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Always Look on
the Bright Side of Life

March 8, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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.

Where Are We Going, Walt Whitman?

November 4, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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.

False Beliefs about Motivation

March 22, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Most theories and beliefs about motivation are quite far removed from the neurochemical reality. But theories that ignore the neurochemical basis of motivation are not only not useful, they can also be harmful. We’ll look at three ways beliefs based on these theories can get in our way, but first, let’s review motivation one more time.

Motivation Redux

The purpose of the brain is to figure out what action to initiate based on its interpretation of the circumstances we’re in. Motivation is the mechanism of movement, the mechanism by which we take an action toward a potential reward or away from a potential threat.

My brain may very likely interpret a set of circumstances differently from your brain’s interpretation of the same circumstances. And my brain has been trained by me to identify rewards and threats just as your brain has been trained by you to identify rewards and threats. Therefore, even in extremely similar sets of circumstances, we are likely to have different interpretations and response, and we are likely to take different actions. The processes are the same; the outcomes of those processes differ from person to person.

This brain training started roughly at birth for each of us and has been ongoing since then. We are training our brain daily to either maintain the status quo (continue to interpret circumstances the same way and take the same actions in response to those interpretations) or to change it. It’s far easier to train the brain to maintain the status quo (reinforce it) than it is to train it to change the status quo. Although that’s probably obvious, it bears emphasizing given that the brain is always looking for the path of least resistance. The current status quo is that path of least resistance so it will always be more compelling.

We don’t need to “motivate” ourselves to take action to maintain the status quo. We are already motivated to take the actions we’re currently taking. It’s a mechanical process: no congratulation or castigation is warranted. Because most of this brain training was unconscious rather than intentional, however, we may be more satisfied by some of the actions we’re currently taking—and the outcomes of those actions—than we are by other actions. But whether we’re pleased or not:

The same process of brain training is responsible for all the actions we are currently taking.
Our brain releases wanting and either liking or stress neurochemicals for all the actions we are currently taking.

This neurochemical activity happens outside our awareness, without our moment-to-moment influence, and faster than our 40-bit brain can process. Yet, if we want to create positive, intentional, significant, and sustained change, we have to modify our brain’s neurochemical activity. If we don’t succeed in doing that, we won’t succeed in changing our behavior.

Hopefully that makes it reasonably clear that motivation is motivation is motivation—meaning there are not different kinds of motivation, such as intrinsic and extrinsic. The belief in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation—and the supposed superiority of intrinsic motivation lead us to think that:

1. We Ought to Be Motivated to…

Current motivational theories strongly suggest that we ought to be (intrinsically) motivated to take some actions rather than others. They also suggest that understanding the value or benefit of taking an action ought to lead directly (meaning motivate us) to taking that action.

This ridiculous notion is even applied to children with the expectation that they ought to be motivated to take the actions we want them to take. That’s not how motivation works. Children don’t come pre-motivated to follow arbitrary social rules, for example. You can train children to take an action you want them to take—if that’s your aim—but your chances of success will be greatly enhanced if you use an extrinsic reward.

Neither adults’ brains, nor children’s brains, automatically produce wanting and liking neurochemicals on demand or because it would be convenient for said brains to do so.

Adults who believe not only that they ought to be motivated to take specific actions that they are not currently taking, but also that their lack of motivation reflects badly on them, tend to have a diminished sense of personal agency and self-efficacy. We have to train our brain to be motivated to do what we want it to do. This takes intention, planning, repetition, and perseverance, which we are much less likely to engage in if we believe motivation ought to be automatic.

2. Enjoying an Activity Is an Indicator of Intrinsic Motivation

Current motivational theories place an undue emphasis on the extent to which we find an activity or an endeavor enjoyable or satisfying in-and-of-itself. I addressed this in previous posts on motivation. What I want to point out here is that there are plenty of things we find enjoyable that we would actually prefer not to do because they lead to undesirable outcomes. If they weren’t enjoyable it would be much easier to not do them.

