Blog on mind and brain research and advice

In the Groove: Meta Mindsets

November 5, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Our brain looks out at the world through its own unique lens, which is called a mental model. The brain creates our mental model to quantify and qualify what’s normal in the world for us so it can determine the actions we should we take.

Our mental model is unconscious, so we can’t examine it directly to find out about it. We can only gain information from inference—by observing our actions in response to different situations and then reasoning backward a bit.

We do know our mental model consists of several different mindsets that operate together or separately under various sets of circumstances. A mindset is a set of ideas, beliefs, or attitudes with which we approach situations or through which we view them. Mindsets have something in common with habits since they tend to be habitual, which means they are mostly unconscious.

Some mindsets are:

In all three examples, one mindset isn’t automatically better than the other. It would be great if we readily shifted between, say, Be Good (focused on mastering a skill or body of knowledge and demonstrating that skill) and Get Better (focused on continued improvement of skill or knowledge rather than on performance) based on the mindset that was most appropriate to the situation. Unfortunately, we don’t tend to do that. The brain likes certainty and ease and so it prefers to lean in one direction or the other.

In the Groove

Furthermore, leaning in one direction in one area generally leads to leaning in that same direction in other areas. So we’re more likely to find Soldier, Be Good, and Productivity mindsets clustered together in one person and Scout, Get Better, and Creativity mindsets clustered together in another. One mindset reinforces the others. That’s what makes shifting back and forth between them so much more difficult.

Other mental processes and ways of thinking also tend to lean in the direction of one cluster or the other. All this clustering results in what I call the Meta Mindset: an overarching perspective that influences not only our responses to the events and situations we encounter but also our general attitudes and our beliefs about what’s possible for us to do, be, have, or create.

The two Meta Mindsets are Experiment and Production. Here are some of their qualities and attributes:

The Production mindset is the default because it requires less System 2 attention. It’s easy for all of us to fall back on it. Indeed, it’s difficult for some of us to ever get out of it.

There are definitely occasions when Production mindset is necessary and desirable. But the situation between these two mindsets is akin to the situation between System 1 (the unconscious) and System 2 (consciousness). Because we operate on autopilot approximately 95% of the time, both System 1 and the Production mindset are dominant. System 2 and the Experiment mindset require conscious attention which is costly in terms of energy and is also less available.

But System 2 and the Experiment mindset are what make humans unique as a species. They are also essential to the process of transformational change and creating and enjoying a satisfying and meaningful life. So it’s important for us to use them to harness the power and direction of System 1 and the Production mindset. It’s an important part of learning how to use our brain instead of letting our brain use us.

Note: Like most things, Meta Mindsets aren’t completely black or white (at least not for everyone). I’m developing a tool where you’ll be able to rate yourself on a continuum for each of the 15 items listed above. I’ll link to it in a future blog post.

Pandemic Pivot

September 27, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The Past: Some Context

We live in a vast country. We are people of different ages, different ethnicities, different genders, different levels of education and economic circumstances, different histories, different (or no) religions, different experiences, different beliefs, biases, and political leanings, and different personalities. And we are just one country among many different countries on this planet.

We humans have a need for other people (one of only six things we can genuinely call needs), and we desire to have a sense of belonging. So we identify ourselves with various others: maybe the citizens of the country where we live, but also with other groups, both large and small, including immediate and extended family, circles of friends, fellow-hobbyists, co-workers, spiritual or religious organizations, business associations, and political parties.

Sometimes our loyalty to the groups we identify with can lead to an attitude of tribalism: us vs. them (those others). It’s not a coincidence that tribal mentalities are strongest in wartime. Is it also possible that extreme tribalism promotes a wartime mentality? It’s a question worth asking for several reasons, one of which is that it doesn’t seem we can blame our Pleistocene-era brain for our tendencies toward either tribalism or violence—at least not directly.

It appears that our ancestors gravitated toward violence only after they transitioned away from a nomadic lifestyle to what is referred to as sedentism or sedentariness (the practice of living in one place for a long time). Their—and our—allegiance may be more to the territory we have staked out and less to the people we have staked it out with.

