The Social Matrix: This Will fuck With Your head

If the work of gathering evidence and reasoning through thorny, polarizing political questions is actually the process by which we trick ourselves into finding the answers we want, then what's the right way to search for answers?  How can we know the answers we come up with, no matter how well-intentioned, aren't just more motivated cognition?  How can we know the experts we're relying on haven't subtly biased their answers, too?  How can I know this article isn't a form of identity protection?

I love that there is a growing amount of research that is actively questioning itself.  I love that there are researchers who feel deeply troubled by their own findings.

At the same time, I understand why this emerging cognitive dissonance is happening at a time of increased partisan tribalism and shorter-sighted policy positions.

Of course, I've thought through all this social lekking, partisan tribalism and the evolutionary cognitive matrix behind our so-called conscious thought.  I keep doing so, because I know the rabbit hole only goes deeper.

And I would be happy to share with you, point-blank, the startling, comforting conclusions I have found.  I try to do so on this blog, regularly.

If I've learned anything, though, it's that there's purpose behind this little bit of aged wisdom:

Anyone can show you the door; you're the one that has to walk through it.

What happens when you let go of the tribe?  You become part of something infinitely more satisfying.

But don't take it from me - I'm just a messenger.

The Cognitive Value of Planning Ahead

It takes the human brain (on average) 8 to 10 seconds to process new information; absorb it through the senses, run it through the limbic emotional response filter and figure out how to react.  The more new information you're faced with - a disaster situation, a crisis or a scandal - the longer that time frame gets.

This is why 70% of people freeze up like deer in headlights under duress.  They wait for someone to bring answers while they process, or they err on the side of "do nothing and this will blow over" as a confabulated rationale for their inactivity.  15% panic and do or say things that make no rational sense, like denying inflammatory comments that are already on the public record.

Public service providers try to reduce the amount of challenges people have in processing information (and therefore getting/doing what they need) by standardizing delivery mechanisms, symbols, etc.  Of course, taken to extremes this explains the colonial instinct and cultural stigma, but that's a post for another day.

The way to reduce the cognitive processing period and respond quickly and effectively to disasters, crises and scandals is through drills and pre-planning.  When you have already considered contingencies and planned/drilled accordingly, you've taken the processual (if not the emotional) cognitive function out the equation; instead of absorbing and responding to new data, you're pulling up old files and their related action plans.

"Remember your training, men!"  There's a reason that's a line soldiers hear often.

The lesson, therefore, is this - it pays to think ahead.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

The Science of Consciousness for a Conscious Society?

A topic I think about, from time to time - the nature of consciousness, how conscious we really are, and the social matrix; if our organs aren't conscious that they're part of a body, what consciousness could be part of?

This cognitive consideration is catching; if you don't want to be left behind, it's time to start living consciously.

Can science explain consciousness?

In a book published last fall¹, Thomas Nagel defends the idea that science cannot explain consciousness – that the mind is a natural phenomenon which cannot be reduced to physical states of the brain. He also argues that evolutionary theory, or its current materialist version, is not sufficient to explain the appearance of the mind. My attention got drawn to the book by Kristina Musholt’s review in Science².

Although worth reading to see the state of the reflection in that branch of philosophy of mind, the book turns out to provide a very poor argument for its two central claims. Nagel starts by opposing two ideological stances that he labels inappropriately, in my view. On the one hand, there are “materialists” or “reductionists” in which he seems to include anyone who thinks that the laws of physics and the facts of biology can explain behaviors and the mind. On the other hand, he refers to those who oppose that view as “antireductionists”. There is nothing particularly reductionist in thinking that consciousness could be explained by the networks of neurons in our brain. To the contrary, I find that acknowledging the incredible complexity of those networks and to think that they could underlie our feelings and states may be the most antireductionist claim in the philosophy of mind. What appears as reductionism to me is the trap in which Nagel falls by taking every elements of consciousness that we can’t explain yet (and I’ll address some of those later) and stating that they simply belong to a non-material mind that is not understandable using the tools of science. Reducing the spectacular aspects of the mind to another reality that is not understandable, not physical and not observable other than by our own introspection and intuition does not solve any of the issues, it makes them worse. It is, however, precisely that magic trick which has been used by dualists for years and which is performed here in a new form, perhaps more in line with monism, but still invoking the existence of something that is “more than physical”.

Nagel then asks for an evolutionary explanation of why we are conscious. He does seem to recognize that evolution could, in theory, lead to the appearance of consciousness. He writes:

Selection for physical reproductive fitness may have resulted in the appearance of organisms that are in fact conscious, and that have the observable variety of different specific kinds of consciousness [...]

But then adds:

[...] but there is no physical explanation of why this is so-nor any other kind of explanation that we know of.

[...] To make facts of this kind intelligible, a postmaterialist theory would have to offer a unified explanation of how the physical and the mental characteristics of organisms developed together, and it would have to do so not just by adding a clause to the effect that the mental comes along with the physical as a bonus. [...] Explanation, unlike causation, is not just of an event, but of an event under a description. An explanation must show why it was likely that an event of that type occured.

The problem is that evolutionary theory is not necessarily a complete and deterministic equation. Saying that some feature of an organism has appeared due to biological evolution is one thing, saying that it was certain or highly probable to appear is another thing. The precise shape of our noses, for illustration, is not due to an evolutionary advantage that these specific shapes procure. There is a part of noise in the evolutionary processes that leads to the creation of some features out of pure randomness, and if the organisms that have those features survive they will simply be passed on to the next generation. This does not mean that there is no evolutionary advantage to having a nose – obviously it does play a role in breathing. The same thing goes for the mind – there may not be a specific reason why the mind has the characteristics that it has, but it might just turn out that it appeared with those characteristics and got passed on to the next generations. Now I am making that point simply to highlight the idea that every feature of our biology does not need to be explained as an obligatory and deterministic consequence of all possible evolutionary histories but that some things can be the way they are just because of our evolutionary history. There is something impossible in the kind of predictive power that Nagel demands from evolutionary theory. He would want it to explain why the mind had to evolve. I like to transfer the question to physical features to illustrate its flaws. Think about the fact that a lot of animals on the planet have four legs. Do they have four legs? Yes. Is there an evolutionary advantage to having legs? Yes. Did it have to be four legs? Not necessarily. Yet no scientist, nor Nagel I suppose, would state that quadrupedy is a non-physical feature that evolutionary biology can’t explain. Nevertheless he seems to be making exactly that statement for the mind.

