What's in a Name

Take over the world with your knowledge and talent, even the ugliest name will become pretty. (tweet this)

Somewhere in Nancy Southam's collection of memories about Pierre Elliot Trudeau Pierre is a story about a "how well do you know PET" game that was played at an event in the former PM's honour.  Trudeau the elder was in attendance and participated in the game, which included a question about listing all of his multiple names.

Not too many people got it right.  Trudeau himself was not among those who did.

I think about that story when issues of nomenclature come up.  Names are funny things - we use them to brand other things as much as we do to identify ourselves.  Who discovered America?  Some dude named Christopher?  Are we going with Peking or Beijing these days?  Is it Bombay, Mumbai or something else?

In his preface to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence shares an anecdote about his editors, who fretted over his varied spellings of names that appear in his book.  Lawrence shrugs that off and throws in more variances.  The names, of course, were Arabic - without exact phonetic equivalency in English. 

Did you know that Venice - Italian, Venezia - is purported to mean "I made it thus far?"  Any curiosity about why that became the name of what's periodically considered the most romantic city in the world?

I've been around the world and heard countless variations on my name - for some, it's maddeningly unpronounceable; for others, it's bland, mundane, falls like a stone off the tongue.  It doesn't really matter much to me, for I know that who I am is a different entity for different people.  So long as we connect in the middle, that's what matters.

When it comes to other people's names, however, I try to be a stickler.  I want to know how they self-identify and be true to that.  When I taught in Korea, I strongly resisted the idea of giving people "English names" for the same reason I cringe when we talk about foreign cities or history makers via anglicized names.

This is particularly irritating for explorers - that we record their frontier-pushing stories in history but can't ourselves bother to learn their true names is maddening.

What's even harder to contend with is our urge to reframe people in ways that make sense to use instead of trying to understand them as they are.  It's lazy, it's simplistic and it is counter to the whole point of communication, which is to share and to understand.

My friend whose quote opens this post wrote a great peace about names, here.  She talks about how we will remember the names of people who change the world, no matter how hard to pronounce they are in much the same way that no matter how busy we feel, we will always make time for the people who matter to us.

Her name, in case you're curious, is Mi.

Maybe in the short run, some names will be better than others, however at the end of the day, they are just letters.  We all need to add meaning to them.

The Naming of Things: Owning Free Speech

We can hope that, in time, a generation that has grown up online will outgrow the cowardly shadows of namelessness.  Still, faceless hatred will endure - as long as we let it.  Until then, nothing less than our own collective decency will hang in the balance.

Criticism is important; without it, poor ideas go unchecked and new opportunities are missed.  If people like Galileo and Newton had never bothered to question accepted wisdom; if inquisitive minds like Sigmund Freud or Alfred Kinsey had not thought to explore taboo topics, we'd all be lesser for it.

There is a huge chasm, however, between criticism and opposition for opposition's sake.

One seeks to move the conversation and with it, understanding forward; the other simply seeks to stop conversation dead in its tracks.  It's why in Politics, the goal of Opposition Parties is to grind government to a halt; it's why violence is the weapon of choice for those who've run out of ideas.

Goldenberg makes some excellent points; online anonymity is a refuge for cowards, though not the last one - merely the latest.  This can be a good thing and a bad thing; whistleblowers fearing for their careers and, in some cases, their life may want to do the right thing but not be prepared for martyrdom.  

At the same time, there are the trolls; these are the people who will say online under pseudonyms what they would never say in person.  These are also the folk who will break a window in a riot because they feel they won't get caught, or will join in a lynching when there's already a crowd with noose in hand.

But these people aren't an isolated demographic, one group that can be singled out - they are people, just as we are.  Therein lies the great irony and the deepest lesson.

We dehumanize people when we take away their names - by calling someone an  infidel, a Jew, a faggot, a bleeding-heart, red-neck, latte-sipping urban elitist, monster or any number of variations, we are removing their individuality to better fit a simple, emotionally satisfying narrative.

