Realities, Elephants & Riders

We have an amazing opportunity to do something that no generation in the history of mankind has ever done – be actively involved in shaping the realities that guide our lives. It begins with becoming familiar with the TOV Center Model for Understanding Humans & Human Behavior:

Humans are genetically structured, realities guided,

social creatures that are dependent on other humans for survival.

Everything we are as physical creatures is linked to our DNA. We are able to think because our DNA contained the instructions that produced the genes that were required to create the organ that is the biological control center of human life – the brain. Without a brain none of our organs would function. We would be dead.

The brain also controls the organs that make us aware of the world outside of our bodies. That is the primary focus of this blog. They combine to produce the navigation system that guides us through life and keeps us from or causes us to bump into each other.

Objective & Memetic Realities

From the moment we awaken in the morning, we are surrounded with a rush of light and sounds and smells. Our senses are flooded. All we have to do is wake up every day and without thought or effort each of us is immersed in his or her unique irrefutable reality.¹ We naturally assume that our “irrefutable reality” is “the reality” of the entire world. Why would anyone ever stop to consider there’s something beyond that reality?² Moving beyond our individual realities begins with understanding this fact -- the brain has no direct exposure or access to the world outside the skull.

Sealed within the dark, silent chamber of the skull, the brain never directly experiences the external world -- and it never will. The gateways to the brain are the sensory organs.

Electrochemical signals from sensory organs dash through dense networks of neurons to the brain. It feels as though we have direct access to the world through our senses. Reach out and touch something. Although it feels like the touch is happening in your fingers, in fact it’s all happening in the mission control center of the brain. It’s the same across all your sensory experiences. Seeing isn’t happening in your eyes; hearing isn’t taking place in your ears; smell isn’t happening in your nose.

Biology has discovered many ways to convert sensory information from the outside world into electrochemical signals that travel to designated centers in the brain. Their journey to the begin biological translation machines like these -- hair cells in the inner ear, several types of touch receptors in the skin, taste buds in the tongue, molecular receptors in the olfactory bulb, and photoreceptors at the back of the eye.³

We only perceive a slice of the objective reality that actually exists – what we are able to perceive is limited by the biology of our sense organs. People think of color as a fundamental quality of the world around them, but in the outside world, color doesn’t actually exist. When electromagnetic radiation hits an object, some of it bounces off and is captured by our eyes. Humans are able to distinguish between millions of combinations of wavelengths — but it is only inside our heads that any of this becomes color. Color is the brains’ interpretation of wavelengths and that only exists inside of the brain.⁴

Our slice of the wavelengths we’re talking about involve only what we call “visible light,” a spectrum of wavelengths that runs from red to violet. But visible light constitutes only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum — less than one ten-trillionth of it. We are completely unaware of the rest of the spectrum because we don’t have any specialized biological receptors to pick up on those signals. The slice of reality that each species is able to perceive is limited by the biology of the sensory organs.⁵ No one’s “irrefutable reality” includes the entire objective reality.

So what does the world outside your skull really “look” like? If you could perceive object reality as it really is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside the brain there is just energy and matter. Over millions of years of evolution the human brain has become adept at turning this energy and matter into a rich sensory experience of being in the world.⁶

Objective reality is the domain of facts. Individual realities are the domains of memes – pieces of electro-chemical information that exist in the neural networks of the brain. The most powerful memes in human brains are institutional memes. It is essential that we make accurate distinctions between objective facts and institutional memes.

● Objective facts exist independently of any human institutions. Facts require the institution of language in order that we can state the facts, but the objective facts themselves exist quite independently of language or of any other institution.⁷

● Institutional memes are created in and recognized as part of institutional memetic structures. Language is an institutional memetic structure. Institutional memes consists of names, strategies, rules, laws, standards, associative links, truths, beliefs, doctrines, creeds, covenants, opinions, games, etc.

Scientists now know that certain brain systems required environmental stimuli to develop and that each neural system has a different critical period, or window of time, during which it was especially plastic (subject to change) and sensitive to the environment. Language development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty.⁸

A particularly important critical period lasts from approximately ten or twelve months to sixteen or eighteen months, during which a key area of the right frontal lobe is developing and shaping the brain circuits that will allow infants both to maintain human attachments and to regulate their emotions. This maturing area, the part of the brain behind our right eye, is called the right orbitofrontal system. This system allows us both to read people’s facial expressions, and hence their emotions, and also to understand and control our own emotions. A mother who is with her baby during the critical period for emotional development and attachment is constantly teaching her child what emotions are by using musical speech and nonverbal gestures. For children to know and regulate their emotions, and be socially connected, they need to experience this kind of interaction many hundreds of times in this critical period, and then to have it reinforced later in life. ⁹ We acquire memes from many sources.

