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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

N Is for Narration

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The unconscious part of your brain processes far more data, moment-to-moment, than the conscious part of your brain is aware of. Since you’re missing more than you’re consciously taking in, how can you have the seamless experience of reality you have? You should be a lot more confused than you actually are.

The reason you aren’t more confused is that you have an inner narrator or inner interpreter who makes sense of your experiences and observations, decides which are important and what they mean, and weaves everything together into a unified whole. The inner narrator gives your life a sense of continuity, the result of which is that your experiences feel sequential and (usually) logical rather than segmented and random.

If you tune in to your inner narrator, you may be able to catch it in the act of putting the pieces together for you, but that takes a little practice.

Filling in the Blanks

Michael Gazzaniga, one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience, discovered “the left-brain narrating system,” which he dubbed “the interpreter” in the late 70s when he and Joseph LeDoux were conducting research with split-brain patients (individuals whose corpus callosum had been severed in an attempt to alleviate epilepsy symptoms).

In the most well-known experiment, Gazzaniga and LeDoux flashed pictures in front of a patient, one to the right hemisphere (which is nonverbal) and another to the left hemisphere (which controls language). The patient was then shown several additional pictures—to both hemispheres—and asked to select one that went with the first (right-hemisphere) picture and another that went with the second (left-hemisphere) picture. The patient was able to point to appropriate matches for each of the two pictures and to explain the relationship between the two left-hemisphere pictures. That result was expected.

The surprise was that he also had a ready explanation for why he had chosen the right-hemisphere picture. Given that his left-hemisphere had not seen the first right-hemisphere picture—and there was no communication between the two hemispheres of the subject’s brain—he should have been confused about why he chose that picture. Not only wasn’t he confused, he was completely confident in his answer.

As it turns out, when faced with incomplete information, the left brain quite convincingly fills in the blanks. Essentially it spins a story by making things up that you believe to be true.

The left-brain interpreter, Gazzaniga says, is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.

Your inner narrator views your inner and outer world through the lens of your mental model of the world, which largely determines what you pay attention to, how you interpret events, and the meaning you assign to them. This inner narration doesn’t just weave your world together; it also keeps change at bay by reinforcing the status quo (what is normal for you). If you want to alter your behavior—change the status quo—you have to loosen the grip on your belief in the story you currently have about yourself. This is hard to do because, like everyone else, you probably believe most, if not all, of what your inner narrator tells you. It seems as though it’s just reporting on reality, not creating it.

The Story of You

We spend our lives crafting stories that make us the noble—if flawed—protagonists of first-person dramas. A life story is a “personal myth” about who we are deep down—where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means. Our life stories are who we are. They are our identity. A life story is not, however, an objective account. A life story is a carefully shaped narrative that is replete with strategic forgetting and skillfully spun meaning. —Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal

Your inner narrator helps sustain the illusion that there’s a single you—a single self that’s at the center, having all these thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Not so, says neuropsychologist Paul Broks. He says neuroscience shows there is no center in the brain where things do all come together.

Julian Baggini, author of The Ego Trick, expands on the idea:

When you look at the brain, and you look at how the brain makes possible a sense of self, you find that there isn’t a central control spot in the brain. There is no kind of center where everything happens. There are lots of different processes in the brain, all of which operate, in a way, quite independently. But it’s because of the way that they all relate that we get this sense of self.

This is what Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzaniga, Joseph LeDoux, and many other researchers have discovered. The difference in function between the left-brain and right-brain is only one division of labor.

In fact, the brain contains a swarm of specialized modules, each performing a special skill—calculating a distance, parsing a voice tone—and all of them running at the same time, communicating in widely distributed networks, often across hemispheres….The brain sustains a sense of unity…amid a cacophony of competing voices, the neural equivalent of open outcry at the Chicago Board of Trade. —Benedict Carey, New York Times

If you believe you have a fixed self, a permanent essence, which is always the same, throughout your life, no matter what, as Julian Baggini says, then you’re kind of trapped. If you want to change something about the way you think or the way you respond to things, you have to believe that the way you think and the way you respond can be changed. Of course, you can’t change everything about yourself, but the more you believe in a fixed, essential self, the more difficult it will be for you to make significant positive attitude or behavior changes to that self.

Note: The image is Emma Thompson as author Karen Eiffel in the movie Stranger than Fiction, in which she narrates the life of her character, Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell. It’s one of my favorite movies.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

M Is for Mental Model

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Your brain maintains a model of the world that represents what’s normal in it for you. The result is that you experience a stripped-down, customized version of the actual world. To a great extent, each of us really does inhabit our own world. But it would be incorrect to say that we create our reality; rather, our brain creates our reality for us.

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

Much, if not most, of what you do, think, and feel consists of automatically generated responses to internal or external stimuli. And it isn’t possible to consciously mediate all of your responses. It wouldn’t even be a good idea to try.