It's why, over time, we've feared and loathed the Inscrutable Oriental, the Arab menace, the 1% or the unwashed masses.  It's why the bad guys we dreaded most, be they the zombie apocalypse, the hive-minded aliens, partisans or The Other can always be understood as one homogeneous collective.

When trolls hide behind anonymity, they are equally stripping away their own individuality.  Perhaps the unaccountable attack makes them feel powerful, as does being part of a mob, but the very act of slipping into a pseudonym turns a person into a caricature, interchangeable with any other troll.   When we can and do act without consequence or attack without consideration, we dehumanize ourselves as well.  We trip away the thin veneer of civilization and revert to nothing more than animals.

It's beyond tragic that those who will raise their voices the loudest in defence of individual liberty and free speech as often as not are seeking freedom from everything that makes humanity special.

It's never been freedom and anonymity that has made us distinct, nor isolation or stagnancy; it's ownership, individuality and the ability to become more than what we are.  The flip side of I may disagree with what you say but will defend your right to say it is think before you speak.  

Thinking is not innate.

Which is why this is where I part ways with Adam Goldenberg.  After much study, thought and conversation, I've come to the conclusion that we are all-too often hung up on romantic notions of the superhuman ancestor, the idea that in simpler times we were better people.  I don't see much support for this in history.

As such I don't feel that, with the Internet, our collective decency is at risk.  I don't think there has ever been a collective decency.  In fact, I'd argue that stigma is an evolutionary development that was intended to keep small kinship groups safe from predators, competitors and illness.

The idea of collective decency isn't something we're straying from, but moving towards.  

It's a slow, tedious, painful process with almost as many steps backwards as there are forwards, but such is always the nature of progress.  

We began with the naming of things - ascribing unto them labels and identity born of our own perception.  This is language.

Where we're moving to is understanding the names others give themselves.  By understanding how others view themselves and us, we better understand who we are, as individuals.  Call it an introspective property inspection as well as an exploration of society's holdings.  It's also known as mindfulness or consciousness.

Conscience may make cowards of us all, but consciousness is all about ownership.  And light.

Common Code Words Leaders Use to Shun Accountabilityn (Dianna Booher)

Common Code Words Leaders Use to Shun Accountability

Posted by Dianna Booher - May 14, 2013 - Communication—Interpersonal, Communication—Oral, Executive Communication

Words can clarify or confuse. A favorite pastime of mine is to watch politicians or corporate CEOs squirm when asked straightforward questions on sensitive issues. Accountability can be tough; the language of leadership is not for the faint-hearted.

 

Here are some of the top code lines that contribute to the growing cynicism in today’s workplace:

—”We’re not here to talk about the past. My focus is on the future.”

 

Translation: “I’ve made some mistakes and bad decisions that I don’t want to admit. Let’s not discuss those.”

Result: Others resist. They push to talk about those mistakes the leader is trying to push under the proverbial rug. And followers tend to emulate the leader, learning to side-step discussions about mistakes, weaknesses, or errors. Lesson learned by observation: Obfuscate. Distract. Triangulate.

—”With all due respect…”

 

Translation: ‘I’m about to make a disrespectful, insensitive comment that could be phrased more tactfully and objectively if I thought about it a moment.”

Result: Uncivil discourse prevails when open, honest dialogue would better solve challenging problems and strengthen, rather than weaken, relationships.

 

—”He left to pursue other opportunities.”

 

Translation: “He has been fired or asked to resign.” We routinely see and hear this statement when someone leaves an organization abruptly—even when a scandal involving them has made national headlines, when rumors run rampant, or when tweets trend to the top.

Result: Skepticism and distrust grow.

 

—”That division has seen less than stellar performance.”

 

Translation: “This division has hit rock bottom.” Or: “This division has decreased from its typically high performance.”

Result: This ambiguous statement sets off a scramble to accurately assess the department’s performance and its ramifications. Defenders of the performance will be upset. Outsiders will be alarmed.

 

—”It’s a no-brainer; this is a win-win opportunity.”

 

Translation: “I don’t want to take the time to identify, assess, and explain the real benefits.”

Result: The staff learns that declaring is as good as doing. That is, a phone call made… is as good as a phone call returned. A promise is as good as a signed contract. A product ordered is as good as a product installed.

