Mind Over Matter
We are all familiar with the idea of head and heart being in conflict. The idea of “feeling your way” through a situation is a common one, as is the notion of “feeling out of control,” i.e. unable to consciously manage our physical responses.
This isn’t really a matter of emotion impeding conscious action; in terms of evolutionary development, emotion was there first. The “reptilian” or “primitive” brain, as it is often called, is common to all animals in more or less the same degree. As we have seen, it allows for instantaneous reaction to our environment. What it doesn’t do is allow us to modify that environment, or control our behaviour. Those abilities are permitted by the newer part of our brain, the “neo” or prefrontal-cortex. Remember the snake in the woods? It was the neo cortex that allowed you to create, or incept, a “mental movie” that was based on experience but original in and of itself. The model of the snake – the file that the film was built around – came from deep within your limbic brain.
Our emotions are “original” and allow us to react to stimulus; our consciousness is new and allows us to manipulate the causes of stimuli through proactive innovation, planning and coordination. For people, the challenge lies in bridging the gap – justifying our emotions in cognitively comprehensible ways.
With this in mind, ask yourself these questions:
What is the meaning of life?
What happens after we die?
You can see why this emotional/cognitive confabulatory conflict has broad ramifications and why it’s worth giving some consideration. We’ll get into how that connects to stigma shortly.
As suggested through the example of fear and beauty, children have innate emotional responses – they know what they like and what they don’t like, what they should fear and what they should embrace. My son, a Star Wars fan, needed nobody to tell him that the Emperor was evil (he looks sick and wears black) or that Princess Leia was good (empathetic, dressed in white, good skin). His initial reaction to a toy of Luke Skywalker in black, though, was that Luke must be a bad guy. Not ironically, that’s the subconscious impression the film makers were trying to achieve by dressing Luke in black in the first place.
We all know that kids love to ask why about everything. There is no detail that can’t be deconstructed further. This is natural, expected, and desired – with every question they ask, the more information a child’s mental database is filled with. The more knowledge he or she has, the more accurate models they have to work with. This allows a child to better assess their world, interact with it meaningfully and develop realistic plans to further their interests. Part of this process of establishing a cognitive framework of the world is connecting dots. Back to my son; every now and then, he’ll come up with a syllogistic connection that he’s made. These connections aren’t always right, but they are connections he has made, therefore they are real to him until proven otherwise in a way he can internalize. It sometimes takes a bit of convincing to show him why his connection isn’t the right one.
A hypothetical yet reality-based example: my boy, now three, asks me a “why” question while I’m busy cooking dinner. My attention is split, so I’m a bit tense from distraction, plus I don’t have an immediate answer. Trying to think what to say while keeping dinner from burning, my body language expresses agitation and my brow is furled in concentration. My boy connects that frown and my overall body posture with me being upset – this is, for him, an important emotional piece of information as, if I’m upset with something he has done, he could get a time out. Those two factors cause an automatic emotional response and he asks me, hesitantly, if he is in trouble.
Why is he thinking this? There is no apparent reason he should be in trouble. This is the emotional, reactive piece: my body language matches a mental model in his memory bank of me upset; the recognition of that model has triggered an emotional response of discomfort. In this case, the threat is the potential consequences of being in trouble; a time out or, as is more likely with me, a mini-lecture.
I ask him back, “why would you be in trouble?” After a second’s thought, my son answers “because I said some bad words.” That’s the cognitive, confabulatory piece. He didn’t say any “bad words”, nor is he actually in trouble; the notion of being in trouble exists in his mind only. This doesn’t matter – his feelings tell him there is a threat. By giving him an opportunity to explain, under duress, why he is feeling that way, I’ve just incited my son to confabulate a cognitive justification for an emotional reaction.
Yes, kids do this intentionally; imaginary play is an important process by which they learn to interpret their world. Adults do it too: we call it acting or role-playing, or in writing, euphemisms or allegory. Broadly, we call this fiction, which we distinguish from non-fiction, or fact.
