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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Butterfly Nets, Smartphones, and Coffee Shops

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In  A Tale of Two Kitties (my last post), I shared my current working definition of affordance: “an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.”

This doesn’t deviate radically from other definitions, but it does explicitly identify the three most salient aspects of the concept as it pertains to creating sustained change. An affordance offers or suggest a possible action that an agent—you or I—might take within an environment.

Affordances are like obstacles in that it is an agent with a goal or a desired outcome, preferably both, who interprets something in the environment as either an affordance or an obstacle. A boulder in the middle of a road is just a boulder in the middle of a road. It isn’t an obstacle unless there’s something you really, really want on the other side of it.

Similarly, a fitness center located across the street from where you live is simply one of several businesses in the area unless you have a strong desire to increase your own fitness or level of vitality, in which case you identify it as an affordance. (If it’s occupying the space where you want to establish a hair salon, well then it’s an obstacle.)

Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties. —Don Norman, researcher, professor, author

Affordances, like obstacles, are interpreted as such by your brain and brought to your attention based on their salience (importance) to you. If you get hungry while on a long drive, food becomes salient, and restaurants you might otherwise ignore become affordances. After you’ve eaten and are no longer hungry, food becomes less salient, and restaurants—if you even notice them—are once more just restaurants. But salience isn’t only based on your immediate internal state or external conditions/circumstances.

It’s (Always) All about the Action

The nature of reality is that everything everywhere is in motion all the time, everything is a process, and everything is an interpretation. The brain continuously interprets both internal and external sensory data in order to determine what action to take next. It bases its interpretations on our mental model of the world, which it has built up over our lifetime largely as a result of our actions—especially the actions we repeat.

Let’s say you regularly frequent a chain of coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Maybe you’re particularly fond of iced vanilla lattes. And maybe the coffee shops are also places where you get together with friends or groups. (When I was in various writers’ groups, we tended to hold our meetings in either bookstores or coffee shops.) Repeatedly spending time in Starbucks increases its salience. It’s an affordance that offers you the possible actions of getting the coffee you enjoy or meeting and connecting with other people.

So you are much more likely to notice a Starbucks—and by “you,” I mean your brain—and its potential affordances than someone for whom Starbucks doesn’t have the same importance. Your brain has paid attention to your repeated past actions, and as a result, it focuses your attention on current or future possibilities for action in your environment by identifying affordances.

I like to use the image of an infinity loop to distinguish between “you” (the agent) and “not you” (your environment) to illustrate the dynamic and ongoing engagement between you and your environment.

Each of us is engaged in this continuous interaction; it’s anything but static. But our tendency to perceive the world as being far more fixed than it is prevents us from being attuned to the dynamic nature of our relationship with the world and can easily blind us to the possibilities—both positive and negative—within it.

Everything Is an Interpretation

The affordances described here and in my previous post are generally positive. But in and of themselves, affordances are neither positive nor negative. Given that they describe relationships, they can not only be interpreted differently by different people, they can also be interpreted differently by the same person at different times or in different circumstances. While a smartphone, for example, offers access (to others, to information, to assistance, etc.), it can also offer unlimited distractions that may provide immediate gratification but divert you from more substantive or satisfying activities.

But maybe, in the moment, a distraction is what you want (say, cat videos or a game) while you’re waiting to board your plane or for a friend to show up. Or maybe you need to get your car towed. Or you want to find out if the yarn store has the specialty yarn you need to complete an important knitting project. A smartphone can help you get what you really want (a desired outcome) or it can get in the way of you getting what you want. That knitting project won’t complete itself while you’re playing Wordle.

A purse left unattended in a shopping cart suggests an action to a thief—or a would-be thief—that it hopefully doesn’t suggest to you or me.

It Was Never Just about the Butterflies

Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World, among many other books, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times that was published last month. He says:

[O]ne thing I have not yet discarded is the butterfly net. I carry it in part to catch and release the few things I can’t identify on the wing but mostly because of the way it changes the way I walk.…I don’t know if the same is true for birders with their binoculars…but for me, walking with the butterfly net alters my perceptions. It produces a state of mind, a kind of undifferentiated awareness otherwise difficult to attain. It is a puzzle to me why this is the case, why, that is, I can’t simply learn from walking with the net and then put it away and transfer what I know to walking without it.

