Introduction
What is the meaning of life? For many, it is a question that requires little thought to answer. To be happy, to do good, to seek wisdom and knowledge. For others, the question is unanswerable. After all, how can anyone truly arrive at the meaning behind his or her everyday experiences? Surely, there is a degree of emotional weight attached to any given experience, indicating that each moment in one’s life has some form of meaning to him or her, but from where does this emotional weight come? What does meaning even mean? In his landmark 2010 paper titled “The Weight of Being: Psychological Perspectives on the Existential Moment”, Dr. Jacob B. Hirsh of the University of Toronto draws upon ideas from psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience to propose a framework to describe how humans feel meaning, part of an emerging field called Neuroexistentialism.
What does Hirsh’s neuroexistentialism framework say?
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) of the human brain is larger than that of any other species on the planet (Donahue, 2018). Responsible for high-level cognitive function and behavioral planning, the PFC is perhaps the brain region most responsible for subjective perception of the world. Previous research has demonstrated that the human PFC does not fully develop until approximately age 25 (Sharma, 2013). As our brain develops in this way, so does our capability to begin asking existential questions about our state of being. Thus, as the PFC develops, it may be more common to ask about the meaning of life in late teens or early twenties.
Hirsh’s neuroexistentialist framework aims to answer this question by describing what are called goal structures, which he defines as “hierarchical networks of behavioral patterns.” Hirsh explains that, philosophically, there is no objective meaning to any given event which occurs in the universe. As humans, one assigns meaning to events that occur in his or her life based upon his or her unique, individual goal structures. For example, if one has a high-level goal of becoming a prominent neurosurgeon, then several subgoals underlie this overarching goal: getting into medical school, which is dependent on getting good grades in undergrad, which depends on doing well on exams. Without this goal structure, there would be little to no emotional weight attached to the experience of receiving a good or bad exam score. In other words, obtaining good exam scores has meaning because it is implicated in and tied to larger goal structures.
This psychological explanation for the concept of meaning is corroborated by neurobiological findings, which indicate that the presence of goal structures tunes our brains to be selectively attentive to goal-related stimuli in our environments (Miller, 2001). The presence of these goal-related stimuli triggers neurons in the PFC to fire at higher rates than for non-salient cues, leading to stronger emotional responses and thus a greater sense of meaning. The more prominent the goal, the greater the neural firing will be in response to a goal-related experience and thus the more meaningful the experience will be.
What are goals?
Hirsh explains that the extent to which meaning is intimately linked to the nature of the goals set by an individual. For those who set a narrow life goal, the range of experiences that can be perceived as meaningful is equally narrow. For instance, someone who makes it his or her life goal to be wealthy will only derive meaning from experiences related to his or her career and finances. Neurobiologically, because there is a limited number of goal-related stimuli to which PFC neurons can fire, they will tend to fire less frequently over time. Simply put, the narrow-minded individual experiences less meaning in their life. On the other hand, individuals who set open-ended life goals, such as reaching their full potential in life or achieving a state of spiritual transcendence, can derive meaning from a vast range of daily experiences, including even the most seemingly mundane. Neurons in the PFC become activated with increased frequency, leading to increased neuroplasticity in the brain and a greater number of cognitive transformations over a given timespan. The result of this greater receptivity to meaning among open individuals is that, in Hirsh’s words, “they will, in a sense, have traveled a greater subjective, experiential distance by the end of [their] lifespan.”
Personally, I believe that this point is the most compelling of Hirsh’s paper. In a world where material achievement is so deeply valued, one can’t help but set certain narrowly defined life goals. After all, an individual needs a certain degree of financial success to support oneself and loved ones. One may feel happiness when winning an award or being promoted. An individual can not fault oneself for pursuing some relatively narrow goals, as they ultimately relate back to the most basic human needs—safety, well-being, and contentedness. But as Hirsh explains, those who get the most meaning out of life, those who traverse the greatest experiential distance, are those who have matched their practical, clear-cut goals with goals rooted in existential thought.
Is there too much meaning or too little?
