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Chattanooga Sabbatical: end of fall

Visceral beliefs

Does a chameleon feel its colors? Read on!

Not all beliefs are spoken – at least not in the way that I’ve been unpacking the term so far in this blog. We have beliefs that we articulate, but we also have beliefs concerning what we see and hear. We have beliefs about what is in the future (anticipations, predictions, hopes, expectations, etc.) and beliefs about what has transpired in the past (memories, post-hoc rationalizations, etc.). Our consciously experienced reality is in a sense nothing but belief – a constructed amalgam of history within which we each reside…indeed, within which the totality of our lived existence transpires. We see an external world, but that external world is constructed for us according the imperatives of a history embodied in the form of an eye, the tunings of neurons, and the expectations of experience. At some point I do want to pivot and think through what sort of freedom and responsibility this science permits, because I don’t think that it therefore follows that anything goes – that the mechanistic churnings of historical contingency eradicate morality or freedom. More that these things are a choice and can’t merely be taken for granted. In answer to question from Waterland a few posts back, “Does this mean that the individual never happened / doesn’t matter?” No. But we can only make that assertion when we understand what, exactly, that individual is.

So, I’d like to sit a bit longer with how our embodied beliefs of psyche are constructed. This post is going to start rummaging through a set of perceptions I’m going to term “visceral beliefs.” These are things like pain, emotions, motivations (hunger, thirst, fatigue), but I’m going to focus on emotions in this post.

This past week it just so happens that I went to see “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” with my parents. A few days later we went to hear a performance of excerpts from Handel’s Messiah. The connection? Emotion. When I was a kid – maybe 10, I remember the first time that I heard Handel’s Messiah. It was on a set of vinyl records (I think). Anyway, what I remember is not being able to get enough of the shivers the music sent through me – a weave of layered voices, voices calling out and responding, solitary and unified, and yeah, that Hallelujah chorus! I don’t know how my parents stayed sane, because my memory is of playing the vinyl records over-and-over-and-over-and-over. The reaction I remember having then, is the same reaction that I’ve since had watching an athlete perform at an the unexpected level, or a child returning with bandages to help an injured animal, or a group of people rising to stand in solidarity with an individual, or a red car in space with earth in the background. That reaction, that emotion is something that I connect to potential. A participatory wonder and exhilaration in raw human potential.

The world, though, isn’t necessarily designed for wonder. A book that I once assigned for a seminar, entitled Reality is Broken, essentially argues the societal imperatives of the 21^st c. U.S. have minimized the emotions of wonder and exhilaration. Specifically, essential motivations connected with feelings of autonomy, competence, and meaningful social interactions have been removed from our daily experience. This is why, according to the author Jane McGonigal so many individuals have turned to games and virtual environments. Only in these environments do they encounter the sense of raw potential that they crave. In a sense this theme is no different from that found in the book The Giver. A colorlessness. An imposed blindness. And this is how “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” comes in. The movie is essentially an episode of Mr. Rogers for adults. An emotionally stunted, “blinded” protagonist learns to attend to his emotions, to accept them, and to own their meaning. Mr. Rogers is the guide, and the protagonist follows him into a place of, well, new potential. What was unseen becomes seen. As William Carlos William’s writes:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens

Something I drew a long time ago: charcoal on paper

This poem is partially about seeing. Noticing. Attending, and it is a beautiful poem. I’m mentioning it, though, because a similar poem could be written for the perceptions that we label “emotions.” So much depends upon a feeling of sadness, or a feeling of joy, or a feeling of contentment, or a feeling of urgency. If a wheelbarrow is worthy of notice – and it is – then the emotional landscapes we inhabit are equally worthy of notice.

Emotions are curious things. We are taught the need to control them, and some of us even have a fear and an embarrassment of them. An emotional reaction to emotion! Classically, too, emotions have been held to be in opposition to reason. Reason = good = human. Emotions = bad = animalistic. The thing is, though, emotions are merely another type of perception. They are really no different from vision or smell or hearing. Would we say that vision = bad = animalistic? And yet to denigrate emotional information is really no different from purposefully wearing a blindfold throughout the day.

But what kind of information is contained in an emotion? Well, as I pointed out a while back, our perceptions are constructed things. They are beliefs about the world, and illusions are fun because they remind us of this fact. I apparently have beliefs about color and shade and times of day, and these beliefs construct for me a gold and white dress where others have constructed within their psychological interior a blue and black dress. Likewise, the Hermann grid illusion produces beliefs about discolorations that are not actually present.

This is an illusion that is apparently created by the manner in which our brains respond to vertical and horizontal lines.

Emotions, too, are a form of perception. They don’t “just happen” any more than yellow and white dresses “just happen.” Emotions are constructed things. They are a perception or set of beliefs, albeit of visceral sensations. So, in that sense (ha! intended pun, there) emotions are visceral beliefs. In fact, I’d argue that the term “visceral belief” is a much more accurate expression than “emotion.” Here is the entymology for “emotion“:

1570s, “a (social) moving, stirring, agitation,” from Middle French émotion (16c.), from Old French emouvoir “stir up” (12c.), from Latin emovere “move out, remove, agitate,” from assimilated form of ex “out” (see ex-) + movere “to move”

Culturally, then, emotions are things that cause agitation – a stirring up from the inside. However, is gratitude a type of “stirring up” from the inside? Is depression? Is contentment? Or let me ask a different question. Is “age” an emotion? Is it a motivation? Is it a belief? From the perspective of psychology the answer is yes and yes and yes. Age is a visceral thing. A set of visceral stimuli that we psychologically “read,” build upon, learn about, and fit like a puzzle piece into cultural / social systems. In other words, we feel it. We might not attend to the feelings of “age” or have any basis for comparison or prefer to look at its “sensation scale” (i.e., more or less feelings of age / youth) from one direction vs. another, but regardless, age is a sensation, a perception that originates in the body. “Youth is wasted on the young.” “I am 40 years young.” “I’m really feeling my age, today.” All of these expressions relate to the feelings that we term “age.”

These feelings of “age” are real, and age is certainly both an objective measure as well as a feeling. But when we use that word “feeling” what we are speaking of is a perception that originates in the body. If vision is a set of constructed beliefs about “things out there,” feelings are a set of constructed beliefs of “things in here” – where “here” is the body you inhabit. The precise terms are exteroceptive vs interoceptive stimuli. Exteroceptive stimuli are those that originate from outside the body, while interoceptive stimuli originate from within the body. Interoceptive stimuli are the change in body temperature, the constriction of blood vessels, the beat of the heart, the tingling rush of adrenalin, the vertigo, the rise of body hair, the rhythm of a walk, the roil of the stomach.

Here’s a diagram showing how perception is (at the very least) determined by both exteroceptive and interoceptive cues. Exteroceptive cues refer to information that originates outside the body, while interoceptive cues refer to information that originates inside the body. We call the latter “feelings.”

