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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Randomness Does Not Compute

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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.

L Is for Luck

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Plans, practice, and preparation are all useful, even essential, if you want to accomplish anything significant in life. But no matter how rock-solid they are, your plans, practice, and preparation cannot immunize you against random occurrences, aka luck. Your luck in a given circumstance may be good or bad, but by its nature it isn’t predictable.

A good definition of luck is:

The chance happening of fortunate or adverse events.

It’s important to recognize that, statistically speaking, random events occur far more often and have a far greater impact on us than we recognize. Events outside our control will occur. When everything goes according to plan or falls into place, we can thank our lucky stars. But we can’t count on being lucky. And we can’t take credit for luck.

The fact that luck is something we can’t control automatically casts it in a bad light. Both the nature of it and the outcome are uncertain and uncertainty gives the unconscious part of our brain the heebie jeebies. We prefer to operate under the illusion of control, maintaining our belief that we can influence outcomes even in the face of significant irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

Thus there are people who believe they create their own luck. “Chance favors the prepared mind,” said Louis Pasteur. And in some circumstances that’s true. You can’t necessarily take advantage of advantageous circumstances if you don’t know how to respond or are not prepared to do so. You can, to an extent, be ready to open your arms to random good fortune—which would certainly be more welcome than bad fortune.

Estimating Impact

However, good fortune does not always lead to good outcomes. Take lottery winners, a group that has been the subject of numerous studies. Not everyone who wins the lottery ends up worse off than they were before—but a surprising number of winners do. And most report being no happier after winning than people who didn’t win.

Our beliefs about outcomes are strongly affected by one of the cognitive biases we’re afflicted with. This one is known as the impact bias, and it has two parts. We think we know whether a future potential event will affect us in a positive or in a negative way. And we’re usually pretty good at getting that prediction right. We also think we know how large or small that impact will be and how long it will last. That’s where we often miss the mark by anticipating that both good and bad events will affect us more—and for longer—than they actually will.

Something that is pretty predictable is that you’re more likely to overreact to bad luck when you aren’t fully committed to your current plan of action. If you’re more or less going through the motions, it won’t take much to blow you off course or permanently derail you. You might think what you’re up to is just not meant to be or that you don’t have what it takes.

That’s why it’s critical to get very, very clear about your desired outcome ahead of time. If you have a strong commitment to what you’re going after, you’re more likely to consider bad luck a bump in the road. Maybe it’s a small bump or maybe it’s an enormous boulder. Nevertheless, you’ll be more inclined to figure out how to navigate around it and continue on your way if you really want what’s on the other side and if you know the next steps you need to take.

Enter the Black Swan

Sometimes luck, good or bad, has a relatively minor effect. On the other hand, luck—in the form of what Nassim Taleb calls Black Swans—can be life-changing. Taleb describes a so-called Black Swan this way:

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

The majority of swans are white, so black swans are unexpected. As Taleb says, on September 10, 2011, the events of September 11 were not reasonably conceivable. If they had been, something could have been done to prevent them.

A Black Swan event can permanently alter your course or at the very least make it vastly more difficult to pursue. But you can’t anticipate such events or know whether they will be positive or negative. What you can be certain about is what is meaningful to you. If the course you’re on is massively disrupted, you will still have the knowledge of what’s important to you, even if you have to find a completely different way to create it in your life.

If there’s something you want to do and the main thing holding you back is uncertainty, try imagining a world where all is preordained, everything is known in advance, and there is no possibility of surprise. Is that really a world you’d want to live in?

You can’t predict the future no matter how much your brain wants you to believe you can. Although you can—and should—plan ahead, it’s important to remember that the path from here to there is rarely a straight line. Randomness and luck often play a larger role in both process and outcome than we’d like to acknowledge.

In the long run, how you respond (persevere) in the face of setbacks and random events is more important than achieving instant or quick success. And you can take all the credit for persevering.

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

Uncertainty: Learning to Live with Butterflies

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uncertainty

The unconscious part of our brain abhors ambiguity and uncertainty. And patience is not its middle name. That’s unfortunate.

We work to eliminate as much uncertainty as we can as quickly as possible. But when we eliminate uncertainty, we necessarily eliminate novelty. And novelty is the starting point for creation and innovation. In eliminating uncertainty, we kill our shot at brilliance. We become derivative. All in the name of not having to learn to live with butterflies. —Jonathan Fields

In our haste to return to the illusory state of certainty, we tend to do things like jump to conclusions, accept the first answer or explanation that comes to mind (consistent with our mental model), act prematurely, or immobilize ourselves in endless rounds of rumination. (Rumination feels like problem-solving but it’s the opposite: problem-prolonging, if you will.)

By refusing to allow ourselves to simply observe the discomfort that accompanies ambiguity and uncertainty, we often deny ourselves another experience: the pure joy of the aha! moment when a solution presents itself. That may take an hour or several days—or even longer—but suddenly what was murky and inchoate becomes bright and clear. The path ahead becomes obvious.

I say the solution “presents itself” because although we tend to take credit for coming up with the brilliant idea or flash of insight, the part of our brain we identify with had little to do with it. It’s the unconscious that figured it out and then clued us in.

