You may think you understand the difference between seeing
something and imagining it. When you see something it’s really there; when you
imagine it, you make it up. That feels very different.
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The problem is that when researchers ask people to imagine
something, like a tomato, and then give some of them a just barely visible
image of a tomato, they find that the process of imagining it is hard to
totally separate from the process of seeing it. In fact, they use a lot of the
same brain areas.
And when you stop to think about it, that makes some sense.
Your brain is locked in the pitch-black bony vault of your skull, trying to use
scraps of information to piece together the world. Even when it’s seeing, it’s
partly constructing what’s out there based on experience. “It turns out,
reality and imagination are completely intermixed in our brain,” Nadine
Dijkstra writes in Nautilus, “which means that the separation between our inner
world and the outside world is not as clear as we might like to think.”
We grew up believing that “imagining” and “seeing” describe
different mental faculties. But as we learn more about what’s going on in the
mind, these concepts get really blurry really fast.
This is happening all over the place. Over the centuries,
humans have come up with all sorts of concepts to describe different thinking
activities: memory, perception, emotion, attention, decision-making.
But now,
as scientists develop greater abilities to look at the brain doing its thing,
they often find that the activity they observe does not fit the neat categories
our culture has created, and which we rely on to understand ourselves.
Let me give you a few more example:
Reason/Emotion: It feels as if the rational brain creates
and works with ideas, but that emotions sweep over us. But some
neuroscientists, like Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University, argue
that people construct emotions and thoughts, and there is no clear distinction
between them. It feels as if we can use our faculty of reason to restrain our
passions, but some neuroscientists doubt this is really what’s happening.
Furthermore, emotions assign value to things, so they are instrumental to
reason, not separate from or opposed to it.
Observation/Memory: Observation feels like a transparent
process. You open your eyes and take stuff in.
In fact, much or most of seeing
is making mental predictions about what you expect to see, based on experience,
and then using sensory input to check and adjust your predictions. Thus, your
memory profoundly influences what you see.
“Perceptions come from the inside
out just as much, if not more, than from the outside in,” the University of
Sussex neuroscientist Anil Seth has observed.
The conversation between senses
and memory produces what he calls a “controlled hallucination,” which is the
closest we can get to registering reality.
Understanding/Experiencing: Understanding seems cognitive;
you study something and figure it out.
Experience seems sensory; you physically
live through some event. But Mark Johnson, now a professor emeritus in the
University of Oregon’s Department of Philosophy, points out that there is no
such thing as disembodied understanding.
Your neural, chemical, and bodily
responses are in continual conversation with one another, so both understanding
and experiencing are mental and physical simultaneously. “When faced with a
whole person,” Joe Gough, a PhD student in philosophy at the University of
Sussex, writes, “we shouldn’t think that they can be divided into a ‘mind’ and
a ‘body.’”
Self-control: We talk as if there’s a thing called
self-control, or self-regulation, or grit. But the Stanford psychology
professor Russell Poldrack tells me that when you give people games to measure self-control
in a lab, the results do not predict whether they will be able to resist
alcohol or drug use in the real world.
This suggests, Poldrack says, that what
we believe is “self-control” may really be a bunch of different processes.
Jordana Cepelewicz recently had an excellent essay on this
broad conceptual challenge in Quanta Magazine. “You realize that neither the
term ‘decision-making’ nor the term ‘attention’ actually corresponds to a thing
in the brain,” the University of Montreal neuroscientist Paul Cisek told her.
She also reported that some in the field believe that the concepts at the core
of how we think about thinking need to be radically revised.
That seems exciting. I’ve long wondered if in 50 years terms
like “emotion” or “reason” will be obsolete. Some future genius will have come
up with an integrative paradigm that more accurately captures who we are and
how we think.
I love how holistic the drift of research is. For a while,
neuroscientists spent a lot of time trying to figure out what region of the
brain did what function.
(Fear is in the amygdala!) Today they also look at the
ways vast networks across the brain, body, and environment work together to
create comprehensive mental states.
Now there is much more emphasis on how
people and groups creatively construct their own realities, and live within
their own constructions.
I’ve often told young people to study genetics. That will
clearly be important. But I’m realizing we all need to study this stuff, too.
Big, exciting changes are afoot.
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