Here is a figure to help visualize all of this. Perception is the category of experience given by our senses. Some of those senses respond to information that originates outside the body (sound waves, light waves, chemicals, pressure, etc.) while some of those senses respond to information that originate from inside the body. This latter category is what I’m terming visceral beliefs, and emotions are one type of visceral belief. Others are states like “hunger,” “thirst,” “ennui,” “age,” and so on.

I’ll quickly explain the other boxes, but I don’t want to dwell on them right now. Homeostatic state refers to the fact that our bodies are designed to monitor particular “needs.” Some of these needs are common to other animals. We monitor salt, and when we “need” salt, we crave it, and it tastes particularly good. We monitor temperature, and when we “need” temperature, warmth feels particularly good and we take actions to procure it. These homeostatic needs partly define the type of animal that we happen to be (Homo sapiens), and so we have social needs that, for example, might be absent from a turtle, and as mammals we engage in nurturing and attachment in ways that I would categorize as “motivational” (i.e., connected with homeostatic “need”). Finally, behavioral systems refers to the species typical way that we satisfy our homeostatic needs. Do we hunt in packs? Do we play? Do we perform mating rituals? Finally, learning, of course, can layer all sorts of complexity into this system, but as a starting point, it’s a decent way to begin thinking about the mechanisms constructing our psyche.

Here’s an exteroceptive cue that might just start interacting with motivational states and interoceptive cues to produce the feeling “Mmmmmm.”

Emotions and feelings are visceral beliefs. A kind of perception that originates within the body, and which is built up from basic processes and learned expectations. Sometimes we attend to these “feelings” and at other times we do not, just like sometimes we attend to the clouds in the sky and sometimes we do not. Sometimes we purposefully “look away” from feelings in the same way that we might look away from a panhandler, or we learn to ignore feelings in the same way that we learn to ignore the train that passes by every night at 4:00. We feel tired, but push on through the night in order to complete an assignment. We feel sad, but believe that sadness is “weak” and ignore the sensations. The point is that just as the room you visually inhabit is partially constructed from color and lines and assumptions of depth, the emotional room you inhabit is constructed from the stuff of the body.

Soapbox Aside: I’ve been meaning to remind everyone that when it comes to psychology, we need to be careful about ascribing a particular state to everyone. Just as some individuals are “color blind,” not everyone experiences empathy or fear or anxiety. Not everyone experiences pain the way that you do. Some people see colors when they hear music. Some people experience extreme disgust to situations to which others merely shrug their shoulders. Some people are attracted to women. Some are attracted to men. But “men” and “women” are variable categories, too. Some are tall. Some are short. Some have penis-like appendages. Some don’t. There’s no such thing as a “real” woman or a “real” man. Not in any scientific sense, and most of us do know this when we pause to think about it, but there is a tendency to get sloppy. For example, the other day I was listening to the radio and a very reputable commentator said, “I believe that everyone is fundamentally good.” Depending on what the commentator meant, the odds are that, no, not everyone is fundamentally good. If the commentator meant that everyone has “fellow feeling,” that is wrong. Most might possess this perception, but there is variance. Some experience it more often, while others experience it less often. On the other hand, perhaps the commentator meant that all humans have the potential to be “good,” or the commentator might be using short-hand for a belief that all individuals possess “value,” but that is a very different thing that saying that everyone is fundamentally good. The latter statement is passive, shirks responsibility and is simply inaccurate. Variance is the norm, even if broad strokes (e.g., averages, medians, modal frequencies) allow for certain generalities. Speaking of which, there is a realted generality known in psychology at the fundamental attribution error. This a tendency for people to allow variance for themselves, while dismissing it for others. Why did you do poorly on the test? Because you didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Why did that other person do poorly on the test? Because they are stupid, lazy, a member of a racial category, etc. In this blog, if I make overarching generalizations I am either being lazy, or I am trying to make a broad point as efficiently as possible. Sometimes it makes sense to refer to averages, but it is important to always remember that there is almost always variance around and average, and that variance is normal.

A thought experiment

I have been going on for a bit about how our psyches are constructed things. But I’ve been doing so in kind of general terms. So, let’s take a breather and see if we can’t assemble a simple belief engine from some of the pieces that have shown up on the blog so far. Or if engineering isn’t your thing, you can think of this as a sort of recipe.

Ingredient List

1 c. Visual perception of faces

1 c. The other race effect

1 Tbs. Generalization

Stir with a dash of cultural experience

Faces. Faces are a construct of our visual system, and a lot could be said out them. For example, here is an image from a well-known experiment seeking to determine if infants are born with an innate ability to recognize face-like images

The basic idea is to take a face and show it to infants of different ages. Of course, you then need other images so that you can make comparisons. Like, maybe make sure that the infant isn’t simply responding to the nose, mouth, etc., no matter how they are arranged (Linear). Or maybe check out if it’s a triangular arrangement of stimuli that the infant “likes” and compare that a more normal face, and the same image with the triangular arrangement flipped. This is some of what psychologists do!

Whether infants are innately predisposed to respond to face-like images, over time, most of us become better at distinguishing between faces. When our eyes encounter a face-like stimulus they tend to bounce around in a manner that picks out particular features.

Saccades registering the features that will be turned into a face
Orginal work done by Alfred Yarbus (1967) and image found here.

Like any skill, this is something at which we become better and more efficient with repeated practice. We don’t just pick out faces as generic visual objects, but individual faces for our friends, parents, siblings and so on. And yes, we know that all of this construction is happening in a brain, and since that is the case, damage to the brain can interfere with our ability to construct faces. Prosopagnosia is a syndrome that refers to an inability to recognize faces brought on by strokes / damage. Individuals experiencing prosopagnosia might be able to perfectly describe the features of a face: the nose, the color of they eyes, the shape of a chin – but they cannot “see” the face.

The Other Race Effect. As we encounter faces, we become more and more adept at pulling out features that allow us to efficiently “recognize” the individual attached to any particular arrangement of these features. The general thinking is that this process results in the creation of a prototypical face. You can think of this as being the weighted average of all of the face-features that an individual has encountered in their day-to-day living. That prototype is then going to become your psyche’s starting point for recognizing new faces. Just like a few posts back, when we talked about how our visual system has beliefs about depth, and size, and relative brightness, our visual system constructs beliefs about faces. One of these beliefs goes by the name the other race effect.

Basically, the other race effect refers to the fact that your psyche is better at recognizing prototypical faces. If you’ve ever tried to use money in another country, you’ll have an appropriate analogy. Even after living in Germany for four year, I would sometimes get hung up on counting out change. I had trouble remembering which coins went with which amounts, and strangely this made it more difficult to simply add up and subtract amounts. The other race effect is something like that. It refers to the fact that individuals who regularly experience faces within a particular ethnic / racial category find it harder to distinguish between faces outside of that category.

A study from 2007 published in Psychological Science provides a nice conceptual demonstration of the other race effect.

