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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Sensing and Perceiving
the Physical World

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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?

Making Sense of
Sensory Information

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On a continuous basis, our brain receives multiple streams of exteroceptive sensory data about the physical world and other people. At the same time it receives a steady stream of interoceptive data about us: our physical, mental, and emotional states.

We don’t have the necessary machinery, and we wouldn’t even want it, to process carefully all of the amount of information that we’re constantly bombarded with. —Susana Martinez-Conde, neuroscientist

We have to filter it, sort it, and make sense of it. The lenses or filters through which our brain views and processes the streams of information include:

  • Our mental model, which consists of our personality (much of which is genetically determined), our beliefs, and our experiences.
  • Our current situation or circumstances.
  • What we know or don’t know that’s relevant in the moment.

All of this data processing takes place in an environment in which everything everywhere is in motion all the time, everything is a process, and everything is an interpretation.

Perception vs. Reality

However, the previous statement, while true, does not reflect our experience. Our experience is that the world is full of relatively stable things that are inherently meaningful (that is, we’re not interpreting them; they simply are as we perceive them to be).

My brain manages to create for me the experience of a constant, unchanging world through which I move. —Chris Frith, neuropsychologist

Our brain creates this illusion and many, many more, all of which we take for granted. But in fact, nothing is static, fixed, or permanent; nothing is unchanging.

Because nothing is fixed or unchanging, there are no things—tangible or intangible—there are only processes. Each of us is a process composed of multiple processes: purely physical processes (blood flow, digestion) as well as personal identity, emotions, memories, thoughts, and relationships. Processes, both physiological and psychological, are a result of the multiple interactions (motion) of complex adaptive systems. Each of us is continuously in the making, becoming, being constituted.

Identity as a programmatic—but not deterministic—process welcomes innovation through small, recurring changes. Under these metaphysical assumptions, a meaningful life is less about finding your ‘real’ self than expanding its boundaries. —Celso Vieira, philosopher

The solar system, climate, ecosystems, life cycles, plants, and also the device you’re reading this on, your vehicle, and the mug you drink coffee or tea from are processes, too. Some of them just happen to be much longer processes than the process of you or the process of me.

The Interpreter Explains Everything

As previously stated, in order to make sense of what is happening externally and internally the brain has to interpret the data it’s exposed to.

[Your brain is] locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what’s out there in the world. There’s no lights inside the skull. There’s no sound either. All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception—figuring out what’s there—has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world. —Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, University of Sussex

Since the conscious brain only processes about 40 bits of information at a time, it has no idea of what the unconscious is dealing with. Thousands (perhaps millions) of brain activities go on relatively independently of one another and all outside the realm of conscious experience. Once these brain activities are expressed [action, thought, emotion], the expressions become events that the conscious system takes note of and that must be explained.

That is the job of an interpreter, so-called, in the left hemisphere of the brain that essentially explains us to ourselves. The interpreter constructs theories about why we act and behave the way we do based on the limited and fragmentary data available to it. (It’s a little bit like listening to a play-by-play announcer calling a game over the radio.)

Our conscious life is essentially an “afterthought” constructed by the interpreter.

In truth, when we set out to explain our actions, they are all post hoc explanations using post hoc observations with no access to nonconscious processing. Not only that, our left brain fudges things a bit to fit into a makes-sense story. Explanations are all based on what makes it into our consciousness, but actions and the feelings happen before we are consciously aware of them—and most of them are the results of nonconscious processes, which will never make it into the explanations. The reality is, listening to people’s explanations of their actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a waste of time. (Michael Gazzaniga)

If you recall from the last article, our brain is more concerned with utility than with accuracy. As a result, the most satisfying explanations are the ones that are simple, straightforward, and unambiguous. If we find a satisfying explanation, we accept it as true and move on. Consider the implications.

The Path of Least Resistance Is Paved with False Affordances

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In considering how desire does or does not come easily to us, I’ve suggested we can categorize our lives as:

  • Things we have that we dislike
  • Things we have that we like
  • Things we don’t have that we want (desire)

Things can be tangible, of course (money, weight), but they are just as likely to be intangible (time, stress).