 

Beside that, the very characteristics of what we call consciousness do not seem completely independent from our biological needs – in fact they seem to be highly in tune with our survival. Ever noticed how pain hurts very badly and how positive feelings make you want to repeat the experience? It does seem that the mind has characteristics that make us better adapted and in that idea might lie the evolutionary explanation that Nagel is looking for. Nagel does recognize that some of those characteristics could have an evolutionary explanation, and I’ll cover that later.

 

For now, although I disagree that there has to be a reason for the appearance of consciousness, I do think we can play the game of hypotheses and I do think it is likely that there may be multiple reasons indeed. “Why [is] the appearance of conscious organisms, and not merely behaviorally complex organisms, [...] likely?”, Nagel asks. Here are some possibilities.

 

First, to be efficient and act, our brain needs to represent the world and update its model of reality. It is this internal representation of the world that makes it such that we can close our eyes and still reach to objects. It is also due to this representation that when we hear the voice of someone behind us we can imagine a visual representation of his position, and even his identity if we know him. We have inside of our head a very detailed and complex model of the world and when we generate actions, we sometimes rely solely on that model rather than on inputs from the outside world (like the reaching in the dark example). It is not at all unlikely that part of our perceptual subjective experiences might simply be a good way that biology has found to make us negotiate our actions within that model of the world. By creating feelings of perception when we see things for real and when we imagine them, the brain might simply be using subjective experience as a good common language to link real world inputs and imagined perceptions. There is already a great deal of evidence that the parts of our brain activated when receiving inputs from the world are also activated during mental imagery, which makes this hypothesis at least plausible^3,4. This is also the case for motor imagery and we know that brain damage impairs such skills, suggesting that they have a physical and neurobiological basis⁵.

 

There is, also, the possibility that subjective experiences could have evolved in response to social context. Perhaps someone really in pain, really happy or really annoyed is more convincing than someone who would simply generate behaviors without actually experiencing the feelings. Robert Trivers pointed out that self-deception might have been favored by evolution to better deceive others⁶. Can’t the same thing be said of feelings like pain? Is it really unlikely that we might have evolved a feeling of pain so we could send better “stop” signals to others? Is it really unlikely that the inner conviction that we are hungry might be a drive to gather more food or to incite more food sharing from our conspecifics and parents?

 

None of these possibilities are proven scientific facts but their simple plausibility renders the alternative view proposed by Nagel unnecessary until they get more scientific attention.

 

I have not yet mentioned, however, what constitutes the biggest problem with Mind and Cosmos. The problem is one that affects many other works on the philosophy of mind: the so-called unique properties of the mind that science is portrayed to have so much difficulty to explain are often poorly defined, and when trying to seek what they really mean, one realizes that they might very well have homologies with brain properties that have already been identified. After removing all those subjective experiences that may have evolutionary significance like pain and happiness which he recognizes might result from our evolutionary history, Nagel claims that other properties of the mind are problematic for materialism, including our ability for reasoning (mathematics for instance), logic and ethics.

 

Let’s consider abstract reasoning. Our ability to find truths, in short, would be unlikely to be explained by materialist evolutionary theory because the truths that have been identified in modern physics and mathematics are too complex to have been produced by a brain that evolved in prehistoric conditions.

This story depends heavily on the supposition of a biological origin of the capacity for nonperceptual representation through language, resulting in the ability to grasp logically complex abstract structures. In view of the mathematical sophisticiation of modern physical theories, it seems highly unlikely; but perhaps the claim could be defended.

There are many problems with this equation linking the sophistication of the great abstract human creations with an impossibility or unlikeliness that these creations could emerge from a biological brain. First, as argued previously, there doesn’t need to be an evolutionary explanation for everything that the brain does. The fact that it can do many different things might, however, reflect the dynamic environments in which we have evolved. In simple words, maybe evolution has programmed into the brain the ability to do anything or many things, not just hard-code specific behaviors in it. Secondly, the brain of any individual does not have any particular access to “truths”. For every mathematician who develops a single great mathematical equation, there is at least a thousand freaks who believe they made an extraterrestrial encounter or who think apocalypse is due next year. For every trained mathematician who ends up discovering something, there are hundreds of others who end up making errors and not discovering anything. It is through a social process, that of the scientific and academic system, that we identify those who produce the most useful equations and give them a job and the recognition they deserve. But looking back at it, it all seems like there is a part of random in that process and subsequent selection. The brain wasn’t programmed by evolution to seek abstract truths, it was programmed to be curious maybe, and to learn things, most likely. One does not need to invoke the existence of a non-physical aspect to the mind to explain how some people might end up being right and their theories might end up being selected as useful for mankind. For a more detailed view of how good ideas can spread through social networks, the reader might want to consult Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the meanings of life.

There are, on top of it, many reasons why the brain might have evolved some form of logical reasoning, even in prehistoric context. We know that even birds and monkeys are capable of some degree of numerical cognition^7,8. We know that the social environment humans always lived in might favor skills such as knowledge attribution to specific individuals and reasoning on fictive scenarios to deal with others⁹. The dynamic evolution and learning of interacting individuals have been largely discussed and are a subject of current research¹⁰. There is in fact no reason to believe that our mental faculties cannot be explained by an evolutionary process – a biological and physical one.

There are other claims about value and intentions being other problematic characteristics, but again most of these questions are already being studied in current brain research. I might cover those claims in more details in a future post.

Finally, another argument that is brought by Nagel is the idea that rationality cannot be divided in small components like a computer separated in miniature transistors. This irreducibility of the mind and of rationality in particular, he argues, constitutes a big problem for the idea that it may be entirely explainable by neuronal networks. But there are other things that are not reducible in biology and that do not seem to require the kind of explanations that Nagel wants to develop for the mind. If you slice a heart in small dices, there is a point at which it is not a heart anymore, it’s just a bunch of cells that have no function because their normal biological structure has been destroyed. Yet I hear no one claiming that the heart is a non-physical entity that is not explainable by the materialistic version of evolutionary theory.