In this particular study, the researchers asked about the development of the effect. In other words, they asked whether very young children showed the effect, and if not, when did it become pronounced. Their subject pool consisted of Caucasian infants from three age groups: 3-month, 6-month, and 9-month. In the experiment, these infants were presented with faces from four “ethnic categories”: Caucasian, African, Middle-Eastern, and Chinese. Please note that these are the designations from the article. All of the faces were taken from students who were 23 – 27 years old.

The way that these experiments typically work, is that an infant will be shown a stimulus until they become bored. “Bored” is measured by the amount of time that the infant spends looking at a stimulus vs. looking elsewhere (remember, in science we have to measure something!). This “boredom” is referred to as habituation. Once an infant is habituated to a stimulus, an experimenter can show that infant another stimulus and ask: “Does the infant remain bored?” If so, then that means that the infant doesn’t recognize a difference between the two stimuli. On the other hand, if the infant’s attention perks up, then we can conclude that the infant DOES recognize a difference between the stimuli.

That is the logic that was used to examine the development of the other race effect in the Daley et al. study. Infants were be shown a particular face until they habituated to it. Then there were shown the same face along with another novel face. That novel face either came from the same or another ethnic category. The question was whether the infants would recognize the difference of novel faces within an ethnic category. For example, if the infants were habituated to a Chinese face, would they perk up when presented with a new Chinese face?

Re-visualization of data from Kelly et al (2007). Bars above the dotted line indicate that the infants are recognizing faces as unique.

Here is their data. I’ve changed it from what was provided in the actual paper, because the data there consisted of numbers in a table. I took those numbers and created a graph that makes the same points. Any bars above the dotted line indicate that the infants “recognized” the novel faces as novel. 3-mo old infants essentially treated all faces as unique. 6-mo olds, though, treated Caucasian and Chinese faces as unique, while tending to clump African and Middle-Eastern faces into generic categories. Finally, at 9 months, the infants showed the full on “Other Race Effect.” They treated faces from their own ethnic group, Caucasian, as unique, but tended to treat the faces from the other three ethnic categories as generic.

Generalization. Ok, so we know that faces are visually constructed things. We also know that we tend to learn to distinguish between commonly encountered faces, and that is going to tend to produce better recognition of faces within our ethnic group as opposed to outside of ethnic group. All of this is simple engineering. Let’s start to push it in a direction that we’d connect with more traditional notions of belief. We’ll do this by reminding ourselves of a psychological phenomenon known as generalization.

Like so many things in psychology, generalization is conceptually simple, but incredibly complex in its details. The basic phenomenon is this. If you learn something about a situation, you will tend to transfer that learning to “similar” situations. This transfer to “similar” situations, contexts and stimuli is termed generalization, and it is seen in so many animals that it is considered a basic feature of learning. Here is an example of generalization in pigeons. Pigeons that have learned that a vertical line either indicates food or the absence of food, will tend to generalize that learning to other line orientations.

Figure from Honig et al (1963). Responses here are pecks at the stimuli shown on the x-axis. Positive or negative training occurred to the vertical line.

However, notice that I put “similar” in quotes. Usually we think of “similar” as sharing features. If you are humiliated when you recite a poem in 4^th grade, then maybe you will feel emotions of humiliation whenever you enter any classroom. Classrooms, after all, are “similar.” However, when we use the term “similar” what we really mean is that your brain is not recognizing a situation as completely unique. Someone else’s brain might very well. Also, this is not to say that at some point in the future you won’t recognize difference. You might very well learn that situation A is quite different from situation B.

So “similar” is a subjective thing. When we transfer learning, feelings, and assumptions to new situations, this says more about what we as individuals recognize as “similar” at that particular moment. As an example, when we learn a new language, one of the humps we have to overcome is hearing sounds as unique that we start off hearing as generic. In any event, generalization is the phenomenon of transferring learning to “similar” situations and stimuli. But remember, “similar” means, to some degree, “not recognizing difference.”

A Dash of Cultural Experience. So here is where we mix all of our ingredients together to construct a larger belief. First, we’ve pointed out that our visual system uses features in the environment to construct faces. Whether some of this construction is innate, or not, is beside the point. Faces are constructed things. Second, we’ve pointed out that how this happens creates categories of faces that we recognize as unique, and categories of faces that we treat as generic. Thirdly, we’ve reminded ourselves that if stimuli are generic, then this means that they are “similar,” and learning will tend to generalize across similar stimuli. What will happen, then, if culture pulls out a single face from an ethnic group and portrays it in a particular way? For example, let’s suppose that we are Caucasian child from the Kelly et al study. We see a show that portrays a Caucasian as a criminal. Well, since we tend to treat Caucasian faces as unique, then we won’t generalize criminality to a broad range of Caucasian faces. On the other hand, if we see a show that portrays an African, Middle-Eastern, or Chinese individual as a criminal, we will be more likely to generalize “criminality” to a broad range of African, Middle-Eastern, or Chinese individuals. That’s the thought experiment for this blog post.

A Study of Gratitude

Since it is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, how about a study about gratitude? This particular study comes from the lab of David DeSteno. Prof. DeSteno is at Northeastern University, and he is the PI for a group that studies emotional effects on prosocial behaviors. You could do worse than to read his book, Emotional Success: the power of gratitude, compassion and pride. I would quibble with some of the evolutionary accounts that he provides in the book, but the general gist – that emotions are informational, adaptive “lenses” – is an important perspective. I’ll definitely try to unpack this perspective a bit at some point in this blog.

Anyway, for this particular study, Desteno asks a question concerning impulsivity. The question is whether all emotions get in the way of non-impulsive, rational, deliberative choice. Or, are there particular emotional states that actually reduce impulsivity? Certainly the zeitgeist is that emotions are a hindrance to deliberation. Zen, man. That’s the ticket.

A modern psychologist, though, would tend to say that “Zen, man” is as much an emotion as “anger.” The issue isn’t clearing away emotion, so much as it is understanding the congruence between the decisions you are being asked / attempting to make and the emotional state from which you are attempting to make them. If you are being asked to saw a board in two, a hammer isn’t of much use. The same could be said of emotions. So, is there an emotional state that helps rational, deliberative choice?

That’s a loaded question, of course. So let’s anchor it with a more specific question. Are there particular emotions that make us less impulsive? This is the question that DeSteno et al sought to address in their study “Gratitude: a tool for addressing economic impatience” (DeSteno, Li, Dickens and Lerner, 2014).

Now, the first thing to appreciate about any scientific study, is that when a researcher asks about whether x affects y, x and y are going to be defined in operationable terms. This means, they are going to be defined in measurable terms. Not only that, but they are going to be defined in measurable terms that are described in such a way that other scientists can go out an perform the same measurements. Impulsivity is a word. You might be able to provide a meaning for it: “actuated or swayed by emotional or involuntary impulses” However, this definition is meaningless for a scientist. How do you determine actuated or swayed? What counts as an involuntary impulse? What counts as an impulse?