Perhaps it has to do with the way the net declares my intention, which is to apprehend what is in front of me. Walking with the net is like reading with a pencil in hand. The pencil means you want to catch the sense of what you are reading. You intend to underline, put check marks and exclamation points in the margin and make the book your own. You may think you can read with the same quality of attention while lying in bed at night without a pencil, but you can’t. The mind notices your posture and models itself accordingly.

The butterfly net, when used intentionally to generate a specific state of awareness—and likewise the binoculars around one’s neck or the pencil (in my case, pen, highlighter, and Post-It® flags)—are what I call contrivances. Contrivances are affordances—generally positive in nature. Next time I’ll describe the three different types of affordances and where contrivances fit into that scheme.

A Tale of Two Kitties

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Consider the concept of affordance: what exactly is an affordance and why should you care? I think I could write an article on all the different definitions of affordance. In fact, I would be surprised if someone hasn’t already done that. So instead of first defining the word, let’s begin with my cats.

When I adopted Naima (pictured above) in November 2010, she was three months old, and the apartment complex where I live did not require cats to be either leashed or kept inside. My previous cat, Tashi, a California transplant, had decided early in life that she was an indoor/outdoor cat. Her petite size was misleading. Back in California, she acquired a series of formidable panther boyfriends and regularly hung out with the small herd of deer on the hill below.

For one unforgettable 30-day period in 2008 I had to keep her indoors while she recovered from a near-death experience. I barely survived the ordeal. She wouldn’t stop yowling to get out. She even attempted to excavate a tunnel underneath the closed cat door.

I was determined that Naima would be strictly an indoor cat. Given that she was also an only cat—and I was her only person—I endeavored to make the environment cat-friendly and appealing while maintaining certain boundaries.

 

Preparations for her arrival included the purchase of cat basics: carrier, litter/litter box, food/food bowls, lots of toys, and a bed. They also included a 72” tall cat tree for the living room with a perch on top, a shorter but wider cat tree for my bedroom, and a few smaller scratching posts.

Cats and kittens of all sizes, including tigers and lions, like to climb. Tashi climbed trees in the yard and, when inside, the eight-foot-tall bookcase. Naima began using the cat trees right away, although they didn’t immediately stop her from climbing or trying to climb other pieces of furniture. She eventually got the message, but my dresser still bears the scratches from her tiny sharp claws.

Cats also like to play with their prey. Sadly, the only toy I could ever get Tashi interested in were those bouncy foam balls that look like miniature soccer balls. She could play fetch better than some dogs. She preferred to toy with birds and mice outdoors, bringing one in occasionally (either dead or alive: quite exciting for everyone involved). To be fair, she sometimes took one of her balls outside to play with. Also, she tended to munch on them. Naima, on the other hand, loved her toys, especially the roller-ball track and a certain brand of catnip mice. She would hide and then hunt the mice. She also loved to chase the bouncy soccer balls.

A Chair Affords You an Opportunity for Sitting

A bookcase offers me a place to keep my books, of which I have a few, as well as some photos or keepsakes. For my cats, the bookcase offered something to climb in order to see what’s there and get a better vantage point. Maybe find a good spot for a nap.

For Tashi (on the right, looking very focused), trees offered something to climb, as well as a hiding place, a lookout, and a possible source of food. There were no actual trees in Naima’s environment. But the manufactured cat trees offered her everything but a food source.

Another word for “offer” is “afford.” Bookcases, real trees, and cat trees are all affordances. When it comes to climbing, both indoor and outdoor cats have access to a number of affordances in addition to those just mentioned: cabinets and counter tops, refrigerators and other appliances, curtains, walls, fences, screens—they excel at figuring out how to get wherever you don’t want them to be. I once watched live video of a kitten whose eyes hadn’t yet opened successfully climb a wire enclosure meant to keep her safely contained in order to get to her mom on the other side.

The concept of affordance was developed by a psychologist, James J. Gibson, in the 1960s and 70s. Gibson was a proponent of the theory of direct, as opposed to indirect, perception, which is just a non-starter for me. Direct perception is an unscientific idea for which there is no supporting evidence. At this point, we know too much about how the brain works to take this idea seriously. (Meaning doesn’t reside “out there” in the environment or in objects in the environment. The brain has to supply meaning by interpreting the sensory data it receives and processes based on our mental model of the world.)

