Mental Model Archives - Page 2 of 4

A Brief “Reality” Check

July 31, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

We all accept the reality presented to us.
–David Eagleman

If you’re a synesthete, your reality may differ considerably from consensus reality. In your reality, numbers and letters of the alphabet might have colors. And they might have personalities. Or maybe you can see sounds or taste words.

It used to be thought that synesthesia was a rare condition, but it now appears to be present in at least 4% of the population and likely has a genetic trigger.

David Eagleman, who studies synesthesia (because of course he does) thinks non-synesthetes may have synesthetic correspondences in the brain but just aren’t aware of them. For example, people tend to think louder tones are brighter than soft tones and that dark liquids have stronger smells than lighter ones.

One of the shapes on the right is named “bouba” and the other is named “kiki.” Which do you think is which?

Some synesthetes consider the condition to be uncomfortable, some consider it a gift, and still others don’t even know they have it. Remember that experience is reality. At least it’s the only reality we have access to. So if your brain connects the color purple with the letter J, then J is purple. Consider the implications.

If you do or you don’t automatically associate colors with numbers and letters, are you creating that reality? Yes. Do you have any control over that reality you’re creating? No.

You operate within a host of biological constraints, many of which you share with all humans, others of which you share with various groups of them. You also operate within cultural constraints and the constraints of your own temperament, knowledge, and experience.

All of these constraints, which are part of your mental model of the world, conspire to determine what you perceive of the world “out there.” Your brain gives rise to (creates) your experience by matching streams of electrical impulses with prior experience, expectations, or beliefs about the way the world is. As a result, you are actively looking for certain things that you predict you will find so you will know how to respond.

Our experienced world comes from the inside out, not just the outside in.
–Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex

Randomness Does Not Compute

April 17, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Have you noticed that the brain has an answer for almost everything? Not only does it work overtime to predict what’s going to happen next, it works nearly as hard to explain what happened after the fact.

The associative machinery of the brain seeks causes.

When something unexpected occurs, the brain tries to explain it and incorporate that explanation into our mental model. Random acts or events, however, are impossible to anticipate and account for.

A random act or event is one that is governed by or dependent upon chance.

Synonyms are: stray, accidental, arbitrary, indiscriminate, haphazard, unplanned, fortuitous, aimless, desultory, hit or miss, unpremeditated, purposeless, adventitious, chance, unintentional, and unexpected.

We’re continually nudged in this direction and then that one by random events. As a result, although statistical regularities can be found in social data, the future of particular individuals is impossible to predict, and for our particular achievements, our jobs, our friends, our finances, we all owe more to chance than many people realize. … In all except the simplest real-life endeavors unforeseeable or unpredictable forces cannot be avoided, and moreover those random forces and our reactions to them account for much of what constitutes our particular path in life. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk

After the fact, everything seems inevitable. After the fact, the past appears coherent as a result of our storytelling mind imposing order on it. After the fact, we have a sense of having had far more control over the direction of our lives than we actually had. But a story is still a story, and there’s no such thing as a “true story.”

Hindsight bias is the tendency to construct one’s memory after the fact (or interpret the meaning of something in the past) according to currently known facts and one’s current beliefs. In this way, one appears to make the past consistent with the present and more predictive or predictable than it actually was. —Robert Todd Carroll, The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary

The brain makes post-hoc dot connections.

It’s not surprising that when the brain looks back, it can construct a neat cause-and-effect explanation for an event that was not expected. The hindsight bias helps all of us maintain the illusion of control by seeming to eliminate randomness. But it’s only possible to clearly and accurately separate the signals from the noise—and connect the dots—after an event has occurred and the outcome is known. Even then, our explanations are going to be coming from our brain, which means our experiences, our point of view, our beliefs, and our biases.

Our brain looks for patterns in order to explain unexpected events so it will be better prepared to predict and respond to them the next time they occur. But no matter how good it may be at figuring out and responding to a single unexpected event that has occurred, it will never be able to predict truly random events.

The question is would you want it to?

Can you recognize a random act and accept it as such or are you more comfortable having an explanation for it even if that explanation isn’t true?

The photo at the top of the post is from the movie Stranger Than Fiction. Author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) has been trying to decide how to kill off the main character in her novel. She finally figures it out when she notices an apple fall onto the sidewalk and roll away.

In the Groove: Meta Mindsets

November 5, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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

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

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

Some mindsets are:

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

In the Groove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conspiracy Theories and the
Storytelling Mind
(Conspiracy Part 3)

July 29, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The most important thing about conspiracy theories isn’t that they aren’t true. They’re stories; of course they aren’t true. There’s no such thing as a “true story.”

We see, understand, and explain the world and other people—including ourselves—in terms of stories, not facts. Stories and the telling of them come naturally. They are easy to formulate and to remember. Facts, on the other hand, don’t come naturally. That’s why much of what we’ve learned, including most of our deeply held beliefs, has been transmitted to us via the stories we’ve heard, read, or watched—beginning with the fairy tales and nursery rhymes of early childhood.

In fact the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are more important to our sense of self than the actual facts of our lives. What we remember of an experience is a story about it. The details are subject to revision, and we often employ confabulation, in the service of reinforcing a particular emotional state.

