Deviate, page 11
Of course the piece was, in fact, out of order, but their experience of it wasn’t. Their ability to re-mean the experience redeemed (and indeed re-meaned) the experience for me. Of course they saw a meaning in the piece. Why should they assume it was out of order? Their brains created meaning, so they didn’t see a piece that had malfunctioned.
Delusion saved me.
As my experience with the Dan Flavin–Goethe–Malevich–Berkeley tribute demonstrates, delusion is one of the brain’s most powerful and inescapable tools. It is the very reason why you are understanding this very sentence. As I mentioned in the introduction, my intent in writing this book is to raise an awareness in you about the source of your own perceptions, and thus create a new layer of meaning in your consciousness that will allow you to see your world and life in a new way in the future. This active mental and emotional engagement begins the process of seeing differently. Yet beyond the realm of ideas, you also are quite literally delusional. Not only do you not see reality—you see things that aren’t there. This is a good thing. Just watch.
You will have noticed by now (probably) that on every right-side page of this book there is a little diamond in the bottom right-hand corner. It’s not meant as an adornment—or not just as an adornment. The diamonds are a flipbook.
What I want you to do is use your thumb to flip through the entire length of the book, in essence creating a small, pared-down animated movie. The diamond will at first spin to the right, because that is the direction it is drawn to spin in. After doing this once, I want you to thumb through the diamond flipbook again, only this time imagine it spinning in the other direction, to the left. It may take a few attempts, but if you blur your eyes and look around the diamond and imagine it flipping directions… it will.
You just saw your delusionality in action. The diamond spins back and forth depending on how you imagine it; if you imagine looking down on the central plane it will spin to the right; if you imagine you’re looking up at the same central plane it will now spin to the left. You are changing what you perceive. To put it another way, since your brain didn’t evolve to see reality, this gives you direct agency in what you do see.
As you just witnessed firsthand, thinking about your perception has the ability to alter it. Note that of course the motion you saw in the diamond doesn’t actually exist either. So you’re not only taking a series of stationary images, you’re taking the small differences between them and seeing that difference as movement (a phenomenon called phi-motion). You’re seeing the empirical significance of the change, not the change itself. This is a delusion without which the cinema wouldn’t exist. What is more, you’re also switching the direction of this imagined spinning depending on how you think about it. Sounds kind of like you’re on drugs!
Remember: we’re just talking about simple motion here. What about something more complex? The diamond flipbook is only one exceedingly simple example of our neurological tendency toward delusion. This explains the “phantom vibrations” many cell phone users report feeling, and why some hardcore video gamers have auditory hallucination-like experiences days after unplugging, known as Game Transfer Phenomena.38 Imagine what else is possible.
Before we see how delusion feeds into seeing differently, it is absolutely crucial to understand the difference between what is happening inside the brain when you’re perceiving real things versus imagined things. Why is this so important?
Because there is little difference… at least not qualitatively so.
Stephen M. Kosslyn is a genial, white-goateed former Harvard professor of psychology and the founding dean of the Minerva Project, a daring innovation in American higher education. His groundbreaking research with fMRIs has fundamentally changed the way scientists across disciplines conceive of perception, specifically imagined imagery versus visual imagery. His breakthrough was to prove that for the brain, imagining things visually is no different from seeing them.
You may be familiar with this concept if you follow sports training techniques. Many elite athletes, for example, spend serious time visualizing the sports they play, from Olympic bobsledders to professional golfers to soccer stars. This isn’t a new approach, but until recently there was no hard science backing up its effectiveness. Motor imagery is a “mental simulation” or “cognitive rehearsal” of something you do without actually doing it.39 Yet research shows this practice can have impacts far beyond sports.
“In psychotherapy, phobias can be treated by using mental images as stand-ins for the actual object or situation, which then leads one to become ‘habituated’ to the experience of actually perceiving it,” says Kosslyn. “One can run ‘mental simulations’ and thereby practice for a future encounter. One can use such simulations to decide how best to pack objects in a trunk or arrange furniture. One can use such simulations in problem solving, to discover new ways of approaching the problem. One can visualize objects or scenes, which will improve, often dramatically, how well they are remembered.… Both auditory and olfactory imagery have been investigated, and in both cases considerable overlap has been found in brain areas that are activated during perception and mental imagery.” In other words, without risk, you can apply mental imagery in every realm of your life—to help overcome social anxiety, dispatch a debilitating workload, or win at your weekly poker night. Likewise, researchers are bringing mental imagery to bear in diverse areas, such as doctors who are incorporating it into stroke rehabilitation.40
For the brain, then, “realness” is much more capacious and open-armed than our more narrow and conventional conception of real as physically experienced and not-real as imagined. On a neurocellular level, they are both physically experienced. With this “in mind,” the effects of internal imagery (and delusion) are really quite intuitive. Think about it in terms of sexual arousal. Fans of The Big Lebowski may recall when the porn king Jackie Treehorn says, “People forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone.” What he means is that imagining a naked body can create as much libidinous excitement as that same body right in front of us. Real sex and imagined sex (and, increasingly, virtual reality sex) create blood flow in the same parts of our brains—and of course in other areas of the body as well.
