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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Know Thyself (or Not)

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Know Thyself is the first of three maxims inscribed at the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi and the one everybody remembers. Fairly succinct at just two words, it’s loaded, nonetheless. It’s difficult, impossible even, to pin down who said what when or the specific meaning that was intended by the ancient Greeks. And Pythia, aka the Oracle at Delphi, was known to be cryptic, so no help there.

Looking at know thyself now, I’m reminded again of listening to a philosopher expound on the meaning of the word is for what seemed an inordinate amount of time. Know is similar in that regard.

It can mean, for example, that I fully grasp or understand something; that I am—or more likely, I feel—certain about something; that I have a working acquaintance with some process, thing, concept, etc.; that I’ve memorized something; that I recognize someone or something, or that I can make distinctions—among other things.

Thyself is a similar kettle of fish since it both assumes a sense of self and implies that each of us is a single self—which, in the latter case, is not the case.

So I don’t know what know thyself is supposed to mean or can mean. Once upon a time, I probably thought I knew. But as I’ve been reflecting recently, I understand more and more that I understand less and less. This seems to be a logical outcome of learning.

To know that one does not know is best; not to know but to believe that one knows is a disease. —Lao Tzu

It’s so Meta

Stephen Fleming has written a book titled Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. From the bits I’ve read, he appears to consider self-awareness and metacognition to be essentially the same thing.

Self-awareness could be defined as having knowledge of one’s own traits, feelings, motivations, behaviors, etc. (This ought to ring some bells.)

Metacognition could be defined as thinking about our own mental processes—or thinking about thinking.

Self-awareness is meta even without the prefix. Both terms describe System 2 (higher order) processes or functions. I haven’t determined whether there’s a significant distinction between them or the extent to which they overlap or converge.

At any rate, Fleming, who is a cognitive neuroscientist and a very good writer, penned a fascinating article on Theory of Mind. In the entire 4,200+ word article, there was not a single reference to the concept of empathy. That’s because he was writing about the possibility that we know our own minds (or don’t know them) in the same manner and to the same extent that we know other minds. And there’s plenty of room for improvement all around.

I Think, Therefore I Am

Rene Descartes thought that we humans have privileged access to information about ourselves and that we can’t be wrong about what we perceive.

I know clearly that there is nothing that can be perceived by me more easily or more clearly than my own mind.

This is still a pretty popular view of things, even though it is obviously incorrect. We most certainly can be wrong about ourselves, and we certainly can and do lack self-knowledge. (If that were not the case, there would be no need for the What Do You Want? course. Everyone would automatically know what they want.)

Another philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, had a different take:

The sorts of things that I can find out about myself are the same as the sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same.

So, from the perspective of what is known as the inferential view, we don’t need one explanation (privileged access) for how we know ourselves and another (Theory of Mind) for how we know others. Furthermore, the methods we employ to know—or not know—ourselves and others are the same methods we employ to know anything about anything else in the world. What are the implications? And what do you think some of those methods might be?

Another Threshold

I would like to be able to say (maybe) that I intended all along to get to this point, but I’ve simply been following the breadcrumb trail, and it has inexorably led to the threshold concept* that happens to be the focus of December’s Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain):

The brain generates a mental model of the world, which determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and the meaning we assign to it.

Our mental models of the world, which circumscribe every aspect of our present experience, as well as what is possible for us to do and be, are not simply abstract concepts; they are encoded in the brain.

More next time on the impact a handful of threshold concepts might have on how we know ourselves or others.

*A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. —Jan Meyer and Ray Land, 5/4/03

Theory of Mind:
Less than Meets the Eye

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In his second book, Brain Changer (which you don’t need to read), David DiSalvo, who also wrote What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite (which you should read), says:

Humans are mind-synced in ways we never realized.

Yes, this is true. It is also true, contradictory though it may be, that we believe we are far more mind-synced than we actually are. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that because we intuit some things about others correctly, we assume that most or all of the rest of our intuitions about them are also correct. As far as this second part goes, we are bound to be wrong—often surprisingly and significantly wrong. (And, no, predicting what someone else might do in a particular circumstance isn’t the same thing as understanding why they’re doing it.)

Theory of mind refers to the ability or tendency to attribute mental states to ourselves and others. It’s pretty straightforward. (1) We attempt to determine our own beliefs, emotions, desires, intentions, and motivations. (2) We do the same for others. (3) And we distinguish ours from theirs.

Clueless

One of the six actual needs we humans have is other people. So it makes sense that we would have a capacity to understand others. But after my numerous decades of life on this planet—observing myself and others, mostly with dismay—one thing I have learned is that we are relatively clueless about our own beliefs, emotions, desires, intentions, and motivations.

That makes determining what others are feeling or where they are coming from clueless squared. At a minimum. And although we are pretty good at distinguishing our own selves from other selves, we suck at imagining that other people might legitimately have completely different perspectives and reactions than ours. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be so easily confounded by their actions and reactions.

The conscious part of the brain prefers to avoid expending mental effort and energy on critical thinking. So it leaves most of the driving, and the heavy lifting, to the unconscious part, which excels at generalizing and extrapolating from personal and/or incomplete information.

What’s So for Everyone

Of course there are things that do apply to all of us.