Of course, just as kids unconsciously confabulate all the time, so do adults. These confabulations are more commonly thought of as biases or, more sinisterly, as stigma.
Stigma
From Inception:
As I have said, my son is a fan of Star Wars. Periodically, when it’s not too over-the-top, we watch the exceptional computer animated Clone Wars cartoon series. As the title implies, there are a lot of clones in the show – genetically identical troopers that look exactly the same except for hair styles and the odd tattoo. In one episode, there is a “defective” clone that does not look like the others – he’s shorter, his face is asymmetrical and wrinkled, he has a limp and a hunched back. While this was a fun episode, chock-full with all the stuff my boy likes – clone-on-droid action, big ships, cool sets – the appearance of that “defective” clone made him so uncomfortable that he insisted we turn the show off. Why would that be?
All the clones are identical except for that one, who therefore stands out in stark contrast. This drew my son’s focus to him, like a stick on an otherwise uninterrupted trail - or the word must caught your eye while we were considering Luke Skywalker a few paragraphs back. The clone’s appearance suggests age and illness – two things which are detrimental to one’s long-term health. The appearance of the “defective” clone (which stood out in sharp relief) triggered an emotional, reactive response of fear in my son, which itself incited a fight-or-flight response. In short, my boy stigmatized the “defective” clone based on appearance alone.
With that in mind, take a quick look at these two videos:
Leprosy is a medical illness with symptoms that manifests in a very visual way.
So – how did those two videos make you feel? Uncomfortable? Why might that be?
I’m not going to be shy – seeing people with skin lesions brings out an emotional response in me, though less so as my understanding of the “why” behind them (both the lesions and my responses to them) grows. Of course, you can’t catch burn and 95% of the human populace is immune to leprosy. These facts do nothing to impede the isolation burn victims often feel or to change the long, sad history of stigma against lepers.
If you’ve read this article in its entirety, you now know why this is the case. Hard-wired deep within our limbic system are mental models of what, in general, illness looks like. Just as we automatically know that black hats indicate bad guys, we autonomically associate “defective” skin with unhealthiness and possibly contagion. When presented with this potential threat we instinctively, emotionally lean towards avoidance or, when larger populations are concerned, containment. To a much lesser extent this is true even of acne. The reverse, of course, is true, too – we “stigmatize” that which we see as beautiful, equating beauty with good health, cleanliness, desirability (it’s easy to see why the cosmetic industry is always in good shape). Remember Princess Leia dressed in virginal white and her clear complexion?
This, then, is the nature of stigma – it’s a hard-wired, model-based reaction to stimuli which trigger an emotional response. These responses can be genetically-rooted (like the fear of snakes or the tendency to feel uncomfortable with people who look sick or somehow different or behaves erratically, especially if dressed poorly) or experientialy rooted (being abused by a relative with tattoos might prejudice one against anyone with tattoos). When a stigmatic response is experientialy-derived, it’s easier for us to consciously trace the cause of experiential fear; with the right facts, we can properly begin to manage it. When it’s a genetic response, particularly one that doesn’t lend itself to an obvious explanation, we subconsciously fill in the logic gap with pieces of other mental models; we confabulate.
Some examples:
Not, “I’m afraid I might catch gay or my kids might catch gay.”
Why sexism? Women are inferior, too emotional, not tough, etc. They therefore can’t be trusted to make the tough choices life gives us. Or, men are brutish, overly competitive, they completely lack the ability to give in or find middle ground. Women are better peace makers.
Not, “I don’t rationally understand the motivations behind a man/woman’s
behaviour because they’re different than my motivations and reactions; I
therefore find them threatening/unreliable.”
Why racism? Blacks/Jews/Indians/South Asians/Irish/British (or, for that matter, Muslims/Christians/Conservatives/Liberals) can’t be trusted, don’t think like you and me, are irrational, their motives are suspect.
