Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show
Page 29
It is also true for a claim that is not an axiom; if our brain meets it repetitively, it has a very good chance of being considered an axiom, since it became familiar knowledge. This tendency of our brain is called “the illusion of truth.” It is broadly used, cynically, for propaganda purposes.
Reduction, when it involves overflattening of the depth and multidimensionality of phenomena, might lead to oversimplifying, which substantially distorts the nature of the phenomena.
Each logical inference has a “window of cognitive scope” that matches it. There are very limited windows, and there are windows that reach the horizon of cognitive view, and their validity seems universal.
Deviation from the valid borders of a logical inference “beyond the verge” might lead us to absurdity.
Often our brain prefers to focus on the short or immediate term (the present) and, by doing so, to mortgage future goals. We often prefer to feel good here and now rather than considering the possibility of improving our condition in the future—thus the difficulty related to postponement of gratification. We have a built-in apprehension about mortgaging the “safe” present on behalf of the unknown future.
The comforting embrace of routine is sometimes a bear hug—it prevents us from looking around in a process of self-interpretation or, in other words, to think reflectively. Such thinking relies on staying at the point where our consciousness replaces the exclamation mark with a question mark. When we hurry through the routine race of life, our brain is prone to thinking fast in response to the immediate challenges of reality. Often, the process of reflective thinking, in which we “look at ourselves from the outside” and perform “second-level thinking processes,” is missing. Intelligent thinking derives from an appropriate mix of reflective thoughts and reactive thoughts.
“The Status Quo Bias”
The status quo bias refers to our tendency to identify the existing with the desirable. The old insights nesting in our brain are probably at the basis of the status quo bias. The traditional supposition our brain tends toward, according to which “the existing is the better,” relies on the old memes.
Thus, for example, the German philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote in 1710 that, despite the disadvantages of our planet, “We live in the best of all possible worlds.” (Time will tell if he was right.)
The existing has the highest priority only because “it is there.” In a lighter tone of loose association, the mountaineer George Mallory answered “Because it’s there” when he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest.
The Sin of “Performance Bias”
If, on certain circumstances, it is customary to “take action,” then not doing anything is perceived as a greater failure than the failure that is caused by taking an action, even if that action does not go well. In other circumstances, it is the other way around—taking an action might cause greater regret if it fails. This behavioral bias is applicable to numerous domains of our life. For example, capital-market experts claim that performance bias, which leads to frantic overactivity in the stock market, is usually prone to cause losses to the ones who adapt it.
Social Suggestion Subjugating Inner Truth Perception
One of the most fascinating studies about social influence was “Asch’s conformity experiment,” which was carried out by researcher Solomon Asch in 1951. The study showed that, in the absolute majority of cases, subjects tended to change their opinion and match it to the “consensus,” even though the data they were shown presented a totally different picture.[31] The wisdom of the crowd often wins over our better judgment and we surrender to it, even when our consciousness interprets the situation entirely differently.
The World as My Image—the Projections of the Ego
We tend to use excuses that please our ego. It is difficult for a person to take out the “self” from himself.
Thoughts, cognitive tasks, and memories create ego projections. We tend to pad the ego and protect it by using shock absorbers, which are built in within us, in an attempt to facilitate its drive along the bumpy paths of reality. Thus, when an operational task is ego-friendly it is called “ego-syntonic,” and when it leads to a sense of discomfort it is called “ego-dystonic.” In fact, each piece of conscious information casts a shadow of “ego projections,” and the magnitude of the projection (the shadow) changes in accordance with their relevancy to the ego.
Numerous pieces of so-called “objective advice” we offer are related to consideration of ego and profitability (how does it affect us?), even at the unconscious level. An attempt to pinpoint such effects enables us to delete them in order to offer the fairest advice. In order to be able to cope with ego projections, we must first be aware of them. Our ego casts a long shadow over each of our thoughts—and being aware of it enables us to weight its proportion in the end product of our thought, or, alternately, to let it be or try to minimize it.
The Good Deeds Quota
A common behavioral tendency is reaching a “quota of good deeds” (we have had this tendency from the days we recited the “Scout oath”). The level of the tendency is determined by each individual in accordance to his beliefs and values. Each person has a personal “reference point,” and he dynamically calibrates his behavior according to it. When the personal line is crossed, as we perceive it, the behavioral bias orders us to find the average for our actions by exhibiting less moral behavior, and vice versa: when we feel we have exaggerated with unfair conduct toward others, the behavioral bias guides us to act with more decency.
This is a common behavioral tendency, although partially undesirable. Obviously, it would be better to do the good constantly and consistently.