Emotion determines what we remember and how we remember. Emotion is what makes an event or an experience compelling. And there’s nothing more compelling than fraught situations, lurking danger, and bad outcomes. That’s because the brain is first and foremost a threat detector—as it should be, since although pleasant things are rewarding, unpleasant things can kill us. We need to know about those things so we can try to avoid them.

Wired for Story

It’s really no surprise that facts don’t persuade people to change their beliefs, especially in regard to conspiracy theories. Facts are not persuasive. Stories, on the other hand, are so persuasive and come to mind so easily that the world seems to present itself to us as a series of stories with beginnings, middles, and endings.

In his highly readable and wide-ranging book The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall devotes several pages to a discussion of how conspiracy theories are one outcome of our mind’s tendency to impose the structure of story in places where there is no story.

He prefaces the discussion with the example of a 1940s experiment involving an animated film of geometric shapes. When the psychologists running the experiment, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, asked viewers to describe what they had seen, almost no one said they saw geometric shapes moving around the screen. Instead they related detailed narratives imputing intentions and desires to circles and triangles.

They saw soap operas: doors slamming, courtship dances, the foiling of a predator. —Gottschall

Gottschall says that he, too, saw a very convincing story involving a hero, a heroine, and a villain. Heider and Simmel’s experiment has been replicated, and other similar experiments have been developed since. All have produced the same result.

Ripping Good Yarns

Conspiracy theories connect real data points and imagined data points into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality. Conspiracy theories exert a powerful hold on the human imagination. …They fascinate us because they are ripping good yarns, showcasing classic problem structure and sharply defined good guys and villains. They offer vivid, lurid plots that translate with telling ease into wildly popular entertainment. —Gottschall

Conspiracy theories serve multiple purposes. Via the structure of story, they provide an explanation for why things are bad in the world; they separate the good guys from the bad guys; they tie random events together to weave a seamless whole.

Conspiracy theories…are always consoling in their simplicity. Bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story. —Gottschall

Our brain is so good at altering our memories to support and affirm particular emotional states that we can become firmly convinced that something that didn’t happen happened (or vice versa). In the same way, conspiracy theories buttress our worldviews, altering our mental model and our actual experience of reality.

Conspiracy theories are an example of allowing the associative processing of the unconscious (System 1), which is gullible and prone to cognitive biases to run unchecked by the skeptical, critical thinking of System 2. It’s an example of letting our brain use us. And because of the way the brain works, once someone starts down that road, it becomes easier and easier to believe the story, and more and more difficult to question it.

Think INside the Box

May 4, 2017 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The concept of thinking outside the box is a metaphor for thinking differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. It’s also a cliché about clichéd thinking. You can’t actually think outside the box, anyway, since you are constrained by the mental model your brain constructs and maintains for you. The mental model is the box, and you are always inside it. Contrary to some branches of popular thought, that’s not a bad thing.

Here’s a story that’s meant to illustrate thinking outside the box but that’s actually an excellent example of just the opposite—thinking inside the box.

Island of Safety*

On August 5, 1949, 15 firefighters and their foreman, Wag Dodge, were airlifted to Mann Gulch in Montana to extinguish what they thought would be a relatively small brush fire on one side of the gulch. They parachuted onto the opposite side of the gulch, joined one fire guard, and began descending with the wind at their backs.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, the wind reversed, and the fire jumped over to ignite the grass on their side. As the flames rapidly approached them, the men began to climb the slope to try to outrun the fire, pausing only to drop their heavy equipment.

But Dodge, the foreman, realized the fire was moving too quickly for that to work. He stopped and lit the grass in front of him with a match. The dry grass immediately caught fire and the wind blew the fire up the side of the gulch, away from him. That left a patch of charred ground Dodge crawled onto. When the advancing fire arrived, it flowed around and then away from his island of safety.

The other men misunderstood what he was doing and in spite of his exhortations for them to join him, continued up the slope. Only two, who had found shelter in a narrow crevice, survived.

Notice that it was the foreman who had the idea to fight fire with fire.

As the foreman, Dodge presumably had more experience and knowledge than the men he was supervising. The other firefighters not only didn’t come up with the idea, they also didn’t understand it when he showed it to them. The “box” Dodge was thinking inside was different from the boxes of the other men.

While you can’t escape thinking from inside your own box, you can continually remodel and expand it, thereby increasing your possibilities for original, innovative, and creative thinking.

Here’s another thinking-inside-the-box example.

WALL-E*

Andrew Stanton of Pixar Animation Studios was working on the screenplay for WALL-E, about the last robot left on a hopelessly polluted earth abandoned by humans. He was struggling with the design of WALL-E’s face, which he wanted to be both machinelike and expressive.

At a baseball game one day, he borrowed binoculars from someone sitting next to him. When he mistakenly turned them around so that the lenses were on the wrong side, he realized the binoculars looked like a face. After flexing the inner hinges several times to create different facial expressions, he decided WALL-E would look like a “binocular on a stem.”

Stanton had been writing and directing animated films for 20 years by the time he started working on WALL-E. He had already framed—and attempted to solve—the problem of WALL-E’s appearance before his binocular incident. And just as Wag Dodge did, he had a vast reservoir of experience and knowledge to draw upon.

The contents and the connections inside his box made it possible for him to come up with the solution.

The best things you can do for yourself to live a healthy (on every level) life also happen to be the best things you can do to expand your mental model: learn, move, create, challenge yourself; repeat.

*The two stories were drawn from The Eureka Factor by John Kounios and Mark Beeman.