Not, “they are different than me, which makes me uncomfortable, particularly if
Poor people are lazy or stupid. Rich people are ruthless or arrogant. Urbanites have no morals; rural folk are bumpkins. It goes on and on. Of course, education has made progress in filling in the gaps in the cases of each one of these stigmas. Knowledge and understanding are replacing the place-holder models with fact, allowing for conscious, considered responses over unconscious, reactive ones.
Why We Lie
We’ve all told lies; some big, some small. The reason we do this is clear, when we stop to look at the facts – we tell lies when telling the truth is less advantageous to us. You might lie on a date to make yourself sound more than you are; you may lie to your parents to avoid getting in trouble for something you have done. In both cases, that’s your reactive, emotional brain egging you on with the self-preservation instinct.
The same holds true with self-deception; we have justified acts that we know to be wrong through confabulation. There’s a cascade of consequence that happens when we do this; the confabulation becomes our reality and therefore becomes a model that we use to inform other aspects of our cognition. If you have ever stewed about something a friend said that hurt your feelings, concluded that person wasn’t a good friend in the first place and turned your back on them, you’ll know what I mean. If you’ve ever taken credit for a colleague’s work because they didn’t deserve it or it should have been your project in the first place, you’ll know what I mean. If you ever justified short-changing the subway or a store teller because they/the chain had it coming, you’ll know what I mean.
Conclusion
This, then, is the whyfor behind how we think and why the rationales we give ourselves aren’t always accurate. Of course, there’s always a chance that I don’t know what I’m talking about; I could very well be unconsciously shilling confabulation. I’m confident I’m not. Heliocentrism, after all, was accepted long before the balance of proof tipped in its favour; evolution and gravity are still theories, but very convincing ones. Cleverly, humans have incepted a scientific model of inquiry to weed out the chance of emotional bias, so time will tell.
Our language (and therefore our thinking) is model-based; some of those models are inherited (nature) while some are based on learned experience (nurture). Our first instinct is to respond to stimuli emotionally – this is an evolutionary adaptation honed over the history of life. This is why there’s a strong correlation between emotion and gullibility or suspicion, an abilitiy that has itself only been stigmatized for a short period of history - for much of human existence, trickery that was seen as negative. Humans have also developed the ability to extrapolate from existing models and build new ones, essentially mimicking the evolutionary process on a cognitive level.
Where these two tendencies (to rely on existing models and to create new ones from the pieces of old ones) collide, we either confabulate (if emotion is highly dominant), lie (if emotion is heavily present but manageable) or take the time to determine the facts (when emotion doesn’t hold sway). This is not to say that emotion is wrong – invariably, there is always truth in feeling, otherwise evolution would not have selected emotions as tools for responding to reality. That truth in feeling, thanks to the generalized nature of models, isn’t always an accurate representation of a given set of circumstances.
If we’re to put some thought into it, then, our best bet is to temper our emotion with reason and to absorb as much varied knowledge as much as possible to inform both. We’ve got a meaning-infused word for that, too – in English, this balance is known as mindfulness, or more commonly – wisdom.
POST SCRIPT: Surfacing
Our pursuit of an answer to “why” has taken us in two directions:
- inward to the brain, the interaction of human systems and down to the
cellular level
- outward to the level of the ecosystem
We’ve used computers and networks, cells and ecosystems as examples. Many of the hyperlinks are to Wikipedia entries, intentionally – Wikis are crowd-sourced pools of information that are modified to reflect user input, much like our sensory and nervous systems.
Each hyperlink (and I know there are many) has been chosen for a specific reason; they might not speak directly to the word they link to, but hopefully, they get you thinking. There’s many an Easter Egg for the patient peruser, like secrets in a video game.
I’ll close with two more questions to ask yourself:
How does the growth of human society/the advent of networked
intelligence parallel the growth of organisms and ecosystems?
conscious thought, is it possible that we’re similarly cells in a larger,
conscious or consciousness-developing organism?
Something to think about.
From The Matrix:
Morpheus: I see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that's not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?
