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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

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).

A Tale of Two Kitties

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Consider the concept of affordance: what exactly is an affordance and why should you care? I think I could write an article on all the different definitions of affordance. In fact, I would be surprised if someone hasn’t already done that. So instead of first defining the word, let’s begin with my cats.

When I adopted Naima (pictured above) in November 2010, she was three months old, and the apartment complex where I live did not require cats to be either leashed or kept inside. My previous cat, Tashi, a California transplant, had decided early in life that she was an indoor/outdoor cat. Her petite size was misleading. Back in California, she acquired a series of formidable panther boyfriends and regularly hung out with the small herd of deer on the hill below.

For one unforgettable 30-day period in 2008 I had to keep her indoors while she recovered from a near-death experience. I barely survived the ordeal. She wouldn’t stop yowling to get out. She even attempted to excavate a tunnel underneath the closed cat door.

I was determined that Naima would be strictly an indoor cat. Given that she was also an only cat—and I was her only person—I endeavored to make the environment cat-friendly and appealing while maintaining certain boundaries.

 

Preparations for her arrival included the purchase of cat basics: carrier, litter/litter box, food/food bowls, lots of toys, and a bed. They also included a 72” tall cat tree for the living room with a perch on top, a shorter but wider cat tree for my bedroom, and a few smaller scratching posts.

Cats and kittens of all sizes, including tigers and lions, like to climb. Tashi climbed trees in the yard and, when inside, the eight-foot-tall bookcase. Naima began using the cat trees right away, although they didn’t immediately stop her from climbing or trying to climb other pieces of furniture. She eventually got the message, but my dresser still bears the scratches from her tiny sharp claws.

Cats also like to play with their prey. Sadly, the only toy I could ever get Tashi interested in were those bouncy foam balls that look like miniature soccer balls. She could play fetch better than some dogs. She preferred to toy with birds and mice outdoors, bringing one in occasionally (either dead or alive: quite exciting for everyone involved). To be fair, she sometimes took one of her balls outside to play with. Also, she tended to munch on them. Naima, on the other hand, loved her toys, especially the roller-ball track and a certain brand of catnip mice. She would hide and then hunt the mice. She also loved to chase the bouncy soccer balls.

A Chair Affords You an Opportunity for Sitting

A bookcase offers me a place to keep my books, of which I have a few, as well as some photos or keepsakes. For my cats, the bookcase offered something to climb in order to see what’s there and get a better vantage point. Maybe find a good spot for a nap.

For Tashi (on the right, looking very focused), trees offered something to climb, as well as a hiding place, a lookout, and a possible source of food. There were no actual trees in Naima’s environment. But the manufactured cat trees offered her everything but a food source.

Another word for “offer” is “afford.” Bookcases, real trees, and cat trees are all affordances. When it comes to climbing, both indoor and outdoor cats have access to a number of affordances in addition to those just mentioned: cabinets and counter tops, refrigerators and other appliances, curtains, walls, fences, screens—they excel at figuring out how to get wherever you don’t want them to be. I once watched live video of a kitten whose eyes hadn’t yet opened successfully climb a wire enclosure meant to keep her safely contained in order to get to her mom on the other side.

The concept of affordance was developed by a psychologist, James J. Gibson, in the 1960s and 70s. Gibson was a proponent of the theory of direct, as opposed to indirect, perception, which is just a non-starter for me. Direct perception is an unscientific idea for which there is no supporting evidence. At this point, we know too much about how the brain works to take this idea seriously. (Meaning doesn’t reside “out there” in the environment or in objects in the environment. The brain has to supply meaning by interpreting the sensory data it receives and processes based on our mental model of the world.)

Nevertheless, I’ve been attracted to the possibilities of this concept, so I’m trying to determine whether or not there is something useful in it within the context of behavior change. One task has been to sift out the direct perception nonsense and see what remains. Another task is to wade through some painful verbiage related to so-called “ecological psychology,” which was also the brainchild of James Gibson.

