Belief as the natural state of mind

Why do con men (and women) continue to be successful? That is a question that I have asked myself for a long time. Why is it people continue to fall for Nigerian fraud schemes? Some of those who have fallen victim say that it is easier than you think. Perhaps, but I have had those letters and emails and I haven’t become a victim. While that does not prove anything other than I don’t have an understanding of the experience. However I will put forward a potential theory of at least a piece of what is happening. I am going to suggest that we are in-built with a natural state of mind that has the tendency to believe. For the sake of specificity, I am going to ignore some of the other factors potentially at play such as laziness, reduced cognitive facility, theft and the many other co-factors that may be involved.

The suggestion being made here is that belief is the default option and we believe all sorts of things to maintain this state. Disbelief, skepticism and scientific analysis is considered by our minds as not natural. That is a very open statement that can be made more precise, however it will suffice for the purpose of introducing this point. The concept of not believing is more difficult and less comfortable for our being. Our operational system seeks to believe through a deeply seeded skill-set of pattern recognition. Our brains seem almost hard-wired to seek and detect patterns, we find cognitive comfort in being able to join the dots. Our neurology is very associative, building association networks for speedy retrieval and functional use in the future. This concept has been proven to be very powerful, from Pavlovian conditioning to the randomness of operant conditioning of poker machines.

Our perception of control over the outcome of any given situation and the decisions we make on the factors involved around that decision point, can lead us to superstitious beliefs if we feel it is less within our own control. This stems from our need to find a pattern even when there is none, and then once we have constructed a pattern that we perceived to exist just before we got the desired outcome, we will repeat that pattern in order to gain control to repeat the process of achieving the desired outcome. That kind of behaviour is superstition and you can see this in many areas, particularly in competition sports. I would mention that this is not to be confused with getting oneself into an optimal state.

Dr Michael Shermer founder of Skeptic Magazine calls this process ‘Patternicity’, defined as, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. He makes the point that this is evident in Baseball players, with batters but not fielders, because fielders are successful 90%+ of the time, whereas the best batters fail 7 out of 10 times.

When we look at any sort of decision process, it doesn’t take terribly long before we hear the word statistic and type I and type II errors. Dr Shermer makes the suggestion in line with Neural Economics, in that the decision between type I and type II errors is based on cost. Shermer uses the example of being on the African plains and hearing either a) wind rustling grass [low-cost] or b) a Lion rustling grass [high cost], the cost associated with error is enough for you to use Patternicity. This fits well with the concept in Neural Economics that suggests that particularly in quick decision environments we have a built-in economic rationality that operates in our own best interest. However, this is where a natural state of belief kicks in, because, especially in these split second decision environments with high cost we refer to our default position of belief, and in Shermer’s example we would just assume that all rustles in the grass were that of a Lion. Shermer suggests that this tendency is an evolutionary protection trait.

There are other potential factors at play. One of which is our priming or framing to identify a pattern. This is the information we have to preempt a pattern. So if I talk about old ladies for a while and then show you the classic ambiguous image of the old lady/young lady and ask you what you see, you are primed to experience the old lady image. And of course there are many ways to prime someone’s experience. Another factor is a chemical one, and that is dopamine. It is thought that more dopamine gets us more creative and able to see more patterns and vice versa. There is also a suggestion that in seeing more patterns we are more open to superstitious behaviour and beliefs. If Dopamine levels are too high that is considered madness and we see patterns everywhere, and if they are too low that is the field of skepticism and we can miss the Lion in the grass, and with the right balance we achieve creativity and balanced decision process.

There are simply too many examples of the ability to trick our pattern detection systems, we often see examples of this with visual ambiguities. So we know that we can’t rely on these systems solely, so we have developed reasoning to give comfort where we cannot otherwise find it. This reasoning is a tool that is not well used and probably understood even less. Much of Neural Economics deals with intention as that often plays into our reasoning. In the African example Sherman says the wind in the grass is an inanimate and the Lion is an intentional agent. Sherman talks about ‘Agenticity’ which he defines as, the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency, often invisible beings and from the top down. This agenticity he suggests, is at the core of many superstitious and conspiracy belief systems, and the problem inherent is that some of these data points will be true and some won’t, so we can not uniformly dismiss all patterns that may seem to be following the agenticity principle.

Experiments have been done that suggest that by affecting our Temporal lobes (that over the ear) with electro-magnetic waves (e.g. God Helmet) or high g-forces, we can experience outer body experiences and alike. So it is also another factor in our processing and leaves an open loop to our understanding of how we may be processing and what may be pre-installed software if you will.

So it would seem we are built to detect patterns, and we are expectant of patterns, so much so that if they are not present we will construct them. And we will also assign intention to the patterns that we allow ourselves. There seems to be a feature of mind that allows a belief in higher intention, and may well be controlled or at least associated by the Temporal lobe.

I think there is sufficient data to continue the conversation on there being a natural built in facility to believe and that is a state that we crave comfort in. I think the power of this, combined with ability to slip patterns by our decision facilities with priming and intention, and the perceived cost of the decision outcome, makes any of us susceptible to the ‘con-artist’, given the right variables, that we have in our previous experiences and our desire for the outcome.