Here in the 21^st Century, “territory” can have multiple meanings and associations, of course; it can be less geographic and more cultural, contextual, or even abstract. We are living in the digital age, as well as the nuclear age and the inter-connected age. That makes territoriality and tribalism more widespread and more dangerous than they have ever been—and a perfect breeding ground for the worldwide pandemic we’re experiencing now.

So this would be an excellent time to take a look around and acknowledge that there is only one tribe to be concerned about and that is the one we all belong to. This is certainly not a new or original thought, and it’s also clearly easier said than done. That doesn’t make the point less valid.

What makes the situation most pressing, even urgent, is that many of us are now quarantined, which means we are stuck in one place for a long time without knowing how long a time it will be.

The Present: A Plethora of Self-Soothing Advice

Remember the Eisenhower box? It’s that matrix with four quadrants:

#1: Urgent and Important
#2: Important but not Urgent
#3: Urgent but not Important
#4: not Urgent and not Important

Essentially, the purpose is to help us classify our to-do lists. According to its proponents:

What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.

The Eisenhower Box is widespread enough to have helped turn “urgent” into a dirty word. Could there be a link between our attitude toward urgency and our nearly pathological desire to avoid stress and so-called negativity?

The pandemic is, factually speaking, both urgent and important, so it falls into the first category. We don’t necessarily have a lot of experience dealing with such situations. And we’ve been sidelined, told to stay home if we can, for an indefinite period of time. Furthermore, we don’t know what the world is going to look or be like when we move back into it.

Responses to the situation vary: squirmy, angry, frustrated, worried, bored, depressed, content, etc. Some of us find ourselves with a lot more to do than before; others may be doing much less. But no matter our individual responses, the vast majority of advice being dispensed about how to cope encourages all of us to find calm, balance, and meaning (which hopefully are located within your home or at least on your property, since that’s about as far as you can go to look for them) and to treat yourself well.

Yes, these are trying times, disruptive times, uncertain times, in which we certainly do need to take care of ourselves. But this blanket focus on managing our feelings instead of solving the problems that contribute to them is absolutely not serving us. The world is in distress; bright-siding is not an appropriate response. Contrary to suggestions otherwise, lounging on the sofa watching Netflix is not actually contributing to saving the world.

If you’re OK, good for you. The more people who are OK, the better. But being OK is not an end, it’s a means.

These trying, disruptive, and uncertain times require something of and from us

The Future: Disturb the World

DREAM BIG

I’ve heard the optimistic belief expressed that we will somehow emerge from this better people in a better society. I have no expectation of a spontaneous occurrence of betterment. In fact, it’s more likely we will easily and quickly return to the situations and circumstances that led to this—or worse.

But I do believe we have the capacity to change that trajectory, or at least to begin the process—if we act intentionally and start now.

In order to do that, we need to use our imagination to generate a vision of what we want the world to be like, whether or not we have any idea how to make that vision a reality. We need a big, bold dream of a better world. We need a compelling vision we can share with others because it will take many people to create that kind of change. It will take many different kinds of people.

TAKE BABY STEPS

A big, bold vision generates creative tension. The bigger and bolder the vision (meaning the greater the difference between where we are now and where we want to be), the more creative tension is created. The more creative tension there is, the more dopamine is produced and the more motivated we are. Once we have a compelling vision of a desired outcome, we can begin to identify some objectives and then some actions we can take immediately. The best way to change the status quo is via repetition and perseverance—taking baby steps. Interestingly, taking action to make things better often has a side effect of making us feel better, but the reverse is seldom true.

As Serena Chan wrote in an article on complex adaptive systems:

Systems that are forced to explore their space of possibilities will create different structures and new patterns of relationships.

What new structures and patterns of relationships do you want to create for yourself? What do you want for the world? What can you contribute? What action can you take in that direction?

Hunting for Foxhogs,
I Find a Foxcat Instead

September 10, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

In the last chapter of Curious, Ian Leslie lays out “seven ways to stay curious.” Item number three on the list is “forage like a foxhog.” The foraging he refers to is for information. The question under consideration is whether it’s better to have a depth of knowledge (specialize) or a breadth of knowledge (generalize).