If I sound dismissive, it’s because I’m frustrated. Affordance is used in many different areas (several branches of psychology, design, communications, AI, etc.) and lots of people have added their own spin to it. That makes it difficult to pin down. Maybe that’s OK, though. This fluidity may be the nature of the beast—better viewed as dynamic rather than static. And, well, I seem to be veering toward doing the same thing: defining—or redefining—affordance as it applies to behavior and behavior change.

My current working definition:

An affordance is an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.

As a definition it seems straightforward, if quite dry. But it just scratches the surface. There are different types of affordances, and understanding those differences is key to applying the concept to behavior change. The possibilities are intriguing and anything but dry. In fact, they’re potentially very juicy. More to come!

Double Your Pleasure…
by Waiting for It

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The most interesting and frustrating encounters I have with people tend to be based on their reaction to the implications of the brain’s reward system. Regardless of anyone’s individual attitude about it, though, the reward system is a biological fact. So we can either learn how to use it or we can let it use us.

It’s true that some personality types have an easier time with rewards than others. But in addition to that, let’s face it: Homo sapiens is a jaded lot these days. When we can get what we want when we want it—and do so regularly—waiting any amount of time for something can feel painful, like deprivation. We expect, and even require, immediate gratification.

In Behave, the Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky talks about the conundrum we’re in as a result of having access to stimulation of the brain’s reward circuitry, some of which is “at least a thousandfold higher” than anything previous humans experienced. Sure that includes drugs like fentanyl and cocaine, but it also includes processed sugar, which wasn’t readily available until the 18th Century.

An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top non-natural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task [emphasis mine]. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger.

The Molecule of More

Well, the brain has been referred to as an insatiable wanting machine, and dopamine—the primary agent of the brain’s reward system—isn’t called “the molecule of more” for nothing.

I’ve written and talked a lot about rewards and dopamine already, including the important role of craving in creating desirable habits or pursuing juicy desired outcomes. But it appears there’s a state to be mastered before craving can be put into play. That state is anticipation.

While craving is a powerful desire for something, anticipation is the condition of looking forward to it, especially with eagerness. Without the ability to anticipate, a craving will take you directly and immediately to the object or sensation. You will experience pleasure, but pleasure (aka liking) neurochemicals fade quickly, and then you’re right back to wanting.

For the record, I hate that Carly Simon song, but as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed anticipation: going to the beach, strawberry shortcake with real whipped cream, the next issue of a particular magazine, a picnic in the backyard, beginning—and finishing—a new piece of writing. When scientists talk about the pleasure evoked by anticipation, I totally get it. As Thomas Hardy wrote in The Return of the Native:

Pleasure not known beforehand is half-wasted; to anticipate it is to double it.

So it surprised me to discover that anticipation can have either neutral or even negative connotations for others. But it’s entirely logical that if you don’t enjoy anticipation, you will probably have a hard time delaying gratification. Sapolsky says that once your brain figures out what it gets rewarded for, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation.

The Utility of Anticipation

Temporal discounting suggests that rewards are more attractive when they are imminent as opposed to when they are delayed. But this is not always the case. If you were the recipient of an Easter basket or bag of Halloween candy as a child, did you consume the contents quickly or did you moderate your consumption and delay gratification?

A paper published just last year in Science Advances describes a function called anticipatory utility, which counteracts temporal discounting:

An influential alternative idea in behavioral economics is that people enjoy, or savor, the moments leading up to reward. That is, people experience a positive utility, referred to as the utility of anticipation, which endows with value the time spent waiting for a reward. Anticipatory utility is different from the well-studied expected value of the future reward (i.e., a discounted value of the reward) in standard decision and reinforcement learning theory, where the latter’s utility arises solely from reward and not from its anticipation. Crucially, in the theory of anticipatory utility, the two separate utilities (i.e., anticipation and reward) are added together to construct the total value [emphasis mine]. The added value of anticipatory utility naturally explains why people occasionally prefer to delay reward (e.g., because we can enjoy the anticipation of eating a cake until tomorrow by saving it now), as well as a host of other human behaviors such as information-seeking and addiction.