But we’re only motivated to do what we’re motivated to do—that is, what we’ve trained our brain to be motivated to do. So if we want to get a different outcome, we have to train our brain to do something different. Again, this is a mechanical process. There’s no underlying meaning in the fact that you or I are doing something we don’t want to do or are not doing something we want to do. If we want to develop a new behavior we need to artificially generate liking neurochemicals which the brain will eventually take notice of and begin generating dopamine (the wanting neurochemical) in order to get.

We may come to enjoy the new behavior or activity in-and-of-itself or we may not. In any case, the brain will generate the neurochemicals that motivate us to do the thing and get the desired outcome—which is something we need to identify if we want to create change. Focusing on momentary enjoyment rather than long-term satisfaction is extremely short-sighted. It generates unreasonable expectations about the kind of experience we think we should be having. And it keeps us from developing a relationship with our future self: the person our current actions are creating.

3. Using an Extrinsic Reward Is Cheating

This is based on the false belief that doing the thing is not good enough; we also have to be doing it for the right reason. Presumably we have a reason for wanting to do the thing and whatever it is it’s a good enough reason. The point is to do the thing we want to do instead of the thing we don’t want to do—and to be motivated to continue doing it. Extrinsic rewards are excellent contrivances (tools) to facilitate the motivational process.

If we believe we shouldn’t need a reward or that extrinsic rewards are somehow unnatural, we further handicap ourselves in our attempts to create change. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, transformational change is possible but it isn’t probable. We need all the help we can get!

Recognizing the neurochemical nature of motivation and using the process intentionally can help us cut to the chase so we can act as we prefer to act and be who we prefer to be.

This is the third of three posts on motivation. The first one is here. The second one is here.

Existential Troublesome Knowledge

January 18, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

There’s troublesome knowledge—and then there’s existential troublesome knowledge.

The concept of troublesome knowledge was developed in academia and has since been applied and utilized in many academic and non-academic areas including scientific exploration, mathematics, politics, finance, history, and even writing.

To refresh, knowledge is troublesome when it:

conflicts with preexisting beliefs, especially if those beliefs are deeply held
is counterintuitive or seems illogical
is complex or difficult to understand
is disconcerting
requires a (transformational) change in self-perception

Troublesome knowledge within a field of inquiry or endeavor is one thing. But troublesome knowledge about the very nature of how we as humans function and our experience in and of the world—i.e., existential troublesome knowledge—is something else altogether. It’s troublesomeness squared, at the very least.

Many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves…are false. —Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal

Phenomenal Individualism and Its Implications

The pursuit of existential troublesome knowledge leads us to a number of inescapable conclusions that point in the direction of what has been called phenomenal individualism.

Our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality, which means things are not as they seem.
We cannot fully know or access the experience of any other person or creature.
What we don’t know far exceeds what we know, and no matter how much we learn, this will always be the case; yet we operate as if what we see is all there is (WYSIATI).
Not only is everything everywhere in motion all the time, but everything (including each of us) is a process, and everything is an interpretation.
Rather than being, or resembling, a mechanical system, each of us is a complex adaptive system, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
These factors all constrain our experience of being in the world—and there is no way out of these constraints—but they also create a space of possibilities, including the possibility of creating transformational change.

I believe the fact that our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality is the foundational threshold concept that we must get (incorporate into our mental model) in order to grasp the nature of our existence and experience: our space of possibilities.

You may recall that threshold concepts are likely to be, among other things:

Transformative: they lead to a significant shift in perspective that alters our sense of who we are as well as what we see, the way we see it, and how we feel and think about it.
Irreversible: they involve crossing a “threshold,” after which our previous understanding is no longer readily accessible.
Integrated: they reveal relationships and connections of aspects and ideas that were previously seen as unrelated.
Troublesome: they are difficult concepts to grasp and are therefore troublesome (see troublesome knowledge above).

The Space of Possibilities

What you or I make of the characteristics that circumscribe our existence—how we interpret them and work with them—depends on our mental model of the world, which includes our personality and our beliefs.

