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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Always Look on
the Bright Side of Life

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Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a British movie but Always Look on the Bright Side of Life could easily be America’s theme song. Barbara Ehrenreich covered the pitfalls of what some call toxic positivity in her book Bright-Sided, which I read shortly after it was published in 2009. It probably goes without saying that I have never been on the positive psychology bandwagon so I welcomed her blistering critique of compulsory optimism.

As one reviewer of Ehrenreich’s book said, “There’s no need to try to sugar-coat the world; reality is far more interesting.”

But what better way to keep our attention focused on the bright side than to get us to compulsively itemize the things we are—or ought to be—grateful for? In fact, many of the benefits cited by a majority of articles and videos promoting the development of a gratitude practice are aimed at generating or increasing a sense of personal wellbeing.

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? —Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

The primary purpose of counting our blessings, in the view of many, isn’t to make us better people. It isn’t to fortify us to go forth and help create a more equitable or humanitarian world for everyone. It’s to make us feel better about ourselves.

Gratitude is touted as a coping mechanism, an alternative to “junk food, self-medication, shopping, etc.” Some so-called coping mechanisms may be inherently less harmful than others, but all coping mechanisms are intended to modify a perceived negative emotional state: to change the way we feel without addressing the circumstances or situation.

When we practice gratitude, we shift our attention from what’s wrong or missing to what is here. —Rev. Connie L. Habash, LMFT

Putting attention on “what’s wrong or missing” is assumed to be counterproductive to this aim. Yet some who have explored the gratitude practice phenomenon have discovered a dark side to trying to drum up gratitude. One negative side effect is invalidating difficult or unpleasant emotions. Emotions provide us with information, so trying to avoid some and only experience others disconnects us from that stream of information.

I suppose that 20 years ago when my partner died suddenly, I could have focused on being grateful for the decades he and I had spent together or for the fact that I still had Tashi, our cat, or that I could remain where I was living. But thinking about what I still had would not have diminished the enormous chasm in my life. He was missing. And that meant something to me. When I think about identifying what I was grateful for in that instance, it feels at the very least dismissive and shallow.

Making ourselves feel better, or trying to, has limits—at least if we want to retain our humanity.

It’s impossible not to conclude that the emphasis on looking for things to be grateful for, no matter what angle we come at it from, serves to—in some cases is even intended to—maintain the status quo. It keeps us focused inward, on ourselves. It chips away at our sense of agency. It requires us to be beholden to someone or something else: the giver who bestows gifts based on criteria we are unaware of and have no influence on. It admonishes us to be satisfied and content—to not wish for more.

It’s an extremely powerful barrier to creating transformational change.

When I said “more,” above, I wasn’t referring to accumulating material goods or status. I mean “more” in the sense of aspiring to be more, to have a more satisfying and meaningful life, and to achieve the objectives that make that possible. The brain is an insatiable wanting machine that will seek immediate gratification unless we train it to help us up our game and our aspirations.

Living = Acting in the World

Essential to creativity is a ferocious dissatisfaction with the status quo. —Roger Mavity, How to Steal Fire

Focusing our attention on what we have is an attempt to inoculate us against dissatisfaction, especially ferocious dissatisfaction, along with anguish, discomfort, sadness, longing, tragedy, confusion, loss, or just a bad mood. There are numerous problems with this trajectory, one of which is that it also inoculates us against joy, exuberance, desire, curiosity, and aspiration.

The most useful—and the most human—way to proceed is to be grateful when we’re grateful, dissatisfied or uncomfortable when we’re dissatisfied or uncomfortable, sad or confused when we’re sad or confused, and joyful, happy, or exuberant when we’re joyful, happy, or exuberant.

And then to be curious. What is it we’re grateful for, dissatisfied with, uncomfortable or sad about? What is the source of our confusion? What is making us happy, joyful, or exuberant? What are we longing for?

Lastly, is there something for us to do about what we’re experiencing? We are not stuck with any status quo. We are not required to accommodate ourselves to our circumstances. We have an ability to create positive, intentional, significant, and sustained change. That’s what we are built for.

There is one more post to come in this series.

You Give Truth a Bad Name

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Not necessarily you, personally. But maybe you. If so, you should stop doing that.