Dr Shermer uses this video in a presentation at TED to summarise this power of expectation and the power of belief. And you will notice all the elements of the process we have discussed in this article.

Poor monkeys

Model of the mind

Below is an interesting talk from Henry Markram, I was very pleased to see this as it is a support for the theories of Neural Economics in a field which has been very much looking in a limited direction. Enjoy the video and let your perceptual bubble expand.

What do you refuse to do?

I was lying in bed this morning awoken by thoughts that I had been gifted, as usual around 3am, although very thankful and always appreciative for the conscious awareness, I do believe I need to spend more time in framing when that may be more useful for me to have. However, it could be equally argued that it was the best time, as I am writing this without interruption as the household sleeps, but that delves into a more ontological question that I won’t get into in this post.

So in the dark, as I lay in bed receiving ideas, I reached over to get my conscious writing pad to get the thoughts down so that I can resume sleeping. I can write in the dark because I can see the pen and page in my mind. I was also using my iPhone to jot down some to do items and next steps in various projects. The iPhone’s LCD screen emits quite a bright light, and each time I would turn the phone off and close my eyes I would get the light appear in my ‘closed eyes’ and then it would slowly fade in my mind. However, always one to play with concepts, I wondered if that image could be maintained in my mind and enhanced, so that I could still see the screen and potentially what was on the screen, in my mind. I guess I could link my curiosity to my recent look at photographic reading and what the unconscious mind may recall from short bursts of visual data.

As I write this I get interrupted by my daughter, but more on that later.

As I played with this concept it dawned on me that even though my eyes were closed, I was still representing the image in the same area that I would use if my eyes were open. How strange I thought. If my eyes are closed then why do I need to represent the image in the same area? It presupposes that this is the best area to do that in. So I used people with sensory disabilities as my reference, in that when they lose a sense e.g. vision, their other senses become enhanced and adapt. And given my interest in the plasticity of the brain and my inherent tendency towards flexibility, I questioned whether I could represent the image somewhere else in my brain?

So I began to imagine the screen image being on the ceiling of my skull, then on the inside back of my skull, then behind me etc. It was an interesting experiment, of which further practise may be useful, and my suggestion would be that I may have set the groundwork for there to be greater flexibility in my neural connections. And I think that is where many of my thoughts lead me, that is to the precipice of experience and scientific understanding. So in my last statement, I mention my experience of my experimentation and what is scientifically understood or proposed about neural connections. That’s fine, however, my question is, what is your process to keep your experiences and science separated, long enough to discover new things and not limit yourself, to achieve freedom. I don’t know whom to quote or whether it is verbatim, but I have heard it said, that art is the individuals experience expressed to the universe and science is the universal experience expressed to the individual. But are you letting science limit your experience.

Science does help the experience though. For example, I mentioned an interruption to my writing before. I am writing this entry in the dark, in the lounge, lying on the couch, with laptop light beaming into my eyes, meaning that everything else in the room I am somewhat blind to. My 5 year old comes out and mentions she has an upset stomach, I close the laptop to see her, but I can’t. I am looking straight at her but I can’t see her. However as I strain to see her, I remember some science. I do not recall the name of the effect, but the eye has a dark/light reflex that means it will pick up differences in light and dark to the side of where you focus, meaning that if you look directly at what you want to see, you will fail to see it. So using this science I looked slightly away from my child and I could see her face and expression. So science was useful, but how was the science discovered?

So I see belief as a limitation everywhere, in both corporations and my personal change work clients. What are you believing, even with good science, that is stopping you from learning and experiencing something new and/or different. What are you refusing to do? 

In chatting with a good friend of mine recently, we were discussing business plans and the difference in philosophy between Eastern and Western cultures in their time horizons. I made the point that some Japanese firms had 400-year business plans. What startled my friend was his own realization that he says he believes in everything being possible, however he was confronted by the fact that in actual fact he was holding a belief that it was not possible to plan 400 years ahead, thus leaving him with an incongruence in his belief model.

So what opportunities are you limiting yourself to by not seeing with different eyes, by not using all your senses or by not experimenting with using your senses in a different way? What scientific model of the world are you using, is it yours and were you its originator? I would suggest you visit some of these questions and more of your own, and become the lead scientist in your own discoveries.

So what would you have if you tried on a different model today? Einstein imagined sitting on particle of light to get a different perspective, and he was hailed as a genius. I do not think that he would have debated with himself as to whether it was sensible to imagine such a thing. I do not think he would have cared what others thought of what he does in the privacy of his own imagination. I do expect that there would have been no resistance; he would not refuse his imagination the opportunity to discover. Maybe being a genius is the ability to not be scared of thinking differently and experimenting with what is ‘known’. 

So why not try on some new concepts, maybe that people can change, that large organisations can shift rapidly, that anything is possible? Remember, we are experimenting and by shifting our model we may reveal totally new realities, which become science.

Welcome to the beginning of a discovery of a new look at our fundamentals

Welcome to the Neural Economics Blog and the discussions that will ensue.