References
1. Thomas Nagel (2012) Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
2. Musholt K. (2013) A Flawed Challenge Worth Pondering. Science 339:1277.
3. Zvyagintsev M, Clemens B, Chechko N, Mathiak KA, Sack AT, Mathiak K. (2013) Brain networks underlying mental imagery of auditory and visual information. European journal of neuroscience. doi: 10.1111/ejn.12140.
4. Zapparoli L, Invernizzi P, Gandola M, Verardi M, Berlingeri M, Sberna M, De Santis A, Zerbi A, Banfi G, Bottini G, Paulesu E. (2013) Mental images across the adult lifespan: a behavioural and fMRI investigation of motor execution and motor imagery. Experimental Brain Research 224:519-40.
5. Daprati E, Nico D, Duval S, Lacquaniti F. (2010) Different motor imagery modes following brain damage. Cortex 46:1016-30.
6. von Hippel W, Trivers R. (2010) The evolution and psychology of self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Science 34:1-16.
7. Pepperberg IM. (2012) Further evidence for addition and numerical competence by a Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus). Animal Cognition 15:711-7.
8. Nieder A. (2012) Supramodal numerosity selectivity of neurons in primate prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109:11860-11865.
9. Cosmides L. (1989) The logic of social exchange: has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. Cognition 31:187-276.
10. Gintis H. (2009) The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences.

The Competitive Edge of Polylingualism

 

Now, just think of the advantages polyculturalism must give us?

 

 

Understanding How the Brain Speaks Two Languages

 

By Jeffrey Kluger

 

Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did. It wasn’t just the 50,000 words you had to master to become fluent or the fact that for the first six years of your life you learned about three new words per day. It was the tenses and the syntax and the entire scaffolding of grammar, not to mention the metaphors and allusions and the almost-but-not-quite synonyms.

But you accomplished it, and good for you. Now imagine doing it two or three times over — becoming bilingual, trilingual or more. The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself. At a bilingualism conference last weekend convened by the Lycée Français de New York, where all students learn in both English and French, language experts gathered to explore where the science stands so far and where it’s heading next (disclosure: my children are LFNY students).

Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth — and perhaps even in the womb — to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations language sounds. At first, we don’t much care which of these phonemes from which languages we absorb, which makes sense since the brain has to be ready to learn any of the world’s thousands of languages depending on where we’re born.

“Before 9 months of age, a baby produces a babble made up of hundreds of phonemes from hundreds of languages,” said Elisabeth Cros, a speech therapist with the Ecole Internationale de New York. “Parents will react to the phonemes they recognize from their native tongues, which reinforces the baby’s use of those selected ones.”

(MORE: How Terror Hijacks the Brain)

Doubling down on a pair of languages rather than just one does take extra work, but it’s work young children are generally not aware they’re doing. Bilingual people of all ages are continually addressing what research psychologist Ellen Bialystok of Toronto’s York University calls the dog-chien dilemma, encountering an object, action or concept and instantaneously toggling between two different words to describe it. Such nimble decisionmaking ought to improve on-the-fly problem solving, and studies show that it does.

Language researchers often point to the famed Stroop test, which asks subjects to look at the word red, for example, which is presented in an ink of a different color, say blue. Then they are required to say aloud or identify on a computer the ink color. That requires an additional fraction of a second to accomplish than if both the word and ink color were the same. Everyone experiences that lag, but for bilinguals it’s measurably shorter. “Monolinguals always need more time,” Bialystok says. “It’s a lifelong advantage for bilinguals.”

Excelling on the Stroop test is hardly a marketable skill, but what it suggests about the brain is something else. Sean Lynch, headmaster of the LFNY, previously worked in a multilingual school in France in which all of the students spoke French and at least one of 12 other languages, including Japanese, Russian, Italian and Spanish. As is often the case with well-endowed schools, the students, on average, outperformed their age peers academically, and it’s impossible to determine how much of that is due to native skill and how much to the fact that they simply have access to better teachers, books and other resources. Still, Lynch observed that these students seemed to show a greater facility with skills that relied on interpreting symbolic representations, such as math or music.

(MORE: Why Your Brain Craves Music)

Lynch also believes — albeit based primarily on his own observations — that multilingual kids may exhibit social empathy sooner than children who grow up speaking only one language, which makes developmental sense. The theory of mind — understanding that what’s in your head is not the same as what’s in other people’s heads — does not emerge in children until they’re about 3 years old. Prior to that, they assume that if, say, they know a secret you probably do too. There’s a kind of primal narcissism in this — a belief that their worldview is the universal one. Once they learn that’s not the case, self-centeredness falls away — at least a little — and the long process of true socialization begins. There’s nothing that accelerates the acquisition of that kind of other-awareness like the realization that even the very words you use to label the things in your world — dog, tree, banana — are not the same ones everyone uses.

(MORE: How Exercise Can Moderate Brain Damage Caused By Drinking)

Preliminary imaging work suggests that the roots of this behavior may even be visible in the brain. Some studies, for example, have shown a thickening of the cortex in two brain regions — most importantly the left inferior parietal, which helps code for language and gesturing. Bialystok is not entirely sold on these studies, since she would expect the greatest differences to be in the frontal lobes, where higher functions such as planning, decisionmaking and other aspects of what’s known as executive control take place. Some of her own work has found an increase in white matter — the fatty sheathing that insulates nerves and improves their ability to communicate — in the frontal regions of bilinguals, suggesting denser signaling and complexity of functions in these areas. “Structural differences are where the new science is really unfolding,” she says. “That work will reveal a lot.”

Not every study out there finds benefits to bilingualism. Earlier this year, psychologists at Concordia University in Montreal studied 168 children ages 1 and 2 years old being raised by bilingual parents. In general, they found that the kids in the younger half of that cohort had smaller comprehension vocabularies — the number of words they appeared to understand — than kids being raised monolingual. The older half of the sample group had smaller production vocabularies — or words they could pronounce. This results, the researches believe, from parents mixing their languages when speaking to their kids, choosing the words they feel the children will have an easier time understanding or reproducing. That in turn leads to what linguists call code-switching — a commingling of tongues by the children that produces what Americans call Spanglish or Franglish when Spanish or French melded with English (this particular study produced more complex comminglings, since it included kids speaking German, Japanese and Farsi as well). However, Bialystok agrees that this is a short-term disadvantage of bilingualism, and says in most cases the kids catch up.