But how does your brain do it? How does it decide what to prune and what to allow into your consciousness? It would be highly inefficient if it had to process all of this data bit-by-bit. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to since it operates by association, which is much faster, and by filtering incoming data through the model of the world it constructs that represents what’s normal in it for you.

Built by Association

System 1, the unconscious part of your brain, uses associative thinking to develop and maintain your model of the world. However, there are some problems with associative thinking. For example:

  • It sacrifices accuracy for speed.
  • It doesn’t discriminate very well.
  • It takes cognitive shortcuts (aka cognitive biases).

Your mental model can—and sometimes does—lead to erroneous conclusions and inappropriate responses. It’s the job of consciousness (System 2) to check the impulses and suggestions it receives from System 1, but consciousness is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Most of the time, it’s content to go along with System 1, which means it’s susceptible to cognitive biases. By definition, cognitive biases are distortions or errors in thinking. They actually decrease your understanding while giving you a feel-good sense of cognitive ease.

Confirmation bias is the easy acceptance of information that validates what you already believe. It causes you to selectively notice and pay attention to what confirms your beliefs and to ignore what doesn’t. It underlies the discomfort you feel around people who disagree with you and the ease you feel around people who share your beliefs.

Information that confirms what you already believe to be true makes you feel right and certain, so you’re likely to accept it uncritically. On the other hand, you’re more likely to reject information that is inconsistent with what you already believe or at least you hold inconsistent information up to greater scrutiny. You have different standards for evaluating information depending on the level of cognitive ease it generates.

Evidence has precious little impact on any of us if it conflicts with what we believe simply because the cognitive strain of processing it is too great. To a very real extent, we don’t even “see” conflicting evidence. While total commitment to your particular worldview (mental model) makes you feel more confident, it narrows—rather than expands—your possibilities. That means it limits your powers of discernment, your ability to increase your understanding of the world around you, and your creative potential. It closes the world off instead of opening it up.

Your Particular Model of the World

In addition to helping you navigate the world, your mental model gives rise to your sense of the way things should be. It generates expectations that are either confirmed or denied, assumptions, biases, etc. that determine what you pay attention to, what you perceive (even what you are able to perceive), how you interpret and respond to what you perceive, and the meaning you make of it all. Your mental model is the result of your genes and your experiences, of both intention and accident. Your brain has been constructing your particular model of the world since your birth, and it is continually updating and modifying it—most of the time entirely outside your awareness.

But while the contents of your mental model determine what you think, feel, do, and say, you can’t search them—or follow a bread-crumb trail backward through them—to find out precisely which aspects (and when and how they came to be) give rise to any specific facet of who you are and how you react now.

The significance of your mental model in your life can’t be overstated. Although you aren’t consciously aware of it, your mental model circumscribes not only every aspect of your present experience but also what is possible for you to do and be. It determines what you see and how you see the world, both literally and figuratively, as well as how you see yourself.

So it stands to reason that you won’t be successful in making long-lasting changes to your behavior, beliefs, or attitude unless you are able to change your mental model.

Changing the Status Quo

The often-quoted statement is true: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. If you want to live a fuller live, if you want to be more effective or useful or loving in the world, you first need to recognize that your greatest constraints are imposed by your own mental model.

You can’t do away with your mental model—or “think outside the box,” since the box is your mental model. But you can expand it through learning, through exposing yourself to new situations, people, and ideas, and through physical movement. You can grow new neurons and generate new neuronal connections and pathways. Those new neuronal pathways represent alterations to your mental model, a change in your status quo to a new normal for you.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

F Is for Feedback

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loop

Any action you take generates some type of feedback. The result can be monumental or tiny, desirable or undesirable, expected or wildly surprising. If you’re paying attention, you might notice what happens after you do something and use that feedback to determine what to do next. If you’re driving along a snowy road and your car begins to skid, the skid lets you know conditions require some type of adjustment. You don’t want to get into an accident, so you slow down. Maybe you slow down intentionally, but maybe you’ve done this a thousand times and adjust your speed automatically without even noticing.

Your brain has criteria for evaluating the data provided by physiological feedback loops (in order to maintain your body temperature and signal when you need to eat or drink—or stop eating or drinking). It also has criteria for evaluating the data provided by your mental, emotional, and behavioral feedback loops. The problem is that these criteria are part of your mental model of the world, much of which is unconscious, which means you’re not aware of it.

David DiSalvo calls feedback loops “the engines of your adaptive brain.”

Day in and day out, we make decisions based on the results of feedback loops that run in our minds without our noticing. None of us stops to think through each stage of the loop—how the data we’ve gathered is being processed to lead us to our next action. And yet, even without our conscious monitoring, the loops just keep moving.

The Four Stages of a Feedback Loop

Science writer Thomas Goetz described feedback loops in Wired Magazine:

Evidence
First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored.