Interestingly, increased emotional sensitivity to perceptual stimuli can be induced pharmacologically with the dopamine agonist cocaine. Hence, users of this substance may experience their surrounding environment as suddenly ‘full of meaning’ while under the drug-induced state. Though these feelings will wear off as the effect of the drug wanes, there will remain a change in neural plasticity afterwards. Alongside cocaine’s chemically addictive nature, this cognitive reorganization could contribute to a form of psychoemotional addiction among users.
Those experiencing mental illness demonstrate similar discrepancies in meaning attribution. Among individuals with schizophrenia, there is an excess of dopaminergic activity in the brain. This causes perceptual gates to be relatively inactive, causing oversensitivity to even the most minute sensory cues. The experience of schizophrenia can be described as attributing too much meaning to stimuli that would otherwise be filtered out by the brain as environmental noise.
If the meaning of what one experiences is derived from goals that he or she sets for him or herself, those without clear overarching life goals may struggle to find a sense of consequence for their actions. Those who lack goals rooted in moral belief may be more likely to engage in morally irresponsible behavior. Additionally, a lack of goals can lead to a lack of motivation towards productive behaviors, setting the stage for behaviors that are destructive to oneself and others. As the old saying goes, the idle mind is the devil’s workshop.
How can I create meaning?
Start by asking yourself an open question like “What is my purpose?” and think deeply about what the answer might actually be. Try to define your answer in general terms, thinking about behavioral patterns that cut across different aspects of your life. You should find your goal is difficult to achieve through a clearly defined plan. More likely, this open-ended goal is something that you can work toward through a broad range of behaviors, including those that would otherwise seem inconsequential. As you do this, you may begin to find greater feelings of significance and self-efficacy emerge within your everyday experiences. Your walk through day-to-day life will be infused with a newfound sense of meaning.
About the Author
Rahul Guda is a senior at Harvard College concentrating in Neuroscience with a secondary in Global Health and Health Policy.
References
What is the meaning of life? For many, it is a question that requires little thought to answer. To be happy, to do good, to seek wisdom and knowledge. For others, the question is unanswerable. After all, how can anyone truly arrive at the meaning behind his or her everyday experiences? Surely, there is a degree of emotional weight attached to any given experience, indicating that each moment in one’s life has some form of meaning to him or her, but from where does this emotional weight come? What does meaning even mean? In his landmark 2010 paper titled “The Weight of Being: Psychological Perspectives on the Existential Moment”, Dr. Jacob B. Hirsh of the University of Toronto draws upon ideas from psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience to propose a framework to describe how humans feel meaning, part of an emerging field called Neuroexistentialism.
What does Hirsh’s neuroexistentialism framework say?
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) of the human brain is larger than that of any other species on the planet (Donahue, 2018). Responsible for high-level cognitive function and behavioral planning, the PFC is perhaps the brain region most responsible for subjective perception of the world. Previous research has demonstrated that the human PFC does not fully develop until approximately age 25 (Sharma, 2013). As our brain develops in this way, so does our capability to begin asking existential questions about our state of being. Thus, as the PFC develops, it may be more common to ask about the meaning of life in late teens or early twenties.
Hirsh’s neuroexistentialist framework aims to answer this question by describing what are called goal structures, which he defines as “hierarchical networks of behavioral patterns.” Hirsh explains that, philosophically, there is no objective meaning to any given event which occurs in the universe. As humans, one assigns meaning to events that occur in his or her life based upon his or her unique, individual goal structures. For example, if one has a high-level goal of becoming a prominent neurosurgeon, then several subgoals underlie this overarching goal: getting into medical school, which is dependent on getting good grades in undergrad, which depends on doing well on exams. Without this goal structure, there would be little to no emotional weight attached to the experience of receiving a good or bad exam score. In other words, obtaining good exam scores has meaning because it is implicated in and tied to larger goal structures.
This psychological explanation for the concept of meaning is corroborated by neurobiological findings, which indicate that the presence of goal structures tunes our brains to be selectively attentive to goal-related stimuli in our environments (Miller, 2001). The presence of these goal-related stimuli triggers neurons in the PFC to fire at higher rates than for non-salient cues, leading to stronger emotional responses and thus a greater sense of meaning. The more prominent the goal, the greater the neural firing will be in response to a goal-related experience and thus the more meaningful the experience will be.
What are goals?
