The weight of being: Psychological perspectives on the existential moment

As the prefrontal cortex expanded in human evolution, so too did the capacity for nesting basic biological goals within more complex systems of behavioral organization. This increased ability for abstraction brought with it the challenge of deciding how to interpret the personal significance of any given experience. The human brain appears to manage this increased complexity by defining meaning in relation to one's currently adopted goals. When encountering goal-related information, arousal and exploratory systems become engaged, such that information is processed more thoroughly. As a consequence of this enhanced attention and arousal, neural plasticity is facilitated, allowing motivationally relevant experiences to have a stronger influence on an individual's neural organization. To borrow a gravitational metaphor, the existential weight, or significance, of a particular moment will determine the strength of that moment's influence on an individual's life. Human experience thus appears to be curved around fluctuations in the existential weight of being.