It seems that our tendency toward decent behavior matches “the momentary level of decency” in which we position ourselves. It depends on our tendency to position ourselves at a certain point, which is often the point of balance between doing good as a value and the energetic price we have to pay in order to reach a certain threshold and retain our position above it.
Clarifications About Art
Some see art as a connection with dimensions of experience that are beyond the personal—as broadening our consciousness from the personal experimenting dimension to the collective experimenting dimension.
Anima mundi (the soul of the world) refers to an experimenting layer that we all breathe—i.e., all of us experience it because all of us live in this world. The artist mines the impressions out of this common medium, and his brain processes them in a unique way that is both subjective and objective.
Part of the aesthetic experience is the sense of excitement that is formed when we identify a familiar pattern. Whenever we meet a new creation, we are in need of the familiar in order to be able to enjoy the unfamiliar.
The fingerprint of the artist’s brain is imprinted on the reality manifestation of the work of art.
Thus, a painter from the Impressionist movement dismantles the vision of his eyes into separate specks of color on the canvas—as specks of light on the retina as they appear in the sensory, iconic “vision memory”—in an attempt to transfer the raw input of the vision experience. The “inner logic” of the creative brain, however, always merges with virginal view of the “reality as is.” We will never be able to find two identical paintings of the same “reality manifestation” painted by two separate Impressionist painters. The personal fingerprint of the brain is an inherent part of the supposedly raw input.
And, as art teachers like to stress, positioning a standstill object in front of art students often turns their work into self-portraits of each and every one of them.
In a sense, composers also reflect the inner rhythms of their brain in their music. Thus, some claim that they could hear the approaching paces of insanity that overtook Schumann in his late compositions.
A great artist as a great scientist—both are sometimes perceived as a Promethean figure who exposes “ordinary” human beings to the secrets of the high spheres.
In art there is no such thing as “no such thing” (or, as the country singer Paul Brant puts it, “Don’t tell me the sky is the limit when there are human footprints on the moon”). It expands the limits of human perception, and it breaks limitations and barriers.
Aspects of Thoughts and Emotions
Emotional ethos or conceptual patterns that are formed frequently are manifested in material changes in the brain tissue and, sometimes, reflected as prominent changes in brain structure. For example, a study shows that the hippocampus in the brains of people who suffer from long-term depression is about 15 percent smaller compared to its size in the brains of those who do not suffer from it.
Behavior researchers who belong to the behaviorism school of thought raised the banner of observational science—i.e., science that focuses only on what can be seen, quantified, and measured. They avoided the subjective aspects of exploring emotions and desires, but it seems that the gap that this approach left in the puzzle of understanding human beings is too wide.
Compatibility between physical senses and thoughts and emotions is required for the formation of a mental scenario. The thinking processes in our brain are related to the overall condition of our body. It is difficult to think about compassion when we are hitting a punching bag. It is difficult to imagine a sleepy afternoon on the shore of a tropical island when our fists are closed tightly and our jaws are fastened. On the other hand, imagine yourself pushing your car, which is stuck in the middle of the street, when your body is in a status of conscious relaxation and your muscles are loose. Compatibility between brain and body is an essential condition for the ability to create a reliable emotional-mental image.
A fascinating experiment showed that when our elbow is bent, as happens when we bring an object closer to us, and we are asked to imagine a list of objects that is read to us, the accompanying feeling is more positive compared to a situation in which the same list is read to us when our arm is extended, as happens when we make a rejection movement, when we push a certain object further away from us. It seems that the position of our body creates a certain tendency to a typical emotional mix.
The values of the scale of “intensity of mental representation” are compatible to the dimensions of the anagram (neural networking) that encodes it. Various insights in our brain have different levels of representation. When we imagine some of them, it creates extremely loud seismic noise and a tsunami in the sea of our brain. In their Richter scale of mental representation, a higher value will therefore be registered compared to representations that make weaker waves in the sea of our brain. The intensity of the emotional charge of the experience greatly affects the intensity of its mental representation.
High Spirits
The Pace of Thinking is also the Pacemaker of our Emotions
Rapid thinking, which is sometimes defined as a state in which the pace of producing thoughts is faster than the ability to express them in words, sometimes improves the inner emotional climate. Studies found that rapid thinking triggers high spirits and usually induces a sense of mental vitality. This finding might be related to the “run of thoughts” and high spirits related to a manic condition. On the other hand, “slow thinking” is compatible to a gloomy mood. These findings suggest that inducing a faster pace of thinking might be a therapeutic tool to improve people’s mood.