And when they do, language skills acquired early can pay late-life dividends. In one study, bilinguals experienced the onset of age-related dementia 4.1 years later than multilinguals, and full-blown Alzheimer’s 5.1 years later. “One school of thought says that any cognitive reserve — education, multilingualism, even playing Sudoku puzzles — strengthens the brain and helps it resist disease,” says Bialystok. “The other says that the brains of multilinguals experience the same level of disease as those of monolinguals, but they cope with it better. They function at a higher level than they would otherwise be able to function.”

In another 2013 study, this one from the University of Kentucky, bilingual and monolingual people in the 60- to 68-year-old age group underwent brain scans while performing a cognitive task that required them to switch back and forth among several different ideas. Both groups performed the task accurately, but bilinguals were faster as well as more metabolically economical in executing the cognitive mission, using less energy in the frontal cortex than the monolinguals.

(MORE: Brain Exercises Better Than Drugs at Preventing Cognitive Decline)

The very fact that something as simple as working with puzzles or having once got a good education can improve brain function does prove that multilingualism is not the only path to staying cognitively healthy in your dotage. And plenty of monolinguals do perfectly well at acquiring empathy and social skills early in life. Still, there are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world. There must be a reason our brains come factory-loaded to learn more than just one.

The Politics and Psychology of Fear (Maia Szalavitz)

How Terror Hijacks the Brain

 

 

Fear short circuits the brain, especially when it hits close to home, experts say— making coping with events like the bombings at the Boston Marathon especially tricky.

“When people are terrorized, the smartest parts of our brain tend to shut down,” says Dr. Bruce Perry, Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy. (Disclosure: he and I have written books together).

When the brain is under severe threat, it immediately changes the way it processes information, and starts to prioritize rapid responses. “The normal long pathways through the orbitofrontal cortex, where people evaluate situations in a logical and conscious fashion and [consider] the risks and benefits of different behaviors— that gets short circuited,” says Dr. Eric Hollander, professor of psychiatry at Montefiore/Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York. Instead, he says, “You have sensory input right through the sensory [regions] and into the amygdala or limbic system.”

MORE: Inside the Hunt for the Marathon Bomber

This dramatically alters how we think, since the limbic system is deeply engaged with modulating our emotions. “The neural networks in the brain that are involved in rational, abstract cognition— essentially, the systems that mediate our most humane and creative thoughts— are very sensitive to emotional states, especially fear,” says Perry. So when people are terrorized, “Problem solving becomes more categorical, concrete and emotional [and] we become more vulnerable to reactive and short-sighted solutions,” he says.

Every loud sound suddenly becomes a potential threat, for example, and even mundane circumstances such as a person who avoids eye contact can take on suspicious and ominous meaning and elicit an extreme, alert-ready response. Such informational triage can be essential to surviving traumatic experience, of course. “Severe threats to well-being activate hard wired circuits in the brain and produce responses that help us survive,” explains Joseph LeDoux, professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University, “This process is the most important thing for the organism at the moment, and brain resources are monopolized to achieve the goal of coping with the threat.”

PHOTOS: Tragedy in Boston: One Photographer’s Eyewitness Account

Says Hollander, “To some extent, that type of behavior is good because if you’re in a forest and get attacked by a snake or a lion, you want to be able to react quickly without too much thinking.” Indeed, our ancestors who spent time contemplating whether or not a risk was real more often that not would not have lived to rationalize their way through such situations again.

But once the immediate threat has passed, this style of thinking can become a hindrance, not a help. “The problem is that often people have these intense reactions and are not able to think about the situation or concept more realistically,” Hollander says. The fear can become generalized so that ordinary experiences like being in a crowd or seeing a backpack trigger intense anxiety.

MORE: Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic?

Traumatic events typically evoke a whole suite of brain responses, such as making people faster to startle, increasing their reaction time and producing hypervigilance to any type of sensation that might be linked with the threatening experience.

And this warping of perspective is exactly what terrorists aim to achieve. “Terrorists are trying to induce fear and panic,” says Hollander, noting that media coverage that repeats the sounds and images of the events maximizes their impact. The coverage keeps the threat alive and real in people’s minds, and sustains the threat response, despite the fact that the immediate danger has passed. The marathon attacks were particularly damaging, he says, because “All of sudden, there’s trauma associated with what had been a meaningful, communal event.”

It doesn’t help that the most common coping mechanisms can make matters worse. People who live in fear tend to want to sleep, drink alcohol or turn to sedatives to ease their anxiety. But, says Hollander, “It turns out that you are better off staying up than trying to go to sleep.” Sleep tends to consolidate and lay down traumatic memories. And that’s partly why the Israeli army, for example, tries to keep traumatized soldiers awake immediately after a difficult experience and engage them in warm social contact, both of which help reduce the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

MORE: ‘Paradise Built in Hell:’ How Disaster Brings Out the Best in People

Fortunately, our brains are designed to modulate fear responses and at least 80% of people exposed to a severe traumatic event will not develop PTSD. Studies show that the more support, altruism and connection people share, the lower the risk for the disorder and the easier the recovery. Because such interactions aren’t always easy in the immediate aftermath of a harrowing experience, Hollander is investigating whether medications based on oxytocin— a hormone linked with love and parent/child bonding— might help to ease this connection.

If fear short circuits the brain’s normally logical and reasoned thinking, social support may be important in rerouting those networks back to their normal state. Which is why the selflessness and altruism we see in the wake of terror attacks is often the key to helping us to process and overcome the shock of living through them.

Marketers exploiting secrets of the living brain (Kelly Crowe)

 

Marketers exploiting secrets of the living brain

 

The same primitive impulses that helped early man survive against the evolutionary odds are drawing shopper Denam Drew to a pair of tan suede shoes. At least that's the theory behind neuromarketing, an emerging field that uses the tools of neuroscience to understand the secrets of the consumer brain.

 

Drew is holding the shoe in his hand while researcher Adam Spadaro stands behind him watching his brain waves light up a computer screen in colourful flares of red, yellow and green. All of this is possible because Drew is wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap with electrodes placed all over his head, recording the electrical impulses on the surface of his brain. He's also wearing eye tracking goggles to reveal exactly what he's looking at when the computer records a flash of emotion.

The human brain A region-by-region exploration of how the brain functions

 

"The goggles use the pupils as a reference point to track where your eyes are looking and wherever the eyes go, that's a measure of the attention of the brain and that's key information for marketers," Spadaro says. He's completing a PhD in cognitive psychology at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, but at the same time he's using his scientific knowledge to help get one of Canada's first neuromarketing companies off the ground.

