In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond by John Zada

Author:John Zada [Zada, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Since my time in Koeye, I’ve been thinking more and more about the role our minds play in mediating what we see and believe—and how these processes work. Contrary to our assumptions, humans don’t perceive the world in the way we think we do. The manner in which we register our surroundings is at best convoluted. That may sound strange. After all, when we look at things around us—the environments, people, and situations—we feel that what we see is a comprehensive picture of things. But it’s not. There’s a huge gap in the education we receive in school about how our minds work. To discover the real nature of how we make sense of reality is to realize that each of us is, in a way, fumbling around blindly.

We know that our brains sketch only the most basic impressions of the outside world—mental models containing only the information most relevant to our survival. The late American psychologist Robert Ornstein, known for his pioneering research on the hemispherical specializations of the brain, wrote numerous books about consciousness and perception. He explains that, contrary to what we think, we experience reality not as it actually is—but as a simplified model. The reason for this? Reality is far too complex. Infinitely complex in fact. If our minds tried to process everything around us, we’d be hopelessly overwhelmed. We’d get lost in labyrinths within labyrinths of stimuli, unable to find food, safety, shelter, or mates. Our species would quickly die out. As a result, our minds evolved to construct a deeply simplified version of all that surrounds us: a virtual reality made up of only the important information—perhaps a trillionth of the possible external stimuli. And we make do with that.

“Our experience of the world assembles in a fleeting instant,” Ornstein writes in The Evolution of Consciousness, “with no time for thinking but just enough for producing a best guess of the world.”13

Our mental habits are subject to the same shortcuts. Much of our thinking, for instance, involves the use of assumptions, which are wrong as often as they are right. We confidently form opinions and draw conclusions about subjects and events of which we have little or no knowledge. All of this came about as a survival strategy. Our prehistoric ancestors had no time to gather all data methodically and work through the various possibilities of a situation. If they did they might have become a meal for a tiger or been impaled by an enemy’s spear.

So we evolved the habit of jumping to conclusions. The price of this inherited shortcut reflex, valuable as it can be, is frequent inaccuracy in our perceptions. And no matter how often we are proved wrong, we just aren’t clued into it, because our self-image is subject to this same modeling. Of all the simplifications the mind creates, the most powerful and convincing is the illusion that we are psychologically consistent—that our perceptions are complete and reliable. It’s the ultimate hoodwink.

How many of us know, for instance,

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