Brain Musings Part 3: Same Place, Different Worlds

This post is somewhat of a continuation from the last one. To briefly recap, I meandered on the idea that our brains categorized input as quickly and generally as possible – only looking at finer details when absolutely necessary, and because of that, different people can sense the same input and yet perceive different things. I’d like to do a quick follow-up with another result of brain laziness and then talk about the consequences of said laziness.

Before I get into the main idea, I’d like to throw out that up until now the discussion has been about the brain’s reactions to sensory input, like what the eye sees or the ear hears. I think these same arguments can be applied to higher level concepts. Every concept that we contain, I believe, simply builds on lower level ones. Just as we build simple ideas of leaves, twigs, and trunks into trees, even our most high-level, abstract ideas, like ethics, are at their core complicated amalgamations of our lifelong internal and external experiences. So when we speak of categorizations and perceptions and beliefs, we can apply our arguments to the full gamut – from low-level concrete features to high-level abstract ideas. And now that that’s taken care of…

Have you ever noticed that if you learn some new concept, then you view everything that comes after through the lens of that concept? Usually, the world is consistent, and finding that consistency is important if we’re going to live in the world. After we learn something, we assume it to be true, and if we get a new piece of information that can be interpreted in two ways, one of which is aligned with what we already know and one of which isn’t, we’re going to interpret it in the way in which it is most consistent with respect to our existing beliefs. Every time your brain gets new input, it is not going to break down everything it knows, re-examine it all to see how it best fits together, and then rebuild a new model of the world. Instead, it assumes that it is already in a nice, consistent state, and anything new had better fit into it. Just like with categorization, your brain has been trained to expect certain things, and once it knows about them, it sees them more often. This is why when you learn a new word, you suddenly hear it used more often, or why people claim to see Jesus in a piece of toast (since our brains are very attuned to recognizing faces). You see what you expect to see, even if your brain has to fudge the input a little, and that ends up reinforcing the expectation. This is why it’s so hard to unlearn something. Again, just like with basic categorization, much of this is done subconsciously (although it can move into the conscious realm, which is why people will keep arguing even after they have been shown wrong to a reasonable extent).

The culmination of these ideas is something that, on the surface, is extremely obvious to us all: people are affected by their history. However, I think this idea gets glossed over. Most people would take that to mean only that people’s preferences and conscious beliefs are molded by their history, but I don’t think that goes deep enough. Instead, we should consider the idea that at any given moment, we basically have a representation of the world in our heads, and that representation, or model, is a result of what perceptions we have gleaned, and if we all perceive differently based on our history and what we have learned, then we are not all working with the same models of the world in our heads. It is not enough to say that we are viewing the same world and simply making different choices; we are making choices based on (possibly radically) different views of the world, even if we are standing in the same place.

This kind of stuff can take a while to sink in, but wrestling with it has value if for only one reason: understanding. I want to be able to understand people. Through understanding, we can empathize with, learn from, and grow closer to others. I think that to truly understand another person, you have to make an attempt to see the world as they do; you have to put yourself in their place. You cannot do this if you constantly assume the other person has the same model of the world that you do. When you know the world in which a person lives, then you may know the person. Plus, the idea is fascinating to me in and of itself. :)