So how does mental imagery play into creative perceptions? The answer comes down once again to the history of usefulness our brain encodes, and how this perceptual record determines our future seeing. The fundamental truth about perception that I explained hasn’t changed: We don’t see reality—we only see what was useful to see in the past. But the implication of the brain’s delusional nature is this: The past that determines how you see isn’t just constituted by your lived perceptions but by your imagined ones as well. As such, you can influence what you see in the future just by thinking. The link between the two is that what we see now represents the history of what we saw before, imagined or otherwise (though not all having the same weight).
This is why we are the experiencers and creators of our own perceptions!
Think back to Ben Underwood and his astonishing ability to echolocate. He conducted an intense trial-and-error process to adapt and learn how to “see” through his clicking, and this changed the structure of his brain. A similar process happens with mental imagery, only the trial and error takes place inside us instead of outside. Strengthening the “muscle” of your brain means seeking out not just enriched physical environments, but mentally constructed ones too. Imagined perceptions shape your future much like lived ones, as both physically change your neural architecture (though to differing degrees, since lived experiences generally have a stronger statistical impact), and not always for the positive. Consider rumination where one becomes “trapped” in cycles of reliving the negative meaning of an experience (but not the experience itself), thereby strengthening the wiring accordingly, making its meaning disproportionately significant.
If each time we do one of these embodied, low-risk thought experiments they are being encoded as if they were experiences, then we need to reconsider the big takeaway from the last chapter: Change your ecology and you change your brain.
Imagined perceptions are so influential for seeing that they are a part of our environment. Which is another way of saying that context is still everything, but an absolutely essential part of that context resides in you. You are your own context. Your brain matches the complexity not just of its external surroundings, but of its internal environment as well. If you imagine complex, challenging possibilities, your brain will adapt to them. Much like a tiger trapped in a zoo exhibits repetitive displacement behavior, if you cage your imagination within the bars of the dull and neurotic, which often portray one’s fears more than they do an empirical “truth,” then your brain will adapt to these imagined meanings, too. Like the sad tiger pacing back and forth within its puny cage, your brain too will ruminate cyclically upon destructive meanings, and in doing so make them more significant than they might need to be. This present perceptual meaning becomes part of your future history of meanings, together with the meaning (and re-meanings) of past events, thus shaping your future perception. If you don’t want to let received contexts limit possibility, then you need to walk in the darkest forest of all—the one in your own skull—and face down the fear of ideas that challenge.
You must learn to choose your delusions. If you don’t, they will choose you (remembering, of course, that not all delusions are choosable).
Your brain is, at its core, a statistical distribution. Thus, your history of experiences creates a database of useful past perceptions. New information is constantly flowing in, and your brain is constantly integrating it into this statistical distribution that creates your next perception (so in this sense “reality” is just the product of your brain’s ever-evolving database of consequence). As such, your perception is subject to a statistical phenomenon known in probability theory as kurtosis. Kurtosis in essence means that things tend to become increasingly steep in their distribution… that is, skewed in one direction. This applies to ways of seeing everything from current events to ourselves as we lean “skewedly” toward one interpretation, positive or negative. Things that are highly kurtotic, or skewed, are hard to shift away from. This is another way of saying that seeing differently isn’t just conceptually difficult—it’s statistically difficult. We’re really talking about math when we say, “The optimist sees the glass as half full and the pessimist as half empty,” though in my view maybe true optimists are just glad to have a drink in the first place!
The good news is that kurtosis can work to your advantage (although this depends on your choosing a useful delusion, since you’re just as capable of choosing one that is destructive). The linchpin is to exploit your ability to influence your inner probability distributions. Imagined perception is self-reinforcing, so by taking control of it you can alter the subjective reality that your brain’s interpretations create. Think positively today and it’s statistically more likely you will do the same tomorrow.41 This seemingly “soft” truism has in fact been borne out by hard science. The psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman has pioneered the systematic study of chance and luck, and has found that people who are consistently “lucky” in life share patterns of believing things will work out well in the end; being open to experience; not ruminating on disappointing outcomes; taking a relaxed approach to life; and looking at mistakes as learning opportunities.42 It will likely come as no surprise that the same self-reinforcing perceptual and behavioral momentum also applies to negativity.