The category of things we have that we don’t like can really get under our skin. Things in this category make us feel bad. Since we tend to believe that it’s the amount of something we have that’s causing us to feel bad, we seek to address the feeling by getting more or less of whatever the thing is. For example:

  • More time
  • Less weight
  • More productivity
  • Less procrastination
  • More money
  • Less stress
  • More happiness
  • Less negative thinking

These and dozens more topics are widely addressed in books and workshops by various experts who offer tools and techniques to help us get the right amount of the thing we want more or less of.

I can’t speak to the soundness of any specific tools or techniques. But I can point out an elephant-sized problem in the room. No matter what we’re trying to get more or less of, what we’re really aiming for is to feel less bad. Feeling less bad might sound like a good or at least harmless objective to aim for, but that is far from the case, for two big reasons.

Psychological Tension

If we’re focused on getting more or less of what we have that we don’t like in order to feel less bad we are operating based on psychological tension. When it comes to relieving psychological tension it almost doesn’t matter what tool or technique we use, we are quite likely to make enough progress to get to the point where we do, in fact, feel less bad.

But given that wanting to feel less bad is what was motivating us, once we get there we no longer feel the push to keep taking the action that got us there. So we eventually end up back where we started with the erroneous impression (explanation) that the tool or technique doesn’t really work or stopped working or isn’t for us. In reality, it worked just fine to get us feeling less bad. At least temporarily.

The Path of Least Resistance

The other problem with aiming to feel less bad is that it sets us up to go for tools and techniques that appeal to us because they seem familiar or easy or understandable: variations of tools or techniques we’ve tried before or that don’t seem like much of a stretch. I call those false affordances because they appear to offer a means or method to create change, but in fact they are highly unlikely to have that effect.

If we want to feel less bad, we are not going to go for something that seems difficult, or tedious, or just “not us,” meaning not the kind of thing we find appealing to do or use because, hey, that will make us feel bad.

Changing the status quo is not easy or comfortable, however. Employing only the tools or techniques we find appealing results in choosing the path of least resistance, i.e. choosing the status quo.

In terms of behavior change, false affordances are the tools, techniques, methods, etc. that don’t challenge us but instead fit relatively seamlessly into what we’re already doing. They give us a false impression of proactively attempting to resolve a perceived problem. Instead of helping us change the status quo, false affordances actively help us maintain it.

A Non-Starter

Wanting to feel less bad is not an indicator of a desire to create positive, intentional, significant, and sustained change to begin with. And feeling less bad is actually fairly easy to achieve, although it is always temporary and rarely satisfying. But even worse, being driven by feeling less bad can decrease our ability to enjoy the things we have that we do like not to mention completely obliterate our ability to identify things we want.

To summarize: feeling less bad has absolutely nothing to do with juicy desired outcomes, aspirations, or creating transformational change. It doesn’t even have anything to do with feeling good. As a motivator, it’s strictly a dead-end path.

Fourth post in a series on affordances. The previous posts can be found here(1), here(2), and here(3).

Stairs to Nowhere:
False, Hidden, and Perceptible Affordances

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Stairs are an example of an affordance. They provide “an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.” The action possibility they provide is the ascent or descent of an incline in order to gain access to another floor or level: moving between the sidewalk and a porch, between the first floor and the second floor, between the ground floor and a basement, or in some airports, between the tarmac and a plane.

Stairs to nowhere, however—of which there are more head-scratching examples than you might imagine—suggest an action possibility, but they do not allow access to anything. That makes them a “false” affordance.

As William Graver, who came up with the concept, put it:

A false affordance is an apparent affordance that does not have any real function, meaning that the [agent] perceives nonexistent possibilities for action.

While in many cases you could climb a staircase to nowhere, you would not actually get anywhere by doing so.

In addition to false affordances, Graver also identified what he called “hidden” affordances:

A hidden affordance indicates that there are possibilities for action, but these are not perceived by the [agent].