The paper is a report of cutting-edge research conducted to test how the brain dynamically constructs anticipatory utility. Three different brain regions appear to be involved:

  1. the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which tracks the value of anticipatory utility
  2. the dopaminergic midbrain (DA), which enhances anticipation
  3. the hippocampus, which mediates the functional coupling of the vmPFC and the DA

Researchers suggest that the vmPFC and DA link reward information to the utility of anticipation, while a strong conceptual tie between the hippocampus, memory, and future imagination supports a suggestion from behavioral economics that the utility of anticipation relates to a vivid imagination of future reward [emphasis mine].

And that brings us smack into the arena of personality and personal operating systems. It explains why I find anticipation to be enjoyable and am therefore able to use future rewards effectively to alter my behavior. It’s not a skill I’ve developed. I’m just wired that way!

Coming up next: (1) my personal example of successfully employing and enjoying anticipation; (2) an investigation into learning how to anticipate.

Craving

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If craving were a person, he or she would definitely be from the wrong side of the tracks. Probably tattooed. Maybe a smoker. Definitely a drinker. A little bit slutty. A silver-tongued devil capable of talking you into doing all kinds of things against your better judgment. Someone your parents would have warned you—in the strongest terms—not to hang around with.

You try to stay away—to be good. But craving is just too hard to resist. Eventually you give in, and it feels so good in the moment, but you always end up hating yourself the next morning. You really want to break up with craving, but you can’t.

At least that’s the perspective many people appear to have about craving. Craving is associated with wanting things that are “bad” (unhealthy, illegal, dangerous, or excessive) or with being out of control. The logical result of this view of craving is to attempt to squash it, eliminate it, beat it in to submission: to conquer it.

What Is Craving?

The best definition of craving I’ve come across is a strong wanting of what promises enjoyment or pleasure.

Essentially, craving is wanting or desiring something. Wanting is driven by dopamine in your brain. But the neurons that respond to dopamine are interspersed with neurons that respond to opioid and cannabinoid neurons that provide the experience of pleasure (liking). In a sense, the brain likes to want, which is why, according to psychologist and neuroscientist Kent Berridge, “we are hardwired to be insatiable wanting machines.”

So even if you could do it, it makes no sense to try to break up with craving. Your life would be so much less enjoyable. But you can minimize your cravings for some things by cultivating cravings for other things.

We often think of desire and the objects of our desire as inseparable. We think it is the indulgence itself—the luscious ice cream, the rush of nicotine, or the flood of coins from a slot machine—that motivates us. To a greater extent, however, it is the expectation of these rewards, the luxurious anticipation of them, that fires up our brains and compels us to dig in, take a drag, or place another bet. —Chris Berdik, Mind over Mind

The unconscious part of your brain (System 1) is always looking for—expecting, craving—the next reward. Untrained, it will go for the most immediate, readily available source of pleasure. Craving is persistent and hard to resist. So applying willpower to avoid indulging in that pleasure, whatever it may be, is an ineffective strategy.

Rejigger Your Pleasure Experiences

“Pleasure is a potent driver of behavior,” as Anjan Chaterjee says in The Aesthetic Brain. But:

Our cognitive systems can reach down into our pleasure centers and rejigger our pleasure experiences.

Rejiggering our pleasure experiences is an essential component of long-term behavior change. You can’t stop your brain from craving, but you can redirect its path from one pleasurable or rewarding object to another. You can only train it to respond to a different reward, however, if it actually craves that reward.

Yes, craving sometimes goes too far in the pursuit of pleasure. Makes you want things you don’t want to want and do things you don’t want to do, at least after you’ve done them. But craving also drives you to take action to get what you want. Craving motivates you to learn and create and expand…to modify your behavior…to effect change in the world…to experience beauty. Craving is frequently misunderstood—but definitely worth the effort to get to know.

Your Brain Can Change Your Mind

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And Your Mind Can Change Your Brain.