 

—”She fell short of her potential.”

 

Translation: “We never set realistic goals, communicated those goals, nor prepared her to reach those goals.”

Result: Leaders continue to lie to themselves about the frequent cause of poor performance. Other observers fail to understand the cost of employee development.

 

So what’s a leader to do to become a straight-talker and build credibility? Own up,… polish up,… speak up.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Lincoln of Political Metaphor

Given their power, metaphors have naturally become a weapon wielded by all great political speechmakers. Lincoln, a devout student of the two great rhetoric texts, the Bible and Shakespeare, understood that power more than any other president.

 

 

Abraham Lincoln.  The power of metaphor.  The role of language in communication.

 

Content-wise, what's not to like about this article?

 

Communication: People Need Symbols

"For me, The Dark Knight Rises is specifically and definitely the end of the Batman story as I wanted to tell it, and the open-ended nature of the film is simply a very important thematic idea that we wanted to get into the movie, which is that Batman is a symbol.

 

"He can be anybody, and that was very important to us."

 

Anonymous uses Guy Fawkes, partially to conceal the identity of members but also to create an identifiable brand.  We might think of this and cringe, but symbols are fundamental to the way we view our world.  Flags are symbols.  Uniforms are symbols.  Even letters are symbols, representing intangibles like sound.  Zero represents a concept, nothingness, that doesn't even exist in nature.

 

We communicate the world we live in through metaphor - images painted on cave walls, languages, parables, art are all expressions of the world as we interpret it - not as the world is in and of itself.  Like any telephone game, layers and personal experiences get added to the expression of what is over time until the metaphor we communicate is something entirely different than the thing it represents.  Thus, bridges have gender, ideologies are understood as uniform blocks, The Other is separate from ourselves. 

 

The invention and use of symbols is a powerful tool - essentially, the building block of communication.  Through symbols, we can record information across time, we can teach, we can conceptualize, plan, build, etc, but it equally creates a filter between the world we are a part of and the world we comprehend in our heads.  Call it a prison for your mind.

 

Cultures around the world have identified this concept, through metaphor, and have equally proposed solutions, which in turn become wrapped in metaphor.  We like to focus on the ever-expanding differences, but here's the thing - when you get passed the telephone-game of social adaptation, you find core concepts and symbols that are truly universal in nature, like the tree, the snake or the circle.

 

The differences aren't a bad thing - they add diversity, complexity and through co-morbidity, opportunity.  It's social evolution, an exact mirror of what happens with biological evolution.  It pays, though, to always stay grounded in where the diversity stems from.  The predecessor of symbolism, that nebulous Centre, is the emotional starting point of our communication big bang.  From the centre stem all things; therefore, from the centre, all things can be unravelled, understood and rebuilt.

 

Those of us yearning for a connection with something greater than ourselves, meaning to life, etc. and look for an external diety or an external paradise are caught in a cycle of conceptualization.  The answers we seek aren't boxed definitions at all, but rather the absence thereof. 

Meaning is not found without; it's felt from within.  Those who become too enchanted by symbols lose the opportunity to divine the understanding they can otherwise unlock.

The Linguistics of Politics

He believes this was not just a case of the scribes having a bad day at the office. There seems to have been an unusual absence of scholarship, with no evidence of any lists of symbols or learning exercises for scribes to preserve the accuracy of the writing.

 

 

The Koreans invented their own writing system - they did it to ensure literacy among the broader populace, as learning Chinese characters was a complicated task that only elites with free time could master.  The resulting phonetic alphabet is one of the easiest to learn in all of human language.  The system was designed with the user in mind; the rules were carefully recorded and taught to ensure continuity.

 

King Se-Jong created this system because he understood the intrinsic value of knowledge and communication.  He wanted to spread the light of wisdom throughout his kingdom, knowing the benefits would be countless.  The Chinese system was still kept in tandem because there was value in having multiple systems to record and share ideas, both to inform and provide counter-balance.