Nevertheless, I’ve been attracted to the possibilities of this concept, so I’m trying to determine whether or not there is something useful in it within the context of behavior change. One task has been to sift out the direct perception nonsense and see what remains. Another task is to wade through some painful verbiage related to so-called “ecological psychology,” which was also the brainchild of James Gibson.

If I sound dismissive, it’s because I’m frustrated. Affordance is used in many different areas (several branches of psychology, design, communications, AI, etc.) and lots of people have added their own spin to it. That makes it difficult to pin down. Maybe that’s OK, though. This fluidity may be the nature of the beast—better viewed as dynamic rather than static. And, well, I seem to be veering toward doing the same thing: defining—or redefining—affordance as it applies to behavior and behavior change.

My current working definition:

An affordance is an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.

As a definition it seems straightforward, if quite dry. But it just scratches the surface. There are different types of affordances, and understanding those differences is key to applying the concept to behavior change. The possibilities are intriguing and anything but dry. In fact, they’re potentially very juicy. More to come!

Everything Is an Interpretation

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In the world in which we live:

  • everything everywhere is in motion all the time
  • everything is a process
  • everything is an interpretation

These three facts are interrelated, but they tend to be descriptive of what’s occurring at different scales.

The fact that everything everywhere is in motion all the time is a somewhat abstract concept that has significant practical implications. In and of itself, though, it’s difficult to grasp or experience directly.

The fact that everything is a process, while less abstract, can also be a bit slippery. We’re used to thinking of things as . . . things. It’s easier to recognize organic processes—or processes that involve people—than it is to recognize inorganic processes. Nevertheless, there are no things, only processes.

The fact that everything is an interpretation has moment-to-moment, immediate impact. Interpretations are the foundation of every single one of our experiences. But that doesn’t mean this concept is any easier to grasp.

The limited capacity of ordinary consciousness—aka the 40-bit brain—makes it much too slow to catch any of the interpretations the unconscious is making as it is making them. It wouldn’t be particularly useful to be able to do so. The unconscious has to interpret everything, from the most basic incoming audio and visual signals to your heart rate to the responses of strangers you encounter to the results of an election in a foreign country.

The unconscious makes these interpretations—which neuroscientist Anil Seth and others have called “best guesses”—so quickly that ordinary consciousness accepts them as reality. Even when we know or believe this to be the case, we have an extremely difficult time distinguishing between the facts of an event and our brain’s interpretation of it.

Several clients who have completed multiple iterations of the What Else Is This Telling Me? exercise can attest to this difficulty and were willing to share their experiences.

Donna

Something happened.

But what? No, not that, that’s an interpretation. No, not that, either; that’s probably a hidden belief. So what happened?

This is a question that’s been bouncing around in my brain for the last several months. I always thought I knew what happened. And what my interpretation was. And what my belief behind it was. I mean, I’m a licensed counselor. I’ve taught this to graduate students. Maybe I was wrong?

It’s been interesting and exasperating to break down to the grain what happened. I don’t think I have a firm grasp of it yet, but I’m getting there—a grain at a time. Wysiati (what you see is all there is)!

Kelly

What was that event? It just tumbled into interpretation and took flight. It seemed as though I was tangling with a bucking bronco that did not want to be tamed or understood. It seems to me that all these pieces of me don’t get out much. I’m trying to pry them open, if only a little: event identification practice . . . interpretation practice . . . it’s been part of the conversation I hope to keep having. I want to know what’s running the program.

Leslie

I think the idea that has become the most clear for me is that the mental model cannot be changed without changing a belief or beliefs that create it. Since we’re mostly unaware of our beliefs, the exercise is a way to expose some of those beliefs. And it has taken all those iterations for me to see how the interpretations, the actions, and the beliefs have to relate to each other.

Adam

It’s powerful and surprising how deep simple reactions go and how hard it is to isolate events, interpretations, and beliefs!

Additionally, it has been hard to ask questions about it for me. I didn’t seem to form the questions, much less make the next step to pursue what the questions might bring up. I had my doubts about how clear I was about how I was doing the different parts of the exercise, but I didn’t clarify my doubts until after about three times trying to complete it.

Debra

In my cohort, on our fourth go round, I finally thought I’d nailed what an interpretation of an event was. I mean, it just has to be simple, right? Nope. I was frustrated. Wanted to quit. Almost started to cry. Even raised my voice a bit.