Here is how DeSteno et al operationalized impulsive behavior: How much money do I need to give you in T amount of time so that you will choose to wait rather than take a different choice of money now? For example in the image below a subject has been presented with a choice between $4.50 now versus $10.00 in 30 days. Which would you choose?

Which of these two outcomes would you choose?

Impulsivity, then, is being measured in terms of a choice between a dollar amount now vs. a dollar amount in the future. Sometimes in the literature this is referred to as a temporal-discounting or delay-discounting curve, and the information it provides is essentially “how easily you can wait.” The more money I have to give you to wait, the higher your impulsivity score.

Ok, so in the the DeSteno et al study subjects will be primed with a particular emotion: happiness, neutrality, or gratitude. This is done by having the subjects in each of these groups write about an autobiographical moment in which they felt this emotion. Next, the subjects will be given a series of questions that ask them to rank (1 – 5) their current emotional state. Finally, the subjects will be given a series of choices between a dollar amount now versus a dollar amount in the future. By the way, subjects had a 1-in-3 chance of actually receiving one of the dollar choices that they made. If you were one of these lucky subjects, the experimenters randomly selected one of your choices (e.g., $30 in 6 months), and made it a reality.

Trigger Emotions: Happy, Neutral, Grateful.
Compare subjects in each group in terms of their impulsivity scale.

That’s the study. Here is what was found.

Figure is taken from Desteno et al (2014)

What this figure shows is the average impulsivity score for each group. The numbers on the y-axis can essentially be interpreted as a measure of patience. Specifically, they indicate the ratio between an amount of money now, and an equivalent psychological amount a year from now. In other words, a discount factor of .5 would mean that $10 now equals an offer of $20 a year from now. A discount factor of .1 would mean that $10 now equals $100 a year from now. In other words, you would need to pay the “.1 subject” five times as much money to wait a year, than you would need to pay a “.5 subject.”

Back to the figure, when you look at how the different emotional groups scored, it is clear that the gratitude group displayed more patience. This is true even when compared to another group that was feeling a positive emotion – the happy group. Feeling happy did not make a subject any more patient that feeling “neutral.” The only emotion of the three manipulated that improved impulsivity was gratitude.

Gratitude. Patience. The season stretches out towards winter and the cold settles in. Thanksgiving readies our waiting, keeping a future spring valued and available.

Happy Thanksgiving 2019!

[Edit: Talk about coincidence. Who should have a column in the NY Times, but David DeSteno! Give it a read to learn some more about the science of gratitude.]

Devil’s Shoals

I’m no fan of bad poetry, but I do understand the lyrical impulse — that attempt to connect pure sensation with something available to the declarative self. So, here’s something I wrote a while back, while living in the Northeast but thinking of my two grown-up daughters and reflecting on memories of growing up, myself, in southeastern Tennessee. Btw, as I continue to learn about HTML and the ins and outs of WordPress, I apologize for wonky layouts.

Devil’s Shoals

(for Delphi and Lydia)

Before the Hiwassee widens like a settled ribbon

of sunlight across the hills, husk yellow and green,

where the old train bridge passes overhead —

before the widening slow of the river

at the gravel lot filled with the church buses

that carry the tubes for the weekend faith groups,

lies the last rapids, the Devil’s shoals.

And when I was a kid canoes would eddy out there,

and pull up to the beaten path that stepped up

boulders and blackberry brambles.

Where the path leveled we’d follow

the tracks laid straight, blasted out of shale,

and then down the embankment to slip into the water

that sucked as smooth and as cold as any promise ever could.

Wading out into the current, we held hands like sentries,

through the rushed lashings, our breath catching

when the water hit the belly, until

we dropped, one-by-one, buoyed

by our life jackets past the shore’s retreat

as we floated down into the mouth of the shoals

desperate of breath and arms flailing.

Water slapped the face and pulled – pulled us below

to where darker flows reversed and crossed

under the heavy waves and sunlight.

Our sneakered feet kicked out and fought,

our lungs ached in their insistence, until hands

joined the pull of preservers to heave us heavenward

where eye-blinking vision washed up like fish.

Once upon a time a boy lost his strength in the shoals,

and crying out to his father for help,

was carried past the hitched boats.

Another time a boy who had lost his father

and seen his mother remarry a Methodist minister

took to the tracks, and walked the mile to the parking lot,

each stubborn tie after each stubborn tie hammered firm.

Either way, the devil sought us all —

like a misguided gift to the homesick-buried

in a place where breath and Will battled for supremacy.

And ever when the day closed, tired and content,

the youth directors gathered up their charges

and bussed them back to their beds

still hearing the rush of the shoals in the dusk of mid-summer.

Fractals, turtles, and lying eyes

Today’s words are fractals, turtles and lying eyes. Let’s see what we can do with these.

Fractal

Here’s the first two sentences of the Wikipedia entry for “fractals”:

In mathematics, a fractal is a subset of a Euclidean space for which the Hausdorff dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension. Fractals appear the same at different levels, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set.

Got that? Fractals, like so much in math, are utterly cool…and mostly beyond my ability to understand in anything other than the most superficial level. For the purposes of this post, though, we’re going to think of fractals as a pattern that recurs at multiple levels: from the large to the tiny. Why and how isn’t something to worry about right now — just the idea of recursive repetition from the tiny to the large. And just to set your mind at ease: no, “recursive” and “repetition” are not identical concepts. Recursive means to define a thing in terms of itself, while repetition is the carrying of a pattern across time and/or space. Tricky things, words.

“Mod” by kevin dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Turtles

So, that’s fractals. What about turtles? Turtles amble in to the post with the phrase “turtles all the way down.” This is where we connect fractals to belief. “Turtles all the way down” is what results when a mischievous 4-y.o. is put into a blender with a pompous priest: the fractal question of “but why” linked to doctrine. The expression apparently originates from beliefs about the earth. What supports the earth? Well, the earth has nine corners that hold up the heavens, and each corner rests on the back of an elephant. And what supports the elephants? Why, the elephants stand on the back of a turtle. And what supports the turtle? Why, another turtle. And what does that turtle stand on? Well, another turtle… And so it goes – turtles all the way down the teleological rabbit hole. A free-floating, authoritative assertion of scales, carapace and reptilian eyes. Maybe the reptilian overlords conspiracy theory is correct after all. Or dinosaurs did drown in the flood of Genesis. It’s like the internal logic of a dream, a language of pure emotion overlaid and painted with the imagery of our internal eye.

