Mental Model Archives - Farther to Go!

You Give Truth a Bad Name

January 10, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Not necessarily you, personally. But maybe you. If so, you should stop doing that.

When I came across a promising article posted on a writers’ website titled “The World Needs Writers Now More than Ever” I could do nothing but nod in agreement, although my perspective runs more along the lines of when hasn’t the world needed writers?

I started reading with great expectations—which were immediately dashed when the author referred to writers as “truth tellers.” She says:

Most of us write to discover what we think and believe about the world, and, in the process, we arrive at a certain kind of truth. We share that truth with the world through our words.

That’s a nice idea, but she’s giving writers too much credit for high-mindedness. Far too many of them are active truth dissemblers.

But…fair enough. It’s the case for some writers I know and it’s frequently the case for me to use writing to explore rather than to explain. It’s a practice available to anyone that I wish more people would take advantage of. But a majority of people in this world, including writers, are far more interested in what they know than in what they don’t know. And they write from a position of absoluteness, as if what they have to say is the final word on how it is, what to do about it, and who is right and who is wrong. “A certain kind of truth” needs more definition.

I was further dismayed by a subheading midway through the piece claiming that all of us “have to tell our truth.” Things that are true are factual. There is evidence for them. Something happened or it didn’t happen. It either is or it isn’t. Or maybe we don’t know. Our lack of knowledge has no effect on the truth. There is no truth that is exclusively yours or mine. What this writer appears to be talking about is personal experience which is exclusively yours or mine, even when aspects of it seems to be shared.

However, I expect more from a writer, especially one writing about the craft of writing on a writing website. Personal experience and “truth” are not one and the same. As a writer, that’s a distinction she ought to assist people in making. Conflating experience and truth is what gives truth a bad name. Personalizing truth makes it wonky, unstable, vague.

If we can’t agree on what truth is, then it is hopeless to expect that we can ever recognize truth and respond to or deal effectively with it. It was snowing 10 minutes ago—a kind of blink-and-you-miss-it bit of flurries, but snowing nonetheless. The fact that someone indoors didn’t notice it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means it wasn’t part of that person’s experience.

Personally, I don’t really like snow, but that doesn’t mean snow is bad even though my experience of it is often unpleasant.

Every child in a multiple-child family has a different experience of their parents. They tell different stories with different details and different meanings and different outcomes. None of them are true because there’s no such thing as a true story. We are all personalizing. Well, to be more accurate, our brain is personalizing.

It is processing sensory data through our personal mental model which contains our personal beliefs and making personal interpretations that give rise to our personal experience. Your experience is your experience and mine is mine. Just because it feels “real” doesn’t mean it’s an accurate reflection of reality. If someone doesn’t experience their own experiences as real, they are likely in a dissociative state, which is not healthy. But claiming that one’s experience is or represents the truth is essentially lying.

We are being sold the idea that our experience is our truth as a way of encouraging us to not deny our experience, to give it voice. This is all well and good, but not if in the process we actually disempower ourselves by failing to take into account that we play a role in how our brain creates our experiences. Besides, if our experience represents the truth, then it is not changeable. We have no power or agency in the matter. The world happens to us and we can’t do anything about it. That is not a desirable state of affairs. And it’s not true.

Storytelling

There are types of experiences that humans tend to have—that we are wired to have, so to speak. Some of them may be given less validity by the society or culture in which we live. Sharing such experiences can validate them, which can bring them out into the open, assist individuals in recognizing others have similar experiences, and broaden the understanding of who we all are (as humans).

Stories pack an emotional punch, or they can, that non-fiction does far less easily. So telling a story of your own experience or of someone else’s can have a profound effect. You could say it represents “a certain kind of truth,” but that truth is abstract, not to be confused or conflated with “the truth.” It is a true experience. You or I or someone lived through it. It is what you or I or someone felt. It is how we perceived it.

Some may even consider abstract truth to be more important and certainly more profound than mere facts. Reading stories about other people’s experiences—especially in the form of literary fiction—has been repeatedly shown to help develop social acuity, emotional intelligence, compassion, understanding, and critical thinking, among other things. In short, it can make us better people.

But it’s vital that we know how to separate fact from fiction and experience from reality and that we all have a basic agreement as to what we’re talking about when we talk about truth. Our experience is real, but it is not the truth.

Stairs to Nowhere:
False, Hidden, and Perceptible Affordances

September 8, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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.

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.

What [Else] Is It Telling Me?

March 25, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In 2018, Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their “discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.”

