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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Suspend Disbelief and Commit
to the Process (Part 1)

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Disbelief: an inability to believe that something is true.

As a lifelong reader and writer, I’m on familiar terms with the concept of willing suspension of disbelief. The ability to suspend disbelief makes it possible for us to immerse ourselves in stories about people who don’t exist living in places that don’t exist (or don’t exist exactly as they are depicted) so that we can, at least temporarily, relate to them as if they and their thoughts, feelings, predicaments, and actions are every bit as real as we are.

Reading a novel is sort of like making a compact (looser than a contract) with an author. The reader agrees to suspend disbelief, which means trusting the author. And the author agrees to do his or her best to be trustworthy by getting things right, even when those things are not factual—in fact, especially when they are not factual. That includes keeping the plot and the characters straight, maintaining internal consistency, not making obvious errors, and having a juicy story to tell in the first place.

Vampires in San Francisco

I stopped suspending my disbelief in Atonement by Ian McEwan once he introduced an event for the sole purpose of moving the plot forward. I willingly suspended my disbelief in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire until she placed the toll booths at the wrong end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Losing my suspension of disbelief in Atonement was a big deal because the plot contrivance was pivotal to the outcome of the story. The toll booths, on the other hand, were a minor issue in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.

As a reader, I felt I was doing my part in both cases; it was the authors who let me down. I would have had a much different experience, however, if I’d approached Interview with the Vampire without a willingness to suspend disbelief. The very idea of “vampires” would have been a deal-breaker; I would never have begun reading the book. Not reading Interview with the Vampire probably wouldn’t have altered my life significantly—although it did give me that toll booth example, which I’ve used many times.

Things without Names

But there are other books I’ve read that I believe have enhanced my life, and reading them has contributed, even if in a small way, to me becoming the person I am now. One example is my all-time favorite novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It begins:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Magical realism definitely requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

But there has to be some promise—some prospective payoff—to cause us as readers to suspend our disbelief and invest our time and energy in a story. We like the genre or the author. The book comes highly recommended by a trusted source. It’s the next volume in a series we’re already hooked on. Or maybe we pick up a copy in a library or bookstore and are immediately captivated by the opening.

Whatever the case may be, on the one hand we readers automatically understand that suspension of disbelief is a requirement of getting the most out of fiction. On the other hand, we don’t automatically or permanently suspend disbelief for every work of fiction we encounter. We discriminate. But once we’re in, we’re in, so to speak—unless the author messes up.

Imagination and Truth

Author and columnist William Safire explored the subject of suspension of disbelief in a 2007 piece for The New York Times:

[W]ho coined the phrase and in what context? The quotation books have the coiner — the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1817 “Biographia Literaria”: “That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

But the context is an eye-opener. Coleridge and William Wordsworth were neighbors. They agreed one day that “the two cardinal points of poetry” were “the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature” (Wordsworth’s specialty, with his “host of golden daffodils”) and “the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination” (which Coleridge was especially good at). They agreed to contribute individually to a group of “Lyrical Ballads.”

You may not have noticed, but we’ve sort of wended our way, via imagination and truth, to art and science.

Safire added:

Richard Sha, professor of literature at American University, takes this to mean that “…one must willingly suspend one’s skepticism.”

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid!

Suspending one’s skepticism in undertaking to read a work of fiction doesn’t usually pose much danger. But in other realms of life, it can lead to a variety of negative outcomes, from minor mistakes to profound tragedy. But while it shouldn’t be done lightly or habitually, there are some times and places where it definitely should be done—where it has to be done if we’re to get anything out of the situation, the learning, or the experience. We not only need to suspend disbelief, we also need to commit to the process if we want to:

  • Learn something new (a musical instrument, a language, a creative pursuit…)
  • Start something (a business, a project, a relationship…)
  • Make a significant decision (to become a parent, to get into or out of a relationship, to take or leave a job…)

What does this have to do with creating transformational change? Maybe you’ve figured that out. If not, it’s what I’ll be covering in the next installment.

You Can’t Live Anywhere
BUT in a Bubble

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A character in a story I wrote a long time ago imagines zipping himself closed inside a transparent bubble. As it turns out, we are all living inside our own transparent bubbles; most of us just don’t realize it. We take our experiences at face value. We assume everyone accesses the world the same way we access it, pays attention to what we pay attention to, sees the same colors, and has the same understanding of basic concepts.

Yes, we disagree with some people, but they’re so obviously wrong. The rest of us are on the same page, right?

The topic of the Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain) this month was imagination. One of the participants commented that he has difficulty creating and sustaining visual mental images. The inability to form mental images is called aphantasia. It was identified in the 1880s but only named a few years ago, perhaps because it affects such a small percentage of the population. I can’t imagine being unable to create mental images! Visual mental imagery is an integral aspect of my sense of self and of how I function in the world. I couldn’t be me if I couldn’t do that.

