On the Brain

These TED Talks explain how your brain works with various phenomena. The thing is I've been exposed to these 'tricks' of the mind, and always understood the 'flaws' in human consciousness that cause cognitive illusions, and so I've learned to always check my own couscous perceptions whenever reasonably possible.

As I grew up, I found my mother's descriptions of events to be highly 'interpretative'. That is, she would tell people what she experienced from her personal emotional point of view, rather than what happened from an objective scientific point of view.

Later, after growing up to 'adult'-hood, and realizing all the cognitive flaws of my child-mind, such as the SIZE of objects relative to my body, my mother would often recount my childhood events, experiences we both shared, but with significant differences. I never trusted my mother's emotionally skewed account of things in the present, but unable to verify my child-mind's experience, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I preferred her old adult memory to my own childhood memory of the events. Then I found a way to verify my own memory, with video and pictures, and now I don't trust my mother again.

The issue is this, my mother doesn't "LIE" in that sense of deceiving others. She is only deceiving herself (unconsciously), but if you believe her she will also deceive you. And further, if you choose NOT to believe my mother on anything then you will also lose good data, because if you think about it, she's only being self-deceptive about things she cares about, in one way or another. So, she tends to be a fairly good reporter of things she has no opinion about.

The trick then, is to understand what she cares about, and how she cares, in short to understand her state of mind. Which is a very scary proposal for me, because mom isn't rational, and as such mirroring her state of mind is dangerous, and could cause insanity, but it is necessary to be able to comunicate. And since we have no real choice about caring about our mothers, and we must communicate to survive, much less to fulfill our moral social lives, then we are all bound to be a bit irrational, a little insane.

Ultimately, I've found in my life that I'm TOO rational to communicate well with most human beings. My perceptions are generally more objective and accurate than others. I contribute this to the fact that I play sports and was well trained in mathematics and philosophy, and love science. Sometimes, I still am effected by irrational states of mind, when I'm asleep, or somewhere between conscious and unconsciousness. I value accurate information, I want to make good decisions to be successful, I don't take drugs for this reason.

As it turns out, communicating with others, understanding their state of mind, and understanding their motivations are more critical to 'success' in a social environment than anything else, even objective evidence. This has been the hardest thing for me to accept, and it has made me question my decisions. It turns out that taking drugs, like alcohol, can deaden the parts of the brain that control our rational thinking, and thus release our irrational 'id' or lizard brain. If you do this often enough you learn how your 'id' works and this gives you insight into others.

What most people will find 'surprising' about the TED talks about our irrational brain, I find common sense, and thus unremarkable, and that is surprising. It is remarkable that I don't understand people's flawed perceptions to such an extent that I fail to be able to predict their wonder when exposed to the flaws. I need to learn to trust my perceptions and my instincts to become successful, but it is my questioning of my emotional states and perceptions that makes me valuable. It is a conundrum.