Graver appears to be talking about alternative uses you are not aware of for objects in the environment. Recently I used pliers to extend my reach so I could lift a chain link over a hook in the ceiling. My first thought was to use a bamboo stick like the ones I stake plants with, but they’re out in the garage. The pliers are in the kitchen. That isn’t really among the tool’s intended uses, but I use pliers for a lot of things so it wasn’t much of a stretch. There may have been other objects I could have used, but any other possibilities for action stayed hidden. If I hadn’t thought of the pliers, that possibility for action would have been hidden, too. Instead, the pliers in this case actually became a “perceptible” affordance.

Perceptible refers to the actions you think an object affords, whether or not those actions were intended and whether or not they are, in fact, available. In A Tale of Two Kitties, I described my cats’ apparent perception that bookcases afford an opportunity for climbing, while my perception is that they are a place to store books, which is what I use them for. (A sturdy staircase to nowhere could afford you the possibility for cardiovascular exercise if you were so inclined and perceived it as such.)

Affordances can—and have been—more extensively categorized. “Real” affordances are another distinction that is sometimes made. But given that affordances are relationships rather than properties of objects in the environment, the categories of false, hidden, and perceptible are sufficient for our discussion.

Creating Transformational Change

If you want to create significant, sustained change—which requires ongoing and repetitive action—you will have a greater chance of success if you find effective affordances to assist you.

As I said in the last post on affordances, everything everywhere is in motion all the time, everything is a process, and everything is an interpretation. You are a process that’s already in progress, on a trajectory with a great deal of momentum behind it. The only way to create change is by modifying your trajectory. And the only way to modify your trajectory is by modifying your mental model, which consists primarily of your beliefs and your operating system. How do you make those modifications? Essentially, how do you change your brain? You change it via the ongoing and repetitive actions you take. That’s neuroplasticity in a nutshell.

The impetus for change is your dissatisfaction with the status quo: an outcome you’re getting that is not the outcome you want. Your desire for change is to a very great extent determined by the level or extent of your dissatisfaction with the outcome in question. Low or moderate dissatisfaction will not motivate you to make significant, sustained change.

What is the most likely source of the outcome you’re getting that you don’t want (or an outcome you want that you’re not getting)?

If you’re like most people, you probably fail to identify the source correctly, which then leads you to look for solutions in all the wrong places. You may believe that if you are not getting the outcomes you want, something is wrong or broken. So you attempt to figure out what is wrong and fix that.

But Nothing Is Wrong

That’s right: nothing is wrong. The source of most problems you’re attempting to solve can be found in your operating system, which is to say that your operating system is working just fine to get you precisely the outcomes you’re getting.

If you want to get a different outcome, you need to determine and undertake a course of action that differs from the autopilot actions you have been taking.

You will most likely gravitate toward actions (solutions) that appeal to your operating system/mental model, but that will only serve to maintain the status quo. It’s a variation on the theme of doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. You may experience some temporary relief of psychological tension just because you’re doing something, but that will almost invariably be followed by a return to the previous behavior once the tension is relieved.

Whatever action you do identify to change your current trajectory and get a different outcome, it won’t be as appealing as the actions you normally take. In fact, it will probably feel contrived, which is why I call such actions—or sets of actions—contrivances.

Contrivances fall into the category of hidden affordances. They afford you the opportunity to modify your mental model and your trajectory and get the outcomes you want. But before they can do that for you, you have to perceive them as such—like I did with the pliers—so they become perceptible.

Third post in a series on affordances. Still to come: the allure of false affordances and our resistance to contrivances.

Butterfly Nets, Smartphones, and Coffee Shops

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In  A Tale of Two Kitties (my last post), I shared my current working definition of affordance: “an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.”

This doesn’t deviate radically from other definitions, but it does explicitly identify the three most salient aspects of the concept as it pertains to creating sustained change. An affordance offers or suggest a possible action that an agent—you or I—might take within an environment.

Affordances are like obstacles in that it is an agent with a goal or a desired outcome, preferably both, who interprets something in the environment as either an affordance or an obstacle. A boulder in the middle of a road is just a boulder in the middle of a road. It isn’t an obstacle unless there’s something you really, really want on the other side of it.

Similarly, a fitness center located across the street from where you live is simply one of several businesses in the area unless you have a strong desire to increase your own fitness or level of vitality, in which case you identify it as an affordance. (If it’s occupying the space where you want to establish a hair salon, well then it’s an obstacle.)

Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties. —Don Norman, researcher, professor, author

Affordances, like obstacles, are interpreted as such by your brain and brought to your attention based on their salience (importance) to you. If you get hungry while on a long drive, food becomes salient, and restaurants you might otherwise ignore become affordances. After you’ve eaten and are no longer hungry, food becomes less salient, and restaurants—if you even notice them—are once more just restaurants. But salience isn’t only based on your immediate internal state or external conditions/circumstances.

It’s (Always) All about the Action

The nature of reality is that everything everywhere is in motion all the time, everything is a process, and everything is an interpretation. The brain continuously interprets both internal and external sensory data in order to determine what action to take next. It bases its interpretations on our mental model of the world, which it has built up over our lifetime largely as a result of our actions—especially the actions we repeat.

Let’s say you regularly frequent a chain of coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Maybe you’re particularly fond of iced vanilla lattes. And maybe the coffee shops are also places where you get together with friends or groups. (When I was in various writers’ groups, we tended to hold our meetings in either bookstores or coffee shops.) Repeatedly spending time in Starbucks increases its salience. It’s an affordance that offers you the possible actions of getting the coffee you enjoy or meeting and connecting with other people.

So you are much more likely to notice a Starbucks—and by “you,” I mean your brain—and its potential affordances than someone for whom Starbucks doesn’t have the same importance. Your brain has paid attention to your repeated past actions, and as a result, it focuses your attention on current or future possibilities for action in your environment by identifying affordances.

I like to use the image of an infinity loop to distinguish between “you” (the agent) and “not you” (your environment) to illustrate the dynamic and ongoing engagement between you and your environment.

Each of us is engaged in this continuous interaction; it’s anything but static. But our tendency to perceive the world as being far more fixed than it is prevents us from being attuned to the dynamic nature of our relationship with the world and can easily blind us to the possibilities—both positive and negative—within it.

Everything Is an Interpretation

The affordances described here and in my previous post are generally positive. But in and of themselves, affordances are neither positive nor negative. Given that they describe relationships, they can not only be interpreted differently by different people, they can also be interpreted differently by the same person at different times or in different circumstances. While a smartphone, for example, offers access (to others, to information, to assistance, etc.), it can also offer unlimited distractions that may provide immediate gratification but divert you from more substantive or satisfying activities.

But maybe, in the moment, a distraction is what you want (say, cat videos or a game) while you’re waiting to board your plane or for a friend to show up. Or maybe you need to get your car towed. Or you want to find out if the yarn store has the specialty yarn you need to complete an important knitting project. A smartphone can help you get what you really want (a desired outcome) or it can get in the way of you getting what you want. That knitting project won’t complete itself while you’re playing Wordle.

A purse left unattended in a shopping cart suggests an action to a thief—or a would-be thief—that it hopefully doesn’t suggest to you or me.

It Was Never Just about the Butterflies

Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World, among many other books, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times that was published last month. He says:

[O]ne thing I have not yet discarded is the butterfly net. I carry it in part to catch and release the few things I can’t identify on the wing but mostly because of the way it changes the way I walk.…I don’t know if the same is true for birders with their binoculars…but for me, walking with the butterfly net alters my perceptions. It produces a state of mind, a kind of undifferentiated awareness otherwise difficult to attain. It is a puzzle to me why this is the case, why, that is, I can’t simply learn from walking with the net and then put it away and transfer what I know to walking without it.

Perhaps it has to do with the way the net declares my intention, which is to apprehend what is in front of me. Walking with the net is like reading with a pencil in hand. The pencil means you want to catch the sense of what you are reading. You intend to underline, put check marks and exclamation points in the margin and make the book your own. You may think you can read with the same quality of attention while lying in bed at night without a pencil, but you can’t. The mind notices your posture and models itself accordingly.

The butterfly net, when used intentionally to generate a specific state of awareness—and likewise the binoculars around one’s neck or the pencil (in my case, pen, highlighter, and Post-It® flags)—are what I call contrivances. Contrivances are affordances—generally positive in nature. Next time I’ll describe the three different types of affordances and where contrivances fit into that scheme.

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