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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

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.

Bite Me! The Anger Post

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Anger is defined as a strong feeling of displeasure or hostility. It’s considered by Paul Ekman, among others, to be one of six basic emotions, the others being surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness. (I have issues with Paul Ekman and his take on emotions, but so be it.)

There are many gradations and flavors of anger. In no particular order (and definitely not an exhaustive list):

  1. annoyance
  2. rage
  3. frustration
  4. contrariness
  5. bitterness
  6. fury
  7. irritation
  8. resentment
  9. resistance
  10. vengeance
  11. agitation
  12. outrage
  13. disgruntlement
  14. vexation
  15. grumpiness

There are numerous theories and opinions about anger, some of which quite honestly just seem to be fabricated. I think we tend to interpret anger primarily based on our personal response to it. Someone’s agitation, for example, might be easy for one person to ignore, but another person might feel uncomfortable or even threatened by it; they might perceive it to be something stronger, such as outrage. If anger activates your brain’s threat detection system, you’re bound to have a lower tolerance for it than someone else might have.

An organization promoting a Buddhist perspective made the claim that anger was delusional. I responded that the relentless pursuit of happiness is far more delusional, not to mention destructive. Why is there so much less concern about that?

In addition, a wide variety of mental and emotional states are commonly interpreted as expressions of anger: excitement, unbridled enthusiasm, intensity, insistence or persistence, directness, and even passion or passionate engagement.

Feeling vs. Doing

 “The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.” —Edward Abbey

Anger tends to be viewed, more often than not, as a negative emotion, something that needs to be “managed,” like time (good luck with that). The emotion of anger is also frequently conflated with the expression of anger (aggression), as if you can’t have one without the other. It’s probably the verbal or physical expression of anger that people want to manage and not the actual emotion.

It’s true that the Latin root of the word emotion is emovere, which means “move out, remove, agitate.” More recently neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Lisa Feldman Barrett have described emotions as providing information from the body/brain to conscious awareness. Damasio refers to them as homeostatic indicators. Are things going well or is something amiss? The purpose of this information is to assist us in determining if we want to do something to adjust our current condition.

We don’t have to respond to sadness by weeping uncontrollably or crawling into bed for the duration just as we don’t have to respond to anger by throwing or smashing things or pushing other people around. Emotions let us know what is going on with us and give us an opportunity to acknowledge that and determine what, if any, action we want to take. In a way, all emotions are somewhat agitating since they’re intended to get at least some of our attention.

State vs. Trait

It’s important to make the distinction between states (or incidences) of experiencing anger (reacting to being cut off while driving or to having someone else take credit for your work or good idea) and the trait of anger (a tendency to be pissed off by the mildest—or sometimes even positive—provocation). Given enough incitement, anyone can experience anger. But for some of us, anger comes preloaded; it’s our default emotional response.

Defaulting to anger has consequences, of course. My experience is that being so familiar with anger, I tend not to be blown away by someone else’s expression of anger. I may or may not like it or approve of it, but I’m rarely freaked out by it. I don’t automatically equate anger with danger or even discomfort, so I have a higher tolerance for it. Those with a low tolerance for anger appear to more quickly or easily interpret intensity or directness as anger.

The downside of defaulting to anger is that it can feel very compelling, energizing, motivating and even righteous. That can lead to stewing in angry juices at the very least or taking ill-advised action that can be destructive or hurtful. I got a handle first on not acting on anger and then on not automatically expressing it. That left me with the inner experience of stewing in angry juices, which I did not enjoy! But eventually I gained greater control over that, too.

Hide and Seek

Deciding to limit the stewing helped me recognize a significant fact of life: I was probably not going to stop having the impulse to anger, given I’d been having it since infancy, but I could alter the effect it had on me. I didn’t have to run with it. I could change, but there were limits to what I could change.

There’s a fairly widespread notion that anger is a “secondary” emotion—that it’s covering up something else, something we don’t want to experience or express, as if emotions are under our immediate control. As if we choose to experience one emotion instead of another. If you understand how the brain works and how slow ordinary consciousness is compared to the unconscious you realize how impossible this is.

I’ve tried to locate the source of the secondary emotion idea, but so far haven’t been successful. Ultimately, I don’t think it matters where it came from. What does matter is that it’s been absorbed as a fact by many psychologists, therapists, and people in general in spite of the fact that it makes no sense from a survival standpoint.

It doesn’t make sense from a homeostatic indicator standpoint, either. There is nothing at all to be gained by being forced to figure out how we’re really feeling while we’re in the grip of another—entirely different—strong emotion. That’s like being provided with intentionally obscure or misleading information. The brain doesn’t work like that, either.

Deception vs. Self-Deception

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. You wish! (Sorry; couldn’t resist.)