Several years ago I learned about misophonia, also called soft-sound sensitivity. For people with this condition, ordinary sounds the rest of us easily tune out, such as chewing noises, tapping, or rustling paper, can be deeply disturbing. People with misophonia may have such strong physical and emotional reactions to certain sounds they curtail their activities to avoid them. Many more people are affected by misophonia than by aphantasia.

A few months ago I created a handout with a chart using four different colors, including a dark green. So many people saw the color that was clearly green to me (and my computer program) as black or gray or brown that I changed the shade for subsequent copies. These weren’t instances of color blindness, just different visual interpretations.

And then there’s the experience of anger. A lot of people believe anger to be a negative emotion, to be avoided, mitigated, or managed—certainly contained. But others, including me, find that anger can be energizing and even motivating at times. When I described getting angry about an aspect of my health/heart conditions to a friend earlier this month, she tried to persuade me of the value of acceptance. (If you know me, feel free to laugh now.) But I often experience anger that is about something—as opposed to anger at someone—as productive rather than destructive.

That Pesky Four-Letter Word

Lastly there’s a word common to all of us, and whether we use it or someone else uses it, we assume we know exactly what it means. The word is goal. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz begins one of his chapters* with this paragraph:

Choosing wisely begins with developing a clear understanding of your goals. And the first choice you must make is between the goal of choosing the absolute best and the goal of choosing something that is good enough.

Does this paragraph make sense to you? Did you sort of nod (at least mentally) in agreement? Apparently it made sense to him.

You could call what Schwartz is talking about a preference, a strategy, a drive, an inclination—you could call it a lot of things, but goal is definitely not one of them. The definition of goal is:

the state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve and that (when achieved) terminates behavior intended to achieve it.

A goal has an end point. (Visualize a goal post if you can.) It represents a significant change from your current state of affairs, which is why it requires a plan. Once you reach that end point, you no longer need to keep taking the steps you outlined in your plan to get there.

Semantics, you may say. So what?

Well, Schwartz is talking about taking an action that involves choosing something. The most important thing to determine when you’re choosing something is what is your desired outcome not what is the method you are going to use to make the choice. And that’s a lot more than semantics.

So you may know what a goal is and how to set and achieve one. Or you may think getting gas on the way home from work—or making the absolutely best choice—is a goal. In any case, you probably assume others define the word the same way you do.

My Particular Bubble

I can and do create vivid mental images (don’t have aphantasia). I’m bothered by the reverberating bass sounds coming out of speakers in cars next to me at stoplights or the apartment next to mine, but I don’t have misophonia. I can distinguish dark shades of green from black or brown. I don’t experience anger as an entirely negative emotion. And I have a good understanding of what a goal is and how to achieve one.

These are all things I now know are not the same for everyone else. But there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of things I must assume to be the norm for everyone. It’s part of the human condition. It’s also one of the reasons I have always been interested in learning about temperaments or personality types—not for the purpose of “putting people in boxes” but to understand perspectives that are so different from my own.

Your view from your bubble, like my view from mine, is unique. The conditions inside your bubble, like the conditions inside mine, create our personal experience. Rather than taking everything at face value and assuming our experiences or interpretations are valid for everyone else, we might be better off adopting the perspective of one of my former clients, which is:

Isn’t that interesting?

*The subject of this chapter of Schwartz’s book will also be the subject of my next blog post.

Time to Let Go of the
Myth of the True Self

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The True Self is a fantasy version of you. It’s who you were meant to be—who you should be or who you could be if you hadn’t lost your way or if life hadn’t messed you up. Your True Self contains all the best qualities and potential available to you. If you could reconnect with it, you would be able to make a different choice. You would always do the right thing.

But the True Self doesn’t exist. There’s no alternate version of you to compare yourself to.

When the present doesn’t measure up to what you imagine it could be, you might have the feeling that something is missing or wrong. You might conclude that what’s wrong—or broken—is you.

If you see the problem as something being wrong with you, you will likely try to solve it by finding a way to fix what’s broken or not working. You might attempt to construct a bread-crumb trail backward to figure out why you do the things you do instead of the things you’d prefer (or think you should prefer) doing.

You might try getting in touch with your True Self or discovering your life purpose or passion. But you are many selves, rather than a single self, so what does authentic even mean in that context? And if you don’t have a True Self, there’s no point in searching for the life-purpose cheese because whose life purpose would it be?

Belief in a True Self Isn’t Harmless.