When I came across a promising article posted on a writers’ website titled “The World Needs Writers Now More than Ever” I could do nothing but nod in agreement, although my perspective runs more along the lines of when hasn’t the world needed writers?

I started reading with great expectations—which were immediately dashed when the author referred to writers as “truth tellers.” She says:

Most of us write to discover what we think and believe about the world, and, in the process, we arrive at a certain kind of truth. We share that truth with the world through our words.

That’s a nice idea, but she’s giving writers too much credit for high-mindedness. Far too many of them are active truth dissemblers.

But…fair enough. It’s the case for some writers I know and it’s frequently the case for me to use writing to explore rather than to explain. It’s a practice available to anyone that I wish more people would take advantage of. But a majority of people in this world, including writers, are far more interested in what they know than in what they don’t know. And they write from a position of absoluteness, as if what they have to say is the final word on how it is, what to do about it, and who is right and who is wrong. “A certain kind of truth” needs more definition.

I was further dismayed by a subheading midway through the piece claiming that all of us “have to tell our truth.” Things that are true are factual. There is evidence for them. Something happened or it didn’t happen. It either is or it isn’t. Or maybe we don’t know. Our lack of knowledge has no effect on the truth. There is no truth that is exclusively yours or mine. What this writer appears to be talking about is personal experience which is exclusively yours or mine, even when aspects of it seems to be shared.

However, I expect more from a writer, especially one writing about the craft of writing on a writing website. Personal experience and “truth” are not one and the same. As a writer, that’s a distinction she ought to assist people in making. Conflating experience and truth is what gives truth a bad name. Personalizing truth makes it wonky, unstable, vague.

If we can’t agree on what truth is, then it is hopeless to expect that we can ever recognize truth and respond to or deal effectively with it. It was snowing 10 minutes ago—a kind of blink-and-you-miss-it bit of flurries, but snowing nonetheless. The fact that someone indoors didn’t notice it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means it wasn’t part of that person’s experience.

Personally, I don’t really like snow, but that doesn’t mean snow is bad even though my experience of it is often unpleasant.

Every child in a multiple-child family has a different experience of their parents. They tell different stories with different details and different meanings and different outcomes. None of them are true because there’s no such thing as a true story. We are all personalizing. Well, to be more accurate, our brain is personalizing.

It is processing sensory data through our personal mental model which contains our personal beliefs and making personal interpretations that give rise to our personal experience. Your experience is your experience and mine is mine. Just because it feels “real” doesn’t mean it’s an accurate reflection of reality. If someone doesn’t experience their own experiences as real, they are likely in a dissociative state, which is not healthy. But claiming that one’s experience is or represents the truth is essentially lying.

We are being sold the idea that our experience is our truth as a way of encouraging us to not deny our experience, to give it voice. This is all well and good, but not if in the process we actually disempower ourselves by failing to take into account that we play a role in how our brain creates our experiences. Besides, if our experience represents the truth, then it is not changeable. We have no power or agency in the matter. The world happens to us and we can’t do anything about it. That is not a desirable state of affairs. And it’s not true.

Storytelling

There are types of experiences that humans tend to have—that we are wired to have, so to speak. Some of them may be given less validity by the society or culture in which we live. Sharing such experiences can validate them, which can bring them out into the open, assist individuals in recognizing others have similar experiences, and broaden the understanding of who we all are (as humans).

Stories pack an emotional punch, or they can, that non-fiction does far less easily. So telling a story of your own experience or of someone else’s can have a profound effect. You could say it represents “a certain kind of truth,” but that truth is abstract, not to be confused or conflated with “the truth.” It is a true experience. You or I or someone lived through it. It is what you or I or someone felt. It is how we perceived it.

Some may even consider abstract truth to be more important and certainly more profound than mere facts. Reading stories about other people’s experiences—especially in the form of literary fiction—has been repeatedly shown to help develop social acuity, emotional intelligence, compassion, understanding, and critical thinking, among other things. In short, it can make us better people.

But it’s vital that we know how to separate fact from fiction and experience from reality and that we all have a basic agreement as to what we’re talking about when we talk about truth. Our experience is real, but it is not the truth.

What Are So-Called
Secondary Emotions?