My cohort leapt in to support me to keep going, asking questions with genuine curiosity—not just for me to see something, but because they were also getting closer to understanding.

When I broke through the frustration, I felt like I/we had made it over a big chasm together. My cohort had not only cheered me on, but they’d jumped into the trench with me. And we made it to the other side victorious.

Why?

If this is so hard to get, which it is for everyone, why go through all the blood, sweat, and tears? If everyone’s brain operates this way—interpreting events so swiftly that, consciously, we conflate the interpretation with the event—why not just accept it and move on?

Our interpretations determine both our emotional responses and our actions. If we’re always satisfied with our actions (and reactions), we can just carry on and not concern ourselves with these matters. But if we’d like to react differently or take different actions in the future, we need to understand what’s driving both our emotional responses and our behavior.

The bottom line is that if we want our brain to make a different choice in the future, we first have to modify our mental model. This is called structural neuroplasticity. Otherwise, all the brain has to go on to interpret events is the connections made by our existing mental model; therefore, we are bound to keep getting the same outcomes over and over again.

Check out Something’s Happening Here and What [Else] Is It Telling Me? for additional information. More to come on this topic.

What [Else] Is It Telling Me?

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In 2018, Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their “discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.”

As a scientist, Allison has pointed out that you can’t really prove anything with science. All you can do is disprove. He says that the data from an experiment may be consistent with your hypothesis, but it might be consistent with another hypothesis, too. So you need to ask, what else is it telling me?

Allison covered similar ground in an interview he gave after winning the Nobel Prize:

[Being a good scientist] takes discipline but [also] creativity, you have got to learn how to view your data as a crystal or something, you know when you look at every facet of it, get to know it from every direction. Look at what it tells you beyond the reason you did the experiment and figure it out. And so I think that’s pretty much it; it is the ability to really study the data and really learn what it is telling you.

As an aside on creativity, Allison is also a musician. He plays harmonica in a band composed of other scientists. This isn’t unusual. It turns out that Nobel Prize laureates are three times more likely than other scientists to have a creative hobby (performing, singing, acting, glassblowing, writing, painting, etc.). You could say they themselves have multiple facets. Knowing that people are Nobel Prize winning scientists doesn’t tell you everything about them.

WYSIATI

I included Allison’s comments at the end of an article on Daniel Kahneman’s concept of WYSIATI or What You See Is All There Is. (Kahneman is another Nobel Prize winner, but I don’t know anything about his hobbies.)

WYSIATI means that when you’re determining the meaning of something or constructing a story about it (i.e. interpreting it), your brain can only use the information available to it at the time. What it sees is all there is. The less information you have, the easier it is for your brain to construct a convincing story. You don’t cast about looking for information you don’t currently possess. What am I likely to be missing? How am I misconstruing this? What else is this information telling me?

Similarly, if the data from an experiment is consistent with your hypothesis, why go looking for trouble by asking if it could be consistent with another hypothesis, too.

The unconscious part of your brain is looking for a good enough answer right now that adequately fits your model of the world. Accuracy is not its highest priority. You need to get a move on. No straggling allowed.

We think we have a clear idea of what’s happening. We think we understand why things happen or happen the way they do. And we feel pretty certain about our assessment of events and situations.

But certainty, like confidence, is a feeling and has nothing to do with the accuracy or lack thereof of our interpretations and beliefs. The more we proceed through life assuming we are correct, the more likely we are to be wrong and the more difficult it becomes to change—our perspectives, our behavior, the trajectory of our lives.

Look at All Facets of an Experience

One way out of this predicament is to ask a lot more questions—not just random questions: hard questions. As a species, we have a unique capacity for self-awareness, but we’re not particularly good at accessing it. As a result:

  • trying to disentangle our interpretations of events from the events themselves is hard
  • trying to identify the unconscious beliefs that could underlie our interpretations is even harder
  • attempting to separate fact from fiction in perceiving events or situations in order to come up with alternative interpretations is extremely hard for some

But if we want different outcomes, if we want to get off the rock we’re on and get on a rock that offers a different perspective, or if we want to think different thoughts, we need to ask the hard questions. We need to be able to explore the facets or components of our experiences and recognize the roles played by our interpretations and our beliefs.