 

"It would be really useful for a brand to know if this product is or is not capturing a consumer's attention," Spadaro says, struggling to balance his laptop computer in the middle of the shoe store and, at the same time, monitor the flashing images of Drew's brain on the screen.

 

"It's really giving you a lot of insight into his emotional response, much more so than if you were just to ask him how he’s feeling. Sometimes you can get a truer response to his emotion. That offers a lot of insight that neuroscience has been taking advantage of for several decades now and marketers are now beginning to take advantage of it."

 

Neuromarketer Diana Lucaci adjusts eye tracking goggles on shopper Denam Drew. Lucaci uses new technologies to measure consumers' engagement, attention and memory. () (CBC)

 

Diana Lucaci is also here at this Toronto shopping centre to supervise the research. She is the founder of True Impact Marketing, which she says is the first and only neuromarketing research company in Canada that uses both EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to try to read consumers' minds. Her company owns the EEG cap and eye tracking goggles, but when she wants to use an fMRI machine, she has to buy time from hospitals and universities.

 

"The three key metrics we measure are engagement, attention, and memory," she says. "We're able to measure levels of positive and negative emotion as well. A company would want to know if its brand elicits a particular emotional response, if it's positive or negative at a particular point in time," she says. "That is invaluable information for marketers because it takes a lot of guess-work out. You're not launching a campaign and crossing your fingers hoping you know what your customers feel and what they want."

 

"My formal education is in neuroscience from the University of Toronto," she says, "following that, I've worked progressively in roles in marketing and communications."

 

"As a marketer, I always wanted better tools before we went to market with a campaign. When you know that a campaign requires millions of dollars and putting it together takes months and months, and the only data you have is a survey, and often you don’t even have that, so you just cross your fingers and hope that people pay attention."

 

Traditional market research has always tried to analyze how consumers think and feel about a product or a brand, using focus groups and surveys. The problem is, sometimes consumers don't tell the truth. "In focus groups, what often happens is that you get people skewing their answer to what they think the marketer wants to hear or what will make them sound better in front of the other participants," Lucaci says.

 

But what if advertisers could bypass the thinking brain and see what's going on at a more primitive emotional level? The theory is that consumer motivation starts there, with a series of brain chemical triggers rooted in primal neural circuits that evolved to help humans make decisions that would help or hinder survival. Assuming consumer choice is not purely rational, but rather is strongly biased by emotion, neuromarketers believe that if they can read pleasure or disinterest at this unconscious level, they can better predict what consumers will buy or avoid.

How the brain makes consumer choices

One of the few studies to examine the brain activity of consumer choice attempted to answer an old marketing question: why do some people say they like Coke better than Pepsi?

 

Dr. Reid Montague, at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, scanned the brains of test subjects while they tasted Coke and Pepsi. During the blind taste test, the brain imaging showed that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was active. "This area of the brain is strongly implicated in signaling basic appetitive aspects of reward," Montague wrote. So when the test subjects didn't know the brand name of the particular sweet, black liquid they were tasting, their brains processed the choice based on taste.

 

What if advertisers could bypass the thinking brain and see what's going on at a more primitive emotional level?

 

When Montague asked the subjects which one they liked better, they were equally split between Coke and Pepsi. But when Montague repeated the taste test, this time showing the test subjects a Coke can and telling them they were tasting Coke, suddenly new brain areas got involved: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and the midbrain, areas that have been associated with memory and based on emotion.

 

"There is a dramatic effect of the Coke label on subjects' behavioural preference," Montague wrote in his paper. Once they knew they were drinking coke, the test subjects said they preferred Coke in the labelled cups significantly more than unlabelled Coke and more than Pepsi.

 

"We hypothesize that cultural information biases preference decisions," he concluded.

 

Lucaci cites this study as proof that consumer choice is not based on a rational judgment of which product is superior. "So what that tells us is that people regardless of their brain telling them, 'this tastes better,' people have a positive brand association with a product that overpowers the emotion of taste," Lucaci says.

Neuromarketing raises ethical questions

What does Montague think about the emerging field of neuromarketing, after this research?

 

"Neuromarketing could be a legitimate pursuit especially in areas where one wants to determine how much someone values a product," he said in an email. "In neuroimaging, this is a rapidly developing area — the study of valuation (not neuromarketing per se) — and there are many possible uses. For example, it may be possible to produce neural focus-group approaches to certain aspects of branding, desirability, and so on. Such approaches could in principle be cheaper and more reliable than other focus group methods."

 

"However, I do not see this kind of approach supplanting anything. A person's purchase behaviour will always be paramount and the brain science will continue to develop."

 

But are there any ethical issues that should be considered? Could neuromarketing data be used to manipulate consumer behaviour?

 

People need to be aware of neuromarketing and its ethical implications, said Ruth Lanius. (CBC)

 

"Of course you can influence the brain," said Ruth Lanius, a neuroscientist at Western University in London, Ontario, in an interview. "I think it's interesting, how can we influence the brain at an implicit level, to get you more interested in something."

 

"It's something that definitely has ethical implications that need to be reviewed and discussed, and that people need to be made aware of," she told me.

 

In an interview, Queen's University behavioural neuroscientist Richard Beninger was asked if he believed the developments in neuroscience could be used to unconsciously influence human behaviour.

 

"I'm interested to understand how the brain works, that's what’s driven me for decades," he told me. "I find it difficult to say well I’m going to stop doing neuroscience because what we’re going to find is going to be so powerful, we're going to be able to change the course of mankind. As one small scientist with one small lab, it's hard to think that I’m going to have some big impact like you're talking about. But perhaps I have to start thinking about these things."

 

"We're learning more all the time and with knowledge, comes power, and with knowledge comes the potential to abuse the knowledge," he said.

 

Back in the shoe store, watching Drew scanning the shelves wearing eye tracking goggles, Lucaci dismisses these concerns.

 

"It's not any more dangerous than running a survey and asking people what they think and pressing a button to pick what product they like," she said. "This time, though, we’re seeing the reaction without having to ask them anything. It’s a lot cleaner in that regard."

 

"It's literally impossible to design a super ad that will make people want to buy something they don't want to buy. The brain simply doesn't work like that," she says.

 

How did Drew feel about people watching his brain while he looked at shoes?