It’s interesting that the unconscious is equally capable of jumping to quick conclusions and of wrestling with an issue long after we’ve depleted our conscious capacity to think about it. In situations where a wrong conclusion isn’t likely to make a huge difference, jumping to one is probably more efficient. But when the issue or problem or project is bigger, it’s worth letting the unconscious mull it over for a while.

One of the reasons waiting this process out makes us squirm is that we have no control over it. It isn’t going to occur by the force of our will or on our timetable. When we try to make it happen we usually just end up getting in our own way and muddling the process.

Certainty Is Not Clarity

Although we frequently use the terms interchangeably, certainty is not a synonym for clarity.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. –Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

There’s a big difference between being unclear—not knowing which step to take—and being uncertain—not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be. It’s important to distinguish between the two and to be able to recognize whether it’s a lack of clarity or the fear of uncertainty that’s getting in the way.

Certainty is an illusion—a somewhat comforting illusion, but an illusion nevertheless. There’s no way to predict the future, and randomness plays a much bigger role in our lives than we want to believe. So if we wait until we are certain of the outcome of our actions, we’ll never act because the outcome can never be certain. There are no guarantees in life.

The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. —Robert Burns

Clarity, unlike certainty, is not an emotional state. It’s a state of mind: unclouded, unobstructed, unambiguous. Clarity isn’t arrived at via a tortuous route. Unfortunately, since the unconscious part of our brain is biased against uncertainty, we are biased against it, too. This is another example of our brain using us instead of the other way around.

What you can do:

  • Practice tolerating uncertainty and not being attached to the outcome by adopting an attitude of curiosity.
  • Learn to distinguish between being unclear (not knowing which step to take) and being uncertain (not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be).

It isn’t easy, but rather than trying to get back to comfortable and certain as quickly as possible, we can develop a tolerance for the discomfort. We can even learn to appreciate the uncertainty and the opportunity it presents for novelty. Whatever is on the other side of our current distress may be unimaginable to us now, but it could be brilliant. Why take the chance of missing out on something brilliant just to avoid feeling a little uncomfortable?

Additional reading: 12 Signs that You Lack Clarity

Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty

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road ahead

Although we frequently use the terms interchangeably, certainty is not a synonym for clarity.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. –Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

There’s a big difference between being unclear—not knowing which step to take—and being uncertain—not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be. It’s important to distinguish between the two and to be able to recognize whether it’s a lack of clarity or the fear of uncertainty that’s getting in the way.

There’s another big problem with trying to be certain, which is that we can’t be. There’s no way to predict the future—and randomness plays a much bigger role in our lives than we want to believe—so we can’t be certain about the outcome of anything we do. We end up tying ourselves in knots and wasting precious mental resources chasing an illusion.

So if we wait until we can be certain of the outcome of our actions, we’ll never act because the outcome can never be certain. There are no guarantees in life.

The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. —Robert Burns

Unlike certainty, clarity is not an emotional state. It’s a state of mind: unclouded, unobstructed, unambiguous. Unlike certainty, clarity isn’t arrived at via a tortuous route. Unfortunately, the unconscious part of our brain (System 1) is biased against uncertainty, and so we are biased against it, as well. This is another example of our brain using us instead of the other way around.

What you can do:
  • Practice tolerating uncertainty and not being attached to the outcome.
  • Learn to distinguish between being unclear (not knowing which step to take) and being uncertain (not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be).

Additional reading: 12 Signs that You Lack Clarity

Anger, Adrenaline, and Arrogance: Addiction to Certainty

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Strong emotions—the ones that amp up adrenaline and cortisol levels—increase our confidence. When we’re angry, for example, we’re more likely to feel certain about whatever position we’ve taken. We’re sure we not only know what we’re talking about, but also that we’re right and any other parties involved are wrong.

This feeling of certainty is an illusion, generated by the amphetamine-like effects of anger, which include kicking our metabolism into a higher gear while narrowing our mental focus. The unconscious part of our brain has a natural tendency to discount anything that doesn’t jibe with what we believe. It already automatically narrows our focus. Adding anger (or actual amphetamines, for that matter) to the mix further constricts our focus, sometimes closing our mind altogether.

When we’re angry, we filter out anything that doesn’t support our position. We focus on one or two aspects of a situation, sometimes taking them entirely out of context, and ignore the rest. Our confidence swells, bolstered by the boost of adrenaline, into over-confidence, even arrogance.

Our brain craves certainty and being right. This can be difficult to compensate for under the best of circumstances. When we’re emotionally aroused, it can be impossible—especially when we don’t recognize what’s going on. We’re used to thinking that the level of confidence we have about something is an accurate indicator of whether or not we’re right about it. Sometimes we are right. But the unconscious part of our brain isn’t concerned with such petty details. It’s less interested in whether we’re actually right and more interested in whether we feel right.

The illusion of certainty can be hard to let go of. Who wants to feel uncertain? Who wants to admit they’re wrong? Who wants to think the powerful sense of confidence they feel isn’t altogether reliable? Too often, we do whatever we can, whatever we have to do, to maintain the illusion of certainty. We refuse to give up the fight, no matter what damage it causes to us or to other people. We’d rather be right than happy. We’d rather be right than free. We’re so addicted to certainty that instead of using our brain, we’re willing to let our brain use us.

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