Eventually he connects these two approaches to a quote from Greek poet Archilochus:

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Leslie suggests that these animals represent two different ways of thinking, neither of which is really better than the other: the hedgehog knows a lot about a little, while the fox knows a little about a lot.

The thinkers best positioned to thrive today and in the future will be a hybrid of these two animals. In a highly competitive, high-information world, it’s crucial to know one or two big things and to know them in more depth and detail than most of your contemporaries. But to really ignite that knowledge, you need the ability to think about it from a variety of eclectic perspectives and to be able to collaborate fruitfully with people who have different specializations. —Ian Leslie

So by combining the fox and the hedgehog, we get the “foxhog.”

Leslie devotes six pages to this discussion, at the end of which I was not entirely clear about the distinctions he was making beyond specialization vs. generalization. So I did a little research of my own.

Assumptions Were Made (but not by me)

The first thing I discovered was that this concept of the hedgehog and the fox is fairly widely used. That was a little surprising. Also surprising was the fact that although people seem to have definite ideas about what the concept means, it doesn’t appear to mean the same thing to everyone.

I listened to a 38-minute podcast of The Hidden Brain titled The Fox and the Hedgehog, which I found interesting and worth listening to. But it did not advance my understanding at all.

It turns out that Archilochus may have been the source of the quote, but we have no elaboration from him on its meaning. That credit goes to philosopher Isaiah Berlin and his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox published as a book in 1953. It was Berlin who first classified various philosophers, writers, and scientists as either hedgehogs or foxes. But the focus of the essay was Leo Tolstoy, who Berlin conceived of as that hybrid creature, the “foxhog” (although he did not, of course, use that term).

According to Berlin, Tolstoy was really a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog, and this internal dissonance was a source of distress to him. That would make Tolstoy a bad example of a “foxhog,” but Leslie does give us a few positive role models.

After checking out Berlin, I understood that Shankar Vedantam (the Hidden Brain podcast) had based his understanding of the concept of the hedgehog and the fox on Berlin’s essay. But other people had somewhat different ideas, and I was still trying to understand it in terms of types of thinkers—or leaders—or learners. The characteristics associated with foxes and hedgehogs by various proponents didn’t really hang together.

Enter the Foxcat

Eventually, I came across a different perspective based on an Aesop’s fable. It turns out there is a fable titled The Fox and the Hedgehog, but the moral of that story doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what Berlin or Leslie or any of the others are talking about. The fable that does connect is The Fox and the Cat.

This fable sees the fox and cat discussing the various tricks and dodges they know: the fox has many, while the cat says he has just one. The fox appears to have the advantage, until a pack of wild dogs attacks them both. The cat’s one bright idea—climb a tree to get out of harm’s way—rewards him by saving him from the dogs, while the fox—busy chewing over which of his bright ideas to act upon—remains rooted to the spot and is torn apart by the hounds.

Clearly there’s a moral there: act quickly and decisively when you have to, rather than endlessly turning over the various options in your head. —interestingliterature.com

In this story, the fox represents System 2, conscious processing, which allows for more possibilities but is also slow and energy intensive. The cat represents System 1, unconscious processing, which is fast because it acts based on habit and instinct: what worked in the past. (I especially like this because I frequently use my cat as an example of a creature who acts exclusively on System 1 impulses.)

Is There a Moral to This Story?

Neither the fable of The Fox and the Hedgehog nor the fable of The Fox and the Cat are directly relevant to Leslie’s idea about foraging for information. (I don’t think they’re relevant to Isaiah Berlin’s ideas about Tolstoy, either, but that’s another rabbit hole.) In terms of staying curious, I definitely agree with Leslie that breadth is as important as depth. “T-shaped knowledge” combines specialization (the vertical axis) with broad understanding in other areas (the horizontal axis).

The same could be said of System 1 and System 2 thinking: one is as important as the other. It’s important to know when to apply logical, linear, critical thinking and when to allow unconscious associative thinking.