Do you find the idea that things are not only not as they seem, but never as they seem disturbing, confusing, trivial, or intriguing?

Is the idea that the extent of what we don’t know will always be far greater than the extent of what we know frustrating, obvious, or expansive?

Does knowing that everything you experience is the result of your brain’s interpretation of data that other brains are very likely interpreting differently make you curious or does it feel unnerving or even threatening?

The Thin Slice

It has become clear that our brains sample just a small bit of the surrounding physical world. —David Eagleman, Incognito

Although what Eagleman says is true, and it’s possible to grasp the concept intellectually, it is simply impossible for us to experience. That’s because our brain is continuously assessing and interpreting the data it has access to as if it is all the data there is. How else could it operate?

If we really understand and acknowledge this aspect of reality—that we are always working with limited information we treat as if it is all the information—we must realize that a likely majority of the conclusions and explanations we take for granted are inaccurate, sometimes extremely so. Our brain can’t take into account factors of which it is unaware. Yet there are always factors that affect us of which we and our brain are unaware.

The conclusions and explanations we arrive at daily are often good enough for us to get by—not so erroneous they threaten our survival. But that isn’t always the case. And even if they don’t threaten our survival, they can modify our mental model in ways that lead to maladaptive perceptions of our internal and external world. Taking all of our perceptions for granted can have detrimental effects on our experience and therefore on our actions in and reactions to the world, as well as our wellbeing, and our relationships with others.

We are not significantly different from humans of the past who didn’t believe in the existence of germs or bacteria because they couldn’t see them with the naked eye. Or humans who believed the earth was the center of the solar system. Or that the brain was a useless organ—or that we only use 10% of it. Or that our memories are accurate, and eye-witness accounts are reliable.

When more information was obtained, we modified our understanding of germs and the solar system and the brain and memory and eye-witness accounts. We have enough information now to modify our understanding of how we operate and how our experience is based on our interpretations.

If we don’t, or don’t want to, understand this thing called phenomenal individualism, we will constantly be at the effect of our mistaken beliefs, locked into a perceptual and experiential system within which we have very little room to maneuver and no room at all to create transformational change.

On the other hand, we can step into and take an active role within this space of possibilities.

More to come!

Sensing and Perceiving
the Physical World

December 27, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Sensation is the information the brain receives; perception is the result of the brain selecting, organizing, and interpreting this information. We don’t experience the sensory data directly; we experience the result of the brain’s processing of it.

As an aside, some people consider sensation to be a physical process, while perception is a psychological process. We may talk about and think about the physical and the psychological as being two distinct domains, but the brain that receives sensory data also does the interpreting that gives rise to perception. It doesn’t make a distinction between the physiological and the psychological in this or in any other regard.

An example of the difference between sensation and perception is prosopagnocia, a neurological disorder experienced by about one in 50 people, including neuroscientist Oliver Sacks. More commonly known as face blindness, it’s the inability to recognize faces, including one’s own in a mirror. Prosopagnocia is not a result of memory dysfunction or loss, impaired vision, or learning disabilities. The sensory data is input, so to speak, but the brain can’t interpret it so there is no perception.

While an interpretation—anyone’s, of anything—can be more or less accurate, it is always approximate. As Daniel Gilbert said, there isn’t a view from nowhere. All interpretations are based in a point of view from a particular brain at a particular point in time, so interpretations are inherently limited and slanted—and they vary both from individual to individual and within individuals at different times and under different circumstances.

“Normal” vs “Abnormal”

We tend to think that there is always a correct interpretation (perception) of an object or an event—that objects and events and their properties exist in an immutable state independent of us. And if we apply the appropriate lens, we believe we can achieve complete, or nearly complete, accuracy in our perception. At the same time, we tend to assume (operate as if) we are perceiving correctly.

