Most neuroscientists believe that the cognitive capacities of our minds emanate from the neural complexity of our brains. It is often claimed that the number of neural connections in the human brain outnumber the number of stars in the known universe. The human brain is estimated to have roughly 100 to 500 trillion synapses. This vast number of connections between neurons allows for the complex processing and communication that underlies all brain functions.
But of course the universe itself is infinitely more complex than the human brain. And it doesn’t take much thinking to come to the conclusion that it is an impossibility for a part of the universe (the human brain) to understand the whole.
I have shown in previous essays how both science (via Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theorem) and number theory (via Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems) reflect the human incapacity to completely understand the universe.
This inherent constraint has forced our minds to concentrate their attention on what seems immediately important in negotiating our interface with the universe. Those trillions of synapses might seem a large number (and indeed they are) but compared with the complexity of dealing with life they are a relatively scarce resource and accordingly must be used frugally.
When we try to build a picture of the world we draw down on a lot of the mind’s resources. We accumulate all our sensory inputs and paint an internal picture of what we believe the world looks like.
We see babies looking at the world with new-found wonder. They are essentially constructing their perception of the world. This is of course one of the most profound tasks for a human being.
This process is so resource-intensive that once we have created our picture of the world we store it and assume it is invariant. Consequently when things change we sometimes don’t notice changes because they threaten the picture of the world we have created and we spent so much of our neural resources developing that picture, we are reluctant to put in the effort to recreate it.
It was seemingly the German polymath, Hermann von Helmholtz, who first postulated that because of the frugality of mind processes we often tend to see the world as we expect it to be rather than the way it is. That is to say what we see is not simply how things are but rather what our minds infer is the most likely scenario.
In other essays I have written about the four factor model of human behaviour. This model postulates that in response to any stimuli, how humans react is determined by:
- Their biological history,
- Their social conditioning,
- Their immediate environment, and
- Their worldview.
Now this worldview is the short-hand depiction of the world we have learnt to utilise to conserve our limited neural capacity to deal with the complexities of life as best we can. I will explain later the important impacts of the worldview.
An interesting experiment to demonstrate the attenuation of attention due to the limited neural resources of the mind is often cited in the psychological literature.
The experiment was conducted by American psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. Participants in the experiments were shown a video excerpt from a basketball game with two teams playing basketball, one team with white shirts and one team with black shirts. The participants were tasked to count the number of passes the white team made. During the segment a person in a gorilla suit walked through the scene. Around half the observers failed to notice this intrusion.
The experiment demonstrated how, many people intensely focussed on a particular aspect of their environment, (the number of passes by the white team) fail to notice something bizarre occurring outside the focus of their attention. The psychologists designated this as inattentional blindness. It demonstrates how the frugal mind concentrates on what it believes is important which necessitates removing attention from peripheral events.
It has been postulated that the mind’s tendency to concentrate on immediate and important issues to the exclusion of all else is probably a survival mechanism.
The English writer and philosopher, Aldous Huxley in his book, The Doors of Perception, commented on the restricted nature of human perception. He wrote:
To be shaken out of the rut of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notion…..this is an experience of inestimable value.
Huxley was a pioneer in the use of psychedelics. He was strongly influenced by the eighteenth century English poet William Blake who, as well as being a poet and a painter, was something of a mystic.
Huxley thought of human perception as a “reducing valve” that filtered out most of the sensate impressions of the physical world to concentrate on what was necessary for survival.
Indeed human perceptiveness seems so designed. As I have observed in other essays, human perception has been constrained for example to only perceive a small sample of the electromagnetic spectrum and just a fraction of the variations in the pressure waves in the atmosphere that constitute sound. It seems evolution has conspired to diminish what we can perceive to the bare essentials so as not to overwhelm us with sensory overload.
Sometimes the frugal nature of the mind can be helpful. If, for example, we are listening to music on the radio, (as I often do), even if the reception is particularly bad, as long as the music is familiar to us the mind is able to fill in the gaps provided by the poor reception and we can still enjoy the music On the other hand, if the music is unfamiliar to us all we hear is an unpleasant cacophony.
But often when the mind attempts recreate a picture from little information it can also be easily fooled Think of a song you know quite well. Now ask yourself would you be able to recognise a phrase or two of that song even if it was hidden in an auditory environment that comprised mainly of “white noise”?
In his book The Experience Machine, Andy Clark, Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, related the following:
Back in 2001, researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands gave this task to a group of undergraduate students, who were asked to press a button if at any point they believed they were hearing a phrase from a familiar song. The song (Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas”) was playing as they entered the lab, and at that time they were asked to confirm that it was indeed a familiar song. Overwhelmingly they agreed. They were then told:
The “White Christmas” song you have just heard might be embedded in the white noise below the auditory threshold. If you think or believe that you can hear the song clearly please press the button in front of you. Of course you may press the button several times if you believe you have heard several fragments of the song.
Surprisingly some 30% of the students declared with 100% certainty they had heard snatches of “White Christmas” when in fact the recording was entirely just white noise! It would seem then that our frugal minds, in minimising their interrogation to preserve mental resources, in coming to conclusions can also be unduly receptive to suggestive influences which might not challenge their mental resources but that are plainly wrong!
Whilst conceding that these frugal mind processes might have evolutionary advantages, Clark argues that what he calls “Disordered Attention” can also lead to psychological disorders.
If we go back to the original thesis that a mind has limited neural capacity and therefore has to be frugal with how it uses that capacity to engage the world, the edifice that helps it most is its “worldview”. As we saw earlier, the frugal mind develops its picture of the world when the person is quite young and tries to make the world “fit” in to the template it has so conceived.
Now you must appreciate that our worldview just doesn’t encompass our picture of the physical world, it also includes assumptions about how people interact and results in predictions about emotional and psychological response. Such predictions are immensely important to the well-being of the individual.
In essence this world view shapes the behaviour of the individual and given the resources the person put into its development, challenging that worldview tends only to happen when it is so out of balance with how the world actually is that the person suffers great distress.
If our worldview is grossly out of kilter with the real world it leads to functional disorders. If we accept this predictive processing of the mind, it is not hard to understand a wide range of psychological phenomena. Indeed it offers a new way of understanding many aspects of mental illness.
For example, many of us come to view the world as a threatening place and consequently such people, so afflicted, put in place strategies to minimise the stress of dealing with the world.
Anxiety can be a result of this misalignment between the world-view and the actual world. This can result in social withdrawal and the minimisation of risk taking. Such people often put in place controlling mechanisms to try and minimise any interfaces with the world that might prove threatening. The condition known as agoraphobia is a good example of a psychological avoidance strategy to minimise exposing oneself to what is perceived as a hostile environment.
Unsurprisingly, a search through the literature unearths many psychological and even physical malaises that seem to be either caused or at least exacerbated by the discordance between a person’s worldview and reality. Schizophrenia and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder have been linked to the perceptual imbalance. It likely plays a role in anxiety, depression and Obsessive Control Disorder.
So in the end our frugal mind in seeking to minimise its neural load also opens us up to deleterious impacts when our convenient shortcut for perceiving the world produces a faulty worldview