As a scientist, Allison has pointed out that you can’t really prove anything with science. All you can do is disprove. He says that the data from an experiment may be consistent with your hypothesis, but it might be consistent with another hypothesis, too. So you need to ask, what else is it telling me?

Allison covered similar ground in an interview he gave after winning the Nobel Prize:

[Being a good scientist] takes discipline but [also] creativity, you have got to learn how to view your data as a crystal or something, you know when you look at every facet of it, get to know it from every direction. Look at what it tells you beyond the reason you did the experiment and figure it out. And so I think that’s pretty much it; it is the ability to really study the data and really learn what it is telling you.

As an aside on creativity, Allison is also a musician. He plays harmonica in a band composed of other scientists. This isn’t unusual. It turns out that Nobel Prize laureates are three times more likely than other scientists to have a creative hobby (performing, singing, acting, glassblowing, writing, painting, etc.). You could say they themselves have multiple facets. Knowing that people are Nobel Prize winning scientists doesn’t tell you everything about them.

WYSIATI

I included Allison’s comments at the end of an article on Daniel Kahneman’s concept of WYSIATI or What You See Is All There Is. (Kahneman is another Nobel Prize winner, but I don’t know anything about his hobbies.)

WYSIATI means that when you’re determining the meaning of something or constructing a story about it (i.e. interpreting it), your brain can only use the information available to it at the time. What it sees is all there is. The less information you have, the easier it is for your brain to construct a convincing story. You don’t cast about looking for information you don’t currently possess. What am I likely to be missing? How am I misconstruing this? What else is this information telling me?

Similarly, if the data from an experiment is consistent with your hypothesis, why go looking for trouble by asking if it could be consistent with another hypothesis, too.

The unconscious part of your brain is looking for a good enough answer right now that adequately fits your model of the world. Accuracy is not its highest priority. You need to get a move on. No straggling allowed.

We think we have a clear idea of what’s happening. We think we understand why things happen or happen the way they do. And we feel pretty certain about our assessment of events and situations.

But certainty, like confidence, is a feeling and has nothing to do with the accuracy or lack thereof of our interpretations and beliefs. The more we proceed through life assuming we are correct, the more likely we are to be wrong and the more difficult it becomes to change—our perspectives, our behavior, the trajectory of our lives.

Look at All Facets of an Experience

One way out of this predicament is to ask a lot more questions—not just random questions: hard questions. As a species, we have a unique capacity for self-awareness, but we’re not particularly good at accessing it. As a result:

trying to disentangle our interpretations of events from the events themselves is hard
trying to identify the unconscious beliefs that could underlie our interpretations is even harder
attempting to separate fact from fiction in perceiving events or situations in order to come up with alternative interpretations is extremely hard for some

But if we want different outcomes, if we want to get off the rock we’re on and get on a rock that offers a different perspective, or if we want to think different thoughts, we need to ask the hard questions. We need to be able to explore the facets or components of our experiences and recognize the roles played by our interpretations and our beliefs.

Here’s an exercise to try. But first, some definitions:

An event is something that happens (the data, if you will).
Your interpretation is the meaning you make of the thing that happens.
Beliefs are convictions you have about the nature of reality (the way the world works).

Part One

Describe an event.
Describe your interpretation of the event.
Ask yourself, what is this interpretation telling me about my perception of the way the world works?
Identify one or more beliefs that could underlie your interpretation.

Part Two

Take another look at the event (the data) and ask yourself, what else is it telling me?
Describe two possible alternative interpretations based on the data (facts) of the event.

Part Three

Identify your emotional response to your interpretation of the event and ask yourself, what is it telling me?
Identify the action you took in response to your interpretation of the event and ask yourself, what is it telling me?
Identify your emotional response to the action you took and ask yourself, what is it telling me?

Keep asking yourself what is it telling me? And then what else is it telling me? We can’t access our beliefs directly because they are part of the mental model our brain maintains of what things mean and what is normal for us. But the beliefs that make up our mental model affect our perceptions and interpretations of everything we experience.

We can’t create significant, sustained change unless we change our mental model. In order to do that, we have to learn more about it. We have to be curious. We have to ask the hard questions.

Part two of two parts. Part one is here.

The Map Is Not the Territory

December 13, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

And the menu is not the meal. In other words, beware of confusing models of reality with reality. It sounds obvious, but it’s much easier said than done, so we end up believing a lot of things that are just not true.

Many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves, and society, are false. —Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal

There’s a handful of threshold concepts that can shed some light on how we might know ourselves (or think we do) and how we might know others (or think we do)—and cause us to consider the possibility that we might be wrong about how we do both.