More than 125 years ago, William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology that organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity. In regard to that insight—and too many others to recount—he was far ahead of his time. Thus he was more or less ignored. Until relatively recently, the accepted belief was that at a certain point the brain is finished developing (“cooked,” if you will). Thus the saying you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Now we know that isn’t true. The subject of plasticity has been getting more and more attention ever since it was discovered that the brain can change at any age—for better or for worse. In the normal course of events, changes in your brain are reflected in your behavior (mediated by your mental processes), and changes in your mental processes are reflected in your brain (mediated by your behavior).

There are two types of neuroplasticity, functional and structural. Functional plasticity is the brain’s ability to turn over a task from one area (that has been damaged) to another. Structural plasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt (change its physical structure) as a result of learning and experience.

Most of the changes that take place in your brain are outside your awareness and control, but in some cases you can encourage the process, resist it, or give it a good nudge. And your personality may play a role in the actions you take—or don’t take. Use it or lose it is a case in point.

Plasticity vs. Stability

Plasticity happens to be one of the two so-called meta-traits that subsume the five factors of the Five-Factor (OCEAN) personality model. The other meta-trait is stability. Plasticity and stability seem to be at opposite ends of a continuum, but when it comes to the capacity for sustained behavior change, the situation isn’t that black or white.

Plasticity

The functions of plasticity are exploration and the creation of new goals, interpretations, and strategies. The negative pole of plasticity is rigidity. Plasticity encompasses the factors of Openness to Experience (cognitive exploration and engagement with information) and Extraversion (behavioral exploration and engagement with specific rewards).

Each of the five factors has two aspects. You might have stronger tendencies for one aspect than for the other. In the case of Openness to Experience, the two aspects are:

  • Intellect: detection of logical or causal patterns in abstract and semantic information.
  • Openness: detection of spatial and temporal correlational patterns in sensory and perceptual information.

For Extraversion, the aspects are:

  • Assertiveness: incentive reward sensitivity and the drive toward goals.
  • Enthusiasm: consummatory reward sensitivity, and the enjoyment of actual or imagined goal attainment.
Stability

The functions of stability are protection of goals, interpretations, and strategies from disruption by impulses. The negative pole of stability is instability. Stability encompasses the factors of Conscientiousness (protection of non-immediate or abstract goals and strategies from disruption), Agreeableness (altruism and cooperation and coordination of goals, interpretations, and strategies with those of others), and Neuroticism (defensive responses to uncertainty, threat, and punishment).

The two aspects for Conscientiousness are:

  • Industriousness: prioritization of non-immediate goals.
  • Orderliness: avoidance of entropy by following rules set by self or others.

The two aspects for Agreeableness are:

  • Compassion: emotional attachment to and concern for others
  • Politeness: suppression and avoidance of aggressive or norm-violating impulses and strategies.

And the two aspects for Neuroticism are:

  • Volatility: active defense to avoid or eliminate threats.
  • Withdrawal: passive avoidance (inhibition of goals, interpretations, and strategies in response to uncertainty or error).
Preferences for Novelty or Conformity

Researchers suggest that the meta-trait plasticity reflects a tendency “to explore and engage flexibly with novelty, in both behavior and cognition,” while stability reflects a tendency “to maintain stability and avoid disruption in emotional, social, and motivational domains.”

People who are high in plasticity tend to be:

  • Higher in “externalizing behaviors”
  • Lower in conformity
  • Lower in morningness
  • Higher in divergent thinking

People who are high in stability also tend to be:

  • Lower in “externalizing behaviors”
  • Higher in conformity
  • Higher in morningness
  • Lower in divergent thinking

Although we all possess some degree of all five factors, considerable variation exists from one person to the next. The five factors, their aspects, and the numerous traits that go along with them all exist on a continuum. So even if two people had identical scores for, say, Conscientiousness, their scores for the aspects and traits could be different enough to lead to very dissimilar attitudes and behaviors.

If you haven’t taken the Five-Factor test yet, you can take it here.

And you can find lists of some of the traits associated with each of the five factors here.

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677