  • We all have the same functional brain networks.
  • We are all motivated by the brain’s reward system.
  • We all view and experience the world through a mental model of it.
  • We are all at the effect of various cognitive biases.

These facts tell us something about who we are, but they don’t help us understand each other as much as the specifics—or the differences—do.

What’s So for You (vs. Me)

For example:

  • We don’t access the functional brain networks exactly the same way or to the same extent.
  • We don’t have identical neural pathways or find the same things rewarding.
  • Our mental models differ based on our temperament, experiences, beliefs, etc.
  • We are more prone to some cognitive biases than to others.
So What?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach or explanation when it comes to the specifics (what’s so for you vs. what’s so for me). That’s why when social psychologists claim that “situations” determine behavior more than personality does, I call b.s. And that’s why when systems thinkers claim that one person will react pretty much like any other person within a given system, I also call b.s. (It isn’t that situations and systems have no effect on behavior, but you and I are unlikely to be affected identically because we are not identical to begin with.)

More importantly, that’s why we need to become less clueless about how we operate, so that we can then become more intentional in our own lives and less clueless about how other people operate. At least, that is, if we’d like to make some progress in upping our own game or finding solutions to any of the significant global problems we face. As long as we continue operating under the assumption that we have more clues than we do about ourselves and others, we’re likely to continue getting the results we’re getting now.

Conspiracy Theories and the
Storytelling Mind
(Conspiracy Part 3)

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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)

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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.

  1. 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.
    .
  2. 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

Conspiracy: Making Distinctions

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While the brain is quite good at categorizing, it is not very adept at making distinctions. (Much like the human brain, neither is Google.)

We encounter this problem in the area of personality or temperament. Just because behavior X is a characteristic of a particular group of people doesn’t mean that every individual in that group will demonstrate behavior X. Believing that everyone in a group demonstrates all of the same characteristics is the basis of stereotyping.

So the problem also routinely arises in regard to ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, age, and political preference, among others.

Categorizing is an automatic System 1 (unconscious) process. Distinguishing is a System 2 (conscious) process that requires intention, attention, and effort. Categorizing is easy; confirmation bias makes it feel right. Eventually tracks are laid down in the brain that carry us along effortlessly. We have no reason to question our perception. Distinguishing is hard and generates cognitive dissonance, which does not feel good.

Making distinctions after those tracks have been laid down in the brain is called change. Changing our perception of another person or group of people may alter our perception of ourselves, as well. Our sense of self is a construct; our beliefs are one of the things that contribute to that construct. And our brain takes our sense of self very seriously. Changing a belief, therefore, is not a small matter.

What Is Up with Conspiracists?

All of that is by way of getting to some recent thoughts about conspiracy theories currently being floated and about those who have bought into them so completely that they see “evidence” for them everywhere. These people appear to be living in a very different world than I’m living in. If I didn’t already know something about the extent to which we create our own reality, I would have concluded either they are delusional or I am.

But I know that our brains do not allow us to experience reality first-hand or directly. We have to be trained even to be able to see what’s out there. So while there are no doubt extreme conspiracy theorists who are—or border on being—delusional, most of them are simply processing the world differently from the way I process it. And that interests me.

When I started exploring the subject from a psycho-social, neurological, philosophical, and historical perspective, I accessed a few resources I already had. And then I turned to Google, which does a great job of categorizing everything related to conspiracy, but is absolutely abysmal at distinguishing between conspiracy and conspiracy theory.

They are definitely not the same thing. Conspiracies do exist. Conspiracy theories are speculations. Furthermore, the word theory has a broad definition. A conspiracy theory is not the equivalent of a scientific theory, which is the result of research, evidence, and consensus. Good scientists modify or even abandon their theories when new information is uncovered. Conspiracists either reject conflicting information out of hand or expand the theory to incorporate it. More importantly, scientific theories are falsifiable; conspiracy theories are not.

Understanding the Concepts

Here are some definitions (from freedictionary.com):

Conspiracy: (1) an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act, (2) an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action, (3) a joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.

Examples of conspiracies: Watergate, The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the 1980s Savings and Loan Crisis

Conspiracy Theory: a theory seeking to explain a disputed case or matter as a plot by a secret group or alliance rather than an individual or isolated act.

Examples of conspiracy theories: JFK’s Assassination (various), Moon Landing (didn’t happen), Illuminati (alien shapeshifters who run the world)

Looking for Answers

Some of the questions I’m hoping to answer for myself include:

  • Who believes conspiracy theories? Are some people more temperamentally inclined to believe them than others?
  • If a large percentage of a population believes in conspiracy theories, does that have an effect on actual conspiracies (committing or uncovering them, for example)?
  • What’s going on in the brains of conspiracists vs. non-conspiracists?
  • Are different groups of people more inclined to believe particular conspiracy theories than others—and does it matter?
  • How do conspiracy theories affect real-world outcomes?
  • How can we distinguish possible from highly improbable conspiracies?

I’ll share what I learn. I’m compiling some useful articles on the topic that I will eventually put into a shareable format for anyone who is interested.

I believe this is a timely subject that bridges brain, behavior, and change. And I hope that exploring it may lead to some measure of understanding. We could surely use more of that in our troubled world. What do you think?

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