But the moral of the story is that there’s no good reason for us to believe that we know what we’re talking about—or what anyone else is talking about, for that matter. We take the world at face value when we ought to question our assumptions.

Sure, curiosity may have killed the cat. But satisfaction brought it back.

Conspiracy Theories and the
Storytelling Mind
(Conspiracy Part 3)

July 29, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The most important thing about conspiracy theories isn’t that they aren’t true. They’re stories; of course they aren’t true. There’s no such thing as a “true story.”

We see, understand, and explain the world and other people—including ourselves—in terms of stories, not facts. Stories and the telling of them come naturally. They are easy to formulate and to remember. Facts, on the other hand, don’t come naturally. That’s why much of what we’ve learned, including most of our deeply held beliefs, has been transmitted to us via the stories we’ve heard, read, or watched—beginning with the fairy tales and nursery rhymes of early childhood.

In fact the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are more important to our sense of self than the actual facts of our lives. What we remember of an experience is a story about it. The details are subject to revision, and we often employ confabulation, in the service of reinforcing a particular emotional state.

Emotion determines what we remember and how we remember. Emotion is what makes an event or an experience compelling. And there’s nothing more compelling than fraught situations, lurking danger, and bad outcomes. That’s because the brain is first and foremost a threat detector—as it should be, since although pleasant things are rewarding, unpleasant things can kill us. We need to know about those things so we can try to avoid them.

Wired for Story

It’s really no surprise that facts don’t persuade people to change their beliefs, especially in regard to conspiracy theories. Facts are not persuasive. Stories, on the other hand, are so persuasive and come to mind so easily that the world seems to present itself to us as a series of stories with beginnings, middles, and endings.

In his highly readable and wide-ranging book The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall devotes several pages to a discussion of how conspiracy theories are one outcome of our mind’s tendency to impose the structure of story in places where there is no story.

He prefaces the discussion with the example of a 1940s experiment involving an animated film of geometric shapes. When the psychologists running the experiment, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, asked viewers to describe what they had seen, almost no one said they saw geometric shapes moving around the screen. Instead they related detailed narratives imputing intentions and desires to circles and triangles.

They saw soap operas: doors slamming, courtship dances, the foiling of a predator. —Gottschall

Gottschall says that he, too, saw a very convincing story involving a hero, a heroine, and a villain. Heider and Simmel’s experiment has been replicated, and other similar experiments have been developed since. All have produced the same result.

Ripping Good Yarns

Conspiracy theories connect real data points and imagined data points into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality. Conspiracy theories exert a powerful hold on the human imagination. …They fascinate us because they are ripping good yarns, showcasing classic problem structure and sharply defined good guys and villains. They offer vivid, lurid plots that translate with telling ease into wildly popular entertainment. —Gottschall

Conspiracy theories serve multiple purposes. Via the structure of story, they provide an explanation for why things are bad in the world; they separate the good guys from the bad guys; they tie random events together to weave a seamless whole.

Conspiracy theories…are always consoling in their simplicity. Bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story. —Gottschall

Our brain is so good at altering our memories to support and affirm particular emotional states that we can become firmly convinced that something that didn’t happen happened (or vice versa). In the same way, conspiracy theories buttress our worldviews, altering our mental model and our actual experience of reality.

Conspiracy theories are an example of allowing the associative processing of the unconscious (System 1), which is gullible and prone to cognitive biases to run unchecked by the skeptical, critical thinking of System 2. It’s an example of letting our brain use us. And because of the way the brain works, once someone starts down that road, it becomes easier and easier to believe the story, and more and more difficult to question it.

Intention Seekers
(Conspiracy Part 2)

June 16, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

People who believe in conspiracy theories (conspiracists) are motivated by the same thing that motivates everyone: the drive to understand and make sense of the world we live in. Failing to understand what’s happening around us or how things work could jeopardize our survival.