It is worth noting that in spite of the empowering possibilities of imagery and the imagination applied in the present, or in re-meaning the past, they do have constraints. For example, while seeing the color blue is itself a meaning, you can’t imagine blue to be a different color than it is. That is one perception you can’t re-create, since it is hardwired into your brain from evolution. So, clearly, our consciousness operates within bounds. It’s just that those bounds are often set artificially, usually by others, but even more troubling when set by ourselves. We’ve all had the experience (kids more than anyone) of asking someone a question and the answer is no. Hence the question… Why? The question seems perfectly reasonable, and yet, when challenged, the person answers, “Because that’s the way it is!” or some other clichéd, ill-thought-out answer. None of which have anything to do with the physics of the world, and instead have everything to do with the assumptions encoded in that person’s brain. I call this the “Physics of No,” since the answer is treated as if it’s a law of nature. How we learn to overturn the Physics of No will come later in this book. It is not easy, and it takes courage to imagine, think, and challenge not just other people, but ourselves.
What’s fascinating is that we are predisposed to different directionalities of perception… different delusions… at different ages. Recent research shows that adolescents tend to look at the world so that their seeing confirms their emotional state. If they are sad or anguished (as many of us will recall from personal experience is common at this age), they will seek out sad images, and interpret their environment with a sad/anguished bias. In academic science-speak, adolescents have a harder time mastering “emotional regulation.”43 This is the neurological explanation for what we often jokingly call teen angst, and without it we likely wouldn’t have ripped jeans, the term “emo,” or bands like Nirvana. While such angst is in many ways a rite of passage, both culturally and personally, it is critical for young people with a high delusion toward negative statistical distributions to learn how to develop “regulatory skills,” as suicide is the third-leading cause of death for males and females aged 10 to 24 in the United States.
The good news, however, is that as we get older we tend to look at things that represent the emotions we want, which is a kind of aspirational probability for our brain to sculpt future perceptions with. This is why, on a bad workday, we might find ourselves googling “dream vacation” (and not “closest bridge to jump off ”). Yet in spite of our behavior tending to get “wiser” with age, this doesn’t mean we should exert less agency in choosing our delusions. Circumstantial conditions (the death of a loved one, a divorce, unemployment, a midlife crisis) can make us vulnerable to useless thinking in the present, which of course leads to more useless perceptions in the future. Plus, each one of us has our own distinct statistical “constitution” in our brain. Some people are more prone to be healthy regulators; others turn out to be non-regulators. But as you’ll recall from my story of the dinner party experiment in the introduction, we can be easily primed (or even prime ourselves) into higher (or lower) states that affect our behavior.
A concept crucially connected to this facet of perception is confirmation bias, also known as “myside bias,” which likely gives you a hint what it means. It’s really a rather self-explanatory idea, if not very flattering about the human propensity to listen to no one but oneself, much less about our collective deafness to nature itself. Confirmation bias describes the tendency to perceive in such a way as to confirm your already established point of view. It is present in everything from the way you argue (and what you take away from arguments) to how you behave in relationships and at work. It even structures what you remember, shaping your memories according to your ideas about yourself (which are often incorrect). The concept need not be restricted to individuals, but also applies to social groupings. Political parties, jingoism, sports fandom, and religion all suffer from cognitive bias. Such biases also shape the history of whole peoples, as is the case with the sexes. Historically, the prominence of women (educationally, professionally, civically) in Western society was retarded in several ways not just by the mis/disinformation that men promulgated about their abilities, but also by women’s own internalization of it.44
Confirmation bias takes us back to the fundamental premise of this book: We don’t have access to reality… we perceive (or indeed, in this case find) the version of reality with which we are familiar… and often that makes us look good. For instance, if you ask a large room of people (especially men) who are a random sampling of the population at large, “How many here are better than average drivers?” the vast majority typically raise their hands. Sorry, this isn’t possible. Not everyone can be above average. By definition, assuming a uniform sampling, half of the population has to be less than the median. That’s the essence of a median. Likewise, studies show that we believe ourselves much more willing to engage in selfless, noble acts than we actually are (while at the same time underestimating the generosity of our peers).45 We are our own best heroes!
Yet our blindness to our biases makes it exceedingly difficult to notice them. In a now-famous study published in 2012, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky found that people who wore a white doctor’s lab coat while executing a series of mental exercises that tested attention did better than participants who wore street clothes. They also did better than participants who wore the same lab coat but were told it was a painter’s coat rather than a doctor’s.46 This area of research is called “enclothed cognition” and shows that not only do others project expectations onto us according to what we wear, but we ourselves project similar expectations that directly influence our perception and behavior—yet another instance of delusion. Adam and Galinsky’s experiment is a powerful demonstration of the effects of priming: one stimulus (wearing the lab coat) influencing behavior and perception when confronted with a subsequent stimulus (the attention test).47 So not only do we “brand” ourselves for others and condition how they treat us by what we wear each day, we are also engaging in potent self-branding.