Here’s an exercise to try. But first, some definitions:

  • An event is something that happens (the data, if you will).
  • Your interpretation is the meaning you make of the thing that happens.
  • Beliefs are convictions you have about the nature of reality (the way the world works).

Part One

  1. Describe an event.
  2. Describe your interpretation of the event.
  3. Ask yourself, what is this interpretation telling me about my perception of the way the world works?
  4. Identify one or more beliefs that could underlie your interpretation.

Part Two

  1. Take another look at the event (the data) and ask yourself, what else is it telling me?
  2. Describe two possible alternative interpretations based on the data (facts) of the event.

Part Three

  1. Identify your emotional response to your interpretation of the event and ask yourself, what is it telling me?
  2. Identify the action you took in response to your interpretation of the event and ask yourself, what is it telling me?
  3. Identify your emotional response to the action you took and ask yourself, what is it telling me?

Keep asking yourself what is it telling me? And then what else is it telling me? We can’t access our beliefs directly because they are part of the mental model our brain maintains of what things mean and what is normal for us. But the beliefs that make up our mental model affect our perceptions and interpretations of everything we experience.

We can’t create significant, sustained change unless we change our mental model. In order to do that, we have to learn more about it. We have to be curious. We have to ask the hard questions.

Part two of two parts. Part one is here.

Something’s Happening Here

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Something happens. You get a phone call, say, or a friend invites you to a movie—or cancels a movie date—or you wake up on a Monday or a Saturday or from a nap or from being sedated, or you read a news article, or the line at the grocery checkout is longer or shorter than it normally is. Something happens. Anything. Anything at all.

The unconscious part of your brain interprets what happens in order to figure out what it means to you. And it does that so it can determine what action you will take next.

Your brain is predictive, so it was already on the job looking for specific information when the thing that happened—let’s call it an event—occurred. Your brain’s interpretation is instantaneous and presents with a high level of certainty. So much certainty, in fact, that you conflate the interpretation with the event itself. This is automatic.

Your brain formulates its interpretations via the mental model it maintains of what is normal for you, which is based primarily on beliefs you have about the way the world works. It’s easy to conflate the interpretation of an event with the event itself because you believe your experience is an accurate reflection of reality. Almost everyone holds this belief. But experience and reality are not the same thing. Furthermore, our experience is based on our interpretations and not on events themselves.

To recap: something happens and your brain immediately interprets it based on your unconscious beliefs about the way the world works in order to determine an appropriate action to take. The action, like your experience, is based on your brain’s interpretation of the event rather than on the event itself. By the time you become consciously aware of the action you are taking, it’s a done deal.

You may feel that you consciously intended or initiated the action (made the choice to take it), but you did not. That’s not how your brain works. It has to keep making the choice of what to do next. And next. And next. And next. Ordinary consciousness is far too limited to manage that process; all it can do is note some aspects of it after the fact.

Just as your experience and your actions are based on your brain’s interpretations, so are your emotional responses. You likely have an emotional response to your interpretation, as well as to the outcome of your action.

So what you are consciously aware of (whether or not in so many words) are your brain’s interpretations of events, your emotional responses, and the actions you take. What you are not consciously aware of is the beliefs that underlie your brain’s interpretations. In addition, if you’re like most people, you probably find it difficult to separate the facts of events from your interpretations of them.

What’s really amazing about belief is that biologically, what we believe about the world shapes the way our bodies respond to it. —Agustin Fuentes, anthropologist

When our interpretations of what’s going on around us or to us jibe with our beliefs we experience cognitive ease. That makes our brain happy and allows us to continue merrily on our way—no matter if we’re right or if we’re wrong. Of course, all of our interpretations are based on our beliefs, so this ongoing sense of cognitive ease is the usual state of affairs. Whether or not we like what’s going on is beside the point. It’s important to the brain to have a sense of certainty about what’s happening and what caused it to happen. The upshot is that we are not motivated to recognize our interpretations as interpretations rather than accurate representations of reality.

Even on the occasions when our expectations are not met, we rarely take the opportunity to explore the basis of them—or even recognize them as expectations based on interpretations, which in turn are based on beliefs.

This is unfortunate. It’s one of the reasons why transformational change is possible but not probable. But there’s a question we can ask that could change everything.

Part one of two parts.

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