James Vornov, MD PhD
Neurologist, drug developer and philosopher exploring the neuroscience of decision-making and personal identity.
Our actions often conflict with our beliefs. The discomfort we feel isn’t moral failure — it’s what happens when valence systems disrupt the brain’s coherent story of personal identity.
Getting back to my exploration of personal identity this week.
As I’ve been writing here weekly, I’m settling in on an approach of looking at everyday experience and examining the underlying brain mechanisms at play. Often they constrain our thoughts and actions, but it seems to me that even more often, seeing it from the point of view of the brain’s work as system regulator, it’s really quite liberating. Knowing that our actions rely on physiology, not failure or flaw, lets me feel a bit more comfortable in this human skin.
So I want to return to the subject of my first post on Substack and make another run at explaining what’s called “Cognitive Dissonance”. For our purposes here today, lets limit the concept to those times when we find ourslelves acting and feeling one way, but For our purposes here today, let’s limit the concept to those times when we find ourselves acting and feeling one way, but intellectually finding fault with what we’ve done. finding fault with what we’ve done. So we’re acting in ways contrary to our beliefs.
Cognitive dissonance as conflict between action and belief
So I want to return to the subject of my first post on Substack and make another run at explaining what’s called “Cognitive Dissonance”. For our purposes here today, let’s limit the concept to those times when we find ourselves acting and feeling one way, but For our purposes here today, let’s limit the concept to those times when we find ourselves acting and feeling one way, but intellectually finding fault with what we’ve done. finding fault with what we’ve done. So we’re acting in ways contrary to our beliefs.
No reason not to use a perfectly trivial, but common example. Chicken thighs.
I’m going to prepare dinner for my wife and me and it’s a nice summer Sunday. So I decide to grill some chicken thighs, one of my favorite foods with corn on the cobb and cole slaw. So I stop by the butcher and get a nice pack of thighs, trim then as necessary and dry brine them for a few hours. Then seasoned and brushed with olive oil and on to the grill. Indirect heat until nearly done, then get the skin crisped up for a perfect dish. Juicy flesh, crunchy, flavorful skin.
Then thought during dinner, I thank the chicken for gracing our table and providing us with dinner. But then I realize what the chicken went through to be dinner. Let me tell you that story.
A horror story starring my dinner
In a vast, windowless shed on the outskirts of a rural highway on the Eastern Shore of Maryland about 50 miles from here, 30,000 chickens lived their entire lives under fluorescent lights that never dimmed. They had been bred to grow so fast that by five weeks, their bones could no longer support their bodies—many collapsed, unable to walk, lying in their own waste, pecked at by others in the ammonia-soaked litter. The air was thick with dust and feces, and the birds’ lungs burned from the acrid stench, their feathers yellowed and patchy from constant contact with filth.
When it was time, men came with machines—giant vacuum tubes that sucked up the birds like garbage into crates—some alive, some already dead—and any that fought or got stuck were yanked by legs or wings, breaking bones with a crack that was drowned by the industrial hum. At the slaughterhouse, the stunned birds were shackled upside down by their legs, but the stun often failed, and they were still conscious as their throats were slit by automated blades—unless the blade missed, and they entered the scalder alive.
Okay, worst case scenario, but that’s how my mind works.
The valence flip
And I think as I savor a bite of chicken, how could I be the person that bought this meat, prepared it so carefully and is now in the midst of enjoying the experience of consuming in, when I can vividly imagine how it got to the store for me to buy. At a very good price I might add.
And of course, the answer is that your brain has no need of consistency or cohernecy. Whats going on as you plan dinner? as you look at and taste the chicken? Your brain’s valence system, most prominently the deep areas of the forebrain that arose early in evolution, is constantly active, tagging every perception that arises across the cerebral cortex with a contextually appropriate value. The hippocampus, the librarian of the brain, along with the neighboring areas of younger neocortex work to index brain states with feeling, either positive or negative. The amygdala, weighing the current context and content across the brain, drives
So planning the meal, the Default Mode Netwok is active, the brains way of taking planning and recall off line in the absence of necessary immediate action. So as the hippocampus and frontal areas direct recall of meals. past, you imagine tonights dinner and those chicken thighs have the strongest positive valence, setting frontal areas into an action plan to buy and cook them. Later, it was sensory systems relaying taste, smell, texture, heat, along with vision of the food and the sound of that crisp skin that provided lots of positive valence attached to the experience. The amygdala was in happy state. And if the food came out rally well, then sure, the substantia nigra was active giving the signal of better than expected reward with this food. No wonder you were in a very good place subjectively.
