I've been working on a concept recently which, for lack of a more reader-friendly term, I’ve labeled "the extrasomatory extensions of self." The basic idea runs something like this. When we get wonked, bonked, roiled, and boiled by powerful feelings--whether they are delightful or nightmarish--a strange thing happens. We often don't know what to make of them. Our logical mind has a hard time seeing into the swirl of our visceral passions and making sense of them. When we probe the whirl within us we can posit numerous possibilities. But this guessing is often the best that we can do. What's more, our internal monsoons often pelt us with unbearable gales of emotionality. So how do we solve our confusion? We look for someone to talk to. We babble out our situation to a friend, a relative, a mentor, a bartender, or a shrink and beg him or her to tell us what s/he makes of it. Then, through the words of someone outside our self, what's going on inside of us gains a little clarity.
Now this is very peculiar. Very peculiar indeed. The talking self in the left cerebral cortex may be mere inches from the "seat of feeling"--the limbic system--the place (or upper traces of a far-flung hurricane) where the basic emotions are doing their thing. Why can't our thinking self see what's happening right under its nose--or mere millimeters from its dendritic threads?
The answer may lie in the evolution of emotion and the self--or so the theory of the extrasomatory extensions of the self says. We evolved not just as individuals, but as members of groups whose competition was often a matter of life and death. Those of us who acted as productive plug-ins to a group's machinery were likely to survive--and to produce lots of offspring. Rugged individualists who refused to become components in a group's IQ would have had it rough when pitted against a horde of the well-organized. Some of them would have literally been eaten (given the recent evidence on early hominid cannibalism). At the very least, they would have lost their wives. No mating, no procreating. So the line of loners would have soon ceased to be.
In ants, a worker's nervous system is wired as a strand in a hive-wide circuitry. The need to connect shows up in the worker's equivalents of gregariousness and uncertainty. She wanders a small distance from the pack, then grows uneasy and feels the need to hurry back. Once she's gotten reassurance from her "friends" she wanders off and explores a bit of far-flung territory again. Each time she does a bit of sightseeing she spreads the group's search web—the net of eyes and antennae the hive sends out to hunt for food. Each time the wandering worker returns for the hymenopteran equivalent of tea and sympathy she inadvertently brings back a report on a bit of previously uncharted territory.
We humans seem to be rigged in similar ways—our psyche drives us to be neurons of a collective brain. To the group it's often less important that we understand our innards than that our innards drive us to synapse with others, and to make our contribution to the data pool of society. So when we encounter something that troubles or uplifts us, we are driven both to introspection and to the comfort we can find in sharing our fears, our furies, and our joys with the company of friends. To them we give reports on the strange territories we've explored--realms that range from romance to finance, from madness to meaning, from pathos to punch lines, and a good deal in between. In return our friends give us the words and concepts with which to interpret our moods.
Every time we're driven back to others for a "reality check," we're tuned to interpret our experience using the acceptable forms of expression of the moment. We're plugged into our group's zeitgeist. And every time we return to babble our half-digested angsts or triumphs, we expand, even if by only the slightest bit, the ambit of the group's understanding of its circumstance--its view of its internal and external realities.
Self didn't, in all probability evolve as just a way of navigating the private paths of solitary life. It seems to be a social billboard and a social interface. E.E. Coons, the discoverer of the role of the hypothalamus, pictures self as a model human inside of us standing in an arena where his or her every actions are observed by an audience of significant others, the inner representations of our friends and family. The self is also judged by an observer of even greater importance, ourselves, our basic "me." With this model human, this puppet "us" homunculus, we try out the various ways in which we should dress in the morning, or the speeches we should use to present an idea, a feeling, a demand, or a request. We see how the model audience would react to each form of presentation, and most of all how we'd respond to it. If it seems witty, delicious, or appropriate to circumstance it's sent out for implementation by the body and the tongue. If it seems obnoxious it simply disappears back into the oblivion from which it’s come.
Which means the self may not have evolved as a bridge to our interior. It probably evolved as a causeway to the folks with whom we live. A pathway which connects us even to those with whom we interact but whom we'll never see--the bosses far above our head, the farmers who produce our food, the construction crews who built our home and the carpenters who built our bed.
These ruminations spring from a bit of reading in George Stephanopoulos' All Too Human: A Political Education. I've reached that part of the book in which Stephanopoulos gets the job of key political adviser to Bill Clinton. Clinton, at this point, is governor of Arkansas and one of many candidates about to run the gauntlet of the primary elections for president. Bill walks through his bedroom and his hallways, taking off his pants, changing into others, picking up papers from his night table, constantly spurting ideas, and looking insistently for new solutions and for new ways to bathe in the feedback of those around him. Stephanopoulos follows him through his soliloquies in mid-pants-change and the moment a bit later when Hilary enters the room and both Bill and Hil are dialoging at full speed, bouncing Bill’s concepts and Hilary's analyses off of Stephanopoulos, looking for his feedback. But Stephanopoulos is not Bill and Hilary's only extracranial extension of self. Bill frequently asks, "What ideas do our friends in New York have on this? Are there any new ways of handling this coming in from that group in California we've been talking to? What do the polls say the public mood thinks about this issue right now?"
From the mix of incoming signals, Bill Clinton arrives at a conclusion which he can say with full conviction is his. In fact, his self-confidence and the passion with which he conveys his beliefs, says Stephanopoulos, puts him head and shoulders above any other candidates whom this well-placed political operative has ever met. Equally important, Clinton absorbs each audience to which he speaks and adjusts the way he puts things to make his stump speech intimately personal. He is compelling because he believes in what he says but says it in a way that shows how quickly he's plugged into his listeners.
So the number of contributors to Clinton's "self" is immense. Stephanopoulos is just one of many advisors. He and those like him are considered staff--and that staff is large. Then there are the old and trusted friends, the ones with whom the bonds go back in time. These are the FOB, the Friends of Bill. Clinton grills these people constantly, not only for their opinions, but for input they've gleaned from sources spread in nearly every state. If a key FOB like Webster Hubble nixes an idea, then it's understood the idea is kaput.
This form of reliance on others is occasionally derided as an overdependence on polls. And it can clearly get that way when the candidate is a pale puppet who parrots the popular thoughts of the day. But in a representative government, the self of a candidate is SUPPOSED to represent that of the populace he is elected to serve. In that sense, there is a justification to Louis XIV's pronouncement that "L’état c'est moi." "The state is me." Or, to put it in democratic terms, "I, the candidate, am my constituency."
Who in this case, is an extrasomatory extension of whom? Bill Clinton is a walking summation of those around him--much more so than the average man in the street who doesn't have the team of social input purveyors available to a politician. He is an extrasomatory extension of the public personality. Those from whom he sucks opinions are, in turn, extrasomatory extensions of him--vital feelers feeding his identity. What, under these circumstances, gives a public figure the appearance of having a strong sense of self--the kind of thing John McCain had in spades? Is it sheer self-confidence, despite the contributions from others of which the self is made? Is charisma a matter of postural and facial cues--those of an alpha leader, of a silverback—the cues of an upright walk and a masterful talk? Is a sense of self the flimsiest of masks, but one of great persuasive strength?
Where do others stop and we begin? Why is the self so calmed by others and so often jolted by incoherent feelings from within?

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