Relevance
Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant.

Consequence
But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead.

Action
There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act.

After that action is measured, the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.

As DiSalvo says, we make decisions based on the results of feedback loops, but even in cases where we’re making decisions rather than simply reacting, it would be more accurate to say we make decisions based on our interpretation of the results of feedback loops. The apparent result of an action we’ve taken—the evidence—has to be interpreted for relevance and consequence before we can determine how to react.

alphabet-changeYour brain does not necessarily objectively evaluate the data presented to it. Because you perceive the world through your particular mental model, you’re predisposed to interpret the results of your actions in certain ways. This can be problematic especially when you’re presented with negative evidence. Things didn’t work out the way you planned; you did something other than what you intended or wanted to do; or you’re faced with unexpected obstacles. The most useful way to respond to such information is to look at it objectively: you tried something and it didn’t work. You can then try to figure out why it didn’t work and decide whether to try it again or to do something else.

Your Brain Prefers to Maintain the Status Quo

Let’s say you normally dine out with a group of friends once a week at which time you tend to overindulge a bit. You’ve now decided to cut back on the calories and have a vague idea of ordering something from the lighter side of the menu. But once you’re at the restaurant, menu in hand, you find yourself quickly scanning the lower-calorie items  and then ordering what you always order.

You’re disappointed in yourself, especially when you think about it afterward. You’ve had similar experiences before, so you interpret it as just another example—more proof—of how little willpower you have.

Confirmation bias is powerful. If you believe you lack willpower, you’re likely to view the negative results of your actions as confirmation of your preexisting belief. Once you interpret your result as proof of a preexisting belief, you’re much less likely to attempt to figure out what didn’t work and what to do next and much more likely to give up. At that point, the habit or behavior you were trying to change becomes even more entrenched and the goal you were trying to achieve seems even more distant.

But if you looked at this situation objectively, in terms of gathering data (feedback) so you could decide what to do next time, you might see it differently.

You might remind yourself that your brain prefers to maintain the status quo. So when you went to a familiar restaurant where all the familiar cues and triggers kicked in, the result you got—ordering the usual—was really quite predictable. The feedback to store is that going into this situation with a vague idea but no plan doesn’t work. Next time, you could try deciding ahead of time what you’re going to order so you don’t have to be tempted by the menu. If that doesn’t work, you could suggest meeting your friends at a different restaurant that doesn’t have the same kind of food-related associations.

How you perceive and interpret what happens after you take, attempt to take, or fail to take action strongly affects your chances of success. Not everything you try is going to go smoothly or work out the way you hoped it would. Sometimes the road is slippery, under construction, or takes a detour. Noticing that what you tried simply didn’t work will allow you to use the information to help you determine the best action to take next—as will noticing when what you tried did work.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Do You Object to Being Typed?

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people in boxes

I’m preparing to present the second annual Enneagram Panel at my upcoming Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain), so I thought I would respond briefly to a few of the objections people have expressed about being typed.

#1: I Don’t Want to Be Boxed In

Some people strongly resist being typed. They believe they are unique and that assigning a label to them diminishes them somehow. They think typing puts them in a box. But typing doesn’t put people into boxes; it identifies aspects of the boxes we’re already in—and from which we can’t completely escape.

Each of us looks out at the world from within our own model of the world (our box), which influences what we pay attention to, how we interpret and react to events, the meaning we assign to them, and much of what we think, feel, do, and say.

Learning about your Enneagram type can provide you with a window into your personal model of the world. It can also help you understand others while developing the self-awareness that’s essential for creating positive and sustained change. Knowing your type doesn’t diminish your uniqueness. In fact, it can actually help you expand and reshape the box you’re in.

#2: Typing is Just another Term for Stereotyping

The premise is that stereotyping equals categorizing, and categorizing people is a bad thing. However, categorizing is a function of the unconscious part of your brain (System 1). You can’t stop your brain from categorizing, which means your brain (i.e. you) is already stereotyping other people. (Reacting based on stereotypes is a separate issue.)

You wouldn’t want to stop your brain from categorizing. Being able to make quick assessments is essential to your survival. If you were roaming the savanna as your distant ancestors did, you wouldn’t want to have to wait until a lion was in your face to determine whether or not it was in fact a lion. You’d want to be able to make a quick assessment based on general features, take action, and fill in the details later.

In the case of a lion, it’s better to be safe than sorry. And that’s the basic operating principle of the part of your brain that runs you. It wants you to survive and categorizing is a thinking shortcut that increases your chances of survival. The lion’s brain makes the same kinds of quick assessments. So does your cat’s or dog’s brain.

Since your brain is always categorizing anyway, wouldn’t it be preferable to have those categorizations be based on something (informed) rather than be random or arbitrary?