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It isn’t exactly news, but the evidence that we are all walking around, unaware, inside our personal fog of vagueness is becoming hard to ignore. We not only lack clarity, but we are also unable to pin down (be specific about) what’s important to us. We use words, we engage in verbal communication, we consider and think about things, but we are often in the dark about the meaning of our own words, let alone the words of others.

So it is not such a surprise that much like investigating the ephemeral concept of empathy, investigating what is meant by secondary emotions leads to less clarity and more confusion. Empathy, as I previously discovered, is not a thing. The same can be said about secondary emotions.

Psychologists, psychotherapists, and other wellness-minded individuals don’t agree on what constitutes secondary emotions in the first place. In other words, the meaning is vague.

“Secondary” as a Characteristic

Some of them believe “secondary” is an attribute of particular emotions, meaning that those emotions labeled as such are never “primary.” But they do not agree about which emotions are secondary and which are primary. Nor is it easy to determine what this theory is based on or how it serves us in terms of survival.

There is a commonly-held belief that secondary emotions “mask” other emotions, but that would actually defeat the purpose of emotions, which is to provide us with information. Emotions are generated by the brain to keep us apprised of our current state of affairs. We may consciously attempt to hide our feelings from others or to change our emotional experience (for which we can’t blame emotions, since they don’t have intentions). But it’s one thing for us to want to keep that information to ourselves; it’s another thing altogether to want to keep it from ourselves.

The brain is attempting to tell us what it perceives we need to know (11 million bits of information condensed into a 40-bit stream); nothing more and nothing less. It’s not playing games with us or actively attempting to mislead us. If, for example, you’re feeling guilty, your brain generated that emotional response based on the circumstances and your personal mental model of the world. The conscious you may not enjoy feeling guilty. Your brain doesn’t care. It’s giving it to you straight—and automatically. It’s telling you that you violated your own moral code in some manner or to some extent. You get to brush it off, distract yourself, examine the situation and/or underlying beliefs, or rationalize it away. That’s on you, not your brain.

The same goes for psychology’s favorite secondary emotion, anger, which I’ve also written about. In that post from two years ago, I mentioned being unsuccessful in my attempt to determine the source of this concept of secondary emotions. I also considered that people who are uncomfortable with expressions of anger might be motivated to view it as a secondary emotion:

I suspect the secondary emotion idea is an attempt to cut anger down to size, so to speak. So-and-so isn’t really angry; he or she is actually sad or anxious or depressed or afraid or hurt: wounded in some manner. They’re not threatening; they’re vulnerable. 

Of course, people may also apply this reasoning to themselves.

At this point, I’m more inclined to view the reaction from a broader perspective, though: less as discomfort with expressions of anger and more as discomfort with discomfort. Discomfort with expressions of anger is situational. Discomfort with discomfort is existential.

“Secondary” as a Sequence

Others believe secondary emotions are those that immediately follow the initial, primary, emotion. In that case, “secondary” is not an attribute of the emotion: any emotion can be either primary or secondary depending on where it shows up in an apparent sequence of emotional responses. But is that 10 seconds later, 10 minutes later, 10 days later, or 10 months later?

If you don’t understand that the brain is focused on what to do right now, then it seems conceivable that an emotion you’re experiencing today is a result of an experience you had two days ago. Your brain uses past experience to determine current action, but it doesn’t live in the past. The emotions you’re experiencing now are a response to what is going on, externally and internally, in the present.

I don’t know what makes a secondary emotion, in this context, significant. Are there always secondary emotions—emotions that are a reaction to a previous emotion? (If not, why not?) If so, aren’t all emotions secondary emotions given that there was always a prior emotion? But then the term is meaningless because there are no actual primary emotions. There are just emotions, one after another. Which, as it turns out, happens to be the case.

Categorizing Emotions

There are many different ways one could classify or categorize emotions. The brain categorizes things in order to get a quick grasp of what something is and how it pertains to us so it can figure out what to do about it. Speed is of the essence if you’re pursuing rewards but even more so if you’re dodging threats. Classifying emotions as primary or secondary is completely unhelpful to this process. In my opinion, it’s nothing more than psychobabble. Classifying emotions as good or bad may be easier to justify (potential reward or potential threat). But it’s not fail safe given that context and personal neurochemistry play a bigger role in determining how we experience an emotion than these black or white categories suggest.