Hirsh explains that the extent to which meaning is intimately linked to the nature of the goals set by an individual. For those who set a narrow life goal, the range of experiences that can be perceived as meaningful is equally narrow. For instance, someone who makes it his or her life goal to be wealthy will only derive meaning from experiences related to his or her career and finances. Neurobiologically, because there is a limited number of goal-related stimuli to which PFC neurons can fire, they will tend to fire less frequently over time. Simply put, the narrow-minded individual experiences less meaning in their life. On the other hand, individuals who set open-ended life goals, such as reaching their full potential in life or achieving a state of spiritual transcendence, can derive meaning from a vast range of daily experiences, including even the most seemingly mundane. Neurons in the PFC become activated with increased frequency, leading to increased neuroplasticity in the brain and a greater number of cognitive transformations over a given timespan. The result of this greater receptivity to meaning among open individuals is that, in Hirsh’s words, “they will, in a sense, have traveled a greater subjective, experiential distance by the end of [their] lifespan.”
Personally, I believe that this point is the most compelling of Hirsh’s paper. In a world where material achievement is so deeply valued, one can’t help but set certain narrowly defined life goals. After all, an individual needs a certain degree of financial success to support oneself and loved ones. One may feel happiness when winning an award or being promoted. An individual can not fault oneself for pursuing some relatively narrow goals, as they ultimately relate back to the most basic human needs—safety, well-being, and contentedness. But as Hirsh explains, those who get the most meaning out of life, those who traverse the greatest experiential distance, are those who have matched their practical, clear-cut goals with goals rooted in existential thought.
Is there too much meaning or too little?
Interestingly, increased emotional sensitivity to perceptual stimuli can be induced pharmacologically with the dopamine agonist cocaine. Hence, users of this substance may experience their surrounding environment as suddenly ‘full of meaning’ while under the drug-induced state. Though these feelings will wear off as the effect of the drug wanes, there will remain a change in neural plasticity afterwards. Alongside cocaine’s chemically addictive nature, this cognitive reorganization could contribute to a form of psychoemotional addiction among users.
Those experiencing mental illness demonstrate similar discrepancies in meaning attribution. Among individuals with schizophrenia, there is an excess of dopaminergic activity in the brain. This causes perceptual gates to be relatively inactive, causing oversensitivity to even the most minute sensory cues. The experience of schizophrenia can be described as attributing too much meaning to stimuli that would otherwise be filtered out by the brain as environmental noise.
If the meaning of what one experiences is derived from goals that he or she sets for him or herself, those without clear overarching life goals may struggle to find a sense of consequence for their actions. Those who lack goals rooted in moral belief may be more likely to engage in morally irresponsible behavior. Additionally, a lack of goals can lead to a lack of motivation towards productive behaviors, setting the stage for behaviors that are destructive to oneself and others. As the old saying goes, the idle mind is the devil’s workshop.
How can I create meaning?
Start by asking yourself an open question like “What is my purpose?” and think deeply about what the answer might actually be. Try to define your answer in general terms, thinking about behavioral patterns that cut across different aspects of your life. You should find your goal is difficult to achieve through a clearly defined plan. More likely, this open-ended goal is something that you can work toward through a broad range of behaviors, including those that would otherwise seem inconsequential. As you do this, you may begin to find greater feelings of significance and self-efficacy emerge within your everyday experiences. Your walk through day-to-day life will be infused with a newfound sense of meaning.
About the Author
Rahul Guda is a senior at Harvard College concentrating in Neuroscience with a secondary in Global Health and Health Policy.
References
- Hirsh, J. B. (2010). The weight of being: Psychological perspectives on the existential moment. New Ideas in Psychology, 28(1), 28–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2009.03.001
- Donahue, C. J., Glasser, M. F., Preuss, T. M., Rilling, J. K., & Van Essen, D. C. (2018). Quantitative assessment of prefrontal cortex in humans relative to nonhuman primates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(22). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1721653115
- Sharma, S., Arain, Mathur, Rais, Nel, Sandhu, Haque, & Johal. (2013). Maturation of the adolescent brain. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 449. https://doi.org/10.2147/ndt.s39776
- Miller, E. K., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24(1), 167–202. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.24.1.167