#3: Type Doesn’t Explain Everything about a Person

It’s absolutely true that type doesn’t explain everything. In fact, over three years ago, I published a blog post on my Enneagram website in which I wrote:

As comprehensive a tool as it is, the Enneagram can’t and doesn’t explain everything there is to know about us. It is not the personality equivalent of a Theory of Everything.

But that’s no reason to avoid it.

You have a capacity referred to as mentalization that allows you to understand your own mental states or thought processes and to attribute mental states—beliefs, intentions, desires, etc. to yourself as well as to others. You can also recognize that others have beliefs, intentions, desires, etc. that are different from yours.

Learning more about the mental states of other people actually increases your ability to understand both them and yourself. And the Enneagram is the best tool I’ve found for knowing myself at a deeper (rather than a superficial) level and for understanding where other people are coming from.

Occasionally I wonder if the real resistance some people might have to being typed is a fear of being found out—of actually being understood. But there are no good or bad types. You can be highly self-aware or pretty much asleep-at-the wheel no matter what type you are. You have to decide what you want to do with the information.

Is What You See All There Is?

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rainbow eye

As you move through the world, you probably have the sense that you’re aware of whatever there is to be aware of as it is. This applies not only to the sensory world, but also to events, situations, interpersonal interactions—actually to everything that exists or occurs within your world. But the capacity of conscious attention is much too limited for this to even be possible. The 11,000,000 bits of information being processed by the unconscious part of the brain at any given moment need to be considerably (and swiftly) condensed and summarized into the 40 bits you can process consciously.

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, Incognito

What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI)*

Your brain maintains a model of the world that represents what’s normal in it for you. The result is that you experience a stripped-down, customized version of the actual world. To a great extent, each of us really does inhabit our own world. But it would be incorrect to say that we create our reality; rather, our brain creates our reality for us.

Much, if not most, of what you do, think, and feel consists of automatically generated responses to internal or external stimuli. And it isn’t possible to consciously mediate all of your responses. It wouldn’t even be a good idea to try.

In addition to helping you navigate the world, your mental model gives rise to your sense of the way things should be. It generates expectations (that are either confirmed or denied), assumptions, biases, etc. that determine what you pay attention to, what you perceive (even what you are able to perceive), how you interpret and respond to what you perceive, and the meaning you make of it all. Your mental model is the result of your genes and your experiences, of both intention and accident. Your brain has been constructing your particular model of the world since your birth, and it is continually updating and modifying it—most of the time entirely outside your awareness.

But while the contents of your particular mental model determine what you think, feel, do, and say, you can’t search them—or follow a bread-crumb trail backward through them—to find out precisely which aspects (and when and how they came to be) give rise to any specific facet of who you are and how you react now.

The significance of your mental model in your life can’t be overstated. Although you aren’t consciously aware of it, your mental model circumscribes not only every aspect of your present experience but also what is possible for you to do and be. It determines what you see and how you see the world, both literally and figuratively, as well as how you see yourself.

But…Your Brain Can Get It Wrong

System 1, the unconscious part of your brain, uses associative thinking to develop and maintain your model of the world. However, there are some problems with associative thinking. For example:

  • It sacrifices accuracy for speed.
  • It doesn’t discriminate very well.
  • It takes cognitive shortcuts (aka cognitive biases).

Your mental model can—and sometimes does—lead to erroneous conclusions and inappropriate responses. It’s the job of consciousness (System 2) to check the impulses and suggestions it receives from System 1, but consciousness is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Most of the time, it’s content to go along with System 1, which means it’s susceptible to cognitive biases. By definition, cognitive biases are distortions or errors in thinking. They actually decrease your understanding while giving you a feel-good sense of cognitive ease.

Confirmation bias is the easy acceptance of information that validates what you already believe. It causes you to selectively notice and pay attention to what confirms your beliefs and to ignore what doesn’t. It underlies the discomfort you feel around people who disagree with you and the ease you feel around people who share your beliefs.

Information that confirms what you already believe to be true makes you feel right and certain, so you’re likely to accept it uncritically. On the other hand, you’re more likely to reject information that is inconsistent with what you already believe or at least you hold inconsistent information up to greater scrutiny. You have different standards for evaluating information depending on the level of cognitive ease it generates.

Evidence has precious little impact on any of us if it conflicts with what we believe simply because the cognitive strain of processing it is too great. To a very real extent, we don’t even “see” conflicting evidence. While total commitment to our particular worldview (mental model) makes us feel more confident, it narrows—rather than expands—our possibilities. That means it limits our powers of discernment, our ability to increase our understanding of the world around us, and our creative potential. It closes the world off for us instead of opening it up.

The often-quoted statement is true: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. If we want to live fuller lives, if we want to be more effective or useful or loving in the world, we first need to recognize that our greatest constraints are imposed by our own mental models.

It’s important to remember that what you see is not all there is.

*Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677