Elephants & Riders

The brain operates on two levels – subconscious and conscious. The subconscious level interprets and responds to over 40 million nerve impulses per second, while the conscious level processes about 40 nerve impulses per second. As an information processor the subconscious level is one million times more powerful than the conscious level and it contributes 95% of cognitive activity.

Think of the relationship of the conscious and subconscious levels as that of a rider on an elephant. The rider will go wherever the elephant wants to go -- unless the rider is able to coax the elephant to go somewhere else. Learning to be consciously aware of activities of your elephant requires learning skills that can involve the raider at critical times.

The brain’s most important mission is survival and most of that activity takes place at the subconscious level. The elephant devotes lots of time and energy to predicting what will happen next, so that the body will be ready for any contingency. Every moment of your life, the brain is issuing thousands of predictions at a time -- based on your past experience. The predictions that win are usually the ones that fit the situation in the next moment.¹⁰

The elephant forecasts when your heart should speed up or slow down, when your blood pressure should rise and fall, when your breathing should deepen, and when you need more salt, sugar, water or hormones, and attempts to meet those needs before they arise. It’s like running a budget for your body, but instead of money, the currency is biological.¹¹

The rider, the consciousness level, gets involved when the unexpected happens and the elephant needs time to work out what to do next. Consciousness isn’t just about reacting to surprises; it also plays a vital role in settling internal conflicts within the brain.¹² Say you find yourself reaching for an ice cream sundae, but you know that you’ll regret having eaten it. In a situation like that, a decision has to be made. Consciousness is the system that has this unique vantage point. It plays the role of arbiter between the billions of interacting elements, subsystems and burned-in processes. This makes it possible for rider to make plans and set long-term goals for the system as a whole.¹³

Guarding Its Beliefs

All beliefs are memes and they play major roles in creating individual realities. The elephant is the guardian and promoter of its most trusted belief-memes. It is absolutely essential for us to be aware of this process in ourselves and others when we are involved in conflicts and disagreements. Below is the process everyone’s elephants are actively engaged in as they predict what actions to take.

1. Searching for patterns in incoming information that confirms its beliefs.

2. Distorting and molding new information to make it fit its preconceived concepts or confirm its beliefs.

3. Filtering out information that doesn’t fit its preconceived concepts or confirm its beliefs.

We are consciously unaware of the above subconscious activities. What a person actually says to us may not be what our elephants let us hear. Think about that for a moment. It is important to understand that the choices determined best by the elephant aren’t always the one’s the rider would make for ethical, moral, religious or logical reasons.¹⁴

Herein lies what science has to offer when it comes to human morality – science can tell us how our brains work but not which decision we should ultimately make. That is the domain of social institutions, like families, schools, religions, etc. Feeding our riders and elephants a steady diet of time-tested values and wisdom principles is essential to making sure our elephants stay on the best paths.

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SOURCES

¹ The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman © 2015, Vintage Books, New York, NY; p. 32.

² The Brain: The Story of You; p. 64.

³ The Brain: The Story of You; p. 43.

⁴ The Brain: The Story of You; p. 63.

⁵ The Brain: The Story of You; p. 64.

⁶ The Brain: The Story of You; p. 37.

⁷ The Construction of Social Reality By John R. Searle © 1995; The Free Press, New York, NY; p. 37.

⁸ The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science By Norman Doidge, M.D. © 2007; Penguin Books, New York, NY; p. 52.

⁹ The Brain that Changes Itself; pp. 226-227.

¹⁰ How Emotions Trick Your Brain: The Surprising New Science Rewriting What We Know About Our Feelings By Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett; BBC Science Focus, May 2018, pp. 45b.

¹¹ How Emotions Trick Your Brain; p. 46a.

¹² The Brain: The Story of You; p. 99.

¹³ The Brain: The Story of You; p. 99.

¹⁴ The Truth About Trust; p. 227.