If your status quo includes such a belief, consider the implications:

  1. You need to fix yourself before you can determine who you want to be or what you want to do. So some aspects of your life are either on hold or have been abandoned altogether as you attempt these fixes—sometimes energetically, sometimes halfheartedly—usually repeatedly.
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  2. Your ideas about how you should be are based on looking backward rather than forward.
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  3. Your ideas about your True Self come from your Broken Self. (Where else could they come from?) Your concept of your True Self is most likely based on what you don’t like about your current self.
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  4. It is hard to trust your Broken Self to restore you to your True Self and to believe you have sufficient personal agency to do it.
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  5. Trying to fix yourself is hard work, and it’s neither inspiring nor motivating: the best you can do is get back to where you should have been all along. That is unlikely to be compelling enough to generate a sense of urgency.
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  6. If you erased the experiences and beliefs that have made you who you are, you would no longer be you. Who would you be then? And what would you want? As Julian Baggini says:

I am my baggage. I am the layers that have grown on the onion, not the tiny core at the middle. We are precisely all the things we’ve accrued, the memories, the experience, the learning. If you strip away what you call the baggage, you’re stripping away precisely the things that make us…that fill us out.

Belief in a True Self reflects a static, deterministic, mechanical perspective that is at odds with the dynamic nature of our existence. It keeps us going round and round on the hamster wheel instead of creating change or moving forward.

You Are Here.

You happen to be functioning exactly the way all human beings function: you can—and do—generate multiple possible alternatives to what’s so. Not only can you imagine many scenarios that are quite different from the present, you readily and frequently compare the actual to the imaginary—and often find the actual to be wanting. That’s only a problem if you interpret it that way.

Yes, imagination is a double-edged sword. Our ability to imagine things that don’t yet exist sets us apart and has led to our continued survival thus far. It’s an essential element of creativity and invention and without it we would be unable to formulate plans or goals or even think about the future.

Imagination is also the primary source of dissatisfaction. Without it, you would be much more content—but you also wouldn’t be you.

If you’re not satisfied with the present, but there’s nothing wrong with you, you will need to redefine the problem before you can attempt to solve it. Consider that you are just who you are: the current version of you, neither broken nor exactly as you would like to be. Instead of fixing yourself, which is not only uninspiring but also impossible, how about imagining what you want to create and moving forward into that?

Based on an article published in lucidwaking on 1/21/19.

How Your Mindset Sets You Up

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A mindset is the set of ideas, beliefs, or attitudes with which you approach situations or people—or through which you view them. It determines how you interpret situations and respond to them. Mindsets have something in common with habits since they tend to be habitual, which means largely unconscious. They are a type of mental shortcut; they operate based on assumptions, and they generate expectations.

You can have mindsets about yourself, other people or groups of people, places, situations, events, political organizations, types of music—actually just about anything. A mindset can have surprisingly deep and far-reaching effects.

Mindsets Are Self-Reinforcing

You’ve probably heard someone described as having a victim mentality, which is the same as having a victim mindset. If you have a victim mindset you would tend to:

  • feel that others are to blame for your misfortunes
  • believe you are powerless to alter your circumstances
  • have a primarily external locus of control
  • be disinclined to take personal responsibility
  • distrust other people
  • fail to take positive action on your own behalf

The first three attitudes and beliefs lead to the subsequent three behaviors—which, in turn, confirm the attitudes and beliefs. Like any mindset, a victim mindset causes you to view situations, events, and interpersonal relationships through a distorted filter. It leads you to believe your perception isreality. That’s one of the ways your mindset sets you up.

A Few Other Mindsets (Labels)

I’ve written about the productivity vs. creativity mindsets. Here are some others to consider.

  • Survivalist
  • Globalist
  • Entrepreneurial
  • Lifelong Learner
  • Achiever
  • Maker
  • Activist
  • Liberal
  • Conservative
  • Libertarian
  • Progressive
  • Outsider
Recognizing and Changing a Mindset

When examining a mindset, it’s important to know what it is, when it’s in effect, and how it affects your perception, interpretation, and response. But trying to understand where it came from or how it developed is a side trip that won’t get you closer to altering it. (It doesn’t matter how you came to possess the diffusion filter for your camera lens. Once you install it, it affects what you see when you look through the lens.) Instead, focus on determining your mindset’s attributes: what beliefs, attitudes, personality traits, etc. are part of it?

One of the best ways to catch your mindset in the act is to notice when your expectations of a person or a situation are not met. Instead of pausing to consider the source of your expectations, your brain is more likely to jump into action to find a suitable explanation that will allow you to comfortably fit the experience into your ongoing inner narrative. Unfortunately, even when reality conflicts with your mindset, your brain’s tendency is to interpret what happens in a way that reinforces your mindset.