 

Now look at this writing system, undeciphered, lost to history.  The Mr One Hundreds might have created their own system for political reasons; to be distinct from the Mesopotamians or to ensure that only the elites had access.  They defined themselves, after all, on how many people they ruled over - not by what they accomplished.  So cautiously did they guard their literary secrets, however, that the system could not be sustained.  Without collaboration, without sharing, without embracing diversity, their story ended up going extinct.

 

It's the same with writing as it is with language, culture or ethnicity.  That which stagnates in isolation dies.  That which embraces diversity, transparency and collaboration evolves and continues.

 

There's a lesson in here, somewhere, for both language purists and governments that ignore process.

Fighting Words

 

“I want to be leader of the Liberal party, not some sort hybrid semi-ideological formation. The NDP is an ideological party of the left and the Conservatives are an ideological party of the right. We’re a pragmatic centrist party that is ready to take from the left or the right, depending on what actually works.”

 

Hybrid semi-ideological formation.  Somewhat insulting.  Stating that it's the other guys that are ideological - ie, emotion-driven - but not the Liberals is a bit like saying you're the only unbiased journalist in the room.  Tough and nose-thumbing, sure, but reflective of Canadian values of honesty, respect and integrity?  "We'll take from the left or the right" makes one sound like a political pirate, tacking to where the spoils are best.

 

Now, I agree with the theory of what Trudeau said; I think it's best for there to be different Political Parties representing different points of view in Parliament, because it's through a debating a diversity of ideas that we land on the best solutions.  There's an unfortunate thread in our politics that suggests separate Parties can't work together for the good of the country, because that's not good for their partisan image.  The thing that's missing is people who want to find the best middle ground for everyone, even if it means compromise; perhaps our politics has become too polarized for that.  Being disrespectful to Parties that do have so much support across the country isn't going to help.

 

It's a wording thing, perhaps, but words are my thing; "we're ready to take" comes across as entitled and arrogant.  How about "we're open to?"  You can ignore the subtle impact wording choice has, but you do so at your peril.  That's the sort of thing that is causing the electorate to tune out in the first place and simply creates fodder for CRG attack ads.

 

I thought Trudeau was brilliant in employing the Ender's Game "empathy against" bid with his "This is not a personal indictment of Mr Harper or Mr Mulcair. On the contrary, I honour their commitment and their service. But I think they are both dead wrong about this country." Show yourself a Statesman by respecting their contributions and empathizing with their failings.  One of the most effective attacks I think Dalton McGuinty ever used was when he responded to silly kitten-eater insults by Ernie Eves by saying he knew Ernie, that wasn't the kind of thing he says.  It was political judo at its finest. 

 

We need to see more of that.  We need more inclusive language, more empathy, more embodiment of the values he hopes to bring back to Canadian politics.  That doesn't mean being weak-kneed or whatever - it's about demonstrating how you rise above the fray, as leaders do.  If you want to change the system, you cannot do so by employing the traditional politics.  You just can't. 

Not if your end goal isn't to be just Leader of a Party, but Prime Minister of the entire country.

 

UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL MATRIX: Stigma, Confabulation and the Power of Persuasion

CONTENTS:

As We Go Along

Prometheus

Going Down the Rabbit Hole 
The Immediacy of Competition 
Model Students
 Mind Over Matter 
Children Will Inherit the Earth 
Stigma

Why We Lie

Conclusion 
POST SCRIPT: Surfacing 

-----

“What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”

      -          Morpheus, The Matrix

DEFINITIONS

Stigma:

1.          A mark of disgrace or infamy; a stain or reproach, as on one’s reputation.

2. a)     medicine/medicinal – a mental or physical mark that is characteristic of a defect or disease

    b)      a place or point on the skin that bleeds during certain mental states, as in hysteria.

 Confabulation:

1.          To talk casually; to chat

2.          Psychology – To fill in gaps in one's memory with fabrications that one believes to be facts

 -----

As We Go Along

“Although it may appear that the person is fabricating a story to fill gaps in their memory, it’s important to realize that the person is not deliberately trying to mislead or lie.  Rather, they are usually unaware that their memories are erroneous.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”  We’ve all been there – getting or giving false directions; using terminology inaccurately; having the birds and the bees explained to us (through wringing hands) with a less than specific description of the biological process; being fed complete bullshit, wondering how the speaker thinks anyone’s going to believe them.

