On our ability to know how we think and change how we think

We can't change how others think. "The only book that can actually teach you how to change how others think is a lobotomy manual," wrote Bennett and Bennett.

So why would we be able to control how we ourselves think?

"You are the one who decides," wrote Anthony Robbins, "how to feel and act based upon the ways you choose to perceive your life. Nothing has any meaning except the meaning we give it. Most of us have turned this process of interpretation on automatic, but we can take that power back and immediately change our experience of the world. * * * You can run your brain as skillfully as Spielberg or Scorsese runs his set."

I think that this is not true. Probably we cannot run our brains as a director runs a stage performance.

And yet, we can surely influence how we think. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi made a more qualified statement. Because we can only absorb a finite amount of information, "the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of life."

Clare Sestanovich observed that we all ask similar questions "on the brink of adulthood. Which facts should you resign yourself to? Which dreams should you devote yourself to? The liminal state of late adolescence (or at least a certain privileged one) can seem like a kind of lucid dream, a world of boundless potential, in which all you have to do is choose what happens next. It will end whenever you find an answer: which world do you want to wake up in?"

Part of what we need to do is build awareness of what other poeple are trying to cause us to believe. Advertising, as well as political communication, is based on persuasion. Rick Alan said that ordinary people need to "learn the tricks of the trade. The basic building blocks of persuasion techniques. For example, Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, which identifies the consistent themes used in advertising and in destructive cults to persuade people and influence them and bring them in. And then Edgar Schein of MIT wrote the book Coercive Persuasion, which is quite good. And then there’s the seminal work by Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Lifton studied North Korean POW camps and how the North Koreans were able to break down their prisoners and basically co-op their critical thinking and create a kind of mindset that they crafted through coercive persuasion. I think if we understand the tricks of the trade and I have a chapter on that in my book [Cults Inside Out] that I call “Cult Brainwashing” because that’s the term that’s used so often."

Neel Burton: “Cognitive distortion involves interpreting events and situations so that they conform to and reinforce our outlook or frame of mind, typically on the basis of very scant or partial evidence, or even no evidence at all. … This is similar to confirmation bias, but much more pronounced and pathological. … A cognitive distortion can open up a vicious circle: the cognitive distortion aliments the depression, which in turn aliments the cognitive distortion.”

Gustav Kuhn, a magician and a teacher of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, said magicians try to "find" and "exploit" our "loopholes in cognition." Magic "allows us to experience the impossible — and by doing so, it creates a conflict between the things that we think are possible and our actual experience." He and his colleagues "want to build a science of magic," according to Linda Rodriguez McRobbie. She explained: "One reason magic is so well-suited to explore human cognition and perception comes down to one of the weirder facts of being human: Every experience we have in the world — everything we can see and hear and taste and feel, and everything we remember about it afterward — is in some ways virtual. Our perception is created in the cognitive interpretation, how we sort through crowded fields of data to understand what’s happening to us." She also quoted Peter Lamont: "Magic is not simply something that happens in the brain, it’s something that happens between people, it’s learned from people interacting with each other." And she quoted Will Houstoun: “Each magic trick is sort of an experiment to see if you can use some form of applied psychology in concert with other things to see if people are deceived."

The novelist Roseanna White: "How could something that touched only one part affect her whole body? Her feet felt the prickles of a thousand needles that coursed like spears up her legs." Oliver Sacks said "there is increasing evidence from neuroscience for the extraordinary rich interconnectedness and interactions of the sensory areas of the brain, and the difficulty, therefore, of saying that anything is purely visual or purely auditory, or purely anything." Brian Boyd said: ”Recent neuroscience research in grounded cognition shows that thought is not primarily linguistic, as many had supposed, but multimodal, partially reactivating relevant multimodal experiences in our past, involving multiple senses, emotions, and associations. Just as seeing someone grasp something activates mirror neurons, even hearing the word grasp activates the appropriate area of the motor cortex. Our brains encode multimodal memories of objects and actions, and these are partially reactivated as percepts or concepts come into consciousness.”