Obviously, it’s possible to behave in a hostile or combative manner without experiencing the emotion of anger. Just like it’s entirely possible to behave in a pleasant and congenial manner without experiencing friendly feelings toward one’s companions. We do it all the time. We can also express interest in something someone else is talking about when we not only don’t care but fervently wish they would shut up right now. When we act one way while we’re feeling something else, we know we’re doing it. We have a good idea of what we’re feeling in spite of the fact that we’re not acting in accord with it. We’re hiding our emotions from others but not from ourselves.

The secondary emotion promoters want us to believe that when we’re experiencing anger, however, we’re hiding our emotions from ourselves.

Fortunately, not everyone subscribes to the secondary emotion theory. And, anyway, the most important thing to remember about emotion, any emotion, is that you have no idea what I’m feeling, and I have no idea what you’re feeling. Instead of making assumptions and interpretations based on our own biased perceptions or beliefs (if that happened to me or if I were in that situation or did that, I would be feeling [fill in the blank]), we could instead be curious—about both ourselves and others. We could check in; we could ask.

On a side note, being comfortable with a wide range of emotions has many benefits and few downsides.

Games People Play

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Since I began rereading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, I’ve noticed coincidences of birds and of John Updike. (That’s two, and I’m barely into the book, so I’m starting a mental list.)

Birds haven’t featured prominently in my life or lexicon, other than their presence in the big tree outside my bedroom, which they’re attracted to in part due to my upstairs neighbors’ feeders. That and sometimes they remind me of The Producers.

John Updike features even less prominently, although that was not the case a few decades back. I devoured most of the Rabbit books, the Bech books, Marry Me, The Centaur, and lots of collected short stories (Too Far to Go, The Music School, etc.), among others.

Some of us have a tendency to perceive meaning in coincidences. As for me, I’ve been there, done that, and thankfully survived reading way too much Carl Jung during my formative years. Now I understand that the conscious part of my brain can only process about 40 bits of information at a time, and what it gets to chew on depends on what the unconscious part of my brain thinks might be useful—or will at least keep the conscious part occupied and hopefully out of trouble.

So the unconscious sifts through the 11 million bits it’s taking in at any given moment and … on the fly, so to speak … funnels a minuscule amount to consciousness, which operates as if it has a … bird’s eye view … of what is going on—and, more importantly, knows what it all means.

Of course, the meaning comes from us, not from what is outside of us. So things mean whatever we believe them to mean, based on our brain’s interpretations. We are, as David DiSalvo says in What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, meaning makers.

Everything Is an Interpretation

Our experience of reality is a result of our interpretations, and the vast majority of those interpretations come from the unconscious, which is only concerned about meaning insofar as it affects the next action we’re about to take.

However, we treat all of our interpretations as if they are reality, which leads to a very static, literal, and concrete view of the world. And that worldview is affected much less than we might think by looking for and perceiving meaning in symbols, coincidences, objects, and occurrences. Because when we find meaning in those things, we’re operating as if the meaning is fixed within the objects or the occurrences: static, literal, concrete.

It is the unconscious that processes associatively rather than linearly. So it’s the unconscious that links bird with the notion of freedom or hope or anything else. But only if our mental model contains a belief that the appearance of birds means something other than what is apparent. If you’re tempted to consider that the unconscious has some specialized or secret info that it’s accessing, remember that this is the same unconscious that is addicted to pattern recognition (one result of which is stereotyping) and is riddled with cognitive biases (including our all-time favorite, confirmation bias) for the express purpose of being able to quickly jump to conclusions.

Delusional and Disempowering

Ray Grasse wrote a book titled The Waking Dream, which is subtitled Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives. He quotes Nikos Kazantzakis from Zorba the Greek:

Everything in this world has a hidden meaning. Men, animals, trees, stars, they are hieroglyphics. …When you see them, you do not understand them. You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars.

On the surface, this might be appealing. But there’s so much to unpack in those three sentences, so many assumptions underlying them. At the foundation is the belief that there are specific meanings one can ultimately deduce—again, meanings that are fixed and located within the things of the world. They are there for us to uncover or not.

I take the idea of unlocking the symbolic language of our lives to be another version of the game of finding our life-purpose cheese. There’s no there there.

As it is, life is empty and meaningless and it’s empty and meaningless that life is empty and meaningless. And, hey, we’re making meaning, anyway. We can’t do otherwise. It seems the height (or one height, anyway) of idiocy to fail to recognize that we are the source of the meaning we’re making. It’s somewhat delusional and seriously disempowering.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth reminds us that the color green exists neither in the object we’re viewing, nor in our brain, but in the interaction between the two. In other words, it’s not fixed; it’s an interpretation.

We’re in ongoing interaction with all of the world we inhabit. Both we and the world are in constant motion at all times. Reality is anything but static, literal, or concrete. We’re making it up as we go, and we’re never in the same place twice. A far more interesting series of question to ask is what is my brain bringing to my attention, what meaning am I making of it, and what does this say about who my brain thinks I am?

