Deviate, page 15
In the letter-string exercise, the prearranged, scheduled stops of your neural train kept you from being more “creative” (as viewed in the traditional sense). Your electrical pulses transported your perception on a limited system, thus removing ideas from your space of possibility so you couldn’t step to them. Your assumptions about language constrained what was perceivable, though now that you know this, new possibilities suddenly materialize in your brain. If you’re up for it, go back and do the exercise again. Your perception will have changed.
It should now be clear, then, that you have the weight of past perceptions holding you where you stand among those dots. Of course, you knew this long before I had you do this “test.” We’ve all lived such experiences: coming up with a perfect comeback hours after being slighted; realizing the apartment you should have gone with after renting a different one; perhaps even be ing in a relationship/friendship/collaboration with the wrong person. Or simply not having any good ideas or solutions for a situation. And we’ve all heard the expression “hindsight is 20/20,” or at least experienced what the idea captures. The Great Recession embodies this, along with all the “Monday morning quarterbacking” that accompanied its fallout. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, embodies it as well. The 9/11 Commission Report attributed what happened the day terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center to “failures of imagination” by the government tasked with protecting American citizens. Before 9/11, however, that failure to imagine was simply the way most of us saw the conceivable possibilities that existed in the world. All of this is the result of the neurobiology of assumptions—assumptions that extend into our bodies—the shape of our hands and ears and eyes, the distribution of the touch receptors across our skin, the biomechanics of movement itself… and even into the objects we create. The web of a spider, for instance, is in fact an outgrowth of its assumptions, called an “extended phenotype,” where the spider extends itself into the world beyond itself. And take antelopes, which carry the communal brain bias to respond to the visual behavior of the others: if one antelope sees a lion, they all effectively see the lion as if they are one distributed perceptual system.
But your past is not your present. The electric patterns in your brain (and the distributed patterns across communicating brains) aren’t necessarily the ideal ones just because they might have been the most fit responses “once upon a time.” Indeed… what was once useful may no longer be useful.
The natural world is in constant flux. Life is correlated noise that matters. If your world is stable, remaining still can be the best strategy. But the world is not stable. It usually changes (though not always meaningfully). Evolution is the literal embodiment of this fact, since species that move (evolve) live and movement is life, which includes relative movement, and thus equally can mean remaining still (or constant) when all about you shifts (as in Kipling’s poem “If ”). Remember, context is everything. Our traits must stay useful; otherwise we disappear and take our genes with us… and the resulting assumptions inherent in the structure of our brains. This, of course, is what happened to our vanished evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals and other hominids. This changefulness of reality is just as evident today. Industries collapse and new ones arise, just like all the jobs within these industries. Likewise, our relationships change… with our friends, our families, and our romantic partners. Flux is built into these incredibly important contexts, so we must flow with the flux. We must be adaptive… the most successful systems are!
In fact, the more the world becomes “connected,” the more each event in that world becomes “conditional” (or contextual) on the events around it in space and time. This is an incredibly important point. We all know the saying “When I was young…” Well, the world truly is different now than it was before. Previously, what happened to the Aztecs on any given day, no matter how constructive or destructive, had little immediate influence on the other societies or cultures that coexisted in other parts of the world. That’s not the case today. Today, the stock market crashes in Tokyo and the effects are felt in New York even before the traders on the New York Stock Exchange open their eyes to a new “future bear” day. The possibility of new emergent global attractor states is more probable (hence the global financial crisis is a negative example, although of course not all examples are negative: the assumption that we are free to speak our minds, the Internet, and the World Cup are some positive examples). And like all developing, highly connected systems, the resulting attractor states are less predictable every day, a condition that is paralleled by the unpredictability of the weather with climate change.
In short… the world’s ecology (physical and social, which combine to shape the personal) is becoming more uncertain as the actions of others are now felt much more immediately.
To temper against this, religiosity is increasing, the fear of “otherness” and more generally a fear of losing control (evidenced by the Brexit vote in the UK—or more accurately England). So too, then, are global memes. There is an alternative to these latter strategies: Rather than impose an artificial order that doesn’t belong, we must change with change, as it is inherent in our ever-transforming ecology. This is a deeply biological solution. It’s what we—and other systems—evolved to do. And to explicitly reiterate a previous point (as it’s essential to remember), in nature the most successful systems are the most adaptable.
If we don’t, our brains will surrender to their previous momentums and we will only cling to old, unknown assumptions, increasing the stubborn stability of the personal and social attractor states since they are simply the ones that are there, and thus deepening the attractor states that inhibit us. Our assumptions make them inevitable.