 

“It's a little weird but it’s not too invasive. I don't have too crazy reactions to shoes," he said, walking through the mall with his head wired up in an EEG cap and still wearing the eye tracking goggles.

 

All of this is just the beginning of neuromarketing in Canada. So far Lucaci's company has only one client, and she won't reveal the name until later next year when she intends to publish a case study. But the industry is growing. The first Neuromarketing World Forum was held last April in Amsterdam. And the Neuromarketing Science and Business Association says there are now more than 75 companies doing neuromarketing research all over the world.

 

This is the first in a four part series called Inside Your Brain on CBC's The National, World at Six, and CBC.ca exploring how modern neuroscience is changing the way we think about the way we think. In part two, Kelly Crowe discovers how an ancient system in our living brains can explain our cravings for food, sex and relationships.

Society On Autopilot

 

Since the brain possesses very little capacity for conscious attention, it uses these patterns to automate our responses to the environment as much as possible.

 

Elevator-pitch.  One-page CV.  Messaging over conversation.  KISS.

 

Explains a bit, doesn't it?

 

Of course there's a problem with running society on autopilot - you can't adjust course as necessary when you're not paying attention.  See Europe as an example, or the US banking industry. 

 

The solution isn't to throw the baby out with the bathwater or to shut the whole thing down (see Canadian Immigration, CIDA, the gun registry) and blind yourself to even more of the map.  That's a one-way-ticket to disaster.

 

The way forward is to fill in the map, to plan collaboratively.  And yes, in a dynamic system like the global village, stagnation is not an option.

What's Better for Business: Logic or Emotion? Answers From Neuroscience (Forbes)

 

The scary part?  I keep finding articles that provide support for theories I came up with independently.  That's not a ego-boost, but an alarm; the question that will always gnaw at me is, "am I unconsciously seeking validation for my own opinions?"

 

So long as I keep questioning myself, I think I'll be okay.  None of us is perfect - at least, not on our own.

 

 

What's Better for Business: Logic or Emotion? Answers From Neuroscience

 

Part 1 of a series on neuroscience and innovation

Humans are animals. While we like to think we’re captains of our destiny, we’re far more driven by instinct than we know. In many ways, we’re just glorified apes, even in business.

Neuroscience business expert Janet Crawford

 

For over a century, the overriding philosophy in business has been that rational decision-making is better business. Irrational decisions, on the other hand, were to be avoided. We’ve probably all seen bad executive decisions made based on miscalculated fears, misperceived threats, or misdirected loyalties.

 

Today, science is teaching us that the bifurcation between logic and emotion is not so clear cut. There is business value lurking in what appears to be irrational. Think of the intense devotion of startup teams in Silicon Valley. Think of the culture that surrounds iconic companies like Harley-Davidson. Think of the passion of Apple fans camping out overnight to be first in line to buy a new product.

 

Given what science is revealing about the human brain, what are the implications for business? Janet Crawford is one of the world’s pioneers in applying neuroscience to business. Her firm, Cascadance, leverages biological design to improve individual and team performance. I’ve had the honor of working with her in creating Rainforest Architects, a workshop to train leaders on how to spark their innovation ecosystem by applying techniques from Silicon Valley.

 

Below is part 1 of an extended conversation with Janet. Over the course of this discussion, we dig into human nature, explore how biology affects innovation, and give you practical tips to increase the innovation in your ecosystem.

 

Q: Why does human nature matter in business?

 

Janet: Business is best when the people providing goods and services feel passion and commitment to what they are producing and their customers feel they’ve received value. The operative word here is “feel.” When we use the term “rational” in business, we usually mean dispassionately data driven and informed by explicit measureable criteria.

 

Q: Why do we care so much about rationality in the first place?

 

Janet: Our love affair with the rational world goes back 600 years to the Scientific Revolution, which set in motion not only an epic blossoming of human innovation, but also a series of beliefs about human nature that in large part are being dismantled by recent neuroscience discoveries.

The Brain runs the world in ways we can't easily detect

 

Q: But what’s wrong with rationality as a goal in business?

 

Janet: The problem is that most of what we view as being rationally determined isn’t. Viewed from the lens of brain science, emotions are elegant shortcuts that allow us to sort through reams of implicitly stored (i.e. outside consciousness) neural patterns and generate feelings that guide us toward or away from a course of action. Without emotion, we are biologically incapable of making decisions. Logic is often the last step in the process. The conscious intellectual brain steps in to produce a rational backstory to justify impulses generated in the murky corners of the unconscious mind.

 

Q: Can you give an example of that interplay between logic and emotion?

 

Janet: How many times have you left a data-soaked, death by PowerPoint meeting unable to identify anything faulty with the “facts,” yet left with a feeling that something wasn’t quite right? Your unconscious mind might indeed be letting you know there’s a pattern that doesn’t fit. Equally, it could be that the presentation was sound, but that it overwhelmed the limited capacity of your rational mind, while failing to satisfy your biological need to feel emotions like trust, acceptance, and excitement.

 

Q: Why are humans designed so “imperfectly” in this way?

 

Janet: We come preloaded with deep programming, generated from a long tribal evolutionary history on the plains of Africa. Our DNA tells us to distrust strangers and those who are “different” from us. We see this behavior even in infants nine months and younger. We resemble our primate cousins when it comes to status-seeking behaviors. Power displays like puffing out our chests causes surges of testosterone, translating into increased confidence in both subject and viewer. Soothing touch works on our oxytocin systems, enhancing measures of trust. These are but a few examples of a vast repertoire of unconscious behavioral influences. The point is people act on these feelings of trust, distrust, confidence, etc. and will find ways to make the data confirm their felt experience.

 

Q: But aren’t our rational selves still in control at least most of the time?

 

Janet: Most neuroscientists would agree that well over 90% of our behavior is generated outside of consciousness. We are more slaves to our biology than we realize. Our rational minds represent a very small layer floating atop a vast well of unconscious drivers. Business leaders who understand biological programming and can leverage it possess an enormous advantage.

 

Q: Can you give an example of how biology affects the innovation process?

 

Janet: Sure. There are two main areas where biology affects innovation. First, human neurology is built to resist change. After all, if we’re alive, most of what we’ve done to get here has worked! In order to conserve the status quo, the brain generates feelings of discomfort when we try new things or attempt to change. This is counterbalanced by other systems, driven by dopamine, that reward exploration and discovery.

 

Q: How does that counterbalance work in the brain?