In and of themselves, threshold concepts are both transformative and irreversible. Once you fully grasp them, your understanding of what underlies your experience, your perception, and your behavior will be transformed. Once you cross the threshold from not knowing to knowing, you will no longer be able to view yourself, others, or the world the way you did before.

Threshold concepts are inherently difficult to grasp.

That’s why these concepts are considered to be troublesome knowledge. They’re troublesome because they conflict with preexisting beliefs, they are counterintuitive and disconcerting, and/or they seem illogical. They don’t slip easily into the mental architecture most of us have already constructed. In fact, they often bounce right off. So they bear repeating…repeatedly. (Recently someone said she had probably heard me mention a particular threshold concept a hundred times, but it was just in that moment that she got it.)

Each of these concepts is important individually, but many of them connect with and relate to each other. That’s another aspect of threshold concepts: they are integrative.

One

The brain is not wired to experience reality as it is. That’s troublesome because it’s counterintuitive and conflicts with our belief that we experience an objective reality. But the interior of the brain is a dark, silent space, in which the primary activity is the interpretation of electrical impulses to give us a sense of what is going on inside and outside of us.

Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain. —Chris Frith, neuropsychologist

There is a real world. But you’ve never lived there. You haven’t been there even for a visit. —Susana Martinez-Conde, neuroscientist

Two

The brain operates on autopilot approximately 95% of the time, which means System 1 (the unconscious) directs most of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. That’s troublesome because our experience is that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are consciously determined. But consciousness can only process 40 bits of information at a time, while the unconscious process 11 million bits at a time.

If we were forced always to consider every aspect of the situation around us and had to weigh all our options about what to do, humankind would have died out long ago. —Timothy D. Wilson, social psychologist

It can take huge amounts of time for our conscious brain to think about every scenario deliberately. Everyday life requires us to suspend rationality, to be mindless about countless risks. —Shankar Vedantam, journalist and host of The Hidden Brain podcast

Three

The brain is predictive rather than reactive. It focuses on determining what’s going to happen next so it can figure out ahead of time what action to take instead of waiting for something to happen and then deciding what to do about it. That’s troublesome because, once again, our experience is that, moment-to-moment, we are making conscious or intentional decisions based on our conscious perceptions.

Your brain is wired to ask the question, “The last time I was in a situation like this, what sensations did I encounter and how did I act?” —Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist and psychologist

Our primary contact with the world…is via our expectations about what we are about to see or experience. —Andy Clark, cognitive philosopher

Four

The brain pays far more attention to what we do than to what we feel, what we think, or what we think about doing. This is troublesome because we tend to believe that the brain is for thinking and perceiving—I think, therefore I am, as Rene Descartes famously said—and not for figuring out what action to take. We also expect there to be a more direct correlation than there is between what we think about doing (intend) and the action we ultimately take.

Our brains interpret the world primarily as a forum for action and only secondarily as a realm of facts. —Colin G. DeYoung, psychologist

The course of an individual’s life is determined by the action she takes in the world. —Gabrielle Oettingen, psychologist

Five

The brain generates a mental model of the world that represents what’s normal for each of us both internally and externally. Our model of the world determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and the meaning we assign to it. That’s troublesome because we have the sense that we directly perceive what is available for us to perceive, when in fact we perceive everything through our unique filters.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman, neuroscientist

When we experience things as being real, we are less able to appreciate that our perceptual worlds may differ from those of others. —Anil K. Seth, neuroscientist

We Ought to Be Less Certain…

In attempting to know ourselves, we’re faced with the same problems we encounter when attempting to know anyone else.

For one thing, we have no direct access to either our unconscious or the unconscious of anyone else, even though that’s the part of the brain that runs us most of the time. For another, just about every perception we have had or will have is an interpretation. We are interpreting ourselves just as we are interpreting others. And those interpretations, generated by internal or external cues, are based on our individual mental model of the world, which means they are all highly subjective and necessarily distorted.

Furthermore, we’re literally living in the past, since our predictive (autopilot) brain has already determined the nature of a situation and initiated the appropriate response before we’re consciously aware a response is called for.

In spite of all this, we have a strong, if false, sense of certainty about who we are, who others are and what they are experiencing, as well as our overall experience of being in the world.

…and More Curious

The best way to get a remotely objective clue as to who we—or someone else might be—is to pay attention to what we or they do, note our interpretation of the action, and attempt to reason backward. What might that behavior indicate about me or Joe or Olivia? What belief or character/personality trait might that reflect? What don’t I know? What other explanations could there be?

There’s no guarantee we’ll come up with the correct answer, of course. But curiosity gives us some room to maneuver, to question our assumptions and interpretations instead of merrily running off a cliff with them.