Sometimes, these are intentional falsehoods designed either to misdirect the person opposite or to mask our own ignorance (to make us sound more impressive or to mitigate the appearance of ignorance).  Guy I know who has been very successful in his career – made piles of money, advised leaders on the provincial and national stages – once gave me this nugget of advice: “You don’t have to know what you’re talking about, you just need to sound confident while you say it.”  This approach has been proven to be a successful one on the individual level time and again; however, time and again it’s led to difficulties for society.

Sometimes our fabricated fictions are conscious products, but we also create these subconsciously – and do it far more often than we realize.  To understand why we intentionally fill in knowledge gaps or replace inconvenient sequences of fact with fabrications, we need to appreciate why we do this unconsciously.  This ability is not a parlour trick; our capacity to fill in knowledge sequences subconsciously – to confabulate – turns out to be a vital tool in our cognitive matrix.  It is also at the root of much of our social and internal conflict, facilitated through the lens of stigma.  We’ll get to stigma in a bit, but first, a quick example of how confabulation works in practice.

Ask yourself which you like better, a McIntosh apple bought at the store or a Granny Smith pulled fresh from the tree.

Then, ask yourself why you made that choice.

You might have picked the McIntosh; apart from the taste, it came from the store and was therefore easier to get.  You also knew that the apples in the store were likely more quality-controlled than a random pick from a tree.  On the other hand, you might have picked the Granny Smith because your grandmother used to keep a bowl of Granny Smiths at her home, so they bring up a positive childhood memory, or because you liked the idea that is was fresh.  Thinking about which apple you liked best in a given context – store or tree – might make you more inclined towards one brand or the other going forward.

Made your choice?  Good.  Odds are high that the answer you gave yourself was entirely confabulated.  You just subconsciously made it up, right here and now.  You could very well have no apple preference at all, nor any experitential connection between your Granny and a granny.  In this instance, if you played  long, your subconscious fabricated an answer because you were being pushed into addressing the question.  If I hadn’t asked, you might never have considered preference of one apple over the other.  It was the question that planted the notion of preference into your mind.

Prometheus

This concept of Inception – creating an idea or, in the movie, placing an idea into someone else’s mind – is well understood in our society at the surface level.  We see it when we look out the window, or when we turn on the television, or when we go to work.  When an ad associates manliness with a brand of Scotch, or when a waiter asks you “would you like red or white with your dinner?” or a politician tells you the ballot question is “us or people who want to undermine our country”, these folk are attempting to define your options for you in a way that is not necessarily reflective of reality.  By manipulating the choices before you and putting pressure on you to pick, they’re forcing you to not only make a choice but to develop a rationalization to explain that choice – a rationalization you may find yourself falling back on again and again in the future.    With an increase in our understanding of how the brain functions, that is starting to change.

 

 

 

The human animal is becoming increasingly wise to the trick of inception; more and more people are consciously aware that they won’t look like a TV commercial model if they consume the product he or she is shilling and that bar nuts are intentionally free because they make you thirsty and more likely to buy drinks.  As in sexual selection, we have socially-developed mechanisms to monitor for such deceptions; university papers require listed sources, job applicants must provide references and examples of their work.  The media shines light on the processes of government and business.  We don’t, in other words, accept things at face value – we are driven to understand them.  Director Christopher Nolan brilliantly captures this concept in his aptly-named film Inception; the various dream-hopping characters use personalized totems to help connect them to reality.

 

Going Down the Rabbit Hole

 

This leaves us with a conundrum, though; even when we understand the principles of marketing, they still, by and large, work.  We do buy the product; we do eat the nuts.  My favourite examples – everyone seems to agree that negative advertising in politics is deplorable, yet it continues to be used because attack ads work.  Politicians decry bullying, but continue to heckle in Legislatures.  It’s like dropping a hammer on your foot – knowing that it’s going to hurt doesn’t stop the pain.  Why do we allow ourselves to be manipulated?

