Mental Lens Archives - Farther to Go!

Butterfly Nets, Smartphones, and Coffee Shops

August 8, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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.

Is Empathy Even a Thing?

November 22, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

My post on theory of mind last week elicited several comments and some good discussions about empathy.

What do you think empathy is? How would you define it? Do you consider yourself to be empathetic? Do you think empathy is a personality trait? Can it be developed? Where does it come from to begin with? Can you tell if someone else is—or is being—empathetic? How? How does one express or demonstrate empathy? Are there different kinds of empathy? Is empathy always positive and/or constructive?

If you don’t have clear and immediate answers to these questions, you’re not alone. Neither do the people researching empathy nor the rest of us.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Empathy

Not knowing what we’re talking about is a common trait of humans. So the lack of even a consensus agreement on what empathy is doesn’t stop anyone from studying it or making assertions about it.

What are the many ways researchers define empathy? Sometimes empathy is regarded as a trait of a person, meaning that some people have more or less of it as part of their personality. Sometimes, researchers are interested not in individual people’s characteristics but rather in their behaviors, particularly how they treat other people. A therapist might reflect back a client’s feelings with “I hear you saying you are feeling overwhelmed right now,” or someone might hug a distressed friend, and such behaviors might be considered demonstrations of empathy. Sometimes empathy is viewed as having certain emotional reactions, such as getting sad when someone else is sad. Sometimes it is the skill of being able to read other people’s emotions from their face, voice, or body language. Sometimes it’s taking another’s perspective by trying to imagine why they feel and act as they do. Sometimes empathy is a very broad notion that seems to be not too different from being a very nice, considerate person, while sometimes it is defined very narrowly, for example as the activation of certain brain areas when seeing someone being poked by a needle. —Judith A. Hall and Rachel Schwartz, Society for Personality and Social Psychology

My favorite dictionary’s definition of empathy is:

the ability to identify with or understand the perspective, experiences, or motivations of another individual and to comprehend and share another individual’s emotional state.

That’s a pretty good definition of theory of mind, which I’ve already expressed my opinion of. The secondary definition is more akin to what I think really passes for empathy:

the projection of one’s own feelings or thoughts onto something else, such as an object in a work of art or a character in a novel or film [or another person].

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert talks about a concept called presentism that makes it difficult for us to imagine feeling different from the way we’re feeling right now. In the context of affective forecasting, he’s referring to feeling different in the future. But the same principle applies in regard to empathy. We can’t actually know how someone else is feeling—or how they felt—about something. All we have are our own feelings. Is projecting them onto others—with all the assumptions that go along with that—really helpful?

Can You Relate?

There’s an anecdote I’ve told a number of times over the years of an incident that occurred when I was a child. The story, when I tell it straight, generates emotional responses in listeners: they imagine how they might feel in that situation. That’s all they can do. Almost no one can imagine how I felt, though, unless and until I describe my reactions. And even then they may be able to understand—if they know me, they can make the connection between the adult me and the child me—but most of them can’t relate.

Roger Schank (Tell Me a Story) says that understanding consists of the brain locating a similar personal story to the one being listened to and interpreting the other’s experience based on our own experience. He adds that if we don’t have a similar experience, we literally can’t understand the other person. (Also it’s System 1, the unconscious, that is locating what it considers a relevant story, and System 1 is far more interested in efficiency than accuracy.)

Are we better off assuming we get what’s going on with other people, when it’s more likely than not that we don’t, or might we actually make more headway in communicating, connecting, and solving problems by acknowledging that we really don’t know, but we want to, and then asking how we might be able to find out?

My clients tease me about writing a book titled Is That Even a Thing? I’m just going with the flow now.

In the Groove: Meta Mindsets

November 5, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Our brain looks out at the world through its own unique lens, which is called a mental model. The brain creates our mental model to quantify and qualify what’s normal in the world for us so it can determine the actions we should we take.

Our mental model is unconscious, so we can’t examine it directly to find out about it. We can only gain information from inference—by observing our actions in response to different situations and then reasoning backward a bit.

We do know our mental model consists of several different mindsets that operate together or separately under various sets of circumstances. A mindset is a set of ideas, beliefs, or attitudes with which we approach situations or through which we view them. Mindsets have something in common with habits since they tend to be habitual, which means they are mostly unconscious.

Some mindsets are:

In all three examples, one mindset isn’t automatically better than the other. It would be great if we readily shifted between, say, Be Good (focused on mastering a skill or body of knowledge and demonstrating that skill) and Get Better (focused on continued improvement of skill or knowledge rather than on performance) based on the mindset that was most appropriate to the situation. Unfortunately, we don’t tend to do that. The brain likes certainty and ease and so it prefers to lean in one direction or the other.

In the Groove

Furthermore, leaning in one direction in one area generally leads to leaning in that same direction in other areas. So we’re more likely to find Soldier, Be Good, and Productivity mindsets clustered together in one person and Scout, Get Better, and Creativity mindsets clustered together in another. One mindset reinforces the others. That’s what makes shifting back and forth between them so much more difficult.

Other mental processes and ways of thinking also tend to lean in the direction of one cluster or the other. All this clustering results in what I call the Meta Mindset: an overarching perspective that influences not only our responses to the events and situations we encounter but also our general attitudes and our beliefs about what’s possible for us to do, be, have, or create.