However, I am going to suggest that there is a deeper significance here – that our beliefs are…well, not “nothing more” than fractals, but rather are constructed at a profoundly deep level. So much so, that as with turtles all the way down, our psychological living (which is the only living any of us know), is constructed on beliefs that are constructed on beliefs that are constructed on beliefs, …all the way down. It’s not that there is no “there, there” when it comes to belief, but rather that all we are is belief, and that this goes all the way down, all the way up, all the way back, and all the way forward. It’s more than just the narrative constructions of doctrine – those delivered stories that make us smile in disbelief. Those we mostly grow out of, or as the famous quote from 1^stCorinthian puts it:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

The point I’d like to make here is that putting away “childish things” is not as easy as all that, and the reason is that there is never any “putting away.” That is not how the mind works, and more to the point, that is not what a mind is. Each of us are turtles all the way down. Put aside one turtle, and there are infinite more chomping away, carapace to plastron, one supporting the other. The “I” never separates itself from its own construction, and here’s where the final phrase comes in: “lyin’ eyes.”

Taking a rest from supporting all of your fake news

“Lyin’ Eyes”

A man is caught in bed with another woman; a group of thieves are caught rustling cattle; a man sees his sweetheart with another man; an actress jokes about her age – and the common refrain is some version of “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.” As blatantly, absurdly, gutsy, and desperately as this phrase is, there is no getting away from its nugget of truth. When CAN you trust your eyes? Or to put it differently, does perception feed up facts that are “out there” or does it construct beliefs of what is “out there.” Because let’s face it, if you are going to put aside childish things and embrace the truer, authoritative, responsible, practical beliefs of adulthood, there is the assumption that one can be distinguished from the other – that eyes don’t lie, and that perception and its echoes (i.e., memories) are the bedrock of our truth.

But of course eyes do lie. In fact, they do nothing but lie day in and day out. The psychological science on this couldn’t be any clearer. The processes of perception don’t relay reality to us, but rather construct a reality for us. These perceptual beliefs might have utility, but they are still beliefs, which isn’t to say that these “lies” constructed by our perceptions are “wrong.” It’s simply a matter of mechanism. Let’s see if we can’t untangle this.

The dress

A few years ago in 2015 a meme swept through the internet that involved a photo of a dress. Here is the photo:

And here’s the question that accompanies the photo: what color is the dress? If you are like me, and approximately 60% of viewers, you answered something along the lines of “gold and ivory.” If you are like the other approximately 30% of viewers, though, you answered “blue and black.” Which is correct? Well, the actual dress is indeed blue and black. Here’s a photo of it:

No question there, right? Blue and black, which means that all of you that see it as “gold and ivory” in the first photo are wrong. Wrong or lying. The dress is blue and black, after all. If you were being interrogated by the police, maybe you’d be indicted for perjury. Locked away for spreading falsehoods. A public menace.

But of course, the dress in the first image IS “gold and ivory.” That is what I see, and I can’t unsee it. You can tell me that you see blue and black all you want, but it makes no difference. This I/eye that is me sees what it sees.

Thankfully, science being science can offer up a belief-preserver of sorts. Here is a wonderful deconstruction of what is going on with “the dress.” And here is a write up of that deconstruction written for a more general audience. Basically, the way that we perceive color depends on many contextual variables that our brains filter and interpret in various ways. For example, did you know that the light of mid-day contains more blue in it than the light of, say, morning? Our brains filter that information out in order to keep colors constant. Or take shadow. If an object is back-lit and in shadow, our brains take that information into account in order to provide us with a perception of color. Mid-day or morning, back-lit or front-lit, our brain maintains for us the red of the apple. So, let’s get back to the dress. Is it in shadow or not? Is it mid-day or not? These are some of the questions that our brain is asking, whether we realize it or not, and the assumed answers change the psychological filters that are slotted into place in order to provide us with the belief that the dress is either blue/black or gold/ivory. Our brains even factor in whether most of our visual experience occurs in the morning (e.g., if you are an early riser) or late in the evening (i.e., a night owl). The former are biased to see the dress as gold/ivory, while the latter are biased to see the dress as blue/black.

It just so happens that the photo of the dress cleverly provides multiple, ambiguous perspectives embedded within its static field. In a sense, it is no different from a Necker cube. There is no cube, just as really there is no dress, just wavelengths of light differentially absorbed and reflected. But we see a cube, and not only that, but we see two potential cubes – the image rebounding from one to the other, depending on our point of reference.

I can’t emphasize enough, either, that there is no choice here. There’s no “putting aside the childish gold/ivory” of the dress for the truer, more adult blue/black of the dress, any more than one can put aside the filled in blindspot that sits a little off to the left and right of our eye’s field of vision. Yes, we see a complete field of vision and do not see the empty holes where our optic bundles exit the back of our retinas. Those empty holes are there, but our brains fill them in for us, providing us with a belief in a complete image. Or take the vision so many of us have experienced of a huge moon sitting just at the horizon. That is what we see, even if we know that the size of the moon does not change as it traverses the sky. Magnification of the atmosphere? No, not at all. Once again our brains are using assumptions to construct a visual reality – a set of beliefs about how distance and size are related to one another. On the back of our retinas the projected image of the moon is the same, whether on the horizon or overhead, and yet what we see in our mind’s I/eye differs. This so-called moon illusion, is related conceptually to many illusions, one of which I’ve tried to create below. Both cylinders are the same size, but our brains make one appear slightly bigger.

An even simpler version can be found here, and is called the Ponzo illusion. Two objects, both the same size, and yet our mind offers them up as different. This is a difference predicated on assumptions, on beliefs offered up at the very start of our interaction with reality. There is no escaping these beliefs, nor are these beliefs of perception the bottom. They, themselves, are constructed by processes that are constructed by processes that are constructed by processes…. and on down it goes.

It reminds me of a quote from Graham Swift’s Waterland. Waterland is a meditation on history and memory – their tributaries, swamps, and recursive repetitions. Here is the protagonist, a high school history teacher, relating the ambiguities of the French Revolution and dealing with a student who wants facts.

“So where does it lie, this revolution? Is it merely a term of convenience? Does it really lie in some impenetrable mesh of circumstances too complex for definition? It’s a curious thing, Price, but the more you try to dissect events, the more you lose hold of them – the more they seem to have occurred largely in people’s imagination …’

‘Should we be writing this down, sir? The French Revolution never really happened. It only happened in the imagination.’

Laughter.

‘Don’t be literal, Price.’

…

‘I’m speculating, it’s true, Price. But we’re all free to interpret.’

‘You mean, so we can find whatever meaning we like in history?”

I’m taking that from my digital version of the book, but it’s right at the end of Chapter 14. The quote nicely summarizes the point of this particular blog post, and really the series of posts that I’ve made so far. A psyche is a constructed thing — processes strung together across history, and this “I” that each of us inhabits is a unique, particular and utterly confounded thing. A thing to hold lightly. A thing to hold humbly. Because just like there is no French Revolution, not really, there is no “I” beyond the confluence of processes that temporarily uphold it. And yet, just as the horrors of revolution emerged from processes of belief, so too do our own beliefs emerge from their own hidden furnaces.

*****

I don’t want to end so heavily, though, so here’s a personal story to close out this post. It’s a story about belief and perception.