What I’ve learned from those who specialize in researching the origins and functions of emotions is that there are many benefits and few, if any downsides, to getting granular (specific, not vague) and to getting comfortable experiencing a wide range of them.

It’s a Schabziger Moon. Or Is It?

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We can’t ask (or answer) true or false questions about something if it isn’t real to begin with. By that, I mean that reality and truth are not the same thing. I also mean that there’s a hierarchy in that we have to first determine the reality of something before we can entertain questions about its characteristics or the nature of it.

I may be able to imagine a moon made of green cheese (a notion deriving from a Slavic tale involving, of course, a trickster—in this case a fox), but since such a thing doesn’t exist, I can’t claim to be able to determine that the cheese in question is Swiss green cheese.

On the other hand Swiss green cheese does exist; it’s called Schabziger. So I can ask if Schabziger is a cow’s milk cheese or a goat’s milk cheese.

What Is Real?

Dictionary definitions of the word real leave much to be desired. For example, one definition says real means:

existing or occurring in the physical world; not imaginary, fictitious,
or theoretical; actual

Something that is real, we are told, must be:

  • tangible:  concrete; perceptible by the senses; not abstract or imaginary
  • objective: existing independently of perception or an individual’s conceptions; non-subjective
  • factual: accurate; true/truthful; conforming exactly or almost exactly to fact or to a standard

That would mean, among other things, that anything that is purely or primarily conceptual is not real. Hope, for example, or commitment or justice. What are we to make of the fact that people have apparently lived and died and killed for things—ideas, ideals, concepts, radical notions—that are, based on these definitions, not real?

Let’s put aside this characterization of real because it’s not useful—and it’s not based in neural reality. Neural correlates exist for every emotion we feel, every thought we have, and every sensation we experience. So there’s a physical basis for everything we’re aware of or even imagine. The specific thing or things we imagine may not be real, but neural activity related to our imagining can be tracked by an fMRI machine.

When I imagine a moon made of green cheese, the activity in my brain is real. The image in my mind is real, even though the image does not reflect physical reality. So I can imagine this moon to be made of Schabziger cheese—or any other kind of cheese: a different kind of cheese every day. Not only is my imagination not constrained by physical reality, it is also not constrained by a requirement for consistency. How cool is that?

What we seem to be asking when we ask whether or not something is real is does it exist, or in some cases, is it capable of existing. In fact, the definition of exist is to have being or reality; to be. Something can exist with or without being tangible. When I write fiction, I do a lot of mental pre-writing before I put words on paper or on a computer page. Those stories or story fragments are no less real when they exist only in my imagination. They don’t become real upon being written or typed. And whether or not a fictional story is transcribed, its characters and events (content) are not real, but the story is real. The story exists.

There are, of course, things we don’t know or don’t know about and things we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of. However, the idea that there are things that exist objectively, independent of our perception, is impossible to validate. Everything we perceive/experience has—necessarily—neural correlates.

What Is True (or Factual)?

The definitions of factual are even less helpful than the definitions of real, given that the words are often treated as synonyms. But as we all know, experience is real, and experience is not an accurate—or factual—reflection of reality. Our sense of self, of being a single self, is also real, but the single self we sense does not exist. It’s an illusion created by multiple processes in the brain. Our experience of it is real but it is not factual.

When we perceive a threat and experience fear, both the perception and the experience are real, but there may, in fact, be no actual threat. In order to define the nature (truth) of a perceived threat—and therefore the best response to it—we must first determine whether or not the threat is real.

Here are some things that are real, along with some facts about them that are true:

Three things that are real:

  • Climate
  • Humidity
  • Hurricanes

Three things that are true:

  • Average global temperature has increased by about 2° Fahrenheit since 1880.
  • Both air temperature and relative humidity affect the heat index (how hot it feels).
  • Since 1980, hurricanes have caused more damage in the U.S. than any other type of weather-related disaster.

Three more things that are real:

  • The book Deviate: The Creative Power of Transforming Your Perception
  • Beau Lotto
  • Neuroscience

Three more things that are true:

  • Deviate was written by Beau Lotto.
  • Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist.
  • Neuroscientists have identified patterns of brain activity that reveal how our expectations influence interpretation of sensory data.