 

Janet: It’s a balancing act. When we experience too much stress and threat, the tendency is to retreat into habitual known responses. When we feel sufficiently (but not overly) secure, we venture into new territory. The prefrontal cortex, the area resting just behind your forehead, is key to innovative thought. As Dr. Amy Arnsten of Yale University puts it, “it’s the Goldilocks of the brain….it wants everything just right.”

 

Q: What’s the second way that biology affects innovation?

 

Janet: Second, at a fundamental brain level, innovation is the intersection of previously unrelated neural patterns. We are pattern-making creatures. From the time we’re born, our brains are busily encoding any useful and repeating relationship between objects and events to which we’re exposed. Since the brain possesses very little capacity for conscious attention, it uses these patterns to automate our responses to the environment as much as possible.

 

Q: So our brains create patterns to make sense of things. That’s an efficient way to deal with our environments, right?

 

Janet: The great news is that this works marvelously most of the time. The downside is that we sometimes automate patterns that may have limited utility or which are outmoded hand-me-downs from another generation or set of circumstances. Also, our neural patterns are constricted by our unique circumstances and by what we’ve paid attention to. There’s way more data in the environment than ever makes it onto our neural maps.

 

Q: So how do new patterns get formed in our brains?

 

Janet: In order to create new intersections, it’s crucial that we cross-pollinate by engaging with diverse people, activities and experience to provide the raw materials for serendipitous insight. Just like in venture capital, most of these intersections will go nowhere. The more diversity in the system, however, the more “weeds” will flourish and the greater the likelihood that some of them will be useful!

"From a sheer physical perspective, we humans are a wimpy lot."

 

Q: Are humans designed to innovate?

 

Janet: Humans are marvelously unique among the animal kingdom in that we’re the only species designed to imagine a future that doesn’t exist today and to coordinate action with other human beings to make our visions reality. No other species manipulates the environment to make life easier in quite the way that we do. It’s what has allowed our species to dominate the planet and grow to 7 billion strong. It’s also what drives us to build businesses and engage in commerce.

 

Q: Are human beings, therefore, the perfect animal?

 

Janet: From a sheer physical perspective, we humans are a wimpy lot. Most other mammals are stronger and faster. An isolated human on the African Savannah will likely become dinner on fairly short order. But, we possess two amazing superpowers – imagination and the ability to collaborate and pass down learning through language.

 

Q: How did you first realize that our biological selves and our rational selves were not the same?

Janet: I grew up on a military research base in the middle of the Mojave Desert. My father was a well-respected rocket scientist and I spent my childhood surrounded by gifted scientific minds. Even from the perspective of a child, it seemed obvious that highly rational thinkers often behaved in ways that were anything but. Later, as a manager of scientists and engineers, my experience was confirmed anew.

 

Q: What was your first insight into the power of neuroscience to explain human behavior in business?

 

Janet: In the mid 1990’s, I was introduced to the concept of an “amygdala hijack.” The amygdalae are two small almond-shaped structures in the brain that among other things, monitor environmental and social threats and allow us to respond reflexively when perceived levels get too high. They figuratively hijack our volitional choice by redirecting behavioral control to more primitive responses such as fight, flight and freeze. This small bit of neuroscience went a long way to explain the defensive posturing, shutting down and avoidance I’d seen in the business world.

 

Q: What other ideas have inspired you in this work?

 

Janet: Around the same time, I read two pivotal books, Descartes’ Error and A General Theory of Love. These books changed the way I thought about human nature and illuminated my understanding of why people act in, as MIT Professor Dan Ariely aptly puts it, “predictably irrational” ways. I was hooked. Since then I’ve become a student of the behavioral sciences, reading research, attending social and cognitive neuroscience conferences and connecting with researchers.

 

Q: Do you consider yourself a scientist or a business expert?

 

Janet: I consider myself to be both. My company, Cascadance, works with cutting edge business leaders to build leadership practices and cultures that leverage the best of our biology. My original training was as an environmental scientist. I worked in that field for over a decade, both as a practitioner and a leader, transitioning into business consulting and executive coaching in the mid 1990′s. My background in environmental science has not only given me a wonderful systems perspective on human behavior, but also gave me the strong grounding in science necessary to read original neuroscience research and ask critical questions. As in any concentrated field of study, many neuroscientists are unable to see the larger implications of their work. I see myself as a bridge and translator between the research and its enormously useful real world applications.

"It’s in play where we often gain access to our vast unconscious warehouse of neural information."

 

Q: What are some simple steps people can take to be more innovative, based on biological thinking?

 

Janet’s suggestions:

 

1. Take care of your biological instrument – The areas of the brain involved in innovation are particularly sensitive to sleep deprivation, poor diet, lack of social connection and stress in general.

 

2. Expose yourself – to new and different ideas, disciplines, cultures and environments. The tendency in business is to hunker down, focus, and try to get as much done as possible in as short a time as we can. If we can’t think of a reason that something needs to happen, we deem it a luxury or waste of time. Great innovations happen when there’s a large pool of seemingly unrelated content to pull from. We have to set time aside to cross pollinate even if we can’t see the immediate application.

 

3. Be inclusive and create safety – People outside the system bring fresh neural patterns. People within the system often think and see in much the same way. Unless there are practices that allow diverse elements in your ecosystem to intersect, and unless you’ve created the safety to prompt people to speak up, vast amounts of insight will remain undiscovered.

 

4. Create forums where people can play and prototype – All mammals play, and it’s in play where we often gain access to our vast unconscious warehouse of neural information.

Victor W. Hwang is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley with T2 Venture Capital. He is co-creator of Rainforest Architects, a workshop for leaders seeking to create their own innovation ecosystem based on techniques from Silicon Valley. The next program is on April 22-24, 2013.

Dan Ariely Videos on Cognition and Truth

Because my blog isn't letting me post 'em in the video column.

Why post at all, you might ask?  Never memorize what you can look up.  If it worked for Einstein, who am I to argue?

The Truth About Dishonesty


Are We In Control of Our Decisions?

Our Buggy Moral Code

Where the Magic Happens

Ooh, I kinda like this:



Promotion & Information

 

Your consumers will initially be attracted by the packaging of your product but, to keep their attention, it has to provide value. If your product requires instructions for use, the packaging can be an ideal place for those instructions. Use the space wisely to tell consumers how your product will benefit them, while providing directions for use.