When I was a kid, growing up in the South, I went to a school that required all seventh graders to take “bible.” Our teacher was nicknamed “Yo” by all the students at the school. Yo Strang. Yo was one of the kindest souls I’ve ever met. A prisoner of war during WW II, he wore a heavy coat even on the hottest of days. The rumor was that it had something to do with the suffering that he had seen and experienced as a P.O.W. Yo was totally devoted to the kids in his classroom. Whether they were drawing pictures of penises in their notes or grade-anxiously writing down every word, Yo always projected a simple goodness.

Anyways, the seat that I sat in during Yo’s bible class was right next to a bulletin board. On the bulletin board was a cut-out clipping from a newspaper with a caption that read something like: “Photographer takes photo of wooded scene only to discover the miraculous face of Jesus looking back.” The paper was yellowed, and the photo was in black and white. As a kid in a bible class, I sat next to this photo for most of our journey through the Old Testament, and all I saw was a photo of a some trees and snow. Jacob fighting the angel? Trees and snow. Moses up on Mount Sinai? Trees and snow. David having a husband killed so that he could sleep with his wife? Trees and snow. I wasn’t particularly devout in my thinking about Christianity, but I was a bit concerned that here I was with a 99.4 average in the class, but I couldn’t make out the face of Jesus in a newspaper photo. Finally, I asked one of my friends about the photo. They pointed to one blotch after another, “Here’s the beard. Here’s the eyes,…”

and the face popped out.

A bit anti-climatic, actually, even then. Anyone who has looked at clouds in the sky knows that we “see” objects that aren’t there. A dragon. A train. And when it comes to faces, well, we see faces everywhere. Mars. Queen Elizabeth’s hair. The side of a mountain (until recently). In fact, “seeing” or “hearing” specific objects or words in an ambiguous sensory environment is so common that psychologists have a word for it: pareidolia. The basic idea isn’t so complicated: when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or in other words, when you are so used to interpreting particular combinations of stimuli in a particular way, that’s the way you’ll tend to interpret new combinations.

By the way, if you are curious about where the word pareidolia comes from, it’s a combination of greek bits. Para (“before”) combined with eídōlon, which means “image” or “representation.” So the word means a sort of pre-representation of what is actually there. An image of expectation, rather than an image of reality. The large moon on the horizon, or the gold/ivory dress. Like I say, it’s turtles all the way down.

Chattanooga Sabbatical: start of fall

Perhaps you believe in God

Perhaps you believe in God. You believe that global warming is happening and open to human agency. You believe that hard work pays off, that you are more valuable than at least some other people. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you believe that everyone else has their act together, and you do not. You believe that your spouse is cheating on you, and you believe that your boss is out to get you fired. You believe that music is soul, or that there is such a thing as a justified murder, or that vaccines are dangerous or unholy or life-saving. We could go on…and on, and on. We have beliefs about proper clothing, about racial groups, about inanimate objects. We have perceptions of belief that we hold as “true”; we have perceptions of belief that we hold as functionally “true” – that in the absence of the belief particular outcomes would not happen. For instance, if I believe that the child is capable, that belief makes future outcomes by the child more likely. Conversely, if I believe that the child is incapable, then my belief tilts the child’s behavior in a different direction. In both cases our belief would be “justified” and “true.” After all, I knew all along that child was no good, and look, she turned out that way!

I always knew that’s where she was headed

This idea that our beliefs actively impact the world — that they reverberate outward and affect others — is not a new thing to psychologists. William James, who arguably was the father of U.S. psychology, wrote an essay entitled “The Will to Believe,” in which he allowed for unanchored belief. It’s a complex essay. One that requires a careful reading in order to unpack the many points that James is attempting to articulate. For instance here he is stating as obvious that everyone essentially believes in what is useful for them to believe (within the unique, specific needs or their life):

As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use. Clifford’s cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings. Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism in his scheme of life. Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism, and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because a priestly system is for him an organic need and delight. Why do so few ‘scientists’ even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called? Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me, that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity of Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits.

Keep in mind that James is expressing his thoughts from a mind that did not know cars or television, and which had developed through a period of time in which the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of Americans, dead from the Civil War, haunted the social fabric that had been left behind. Within in that context James’ essay takes on a new urgency. Given the scars of those horrors, given the unrelenting “march of technology and industry” (and yes the sciences of which he was a part) what can be held on to? James’ answer is a generous and humble one. One that defends an individual’s unique feelings, as well as the careful accumulation of authoritative evidence. He writes:

A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality ‘ into which a thinking being can fall.

Two Experiments

Whether one accepts James’ defense of “faith” is beside the point (and I wouldn’t term it a defense so much as an allowance). Psychologists have enough science behind them to show that beliefs are not neutral things. They actively impact and shape the world of not only our own perceptions but those of others, as well — ants and termites busily at work in a psyche’s foundations

Let me describe two classic examples.

Rosenthal and Fode, 1963

The first used rats, but really it used undergraduate students. The students were in a psychology laboratory class, and as part of the class they were assigned the task of training rats to run a T-maze. In a T-maze, an animal scurries down a runway, and then is presented with a single choice: go to one arm (painted white) or go to the other (painted gray). One of these will contain food. Give the rat enough experience, and they’ll figure the choice out. In order to “know” that their rats were figuring out which choice led to food, the students tracked the number of “correct” responses the rats made and also the amount of time it took the rats to make their choices.

The reason why this experiment is famous, though, is because the researchers, Rosenthal and Fode, introduced a very simple manipulation. The students were told at the start of the training that one set of rats were “maze bright.” These rats were “known” to solve mazes quickly. The students were also told that another set of rats were “maze dull,” i.e., had been bred such that they were slow learners in mazes. Sure enough, the average performance of the two groups showed clear differences. The only problem with these results is that there was no such thing as “maze bright” and “maze dull” rats. All of the rats had been selected at random, divided into two groups, which were labeled by Rosenthal and Fode (for the unwitting students) as “maze bright” and “maze dull.”

Loftus and Palmer, 1974

Now, its doubtful that the rats in the Rosenthal and Fode experiment came to see themselves as either “smart” or “dull.” All we can say is that instilling a belief in the trainer impacted the behavior of their subjects (rats). That said, psychologists do know that beliefs are directly shaped by experience, and we can point to many, many examples. For example, here is one that falls under the category of “false memories.”

False memories are subjective memories for events, objects, words, etc., that can objectively be shown to never have occurred. There are reasons to use the word “memory” rather than the word “belief,” but for our purposes I am going to conflate the two. A memory is a particular sort of belief about the past. To be more specific, let’s restrict ourselves to what are termed “declarative memories.” These are memories for events that we can verbally describe. Crudely, they are the normative memories that most people think of when they use the word “memories.” However, like I say, we can reasonably consider declarative memories as a belief about an event that took place in the past. It’s the classic “I know what I heard, because I’m the one that heard it.”

Taken from Loftus and Palmer (1974). Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction:
An Example of the Interaction Between Languageand Memory. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585-589. Notice how the words influence reported perception.

