A World of Your Own

In May of 2023, I attended, remotely, the Cornell University International Systems Thinking Conference. Since then, I keep coming back to something that Rachel Lilley said about how we've depended on an intuitive view that there is a rational world outside of us, and we observe it through our senses. Sure, we have some internal filtration that introduces biases and distortions, but that we can respond more-or-less rationally to it. She says that more recent research shows that, while that's a useful metaphor, it doesn't describe the mechanics of how the mind works. Rather than observe the world around us, our brains create our sense of reality using sensory input as building blocks.

Recent work based on brain scans of living, thinking people suggests that we take a more active role in our observations. Rather than passively observing our world, we're creating an internal image of the world and then looking outward to verify it. When that verification fails, then we might update our internal image. Or we might fall into what's called a cognitive bias to paper over the discrepancy.

Recently I went to sit down in a living room chair to do some reading and bumped into the couch as I approached the chair. That was unexpected, as it's not usually in the way. I was navigating by my internal image of how the furniture was arranged and hadn't noticed that the chair had been moved in the course of vacuuming. It had been close enough to my expectations that I hadn't noticed until I ran into the couch.

When the world we observe doesn't behave the way our internal image predicts, we are surprised and notice errors in our expectations. That's when we may make small shifts in our mental image to correct it. It's that internal mental image that we take as "reality" and we adjust it slowly, if at all, based on experienced differences from our expectations. Or we may adjust our reality to match our expectations. I moved the chair back to it's usual position.

This is a mundane and tangible example. The same forces apply to intangible social situations.

The last couple months I've been talking about the details of how our brains naturally work with regard to sensory input and memories. Some of the experimental examples may seem like really trivial situations, but simpler scenarios are more easily tested experimentally.

These same mechanisms are in play in every thing we do. Decisions, whether made explicitly, tacitly, or by default, are made based on the inputs we perceive, and the state of understanding we carry with us in our memories. That means that the neuroscience we've been examining has a great influence on the decisions we make, and hence our subsequent behavior.

When I was a child, I acquired a mental image that doctors were smart and science-oriented, and nurses were caring and human-oriented. Doctors made the decisions and then handed off the ongoing implementation of those decisions to the nurses who were focused on the patient rather than the disease.

My mental image also included that doctors were men and nurses were women. That's all I had ever seen and it matched the societal gender expectations of the time.The first time I had a male nurse, it was a big surprise. My mental images didn't include the possibility that men could have the empathy to pay emotional attention to people.

At the time, I believed my lying eyes that nurses were women since that was all I had seen up until that time. I didn't know what role this man was playing, since he acting like a doctor, or, at least, not like my internal picture of how a doctor acts. I treated this new situation as an aberration in the world around me rather than as an error in my expectations. I could "see" that it was "natural" that nurses be female. Or, I thought I could, but that was just my internal image based on prior experience. At the time, that internal image was more real to me than the "wrong" situation I was experiencing.

I was not a hospital administrator, so I didn't have the power to "move the chair back to its position." I had to adjust my mental image, no matter how grudgingly, to the fact that some nurses were male. You can imagine, though, how easily someone in a position of power might reject that image and stick with the one to which they were accustomed and with which they were comfortable.

Our prior experiences are not easily ignored, and it can blind us to the present. Yet it's only in the present that we can make choices. We may regret the choices we've made in the past, but we can't change them. We may hope or plan to make better choices in the future, and we can prepare ourselves for making better choices, but we can't make those choices until we get there.

"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift, and that is why it's called the present."¹

We also can't change our behavior for the better when we're seeing the present through the lens of old hurts. If we base our behavior on the past rather than the present, we're bound to perpetuate old patterns, leading to more of the same.

"I have a hunch that oftentimes you don't see what's right in front of your nose, because it is all covered up with what you expect."²

Virginia Satir said this while working with a couple who were stuck, and couldn't seem to synchronize their overtures for change. When one would make an offer, the other would evaluate it in the relationship of their memory, rather than on the current events. This, of course, keeps the relationship from moving forward. It's like trying to walk having one foot nailed to the floor.

I find it interesting how our internal views of the world differ from the shared world of the here and now. It raises a lot of questions for me. What is a question it raises for you?

P.S. You may have noticed that this year I've been on a theme of how our perception of the world is not as reliable as we might assume. I'd like to hear your reaction to that. This topic has become deeply interesting to me, and seems timely given the factual disagreements I see in the news.

Do you think I've overblown the issues? If so, in what way? Or have I left out an aspect you find important? What aspect is that?

Do you find the lack of certainty disconcerting? Does it rattle your image of yourself? I'd love to hear how you feel about it.

And if you'd like to talk further about this topic, you could schedule a Zoom Session with me to talk about it.

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Or you can also simply reply to this email or send an email to newsletter@idiacomputing.com to continue the conversation. There's a person, not a bot, on this end. I'd really love to hear from you.