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.
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