For this experiment, the researchers Loftus and Palmer had college-age subjects watch videos of traffic accidents. They were then asked to rate the speed of one of the cars when it __________ into the other car. The clever bit, or if you are a lawyer, the leading question bit, involved the word that was slotted into the blank. For some subjects the word was “hit.” For others it was “smashed.” For others it was “bumped.” And so on. All in all, Loftus and Palmer used five different words. What they found was that the word influenced the speed ratings. “I know what I saw, because I saw it!” Except in this case, it was more “I know what I saw, because you asked me to see it.”

Now, reporting different speeds based on particular questions isn’t necessarily evidence of a false memory. We’ve all had the experience of “going along” with another person’s opinion, even when our own opinion is different. “Doesn’t that sweater look good on him?” “Sure!” So, students asked to rate the speed of a car after a “crash” might rate the speed higher than after a “bump” merely to please the person asking the question – the authority figure / experimenter. In order to deal with this problem, Loftus and Palmer conducted another experiment.

Once again students watched a car accident. 1/3 of the student were asked how fast the cars were going when they “hit” each other. 1/3 were asked how fast the cars were going when they “crashed into” each other. 1/3 were not asked any questions at all. Finally, a week later, the students were brought back to the lab and asked 10 questions about the video they had watched the previous week. One question was “Did you see any broken glass? Yes or No” More subjects reported seeing broken glass when the cars had “crashed into” one another (16/50), rather than “hit” one another (7/43) or when no question had been asked (6/44). Just to complete the scene, in the objective reality of the actual video, there was no broken glass evident.

James was right, then. Beliefs are not neutral things that have been constructed by our history. Yes, they have been constructed. But, they also construct. They change the landscape of our experience, and in so doing, alter the potentials of that experience for both “good” or “bad.”

Look! There is a psyche peering out of these foundations.

This post has been an especially long one, and believe it or not, we are just getting started on unpacking some of the currents – the river that William James called the “stream of consciousness.” There is just one more construct that I want to quickly introduce, though, because it actually pops up from time to time in the current cultural zeitgeist. It’s a construct that is deeply connected with the topic of beliefs: their origins and their shapings. The construct is gaslighting.

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a colloquial term that refers to a form of psychological manipulation in which a targeted victim is led to doubt their own perceptions and beliefs. Up becomes down. Down becomes up. Memory can’t be trusted. Previously trusted sources of information and validation are doubted or removed. The stress of uncertainty is alleviated by a “supplier” who just so happens to be the manipulator. In the end the victim is so hollowed of agency and psychological certitude that they spiral into despair, depression, and madness. That is the dramatic read, and it’s not a bad place to start because the term “gaslighting” originates from a stage play and then movie, “Gas Light.”

Gaslighting is not a joke for individuals who have experienced its effects. At the same time, it is important to be aware that from a certain perspective “gaslighting” is what the world does to all of us in the construction of our psyche. Illusions, false beliefs, emotional assumptions, phylogenetic beliefs (i.e., cognitive “reflexes”) sprout within all of us, vines planted and spreading like southern kudzu. These processes are normal, true, but we ignore the malleability of our beliefs at our own peril. Victims of gaslighting could be any of us, just as the victims of a scam could be any of us.

“PICT0013”by The_Doodler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

(modified from the original)

So, to wrap up this post, I’d simply like to point out three common techniques of gaslighting. I’m doing so in the same manner as Screwtape from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. Yes, do think about the current political situation in the U.S. with its proclamations of “fake news.” But also realize that we all engage in “manipulations” of belief so some small extent. Sometimes without realizing it. Sometimes with cause. Sometimes for selfish reasons. Sometimes for what we would like to think of as positive reasons. With that said, if you wanted to start upping your game into the political big leagues three guidelines from a “gaslighters handbook” might look something like this (and remember, there are many more than just three):

Establish confusion as to what qualifies as evidence! Trusted sources of information must be discredited or at the very least established as no different from any other source of information. Yes, it’s a long-standing newspaper, but it’s run by a bunch of liberals. Yes, they are your priest, but haven’t you read that priests are pedophiles? By the way, your parents called to check in on you. Are they ever going to let you be your own adult? And, I don’t know, they just seem to have it in for me. Easy peasy. While you’re at it. Reify, reify, reify. A reaction is never a natural result of the environment you’ve created. It’s because they distrustful or prone to depression. Bonus points for turning that characterization into a fixed “personality trait” that your target begins to accept about themselves!
Create distress, but do be sure to become the immediate solution to that distress. Chaos is your special sauce! Unpredictably trigger arguments! Publicly humiliate, if you have to. Just be sure to quickly follow this up with a way of releasing the stress that you’ve caused. Maybe it involves an abject “apology.” Maybe it involves producing a “plan” for both of you to fix the relationship. Maybe it involves wild “make-up sex.” Be creative! But be sure that you are central to the solution to the mess you’ve created, and bonus points if your “solution” subtly interacts with point number 1. “I hate that I get so angry, but maybe it has to do with the fact that I feel unwelcomed by your family. I think maybe it’s because I’m always so honest.”
Make yourself the center of attention! You can’t have your target’s attention wandering out of your control. Attention is a limited resource, so fill that sucker up with your shenanigans. Remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity, when it comes to your target’s attentional audience. Text. Create a scene. Demand gifts. Act helpless. Show up on their doorstep. Call their parents. Your goal is that of any advertiser: crowd out all other brands! Like the hypnotist, you need their identity to be wearied out and replaced by your own. Good luck!!

It’s a bit ironic

It’s a bit ironic that walking along the sidewalks this morning, I looked up to see a sign advertising the Chattanooga Design Studio. A wide crosswalk. A few homeless. Young couples Sunday sleepy, and then I was walking through the old Read House building where a Gospel Breakfast was taking place. Design. Beliefs. The Bible Belt. That’s as good a place to start this post as any, and what’s a belt for but to hold up a pair of trousers? And what are a pair of trousers but beliefs with which we clothe portions of our being?

First though, a mea culpa. I didn’t *plan* on blog posts that would end up going on and on about design, history, contingencies, or words-as-objects, and yet here I am. There’s another bit of irony for us, though. Planning…or lack thereof, and design. Sometimes the plan only emerges from the doing, and so there is hope that some sense will emerge – sense or hot mess.

“Pollock”by Piutus is licensed under CC BY 2.0

So, in my last post I suggested that our psyche is a designed thing. Indirectly, to be sure, but the idea is in there. The logic goes like this: all objects have a history, history is the accumulated processes that led to the object existing – some might go so far as to add “…and provided its purpose,” but let’s not go there just yet. Words are objects as much as can openers or bible belts – objects shaped by the happenstance of their histories. The same, though goes for our psyche. It’s an object, too. One that we happen to inhabit, and one that sticks to the skin like a wet shirt on some days, but nonetheless, an object. And if we want to talk about the history of a psyche, well, what we are talking about is the science of psychology.

