Mind Archives - Page 2 of 31

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?

Making Sense of
Sensory Information

December 21, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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.

Our Brain Creates Our Experience

December 12, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

As Rodney King famously asked in 1992:

Can we all get along?

While we may accept the notion that people disagree with each other all the time, we tend to believe and operate as if we’re right and the people with whom we disagree are wrong. We also tend to believe and operate as if we all have access to the same information and the same thinking processes, and if we just tried hard enough, applied ourselves correctly, we could get on the theoretical same page. We think the truth is out there, and we could all see it if we wanted to.

That’s very kumbaya, but since it’s not in fact the case, believing in and operating from that perspective is detrimental to our collective wellbeing and possibly to the survival of the planet.

We are wired not to experience the world as it is, but rather to apprehend it just accurately enough to function effectively in it. And contrary to the perception of many, including David Williams, as expressed in The Trickster Brain, this isn’t a design flaw.

Instead of being elegantly designed—the most efficient and marvelous epitome of creation—the brain is in many ways a botched construction job leading to endless contradictory impulses as the new and old parts of the brain attempt to work together.

Williams goes on to quote neuroscientist David J. Linden of John Hopkins as declaring the brain to be:

… a cobbled together mess…quirky, inefficient, and bizarre…not an optimized, generic problem-solving machine, but rather a weird agglomeration of ad hoc solutions that accumulated throughout millions of years of evolutionary history.

If you’ve tried to get your brain to do one thing, but it keeps on doing something you don’t want it to do, you might be tempted to agree with these assessments. Or if you’ve realized your memory of something is oddly distorted, missing altogether, or missing significant details. Or if you’ve been absolutely certain about something that proved not to be the case.

The Brain According to Linden?

Linden published a book in 2008 titled The Accidental Mind. I haven’t read it but part of his agenda appears to be a refutation of the idea that the brain was designed—something I’m totally in agreement with. I would probably enjoy the book: he has an engaging writing style and he covers topics of interest to me. But—and it’s a big but—you can’t describe the brain the way he’s described it (inefficient, not optimized, bizarre, etc.) unless you have in mind some other way you believe the brain should be.

I think that’s not an uncommon belief. It doesn’t, however, add anything useful to the conversation. We weren’t present throughout the course of the brain’s evolution. So how it developed, or how it should have developed not only can’t be known by us, it’s also essentially irrelevant. All we can do right now is acknowledge that this is the brain we have and put neuroscientists to the tasks of identifying how it work. Then once we figure out what we want, we can use the brain effectively to get more of that (individually and collectively) and less of what we don’t want.

We Perceive both Less than Is There, and More than Is There

It turns out that it’s actually more functional to have a brain that screens out from our awareness most of the sensory data it encounters and streams a stripped-down version into our conscious awareness. Our brain is more concerned with utility than with accuracy, which is why our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality.

Our experience of the world and our experiences of self within the world are forms of perception, a form of hallucination that’s incredibly useful in staying alive. We perceive both less than is there, and more than is there. —Anil Seth, neuroscientist

Consider the way the brain processes external visual stimuli and turns them into what we see. We have no conscious awareness of the brain’s complex visual processing operations that involve multiple pathways and the coordination of many different parts of the cerebral cortex; all we are aware of is the result, which seems much more straightforward than it actually is. We’re also not aware of our visual blind spot (everyone has one) because our brain does such a good job of filling it in with what we expect to see in that location.

You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you. —David Eagleman, Incognito

The result is that in terms of what we see, both figuratively and literally, we miss quite a lot of detail, are easily fooled by visual and other illusions, fail to notice significant changes, and may not observe something that’s directly in front of us. This is somewhat shocking, really, given that over 10 million of the 11 million bits of information our brain processes moment-to-moment are devoted to visual perception.

Everything Is an Interpretation

May 26, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In the world in which we live:

everything everywhere is in motion all the time
everything is a process
everything is an interpretation

These three facts are interrelated, but they tend to be descriptive of what’s occurring at different scales.

The fact that everything everywhere is in motion all the time is a somewhat abstract concept that has significant practical implications. In and of itself, though, it’s difficult to grasp or experience directly.

