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.