 

To understand this paradox, we need to go down one layer further, past the thoughtful projections of consciousness into the mechanics of the projector – our brains.

If you close your eyes, you cannot see.  If you cover your ears, you can’t hear. In both cases, by blocking a sensory transducer, you are cutting off your brain’s access to a specific type of stimulus.  Under these circumstances, the brain isn’t creating the stimulus; it simply interprets the signals into a format you can understand, just as your computer turns a bunch of ones and zeros into content like pictures and words.  Shut down the input, you lose the signal.  The brain goes a bit further than that, though:

 

It determines the impact of external (or internal) stimulus on the body and suggests an appropriate response:

-        The eye sees and hears an attacking bear, the brain suggests the heart pump

         faster and the limbs get ready to attack, defend, or run

-        The nose and eyes perceive tasty food, the brain recognizes the food as

         desirable and informs the body to feel desire

-       A virus has gotten into the body, the brain reacts by adjusting body systems

         to attack it, redirecting energy to facilitate the response

It creates and stores mental copies of the things the sensory system has encountered for future reference

-          We call these memories.

 

If you close your eyes, you can still visualize representations of the things you have seen in the past.  If you block your ears, you can still recall the sounds that you have heard previously.  Unless, of course, you were born blind or deaf, in which case you have no recorded models to refer to.

 

 

 

Our mental reconstructions and projections of reality, then, are based on the sensory input and memories we collect over the course of our lives.  Does this mean we are born blank slates, then, with no input but that which we accumulate?  To me, this is a different way of asking the age-old question “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did the fall make a sound?”

 

 

 

It doesn’t (mean we’re blank slates – the falling tree makes a signal of sound whether that signal is received or not).  We aren’t born clueless – we are born with built-in models that shape our reactive behaviour.  Two cases in point:

        Fear

                - If children have never had cause to fear the dark in their lifetimes,

                  why would fear of the dark be innate to, say urban kids?

                - If you have never been attacked by a bear, why would seeing one

                  be frightening?

        Beauty

                - If we have no inherent conception of beauty, why would we see anything as

                  beautiful at all?  Why would the basic aspects of beauty – healthiness and

                  symmetry – be universal?

 

 

 

If you think you have an answer – read to the bottom and see if you haven’t changed your mind by the time you get there.    :o)

The Immediacy of Competition

If you believe in evolution, you accept the premise that the purpose of life is to continue.  In an ecological system, there is constant symbiosis – one organism cannot succeed without interacting with another.  On an individual level, what that looks like is competition – the antelope kills the grass by eating it; the tiger returns the favour by eating the antelope.  When the tiger dies, its carcass deteriorates, nourishing the soil from which the grass grows.  If you take a macro look at the process, the circle of life is really just about regeneration – it happens on the level of the ecosystem or the organism in essentially the same manner on which it happens at the cellular level.

Individually, though, we aren’t interested in the circle of life – we’re interested in surviving long enough to pass our genes on, ideally as many times and in the strongest packages possible.  The better equipped our offspring are, the better their chances of survival and propagating our genetic lineage.

We try to achieve this by doing everything we can to select as mates those who appear to us to have the greatest indicators of health or success (beauty) and by avoiding (or eliminating) things which we perceive as threats to our own existence (fear).  Those individuals who are not only good potential mates and able to react successfully to threats but able to identify others who are good potential mates and able to avoid threats are the ones that keep their lineages thriving.

Through an evolutionary, selection-of-the-fittest process, the ability to identify and respond quickly to threats and opportunities has been encoded into our genes.

But how does this function, practically?  There is so much diversity in our global ecosystem, how are we to know a healthy person from an unhealthy person, or a dangerous animal from a harmless one?  The mechanism by which we identify the benign from the threatening from the good is the model.