After you develop an understanding of a mindset you want to change:

  1. Clarify why you want to change it.
  2. Determine your desired outcome.
  3. Identify one situation to change.

Remember that it’s easier to focus on and change a behavior (what you do) than it is to focus on and change a thought, a thought pattern, or a belief. Create an intention to change your behavior in one situation and apply repetition and perseverance until the new behavior or response becomes the status quo.

It isn’t easy to recognize or change a mindset, but if you focus on the mechanics (what, when, and how), you can do it. And it’s worth the effort to open your mind, shift your perspective, and learn how to adjust your personal camera lens filters so you aren’t stuck with whatever lenses you happen to have developed over the course of your life.

Will Satisfying Your Needs Make You Happy?

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The happiness industry wants you to believe you can attain a steady state of happiness and that satisfying your needs will take you there. But happiness is ephemeral and transient, which means you can’t be happy all the time no matter what you do. And if you elect to chase happiness, you might find yourself running faster and faster on the hedonic treadmill.

In addition, humans are demonstrably poor at being able to predict how we’ll feel and what will make us happy in the future (affective forecasting). Thus the phrase it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Certainly happiness feels better than sadness, anger, or unhappiness. But feeling better isn’t the point of getting happy. Happiness is supposed to be good for you, leading, for example, to better health and a longer life. That puts it in the same category with other things you “should” be doing, such as eating more fruits and vegetables, stopping smoking, and getting regular exercise—which sucks all the pleasure out of being happy.

But there’s no indication happiness will increase your lifespan and some indication the opposite is true. In fact, research reveals that the bodies of happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response.

And per BBC Future:

Good moods come with substantial risks—sapping your drive, dimming attention to detail and making you simultaneously gullible and selfish. Positivity is also known to encourage binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.

A Hierarchy of Pseudo-Needs

Satisfying your needs is not guaranteed to make you happy—or at least consistently happy. And it’s definitely a less direct path to feeling good than simply pursuing what you want. At first glance, though, it seems more legitimate and less self-centered. You’ve heard the question and maybe even asked it yourself—of yourself: Do you really need it or do you just want it?

I place a lot of the blame on Abraham Maslow, whose hierarchy of needs has wormed its way into nearly all aspects of modern Western culture even though there’s surprisingly little validation of it. He didn’t have access to the information we have available now about how the brain works—but then neither did William James, who was born 66 years earlier and got far more right than he got wrong.

With the help of Maslow’s hierarchy—and perhaps out Puritan heritage—we have turned all kinds of desirable states and situations (wants) into needs. Just like turning happiness into something we should have because it’s good for us, turning what we want into something we need sucks the joy out of it.

System 1, the unconscious part of the brain, treats needs a little differently from the way it treats wants. Its primary goal is survival—and you do need certain things in order to survive, such as food, water, shelter, and social/interpersonal connection. But like the rest of us, you’ve probably convinced your brain you have a host of other needs that also must be satisfied.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Since System 1 isn’t good at making distinctions, it treats both actual needs and pseudo-needs as if they are essential to your survival. As an example, here’s what happens if you convince your brain you need respect.

  1. If you don’t have respect, you’re not OK. (If you become dehydrated, your brain and your body are not OK. They are in distress. It wouldn’t bode well for your survival if you weren’t sufficiently distressed to turn your attention to seeking water. If your brain perceives respect as a need, you experience distress when you don’t get it.)
  2. It’s the job of the people around you to give you respect—and they’re wrong if they don’t.
  3. Your brain will be on red alert looking for any evidence of disrespect because it represents a threat to your survival. It won’t just notice instances of disrespect; it will divert attentional resources to seeking out such instances. And it generally finds what it seeks.

If, however, you recognize that respect is something you want:

  1. If you don’t have respect, you are still OK (not in distress).
  2. You’re likely to take appropriate action to generate respect, activating both wanting and liking chemicals in your brain. But whether or not you succeed in getting it, you’re still OK, and you’re much less likely to make others wrong if they don’t give it to you.
  3. Since your brain isn’t looking for evidence of disrespect, it won’t be overly reactive to it, and you will have more attentional resources available.
How Do You Want to Proceed?

Your brain is an insatiable wanting machine.

If you identify what you really want, you can activate your brain’s reward network to help you get it. Unless you’re a horrible human being, that’s a win situation for everyone—you and the people you are close to or interact with.

Your brain is also an excellent threat detection device.

If you are focused on getting your needs met—both your actual needs and the wants you have turned into needs—your brain will be on the lookout for anything it identifies as a lack. That’s a lose situation for you and the people around you.

While it may seem as if satisfying your needs is less self-centered or narcissistic than pursuing what you want, it isn’t. It’s more underhanded, and it keeps your attention focused on you.

Do you want to keep your brain’s threat detector set at red alert or do you want to harness the power of your brain’s reward system?

The answer seems like a (sorry!) no-brainer to me.

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677