The brain has to interpret sensory data in order to figure out what, if anything, we should do about it or in response to it. To do so, the brain constantly makes best guesses that are “good enough” for us to successfully navigate the world we live in: i.e., survive. Our brain did not evolve to interpret sensory data “factually”—meaning with complete accuracy. But we take our experience for granted—at face value—without much skepticism or even curiosity. As a result, we sometimes we get caught up in trying to determine the exact nature of the cheese constituting our imaginary moon without realizing the moon is not real.

Where Are We Going, Walt Whitman?

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A couple of weeks ago, I read an article by a philosophy professor, Karen Simecek, who said that conceiving of our lives as narratives is a bad idea. She thinks it’s a bad idea because some narratives are negative or have a negative effect, presumably on the narrator.

She didn’t mention the brain in her article, which led me to wonder how she thinks these narratives come about. Maybe she believes humans all got together at some point in the past when there weren’t very many of us and took a vote on whether or not to conceive of our lives as narratives. The ayes won. Or maybe she thinks each of us comes up with this idea on our own or we pick it up from the zeitgeist.

In any case, this narrative process is not optional. It’s what brains do. Ask a neuroscientist. Or read The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall.

As to bad narratives or those that have a negative effect, that is content, and content can be modified. I would imagine that a philosopher who can’t make a distinction between concept and content might develop some odd perspectives. She doesn’t disappoint.

It’s true that there is no such thing as a true story, something I’ve been pointing out for the past 11, almost 12 years. But that is a fact, not an indictment of narrative. It’s also true that our narratives exert a powerful influence over us that can get in the way of our ability to create transformational (positive, intentional, significant, and sustained) change. So I laud her effort to look for a way to deal with this dilemma. But our narratives are crafted by the unconscious part of the brain and reflect who we’ve been up till now. They provide the brain with a way to determine how to process the sensory data it encounters. As such, neither can our narratives be easily dismissed nor is it even a good idea to try to dismiss them.

Existential Poetry

Our philosopher prefers poetry to narrative, so she suggests we replace our autobiographical narratives with poems.

I mentioned this in a group meeting where everyone present is wise to the already existing difficulties we have communicating with one another. A participant looked up poetic forms on the internet (one of the benefits of Zoom meetings) and found a site that said there were 28 different forms. Writer’s Digest beats that by a mile, however, listing 168 different forms. WD isn’t overly serious about describing this (I hope) exhaustive list. For example:

Chant: if it works once, run it into the ground

Some other forms are haiku, villanelle, sonnet, madrigal, roundelay, epic, and sestina. There are many forms attributed to the Welsh, the French, and the Japanese, and a surprising number are named for how many lines or stanzas they contain. We (in the group) entertained the notion of communicating in poetry and how doing so would compound our communication issues, in multiple ways, since we don’t just have a narrative about ourselves, of course; we communicate with each other via narrative.

I like poetry. I’ve read quite a lot of it. I’ve even written a fair share. I’m trying to imagine the possibility of substituting poetry for narrative—and I’m someone who isn’t particularly committed to my own narrative. My personality is such that my personal narrative is more episodic than continuous. But my unconscious doesn’t write poetry, so poetry is never going to replace my anecdotal narrativity.

A virtual acquaintance, Donald Fulmer, created an email course on learning to write haiku, which he found (I’m putting words in his mouth here aka interpreting) to be an agreeable form of self-expression. But no matter how familiar the form of haiku became to him, I doubt his brain ever got to the point of substituting haiku for narrative. (Perhaps he’ll read this and let us know.)

We Are A Work in Progress

We could develop our own poetic language. It’s not a bad idea. It’s another way—like art or music—to capture and/or express our experience. But it won’t replace our inner narrative.

In addition to the inherent difficulty of attempting to craft our experience into a poetic form, there’s another problem, which is that poems are finished things. I once wrote a poem about that. I said that writing poetry was like reconstructing myself on paper, that I was resetting the words in my sentences like the bones in my body. It can be laborious, but sometimes necessary.

Our narrative, however, is not finished until we die; and it is always changing and can always be changed.

Now if I could capture my life à la the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, I might reconsider my position. Here’s the first stanza of A Supermarket in California, free verse written in 1955 and published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

Later he asks:

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour.

I ask myself.

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677