What Happens When We Don't Think Before We React:

“I didn’t mean to cause such an alarm and I apologize if I did,” you said in a statement sent to this newspaper. “I just want women to be safe.”

Responsibility is a conscious choice - one that few of us make instinctively.  How can we focus so exclusively on individual ownership when we still have so much work to do on ownership of individual action? 

 

Eyes on the Brain

A neurobiologist explores the amazing capacity of the brain to rewire itself at any age.

by Susan R. Barry, Ph.D.

What the Brain Tells the Eye.

 

Do we see what we want to see?

 

 

Published on August 30, 2012 by Susan R. Barry, Ph.D. in Eyes on the Brain

 

 

Have you ever picked up a gallon milk bottle that you thought was full when it was empty instead? You realize your mistake as soon as you begin to lift the bottle because your hand and bottle fly over your head. Your brain assumed that the bottle was heavier than it was and thus instructed your muscles to exert more force than was necessary. Before we make any voluntary movement, a great deal of planning, which is largely unconscious, takes place in our brain.

 

The same is true for perception. Since our eyes sense what is around us, it’s easy to think that our visual system is quiescent unless stimulated by something from the outside. However, what we see is governed to a large extent by what we expect to see. As with our movements, our brain sets us up in advance for what we will see.

 

This idea came home to me one morning when I glanced out my kitchen window at the bird feeder outside. Small woodland birds, such as nuthatches, juncos , and chickadees, were the usual visitors to the feeder. But on this day, I happened to glance up from the kitchen sink and saw five enormous wild turkeys, one male and four females, looking in on me. The male was so tall, he practically looked me in the eye. Despite their large size and distinctive appearance, it took me a full second to figure out what I was seeing. Had I glanced outside and seen the usual juncos and chickadees, I would have recognized and distinguished these birds, despite their small size, in much less time.                  

 

So why did it take so long to see the big wild turkeys? Because I didn’t expect to see them. What we see depends to a large extent upon what we anticipate seeing. The first area of our visual cortex to receive input from our eyes is called the primary visual cortex. It was once thought that neurons in this area respond almost exclusively to stimuli coming from the eyes. But we now know that the activity of these neurons is affected by “higher” brain centers which are involved in prediction and planning.

 

 

When the brain can predict what will be seen, it can prime the appropriate circuits in the primary visual cortex and other regions, allowing us to interpret visual stimuli more quickly. So, when I looked out the kitchen window that morning, my brain may have readied the circuits in my visual cortex for what I expected to see – the usual small birds at the feeder. The image of turkeys threw my visual system into a momentary state of confusion. Some circuits had to be suppressed and others activated in order for me to make sense of the surprising view outside my kitchen window.

Pull Back the Veil to Reveal...

"It's as if Boorman were guiding us down a magic corridor and kept parting the curtains in front of us."

  -  Pauline Kael

"You keep telling yourself what you know. But what do you believe?"

  -  Mal, Inception

"I am all that was, is and will be, and no mortal has yet lifted my veil."

  - Inscription from a statue of Isis

Today, I read an article about how overconfident people succeed, frequently in spite of the limits of their talents.  Promotions, monetary success, etc aren't about skills in many fields, ranging from sales to politics to polling - it's about confidence.  When these people are in positions beyond which their skills are suited - say, management, they can actually impede success of their direct reports.  Mistakes aren't owned. they are trickled down.  Underlings get thrown under the bus, which continues to chug along the wrong trajectory.

I have also written about the cognition of confidence, too - people who are expert at a given task tend not to be hyper-confident.  There is always doubt that perhaps, they've missed something in their analysis, a better example could have been found, etc.  This is how expertise is developed - uncertainty and the need to do better drives these individuals to push beyond the limits of what they know.

If you're overconfident, there's no need to pursue new facts that will cloud the issue - you have the answer, the ability, the skill without modification.  You just need to keep doing what you know.   Which is why overconfidence is the enemy of expertise.

Ignorance is a veil blocking off the dark corners of our mind.  When we pull back those veils, we find new things, new facets, new capacities to build and connect ideas - then communicate them.  When we're overconfident in the model of us we've established, we're telling ourselves we've already pulled back all the curtains; there's nothing left to discover.  We're deluding ourselves we're the best at what we do, we know more than others, the answers are ours, if victory were solely up to us, it would be assured.

Yet nobody's perfect, there is always room for improvement.  The right push, the right crisis - the right motivation will shake our worlds enough to show the impermanence of the walls we've established as safe ground, forcing us to lift another veil. 

With the slightest disturbance, the dream's going to collapse.

Dreams make for another great metaphor.  By their nature, dreams are removed from reality and include impossible detail, but we don't question that while we're in the dream.  When we awaken, it becomes clear to us that the things we accepted could not be - nuance was missing, detail, texture.

Such is perception.  We imbue what we perceive with emotional value - it is that internally described value, not the nature of the thing perceived, that shapes our judgement.  On the surface, the employee who under performs is incompetent and that's all there is to it, or the boss is a superficial egomaniac who cares less about results and more about flaunting their position.  One level deeper, the employee might have been sold that they are something they are not - same too the boss.  There might be family, health, all kinds of issues that shape who that person is and what lineage they bring to a given moment of contact.  The same basic principle applies to someone who looks in the mirror and "feels fat" despite what anyone tells them; it's the feeling of the thing, not the thing itself, that resonates.

You can say that's all irrelevant - all that matters is the bottom line or the pay cheque.  You can tell yourself to keep home and personal and work and social lives separate, but there's just one person in which those worlds are equally grounded - you.  In experience, you find that it's hard to keep those worlds from collapsing in on each other. 

When you cling to your confidence and try to deny the possibility that reality has more depth than you've credited it with, confidence can quickly turn in to fear of the unknown and in response, anger.  When you come to accept that you are not perfect and have much to learn, you tear down another veil.

Maybe you don't like the metaphors; maybe allegory isn't your thing.  Try it this way:

Ambiguous visual images are fascinating because it is often difficult to imagine seeing them any other way--until something flips within the brain and the alternative perception is revealed. This phenomenon, known as perceptual rivalry, is of great interest to neuroscience. Because rivalrous illusions produce changes in perception that are independent of changes in the stimulus itself, they may help to understand how the brain gives rise to conscious experience.

Pay no attention to what's behind the curtain.