So what to do with two broken wrists, a bird in my bedroom and the sound of two doors closing? I am a writer, and I keep thinking there must be a connection to make, that these are pieces of a puzzle, that there is some way everything fits together. I’m damned if I know what it is. The more I squirrel around for a meaning, the more reluctant I am to consider the obvious. But the significance of a closing door is not lost on me, and I’ve never felt quite this mortal. It’s a beautiful word, “mortal,” rhyming with “portal,” which sounds optimistic. And really, who wants to live forever? How tedious life would become. Mortality makes everything matter, keeps life interesting. And that’s all I ask. —Abigail Thomas, memoirist

Born to Make Snap Judgments
—and Run with Them

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The brain is all about the action. It wants to know what’s going on with and around us so it can figure out what to do about it. Uncertainty only gets in the way of its imperative to always know and to always have an answer. Thus, the brain could be considered to be allergic to uncertainty and to the very idea of randomness.

Not only is the brain trying to figure out what’s going to happen next, it’s also trying to identify patterns to speed up and (hopefully) improve the process in the future.

In short, as far as the brain is concerned: randomness is bad; patterns are good.

Association

The part of the brain that is focused on what to do next operates via associative thinking rather than logical, linear thinking. Associative thinking (or learning) is based on finding patterns, making connections, and categorizing.  Associative thinking is fast and nonlinear, and we always have access to it.

Associative thinking takes place automatically. We can’t stop our brain from doing it, which is a good thing; if the brain wasn’t able to find patterns, make connections, and categorize things, our chances of survival would be diminished, and it would take us a lot longer to learn anything. Logical, linear thinking, which is used by the conscious part of the brain (System 2), is slow, effortful, and limited.

Since associative thinking puts a premium on speed rather than accuracy, however, it makes mistakes. If errors are not corrected, they can turn into beliefs or habits of thinking, just like habits of behavior, and become part of our mental model. The more frequently we encounter an apparent pattern or connection, the likelier we are to believe it is true and accurate. That’s also the case with classification and categorization.

Snap to It

Stereotype: fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing. (Oxford Dictionary)

We are born to judge others by how they look: our brains come hardwired with a specific face-processing area, and even shortly after birth, babies would rather look at a human face than anything else. Within their first year, they become more discerning, and are more likely to crawl towards friendly looking faces than those who look a bit shifty. By the time we reach adulthood, we are snap-judgement specialists, jumping to conclusions about a person’s character and status after seeing their face for just a tenth of a second. And we shun considered assessments of others in favour of simple shortcuts—for example, we judge a baby-faced individual as more trustworthy, and associate a chiselled jaw with dominance. —Kate Douglas, New Scientist

Other research indicates that these conclusions we begin jumping to in infancy can develop into stereotypes that then influence future interpretations as well as behavior. It’s highly likely that the brain generates all kinds of stereotypes as mental shortcuts to identify things, people, situations, etc.

Categorization

Categorization: the act of sorting and organizing things according to group, class, or, as you might expect, category. (vocabulary.com)

Categorizing is an automatic System 1 (unconscious) process. That means it’s easy; eventually tracks laid down in the brain carry us along effortlessly. We rarely question our perceptions because confirmation bias makes them feel right. While it is relatively easy—and requires no conscious attention—to lay down these tracks, the same cannot be said for changing them.

Recognizing the differences between things (distinguishing), on the other hand, is a System 2 (conscious) process that requires intention, attention, and effort. Those, in turn, require logical, linear thinking. Making distinctions can be difficult and often generates cognitive dissonance, which is uncomfortable.

Pattern Detection

Pattern recognition/detection: the imposition of identity on input data, such as speech, images, or a stream of text, by the recognition and delineation of patterns it contains and their relationships. (Brittanica, pattern recognition in computer science)

Patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. (Michael Shermer)

We use our brain’s pattern-detection processes all the time: when driving a motor vehicle, listening to music, observing someone’s behavior, following a story, running experiments, playing games or sports, etc. The brain’s attempts to identify a pattern or determine if a pattern is present generate activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is part of the reward system. That means pattern-detection is reinforced by the brain.

It’s not a stretch to imagine that most if not all of perception is a result of pattern-detection. And given that pattern-detection operates unconsciously, in the part of the brain that values speed over accuracy, it’s also not a stretch to recognize how likely it is to be fallible.

According to Jamie Hale, in PsychCentral:

Our pattern-detecting ability serves us well in many instances, but it also can lead to seeing something when there is nothing there. In the words of Rudolf Flesch:

“Instead of the black and-white, single-track, everyone-knows-that-this-is-due-to-that approach, get used to the idea that this is a world of multiple causes, imperfect correlations, and sheer, unpredictable chance. It is true that the scientists, with their statistics and their probabilities, have made a stab at the harnessing of chance. But they know very well that certainty is unattainable. A high degree of probability is the best we can ever get.”

The brain lulls us into believing that we have a good grasp of what’s happening, that certainty is attainable, and that our snap judgments are accurate perceptions of reality. However, things are not as they seem.

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