You were hungry, imagined enjoying chicken so went throug the actions of buying cooking, resulting in a very favorable outcome.
Of two minds in conflict
But then, unbidden, the Default Mode Network takes you offline, puts aside the current sensory input stream, and turns its pattern-matching machinery to bring to awareness a related chicken memory. That same system that helped you plan this perfect meal, now retrieves reconstructed fragments from what? Some half remembered documentry about abuses in the poultry industry?
Instead of recalling past dinners, the DMN is connecting this moment to those images of factory farms you can’t unsee.
So here the amygdala is faced with the brain’s lack of coherence. One moment, it was all postive valence being attached to the state of the cortex enjoying chicken, the next moment the cortex is recaling strong negative valence about the very same thing. There’s no debate here, no rational tug of war, just a change is state of neural networks from one stable configuration to another. Both were always there, ready to be brought into activity by the right external stimulus or context. The same sensory input just now has a flipped valence. The taste hasn’t changed. The chicken hasn’t changed. But the amygdala is now receiving the opposite set of signals.
So you know what this feels like subjectively. There you sit, experiencing what we call cognitive dissonance. It’s no failure of brain coherency or lack of character. It’s just a brain that can reach many possible stable states based on prior knowledge, current context and its continuous shifting instability that we experience as the stream of consciousness, the parade of of thought and sensation.
Creating a coherent story for the hero
There’s no unified command center, there’s no homunculus. There’s no one home, just networks trying to be a good regulator and accurately predict the current situation of self in the environment and meet need both immediate and long term.
So it’s not up to you to reach some compromise between these two opposing states, but you do get to experience the unease of the conflict. Are you goiing to finish the chicken, letting the immediate sensory valence win and put the imagination aside? Do you push the plate away, allowing the abstract moral reasoning to override the gustatory reward?
Most of the time, the brain needs to settle into a single state that takes both sides into acount. It needs to reconcile the agency of enjoying chicken with the agency of disgust at how chicken is produced by the worst parts of the industry. It’s a narrative and that can be made consistent, probably along the lines of finishing the meal, enjoying it, and feeling better by promising yourself you’ll buy cage free or some better cared for chicken meat. Or maybe become of vegetarian.
And that’s the And that’s the experience of your brain smoothing over conflict with a coherent self-identity narrative. of your brain smoothing over conflict with a coherent self-identity narrative. This write your own ending isn’t in your control. You didn’t choose to enjoy the meal but that was your agency. And you didn’t choose to think about industrial chicken production even though that was assigned to you agency, since no one else put the thoughts there. So when all settles down, under that self-identity narrative, you know you did that. And you did, at least your briain’s story telling function did as you became aware of the story you told yourself.
How is it that the brain doesn’t care, but we do
The brain, as we say doesn’t care. The valence system is constantly active, assigning value to each brain state, each perception as they come, one by one. at the core, Hippocampus tags, amygda sets the tone.
So there’s no central model that needs consistanecy and coherency. But the you the brain constructs in its model of self environment should be a coherent actor, the hero of the story.
So why does it bother us so much? Because since we do have a model of self, its disturbing when we see the seams. Our personal narrative, who we say we are should be stable and coherent. Just as we think the world and its contents should be consistent and stable, so to do we feel our personal model should have those qualiteis. Self as an object in the world.
Looking at how we do one thing, believe another is a clear illustration that this is just another brain construction like the stable visual environment painted by saccades, never seeing it all. Just like the color purple which is not in nature, but a way the brain represents red plus blue minus green. The more we understand this process of presenting coheerent content to awarenes, the more we can accept the multitudes we contain.
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© 2025 James Vornov MD, PhD. This content is freely shareable with attribution. Please link to this page if quoting.