Or do they?
This brings us to a potentially (and hopefully) disorienting moment in your reading experience—and a very important one. At this point in the book, you may be wondering if you’ve run face-first into a contradiction that makes my whole claim about the possibility of seeing differently suspect. Earlier we have seen that our brains didn’t evolve to see reality, since that would be impossible; and thus they brilliantly “make sense” out of the senseless. Now we have a physiological, brain-based explanation for why only certain perceptions are likely to occur (and why even fewer actually do). Here is where we hit the problem: If everything you do—indeed who you are—is grounded in your assumptions; and if your assumptions represent your personal, developmental, evolutionary, and cultural history of interacting with your external and internal environments (i.e., what I call your ecology); and if these assumptions produce reflexive responses over which you have little—if any—control in the moment, then how can you ever break out of this cycle and see differently? Aren’t we trapped forever in fixed sequences of reflex arcs of seeing what we saw before, turning us into legs that kick automatically (perceptions) every time the doctor (stimuli) taps us in the same spot? Shouldn’t it be impossible for your brain to do anything but use the same old neuroelectrical train routes?
Up to this point, Deviate has created the space for you to see yourself see… to become an observer of your own observations, a perceiver of your perceptions. We have learned that our brain’s perceptual apparatus is simply the history of past meanings made physically manifest. But more than this, we also learned that the process of creating assumptions is just that… an inherent process of the brain’s constructive process itself. Therein lies our “true salvation.” The process of constructing perceptions is the route to both constraining what we perceive and also changing it, if not expanding it.
You have already accomplished the first step in deviating thoughtfully. You are aware that you are usually unaware.
Which means… a bit confrontationally, though I mean it more challengingly… now that you know this, each of us no longer has the excuse of ignorance, which is too often the initial barrier to change. If I’ve replaced your brain’s default assumption of “knowing reality,” then my aim so far has been achieved: you now know less than you did before. And in knowing less, you (and we) now have the opportunity to understand more. Without this step of understanding, every decision you make in the future will remain a response grounded in history… for better or worse. There will not be any choice in the matter, despite the narrative your brain tells itself. Choices exist where there is an option. Understanding why you see what you do provides that option. It gives you the potential of choice, and therein the potential for intention.
Seeing differently—to deviate—begins with awareness… with seeing yourself see (but by no means ends there). It begins with knowing that some of those often invisible assumptions that maintained your survival in the past may no longer be useful. It begins with understanding that they may in fact be (or become) bad for you (and others), and if not changed would curtail living. To truly embody this is to empathize with what it is to be human… indeed, with what it is to be any living, perceptual system.
So how do we see differently?
We change our future by changing our past.
As strange as it may sound, this is entirely possible. As a matter of fact, it’s what we do all the time. Every story, every book, all narratives spoken, read, or enacted are about changing the past, about “re-meaning” past experiences, or more specifically, about changing the future past.
CHAPTER 7
Changing the Future Past
One of the most famous and controversial experiments in the history of neuroscience, done by a man named Benjamin Libet in the early 1980s, had a very simple premise: participants had to move their left wrist or their right wrist.
A researcher in the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, Libet died in 2007 at the age of 91, but his 1983 paper that came out of the experiment is still legendary. He discovered that there is a time lapse between the behavioral decisions our neural circuitry makes for us and our awareness of these decisions. His results set off a debate about the brain, human consciousness, and free will that is still raging today. Why? Because his findings challenge the very idea that we have agency in engendering new and creative thoughts. In other words, his experiments suggested that we aren’t the conscious owners of our destinies… we just watch them happen, falsely thinking we’re in control. But we do have agency. However, in order to know how to exercise it, we must first understand why it is possible.
Libet’s experiment went like this: He and his team began by fixing electrodes to the scalps of participants to measure the electrical activity in their brains. Then the participants were asked to move either their right or left wrist, but before doing so they indicated the exact instant in which they made their decision about which to move. This was made possible by an ingenious stopwatch-like device, which measured three different things down to the millisecond: the instant the participants’ neuroelectric signals indicated that their decision was made inside the brain (the Bereitschaftspotential in German, or “readiness potential”), the instant they consciously made the decision, and the instant of the actual movement of the participants’ wrists. The results? On average, the Bereitschaftspotential in the participants’ cortexes came 400 milliseconds before their self-aware decision to move, which in turn came 200 milliseconds before the actual movement. While this finding may seem straightforward enough, suggesting a natural “sequence,” the philosophical implications of the experiment were—and are—profound.60
In Libet’s (and many others’) interpretation, his discovery revealed that the participants’ conscious decisions were a fiction. They weren’t decisions at all… at least not as we commonly think of them, since they happened in the brain before the participants were conscious of them. The relevant attractor state of activity within their specific brain networks was present before their conscious, nominally decision-making minds. Only after the fact did the decision appear in their consciousness, masquerading as the cause of the movement. By implication, this means that decisions in the present don’t necessarily belong to conscious proactive intentions as such, but to the neural mechanics that determine automatic perceptual behavior. By extension, it suggests that free will doesn’t exist. If correct, Libet’s experiment would mean that humans are passive spectators to the ultimate virtual reality experience: their own lives.