So it’s tempting, not to mention less troublesome, to view others’ experiences or perceptions—especially when they don’t match ours—as missing the mark somehow. There’s an error in their, or their brain’s, calculations. One example is color blindness (also called color deficiency—see what I mean?), which has a genetic basis. Another example is tone deafness. There are many more, including:

Aphantasia: the inability to create a visual mental image of something that isn’t present.
Synesthesia: a sort of mixing up of sensory pathways in the brain (experiencing letters of the alphabet as having colors or associating a smell with a word).
Misophonia (aka soft sound sensitivity): a disorder in which certain repetitive sounds like gum chewing or paper crinkling automatically trigger powerful negative emotional responses.

And don’t forget prosopagnocia.

Clearly color blindness, aphantasia, synesthesia, misophonia, and other such conditions provide individuals with different experiences of reality than we might consider the norm. But does it make sense to say it’s wrong to experience the letter “M” as orange or the color green as smelling like cilantro? Richard Feynman had synesthesia and saw his equations in colors. Far from being wrong, this sounds pretty great to me, although that’s coming from a point of view of not having the experience.

Is there something wrong with that fellow over there who can’t mentally visualize a field of poppies or fluorescent purple mushrooms or a galloping horse? Aphantasia, unlike synesthesia, seems tragic to me; I can’t imagine I would be the same person if I didn’t have the vivid visual imagination I have. But how could one miss it if they never had it to begin with?

Is it wrong that the crinkling of paper or chewing of gum elicits a fight or flight response in that woman seated the next row over on the plane? She just seems to be overreacting and behaving rudely. Misophonia doesn’t seem desirable to me in any way. Of the few conditions I’ve included here, it’s the one that people who have it are perhaps most likely to view as being abnormal. That’s because it can cause problems beyond the purely sensory. It can create a lot of stress in personal relationships or interactions and in social settings. Many sufferers and the people they interact with tend to think it’s a psychological problem, meaning they could control their response if they tried harder. Or they need therapy. Nevertheless, it is an example of the brain sensing and perceiving (interpreting) sensory data and providing a resulting experience. It’s no different from any other instance of sensory processing.

External vs. Internal

The conditions described above all relate to the processing, interpretation, and experiencing of external sensory data. Enough research has been done on how the brain processes external sensory data to allow scientists to map the parts of the brain associated with them.

But there’s still much to learn about how the brain processes internal sensory information. How does it sense and organize feedback from internal organs to regulate hunger, satiation, thirst, nausea, pain, breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, etc.?

Scientists think that internal sensing may be more complicated than external sensing because, according to cell biologist Chen Ran:

[I]nternal organs convey information through mechanical forces, hormones, nutrients, toxins, temperature, and more—each of which can act on multiple organs and translate into multiple physiological responses. Mechanical stretch, for example, signals the need to urinate when it occurs in the bladder, but translates into satiation when it happens in the stomach and triggers a reflex to stop inhalation in the lungs.

How does the brain determine (interpret) sensory data so that we have an accurate enough experience to allow us to respond appropriately? Researchers do have some leads they’re following as they attempt to get a handle on the coding of internal senses throughout the brain. One motivation for this area of study concerns treatment for diseases that arise from internal sensory system malfunctions—i.e. abnormal feedback.

Of course this is a bit oversimplified since this so-called feedback involves sensation, perception, and interpretation. Feedback might relate to external or internal sensory data or what we think of physiological or psychological sensory data. No matter what it relates to, however, there’s feedback that occurs at the unconscious level and feedback that we are aware of at the conscious level. Most feedback occurs at the unconscious level and doesn’t make it into conscious awareness.

What We’re Aware of

When feedback does make it into conscious awareness, we have thoughts about it (our interpretation, usually in the form of an explanation).

We also experience an emotion, which neuroscientist Antonio Damasio would refer to as a homeostatic indicator. Emotions constitute a sort of personalized, constantly updated, running report to consciousness, indicating the status quo of the organism—as the brain sees it—both internally and externally. This is pretty damn amazing, when you think about it.

If the interpreter (see last post) is like a play-by-play announcer calling a game (your life) over the radio, emotion is your response to what you perceive to be happening both on the field (externally) and internally. There’s lots of information available to you. Are you tuned in?