The fact that everything is a process, while less abstract, can also be a bit slippery. We’re used to thinking of things as . . . things. It’s easier to recognize organic processes—or processes that involve people—than it is to recognize inorganic processes. Nevertheless, there are no things, only processes.

The fact that everything is an interpretation has moment-to-moment, immediate impact. Interpretations are the foundation of every single one of our experiences. But that doesn’t mean this concept is any easier to grasp.

The limited capacity of ordinary consciousness—aka the 40-bit brain—makes it much too slow to catch any of the interpretations the unconscious is making as it is making them. It wouldn’t be particularly useful to be able to do so. The unconscious has to interpret everything, from the most basic incoming audio and visual signals to your heart rate to the responses of strangers you encounter to the results of an election in a foreign country.

The unconscious makes these interpretations—which neuroscientist Anil Seth and others have called “best guesses”—so quickly that ordinary consciousness accepts them as reality. Even when we know or believe this to be the case, we have an extremely difficult time distinguishing between the facts of an event and our brain’s interpretation of it.

Several clients who have completed multiple iterations of the What Else Is This Telling Me? exercise can attest to this difficulty and were willing to share their experiences.

Donna

Something happened.

But what? No, not that, that’s an interpretation. No, not that, either; that’s probably a hidden belief. So what happened?

This is a question that’s been bouncing around in my brain for the last several months. I always thought I knew what happened. And what my interpretation was. And what my belief behind it was. I mean, I’m a licensed counselor. I’ve taught this to graduate students. Maybe I was wrong?

It’s been interesting and exasperating to break down to the grain what happened. I don’t think I have a firm grasp of it yet, but I’m getting there—a grain at a time. Wysiati (what you see is all there is)!

Kelly

What was that event? It just tumbled into interpretation and took flight. It seemed as though I was tangling with a bucking bronco that did not want to be tamed or understood. It seems to me that all these pieces of me don’t get out much. I’m trying to pry them open, if only a little: event identification practice . . . interpretation practice . . . it’s been part of the conversation I hope to keep having. I want to know what’s running the program.

Leslie

I think the idea that has become the most clear for me is that the mental model cannot be changed without changing a belief or beliefs that create it. Since we’re mostly unaware of our beliefs, the exercise is a way to expose some of those beliefs. And it has taken all those iterations for me to see how the interpretations, the actions, and the beliefs have to relate to each other.

Adam

It’s powerful and surprising how deep simple reactions go and how hard it is to isolate events, interpretations, and beliefs!

Additionally, it has been hard to ask questions about it for me. I didn’t seem to form the questions, much less make the next step to pursue what the questions might bring up. I had my doubts about how clear I was about how I was doing the different parts of the exercise, but I didn’t clarify my doubts until after about three times trying to complete it.

Debra

In my cohort, on our fourth go round, I finally thought I’d nailed what an interpretation of an event was. I mean, it just has to be simple, right? Nope. I was frustrated. Wanted to quit. Almost started to cry. Even raised my voice a bit.

My cohort leapt in to support me to keep going, asking questions with genuine curiosity—not just for me to see something, but because they were also getting closer to understanding.

When I broke through the frustration, I felt like I/we had made it over a big chasm together. My cohort had not only cheered me on, but they’d jumped into the trench with me. And we made it to the other side victorious.

Why?

If this is so hard to get, which it is for everyone, why go through all the blood, sweat, and tears? If everyone’s brain operates this way—interpreting events so swiftly that, consciously, we conflate the interpretation with the event—why not just accept it and move on?

Our interpretations determine both our emotional responses and our actions. If we’re always satisfied with our actions (and reactions), we can just carry on and not concern ourselves with these matters. But if we’d like to react differently or take different actions in the future, we need to understand what’s driving both our emotional responses and our behavior.

The bottom line is that if we want our brain to make a different choice in the future, we first have to modify our mental model. This is called structural neuroplasticity. Otherwise, all the brain has to go on to interpret events is the connections made by our existing mental model; therefore, we are bound to keep getting the same outcomes over and over again.

Check out Something’s Happening Here and What [Else] Is It Telling Me? for additional information. More to come on this topic.

Bite Me! The Anger Post

November 25, 2022 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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):

annoyance
rage
frustration
contrariness
bitterness
fury
irritation
resentment
resistance
vengeance
agitation
outrage
disgruntlement
vexation
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.