Over the years, Libet’s findings proved to be so provocative that they spawned a whole new discipline of research… the neuroscience of free will. His experiment also upset and pleased philosophers in equal measure, depending on where they fell in the ancient argument of determinism versus free will, since his experiment confirms that we do not have control over what we do now since everything we do in the moment is a reflexive response, even though it doesn’t feel that way. We only ever react in the here and now… at least when we are unaware.
But a lack of proaction does not mean we can’t act with intention. The key to unlocking this process of acting with intention is awareness. Once we are aware of the fundamental principles of perception, we can use the fact that we don’t see reality to our advantage. To do so, we must remember that all of our perceptions represent nothing other than our and our society’s past perceptions about what was useful (or not). So while we’re not able to consciously control the “present now,” we can influence our “future now.” How? By changing our future past, which raises a deep question about where free will—if we have it—might actually live.
What do I mean?
Libet’s experiments demonstrate that we have little… if any… free will over our responses to events in the present. But through the process of imagination (delusion), we do have the ability to change the meanings of past events, whether they occurred a second ago or, as in the case of some cultural memes, centuries ago. “Re-meaning,” or changing the meaning of past events, necessarily changes our “past” history of our experience of the world—not of course the events themselves, nor the sensory data arising from those events, but the statistical history upon which perception is predicated. From the perspective of perception, exercising the free will to re-mean the past history of meanings (i.e., our narrative) changes our future history from that moment on… hence, our “future past.” And because future perceptions—just like the ones you’re experiencing now—will also be reflexive responses to their empirical history, changing our “future past” has the potential to change future perceptions (each, ironically, is generated without free will). Hence, almost every story we construct about ourselves in relation to the world, whether they are born out of consultation with a psychotherapist or from behavioral cognitive therapy or from reading a “pop-sci” book like this one, is an attempt to re-mean past experiences in order to change future reflexive behaviors individually and/or collectively.
But HOW do we begin to change our future past in practice?
Answer: By starting with a question… or with a joke.
The great Czech writer Milan Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, is a perfect—and perfectly layered—example of just this. The central character is a young man named Ludvik who makes a joke that turns out to be the wrong one for communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, a time in which “fun went over badly.”61 He writes a postcard to a girl he has a crush on, who he doesn’t feel appreciates him. It reads: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!” She shares his subversive missive with the authorities and this horribly recasts his future, causing him to commit a cruel deed many years later. But at the book’s end, a matured Ludvik reflects on his past, arriving at a deterministic—and perhaps convenient—conclusion. He decides that the effect of the joke he made, as well as other seemingly harmless acts, are the result of historical forces beyond human control (a clear argument against free will): “I suddenly had the feeling that one’s destiny is often complete long before death.”
The irony is that not only does The Joke tell the story of upheaval in Ludvik’s life, but the real-life story of the book’s publication led to upheaval in Kundera’s own life and in the life of his country. Soon after The Joke was published, the radical social uprising of the Prague Spring of 1968 embraced it, absorbing its irreverent attitude into a heady rebellion against the repressive government, which promptly banned the novel. Kundera’s book, like Ludvik’s joke, went on “monstrously multiplying itself into more and more silly jokes.” Soon after, Kundera lost his teaching job and entered exile in France, changing the course of his life. The authoritarian regime saw the novel and its titular joke as a threat, and its author as a threatening deviant. This is because governments—especially totalitarian ones—and their spin doctors understand the power of re-meaning history. Those who influence the meaning of the past will shape the foundations by which those who identify with that past behave in the future. Hence asking Why? about the past on something as objectively harmless as ink and paper, as did Kundera’s novel and like the work of so many before and after him, became an act of rebellion that rippled in significance… which ultimately shaped his own future. Years later, Kundera quipped in an interview that every one of his novels could be titled The Joke.62