Psychology is a science. I think anyone reading this knows that, but I’d like to take a moment to make sure that we all know what a science is, exactly, because to put it bluntly, science is a process for designing beliefs. A cabinet maker designs and crafts cabinets. A tailor designs and creates clothing. Scientists design and create beliefs. Particular sort of beliefs, to be sure, but beliefs, nonetheless, that emerge from the contingencies of their craft.

Now, science isn’t the only process for designing beliefs. There are lots of others. Let me give you an example.

Gone Phishin’

About three months ago I was targeted by a phishing exploit. I received an email that seemed to be from my Department Chair, and the whole thing went like this:

“Hi. Sorry. I’m in a meeting. Could you do me a favor?” “Sure. I’m not available until 10:00, but can help out then.” “I’ll still be in the meeting.” “No problem. How can I help?”

At this point I received a message asking if I could go get a gift card for $500, write down its code, and email it back. To my credit, when I read the ask for a gift card, I became suspicious. However, NOT to my credit, this suspicion didn’t immediately kick in. It took a moment to wade through a variety of other beliefs. There was the irritation about the presumption of being asked to do such a strange favor (“The favor is for me to get a gift card?!”) There was the self-criticism for having agreed to do the “favor” in the first place (“How could you be such a sap?”). At the same time there was a bit of ego patting related to being “the person” that my chair was turning to for a favor. Yeah, I wanted to believe that I was the type of person that others could count on.

All of those thoughts and emotions were triggered and played themselves out over 10s of seconds, and only then, did another belief begin to arise. “Wait. Am I being played?” This belief then led me to check the real email address of the sender. My mail client only showed a name as the originating email. But my chair’s name had been spoofed, so that hers was the name displayed on the “From” line of the email. Digging out the actual email address, though, provided the evidence I needed to realize that the emails were coming from a stranger. Who exactly I was communicating with, I have no idea. Only that they were trying to take advantage of the way that I construct my beliefs about the world, and that for a moment, it had worked. I had been led to believe that I was communicating with a particular person.

Sadly, these experiences with scammers are becoming more and more frequent. Buttons pushed. Psychological dials turned. And out pops a belief.

Here’s another one, which isn’t all that different from the frequent phone calls some of us get from the “IRS” telling us that we have urgent back payments to make.

Your in trouble, but we can get you out of it. Just provide your password, and everything will be a-ok!!

Now of course, as long as we aren’t the one who fell for the scam, it can be tempting to mock those that did. “OMG, how could someone fall for that!? What idiots!!” For that matter, let’s throw in the belief that a race of reptiles is secretly running the world, that the Denver airport is the nexus of a New World Order, or that Jimi Hendrix made a pact with the devil that allowed him to play the guitar in the way that he did. [Head palm] How can anyone be so stupid?

It reminds me of one of the great smack downs in literature, a fantastic scene in Hamlet in which Hamlet tears into the puffed up, suck-ups Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me. You would seem to know my stops. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. And there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak? ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

“Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.” Take that scam artists, fake news, conspiracy peddlers, propagandists, and politicians. You won’t fool us.

And yet…

… we all do have beliefs, and our beliefs do come from somewhere. Most of us would claim that our beliefs, unlike so many others, are grounded in evidence. Except that what qualifies as evidence never gets much examining and our belief about ourselves being guided by evidence also doesn’t get much questioning. Hamlet believes that he cannot be played upon like a pipe, and yet there are many instances in which he is played. He believes that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are merely playing at being his friends. He believes that his Uncle murdered his father, he believes that others have tried to play upon his love for Ophelia in order to pump him for information, and he believes that Ophelia allowed herself to be so used. In other words, Hamlet swims in currents of beliefs that have been triggered by processes of some sort while mocking the processes that would have him embrace particular beliefs. In another part of the play he spits out, “Seems madam? Nay, it is; I know not “seems,” as if to say, “everyone else’s beliefs are wrong, but not mine. Mine are capital-T true.”

Imagine that each lit node is a belief that is currently “turned on” by the circumstances of experience

If we take a moment, it is relatively easy to become aware of at least some of the processes that design our beliefs. In other words, to become aware of the manner in which all of us are “played like a pipe.” The preacher stands before the congregation and states that god is love and we accept this statement because the preacher is an authority figure. He stands alone before a group, with the other group members apparently attentive. He often is positioned above everyone else and wears robes that indicate a particular status and area of expertise. He is a particular age, has a particular color of skin, way of arranging his hair, and uses terms and phrases that make sense because they are said with inflections that we hear as conviction or urgency. Most of us, if we take a moment to reflect on our own thinking, would recognize that all of these “triggers” construct a potential belief that “here is a person that I can trust and whose own beliefs I will use to guide my own.”

This says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of the beliefs, by the way. That’s not something I care to get into. The important point for right now is to simply recognize that beliefs don’t just spontaneously occur. They are built from particular processes that act on all of us. It is these processes that scam artists conduct like an orchestra. It is these processes that build up, brick-by-brick, the conspiracy theories that haunt the internet. But really, these histories of belief are ubiquitous. They lead the child to blame themself for their parent’s divorce. They haunt the teen who looks in the mirror with self-disgust. They spur the athlete to run just one more lap. The bonds of trust and friendship that make our day-to-day living more meaningful and the superiority complex of the psychopath – all are the clothing of belief.

I’ll get back to the particular sorts of beliefs that science constructs, but I think maybe I’ll sit with beliefs just a bit longer. For example, it is a common misconception that beliefs are “stated things” – a sort of creed or set of values to which we pledge allegiance. For a psychologist, that statement is true: creeds and values are beliefs, but not all beliefs are explicitly stated things. In the same way that a dinner jacket is only one category of clothing, creeds and values are only one category of belief. There are many other types that emerge from the factories of our psyche’s design. Perhaps we keep them hidden, and speak them only to ourselves, but perhaps not, because we don’t have the words to speak them. Yes, some beliefs reside within the realm of words. Others might more accurately be said to lie within the body: emotional beliefs, reflexive beliefs. We also have what we might as well term perceptual beliefs: beliefs that give us, for example, the meaning in a visual scene. And finally, when beliefs are combined with judgments of value, then we have moral beliefs that guide us to approach, avoid, defend and eliminate – sometimes others, but yes, sometimes ourselves.

“Kayaker at Great Falls, VA”by pthread1981 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
(Cropped)

So sure, all of us are being played, day in and day out. We have all, at least on occasion been led to believe whatever it is that we believe. We’d like to think that we’re the one doing the designing, but at best we participating in design processes that shape our psychology. Even if you are convinced that you base your living on evidence, think of all the “evidence” you never have the opportunity to experience. The saying, “He was born on third base, and believes he hit a triple” emerges, after all, from a narrow read of the evidence – the narrow slice that a single consciousness inhabits — and the goal is to become aware of history, explicitly choose from the objects it offers, and consciously project the meaning that they offer into the future. That’s the goal.