A common assumption among brain researchers is that our brain is wired, on average, to a positive bias of reality—i.e. to perceiving our world in rosy hues—without disregarding the fact that among people who suffer from depression, the pendulum of emotions turns toward negative bias with respect to reality. As aforementioned, however, researchers generally tend to think that the common human tendency with respect to predicting the future is optimistic, with all the reservations that exist with respect to this comprehensive declaration.
High spirit is an emotional trampoline that swings us upward, softens our fall, and often induces a conceptual ethos that strikes like the soles of a flamenco dancer in the midst of a passionate dance.
Just as the Australian plant banksia needs a fire in order to spread its seeds, the flames of enthusiasm might inflame the wick of thought related to a great idea.
It is claimed that Handel wrote the “Messiah” within three weeks only, when he was in high spirits, or even at a manic state. During a manic state, ideas might flow so fast until they “bump into” each other.
High spirits increase the speed of thought and are in a linear-like correlation with the output of the products of thinking. This renaissance of imagination takes place up to a certain point—the point of mania, from which the correlation is distorted and even turns over—then the products of thinking are found trampling along the quicksand of chaos.
At a manic state, the thoughts buzz like bees in the busy center of the beehive. Thinking strings of various lengths are formed—some reach the end of the nose, and some reach the horizon. All great life enigmas stand in line and demand full and immediate answers.
Regret
The director Woody Allen once said that the only thing he regrets in his life is that he was not born someone else.
Most people, however, refer to regret in the sense of actions they could choose whether or not to perform. In this context, there is a common distinction between two types of regret: the regret of doing, which derives from an action that was performed, and the regret of not doing, which derives from regretting not doing something that could have been done. Studies found that, in the short term, we are more concerned about the undesirable outcomes of actions we performed, while, as time goes by, in the long term, we become more regretful concerning actions that we could have taken and didn’t. This tendency was not found as gender-dependent, but it was found that the regret of not doing increases as we become older.
Bonnie Ware, who worked as a nurse in a hospice for terminal patients, described in her book that one of the most common regrets among dying individuals, men and women alike, was not expressing their feelings toward others more frequently. Thus, a person who adopts the approach of Mr. Spock from Vulcan and seldom expresses positive feelings toward others might regret it toward the end of his life.
Elegiac Thoughts
“The inevitable misery of every-day life,” as Freud mentioned, often triggers sorrowful thoughts about the journey of our life.
Sometimes the strident accords of the melody of our mood are formed into a nihilistic tune that sounds like a whistle of a train. This is a march that is heard by those who believe that we spend our days on a train that is headed nowhere.
Studies have found that the predictions of those who tend to provide more strict interpretation are more accurate. The term “depressive realism” connects the rigorous emotional ethos with more accurate and reality-compatible interpretation of reality appearances as they are. We often suffer “emotional phantom pains,” however. This is the anxiety we feel due to reality scenarios that never take place but, nevertheless, cause us emotional distress, because we think about them and are preoccupied by them.
Sometimes knowing causes suffering. A refreshing example of this painful subject is the example of Jerry, the cat, from the cartoon Tom and Jerry, who continues to run even when there is no ground under its feet. But after a short time “air running,” once it finally realizes that it’s walking in the air, it drops down at once like Newton’s apple. The “knowing” summons gravity to perform its familiar magic. Indeed, knowing can bring about suffering.
The Abyss Within
The “Lucifer Effect” refers to a situation that makes “normative” people act wickedly.
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the prominent representative of the view that says that human nature is basically good (the imagination of man’s heart is good from his
youth).[32] On the other hand, there is the view of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who claimed that human nature is basically bad (the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth).[33] It seems that each of the two worldviews is partially true.
The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was well familiar with human cruelty, wrote, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Pandora’s boxes also exist outside the Greek mythology, and one of these boxes is hidden within each and every one of us. The dark side can materialize in each and every one of us. In order to prevent the seed of evil from developing within us, we must constantly struggle not to let this aspect of our being control our behavior throughout every moment of the day, throughout all our life. We must prepare ourselves for this constant struggle according to the time perspective of “The Hundred Years’ War.” We should aspire to select the compassionate action pattern from the repertoire of behaviors unfolding in front of us, as our favorite performance option at any given moment, knowing that, unfortunately, our human essence will probably not always allow this optimal scenario, but, nevertheless, we should always aspire to it.
Several parallel channels of performance options that derive from the momentary brain climate run around in our brain at every given moment. Some of the options are unfair, or even cruel, with regard to others, and we are required to stand guard in order to minimize their expression and even to eliminate them as much as possible.
“Your Wish is My Command”—the Genie Aspect of our Personality