So from an early age, we begin developing and testing theories to increase our understanding. The brains of both conspiracists and non-conspiracists are always trying to connect the dots. System 1 (the unconscious) operates by making associations: detecting patterns and making connections. It functions at a rapid pace and uses heuristics (mental shortcuts) to make determinations. As a result, it jumps to conclusions, seeing patterns that may not be there and making connections that may not exist. Again, this is true for everyone.

It’s System 2’s job to scrutinize questionable System 1 conclusions. But as we know, System 2 is slow, lazy, easily depleted, and may be otherwise occupied; it misses a lot.

Conspiracists appear to be both more likely to see patterns and connections and less likely to question them, especially when they support preexisting beliefs. In The Believing Brain, Michael Shermer says:

Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies? I contend that it is because their pattern-detection filters are wide open, thereby letting in any and all patterns as real, with little to no screening of potential false patterns.

All Explanatory Theories Are Not Equal

Conspiracy theories are different from other theories in a number of ways. They aren’t falsifiable, which means they can’t be disproved, so they can’t be proved; they are only apparent to those who are in the know or can see through the purported cover-ups; they represent a gloomy, sometimes sinister, worldview; they tend to be vast, far-reaching, and complex; and they disallow for the possibility of random or accidental events or occurrences.

Conspiracy theories can’t be proved because they are not likely to be based on verifiable evidence. Lack of evidence would disqualify most other types of theories, but in the case of conspiracy theories the lack of evidence is considered to be evidence of the existence of the conspiracy.

In addition to having wide-open pattern detection filters, the people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to be more suspicious, untrusting, and eccentric than their non-conspiracist counterparts. They have a need to feel special and tend to regard the world as an inherently dangerous place. They are also more likely to infer meaning and motive where others do not.

Several other personality characteristics and cognitive biases have been linked with the tendency to endorse conspiracy theories, including:

openness
neuroticism
authoritarianism
mild paranoia
confirmation bias
the conjunction fallacy
the proportionality bias
projection
attributions of intentionality
decreased sense of personal agency
traditionalism
rejection of science and/or experts
confidence in one’s beliefs

Two additional factors were identified in research reported by Lehigh University in 2018.

People who overestimate how well they understand politics are more likely to believe that hidden actors or clandestine groups are conspiring in wide-ranging activities to influence important world actions, events, and outcomes.
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People who identify with traditional values and systems they believe are under siege due to social change also tend to adopt conspiracy theory thinking.

Intention Seeking

Just as both conspiracists and non-conspiracists are driven to understand the world in which they live, both are also attempting to discern the intentions of others—again because not being able to do so accurately can have significant negative consequences. Our ability to quickly discern intentionality develops rapidly during childhood. Like pattern-detection, it is an automatic function of System 1, the unconscious. And System 1 can make the same kinds of mistakes in discerning intentions as it does in detecting patterns.

The fast and automatic operation of intentionality-seeking cognitive processes allows us to quickly make inferences about the mental states of those around us—an important evolutionary adaptation. However, as is the case with other low-level cognitive processes, inferences of intentionality may be subject to biases and heuristics. Not only are we sensitive to the intentions of others, but we may be overly sensitive, biased towards perceiving or inferring intentionality even where such an attribution may not be warranted. —Robert Brotherton and Christopher C. French, PLoS One

One series of studies reported in 2008 suggested that our brain automatically attributes intentionality to all actions, even those we know are not intentional. System 2 has to override this automatic process in order for us to recognize the lack of intention.

Judging an action to be unintentional requires more cognitive resources, takes longer, and results in increased ease of recall compared to judging the same action to be intentional. —E. Rossett, Cognition

This is an intriguing area of research given that we now know how little of our behavior, moment-to-moment, is in fact either rational or intentional. The consistent, coordinated, intentional action of multiple individuals over time and across distance for agreed-upon nefarious purposes isn’t impossible, of course. But it is highly improbable.

Nevertheless, as Brotherton and French state in their PLoS One article:

To the extent that an individual tends to regard ambiguous events or situations generally as having been intended, conspiracy theories may appear more plausible than alternative explanations.

Next time: Part 3: Conspiracy Theories and the Storytelling Mind
Last time: Part 1: Conspiracy: Making Distinctions