’ non-social choices get strengthened by our quirky Why module.

Which brings us back to the Dark Gift Dilemma. A choice every autist must face with tremendous biological consequences for your brain.

If you choose to repair your social deficits and cultivate your ability to focus on other people, you will develop greater social engagement and experience less divergence from non-autistic people—but you’ll also diminish your potential for “dark gift superpowers” because you will be training your brain to make choices like a non-autistic brain.

If you instead choose to embrace your dark gift, your brain will continue to diverge from non-autistic brains steadily over the course of your life. This ensures you’ll experience vexing social troubles into old age, which can certainly be a source of great sadness—but it also puts your brain on a path where it can self-organize into a ferociously powerful mental system naturally equipped for super-learning and super-wisdom and peace.