The User's Guide to the Human Mind: Why Our Brains Make Us Unhappy, Anxious, and Neurotic and What We Can Do about It by Shawn T. Smith

Author:Shawn T. Smith [Smith, Shawn T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608826049
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2011-11-30T23:00:00+00:00

History Fades, but It Never Vanishes

Andy’s mind seems to be doing what most minds will do when a survival strategy is failing. Try more! Do it harder! Even though the old strategy is clearly failing him, minds turn to history in times of stress. If it worked before, do it again.

Numerous people have told me they wish their histories would simply go away. More specifically, they want some of their history to go away. They want to keep the good memories and lose the painful ones.

Our minds gather history whether we like it or not. Even if we don’t recall specific events, experience shapes our minds. In chapter 2, we looked at implicit learning, which is the mind’s process of gathering information and guiding our decisions without our awareness. Part of the mind’s job is to compel us toward experiences that have worked well in the past, and away from experiences that have historically caused pain. History—especially the painful variety—never goes away.

The way our minds use history and memory fuel a couple of specific problems. First and foremost, memory is fallible. Where history is concerned, the mind simply can’t always be trusted. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that the mind does not record events like a tape recorder, but instead selectively reconstructs them based on what it believes to be the most important features of events (Lin, Osan, and Tsien 2006). Sometimes it insists that we act (against our own best interests) on the history that has the strongest emotion attached to it, and sometimes the mind flat out misleads us about what we have experienced.

Memory is also affected by mood. For example, a depressed mind tends to overgeneralize and misremember autobiographical events (Liu et al. 2010). It might judge that we are unattractive to all potential mates if only a few of them have treated us as though we were unattractive. And memories formed during times of stress can be quite fallible and prone to inaccuracy (Jelinek et al. 2010).

Andy, however, faces a different problem where his experience is concerned. It’s not that he is misremembering the many negative experiences with his mother; it’s that they are driving his behavior when what he learned from them is least useful to him.

Andy is experiencing the downside of implicit learning. Throughout the course of his life, he has learned a lot about the way relationships work. Not surprisingly, all that learning leads to rules for operating in the world. A good mind will protect its owner in complex relationships, just as Andy’s mind tries to protect him from angry women despite the fact that he no longer needs such protection. In complex relationships, the mind does a special variety of learning designed to keep relationships predictable and running smoothly—or if not smoothly, at least in a familiar manner. Using relationship history, the mind derives what some psychologists refer to as an internal working model (Bretherton and Munholland 1999).

Think of an internal working model as a learned advisor. It tells you

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