The two Meta Mindsets are Experiment and Production. Here are some of their qualities and attributes:

The Production mindset is the default because it requires less System 2 attention. It’s easy for all of us to fall back on it. Indeed, it’s difficult for some of us to ever get out of it.

There are definitely occasions when Production mindset is necessary and desirable. But the situation between these two mindsets is akin to the situation between System 1 (the unconscious) and System 2 (consciousness). Because we operate on autopilot approximately 95% of the time, both System 1 and the Production mindset are dominant. System 2 and the Experiment mindset require conscious attention which is costly in terms of energy and is also less available.

But System 2 and the Experiment mindset are what make humans unique as a species. They are also essential to the process of transformational change and creating and enjoying a satisfying and meaningful life. So it’s important for us to use them to harness the power and direction of System 1 and the Production mindset. It’s an important part of learning how to use our brain instead of letting our brain use us.

Note: Like most things, Meta Mindsets aren’t completely black or white (at least not for everyone). I’m developing a tool where you’ll be able to rate yourself on a continuum for each of the 15 items listed above. I’ll link to it in a future blog post.

Conspiracy: Making Distinctions

June 2, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

While the brain is quite good at categorizing, it is not very adept at making distinctions. (Much like the human brain, neither is Google.)

We encounter this problem in the area of personality or temperament. Just because behavior X is a characteristic of a particular group of people doesn’t mean that every individual in that group will demonstrate behavior X. Believing that everyone in a group demonstrates all of the same characteristics is the basis of stereotyping.

So the problem also routinely arises in regard to ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, age, and political preference, among others.

Categorizing is an automatic System 1 (unconscious) process. Distinguishing is a System 2 (conscious) process that requires intention, attention, and effort. Categorizing is easy; confirmation bias makes it feel right. Eventually tracks are laid down in the brain that carry us along effortlessly. We have no reason to question our perception. Distinguishing is hard and generates cognitive dissonance, which does not feel good.

Making distinctions after those tracks have been laid down in the brain is called change. Changing our perception of another person or group of people may alter our perception of ourselves, as well. Our sense of self is a construct; our beliefs are one of the things that contribute to that construct. And our brain takes our sense of self very seriously. Changing a belief, therefore, is not a small matter.

What Is Up with Conspiracists?

All of that is by way of getting to some recent thoughts about conspiracy theories currently being floated and about those who have bought into them so completely that they see “evidence” for them everywhere. These people appear to be living in a very different world than I’m living in. If I didn’t already know something about the extent to which we create our own reality, I would have concluded either they are delusional or I am.

But I know that our brains do not allow us to experience reality first-hand or directly. We have to be trained even to be able to see what’s out there. So while there are no doubt extreme conspiracy theorists who are—or border on being—delusional, most of them are simply processing the world differently from the way I process it. And that interests me.

When I started exploring the subject from a psycho-social, neurological, philosophical, and historical perspective, I accessed a few resources I already had. And then I turned to Google, which does a great job of categorizing everything related to conspiracy, but is absolutely abysmal at distinguishing between conspiracy and conspiracy theory.

They are definitely not the same thing. Conspiracies do exist. Conspiracy theories are speculations. Furthermore, the word theory has a broad definition. A conspiracy theory is not the equivalent of a scientific theory, which is the result of research, evidence, and consensus. Good scientists modify or even abandon their theories when new information is uncovered. Conspiracists either reject conflicting information out of hand or expand the theory to incorporate it. More importantly, scientific theories are falsifiable; conspiracy theories are not.

Understanding the Concepts

Here are some definitions (from freedictionary.com):

Conspiracy: (1) an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act, (2) an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action, (3) a joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.

Examples of conspiracies: Watergate, The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the 1980s Savings and Loan Crisis

Conspiracy Theory: a theory seeking to explain a disputed case or matter as a plot by a secret group or alliance rather than an individual or isolated act.

Examples of conspiracy theories: JFK’s Assassination (various), Moon Landing (didn’t happen), Illuminati (alien shapeshifters who run the world)

Looking for Answers

Some of the questions I’m hoping to answer for myself include:

Who believes conspiracy theories? Are some people more temperamentally inclined to believe them than others?
If a large percentage of a population believes in conspiracy theories, does that have an effect on actual conspiracies (committing or uncovering them, for example)?
What’s going on in the brains of conspiracists vs. non-conspiracists?
Are different groups of people more inclined to believe particular conspiracy theories than others—and does it matter?
How do conspiracy theories affect real-world outcomes?
How can we distinguish possible from highly improbable conspiracies?

I’ll share what I learn. I’m compiling some useful articles on the topic that I will eventually put into a shareable format for anyone who is interested.

I believe this is a timely subject that bridges brain, behavior, and change. And I hope that exploring it may lead to some measure of understanding. We could surely use more of that in our troubled world. What do you think?

You Can’t Live Anywhere
BUT in a Bubble

October 28, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Pesky Four-Letter Word

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

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

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

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

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

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

Semantics, you may say. So what?

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

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

My Particular Bubble

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

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

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

Isn’t that interesting?

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