 

Model Students

Picture a scene: 

You’re walking through a forest at night.  You can’t see too far through the trees – your sightlines are limited.  You hear unidentifiable noises all around you – your sense of hearing is ramped up, trying to identify which of those noises might present a threat.  You feel vulnerable; you’re heart is racing.  Suddenly, you see a snake in the path in front of you.  Your general level of anxiety bursts into fear and your body convulsively takes a jump back.  You’ve no idea if the snake is poisonous or not, but still you are afraid.  Until you notice the snake isn’t moving.  In fact, it’s got some rather sharp angles to its body.  As curiosity overwhelms your fear, you risk moving a step closer.  It’s then you realize it wasn’t a snake at all, but a stick.  You chide yourself, call yourself a fool for reacting so severely to nothing.

In recreating that scenario in your mind, you have fabricated a mental movie that relies on all the visual and auditory memories related to forests, snakes and night that you have collected in your life.  The concept of snake got your heart racing, just as it would if you had actually been in that scenario.  If I had said the object was a taipan, not a snake, you wouldn’t have reacted the same way – unless you already had a mental image of what a taipan is.  As soon as I indicated that the snake was a stick, you switched the mental model for the object – and your emotions adjusted accordingly.  Film makers intentionally manipulate this process to great effect, often using a beat of contrasting emotion to ramp up tension in a sequence.

What allowed you to conceptualize a snake in your head?  What, in the forest scenario, caused you to consider the stick to be a snake and respond to it instinctively?  Why is it that you didn’t feel the same way about the word taipan as you did about the word snake, unless you followed the hyperlink?  If you recognized the “ramp” clip from the first second, what made you tense up in anticipation? If not, what made you jump at the end? 

Coded into your genes are models of perception.  Thanks to these models, honed by generation after generation of selection-of-the-fittest evolution, you have the ability to react to potential threats in real-time – a good skill to have as it could save your life.  These models also nudge you towards things that are desirable; a beautiful sunset, for example, or a pretty girl or a tasty dessert, or cause you to try and appear desirable to others, as in the “save your life” clip at 0:41.  The various objects we see, or even sounds that we here, are in themselves symbols or totems – they represent meaning to us in ways that we are rarely conscious of.

To be widely applicable, though, these models need to be pretty general; a boa constrictor doesn’t look like a cobra which doesn’t look like a taipan.  What these snakes have in common is a general shape – long, straight, often found low-to-the ground.  Traits they have in common with sticks.  You wouldn’t fear a stick if you saw it in the day, in the open; you’d have enough context to know it was a stick.  It was the limited context of the woods at night that led you to fill in the gaps or confabulate the stick as a threat.  What is the autonomic mechanism that allows you to put two and two – context and content – together to determine what is a threat, what is benign, and what is desirable?

Mind Over Matter

 

Subconscious pattern recognition signals connect the models encoded in our brains directly into our body systems (motor, respiratory, etc.), inciting an almost instantaneous response.  More simply put – it’s our emotions that allow us to react almost instantly to the context and content of sensory stimuli.

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.

Children Will Inherit the Earth

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.

Kids also have little self-control – everything from using a toilet to table manners has to be taught.  What kids do have, though, is an insatiable appetite for knowledge.  Language acquisition is a great example of this – kids will pick up a language whether given official language instruction or not.  It’s actually surprising how well kids pick up language regardless of said proper instruction or various language delay factors.  The same, incidentally, is true of deaf children; even without the ability to hear, they can absorb, model and innovate language.  The result might not be as clear or concise as that of a hearing child, but if there is intervention at an early enough stage, even deaf kids can adopt the fullness of language.

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:

  

Cobb: You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream and fill it with their subconscious.

Ariadne: How could I ever acquire enough detail to make them think that it's reality?

Cobb: Well, dreams, they feel real while we're in them right? Its only when we wake up then we realize that something was actually strange.

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:

            Jacqueline Saburido is a burn victim and a brave advocate against drunk driving.

            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:

Why homophobia?  Gays are unnatural (though they seem to appear in nature quite frequently, in a whole host of species), they disrespect the rules of society, they are social engineers, etc.  Gay/straight associations have no place in schools where our kids are supposed to learn important stuff - nor does sex ed, for that matter.

          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

          I fear they’re starting to outnumber my tribe.”

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?

                          If the cells in our bodies are collections that form an organism with

                          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?

Neo: No.

Morpheus: Why not?

Neo: Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life.