We can be aware of how our brains may have changed over out lives. Alan Downs said that, for people "who have experienced significant psychological trauma, the hippocampal region in the brain has as much as twelve percent less volume than those who have not experienced such trauma." In evolutionary time, the human brain grew in size, something that "occurred before it is believed that we needed it," Gregg Braden wrote. If so: perhaps our brain grew in a manner that allows it to fill itself with thoughts that are incorrect or not particularly useful?

And maybe our brains grew to examine themselves? The mind's "chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature," Ambrose Bierce wrote in the Devil's Dictionary, observing the apparent "futility of the attempt." Patricia Churchland: “So it is that the brain investigates the brain, theorizing about what brains do when they theorize, finding out what brains do when they find out, and being changed forever by the knowledge.”

---

Oh, and by the way:

transphobia isn't just hatred of trans people; it's a fanatical insistence that people aren't allowed to change

imagine if cis adults also intentionally spent 5+ years to reevaluating their limits & mindsets, rapid self-improvement, healing past traumas, and learning self-love

— Ladye Voss (limerent thot arc) (@vyrthandi) October 7, 2022

Sources

Michael I. Bennett, MD and Sarah Bennett. F*ck Feelings: One shrink’s practical advice for managing all life’s impossible problems. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. p. 3.

Anthony Robbins. Unlimited Power. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1986. pp. 9-11.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990). Harper Perennial Modern Classics. p. 30.

“The Unreality of Coming of Age.” Clare Sestanovich. Lit Hub. August 21, 2017.

Alex Kantrowitz. “Cult Deprogrammer Rick Alan Ross on NXIVM, QAnon, and What Makes Us Vulnerable.” OneZero. December 23, 2020.

Neel Burton. Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking. Acheron, 2019.

“What magic can teach us about our brains,” Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, Ideas in the Sunday Boston Globe, Sept. 2, 2016.

Roseanna M. White. Jewel of Persia. WhiteFire Publishing, 2010.

Oliver Sacks, quoted in Lisa Zunshine. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006, revised March 2012. (Kindle Edition.)

Brian Boyd, ”The Psychologist" The American Scholar, Autumn 2011. p. 51.

Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing up Gay in a Straight Man’s World. (Second Edition) Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2012.

Gregg Braden. Deep Truth: Igniting the Memory of Our Origin, History, Destiny, and Fate. Hay House, 2011.

Ambrose Bierce. "Mind." The Devil's Dictionary.

Patricia Smith Churchland. Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. (Cambridge, MA: MIT PRess, 1995), p. 482. First published in 1986. Quoted in Victor J. Stenger. The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2009. p. 177.

On perception and the unconscious

R. W. Fevre:

"Well, perhaps we can make use of this awareness [of ourselves and our world and how our actions affect the world], but this is not going to be easy because human beings do a lot more things than make sense, and some of these things — pursuing power, money, status, security and so on; or simply taking our ease — can get in the way of making sense.
"

Calvin Luther Martin:

"The words of the magician snaked in and out of my consciousness: 'It has become clear to me that perception has to be understood and recognized as a reciprocal exchange. When we see things we are also being seen by them. When we hear things we are also being heard. Perception is a type of communication that precedes language.'"

Alan Watts:

"There may be no reason to believe that a return to the lost feeling will cost us the sacrifice of the individualized consciousness, for the two are not incompatible. We can see an individual leaf in all its clarity without losing sight of its relation to the tree."


Antonio R. Damasio:

"Some organisms have both behavior and cognition. Some have intelligent actions but no mind. No organism seems to have mind but no action. My view then is that having a mind means that an organism forms neural representations which can become images, be manipulated in a process called thought, and eventually influence behavior by helping predict the future, plan accordingly, and choose the next action."


Jonah Lehrer:

"'The conscious brain may get all the attention,' says Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at NYU. 'But consciousness is a small part of what the brain does, and it's a slave to everything that works beneath it.'"


Norman Mailer:

"Sometimes I think you have to groom the unconscious after you've used it, swab it down, treat it like a prize horse who's a finer animal than you."


G. W. F. Hegel:

"Only when spiritual unity steps beyond this circle of feeling and natural love, and arrives at the consciousness of personality, does that obscure and rigid nucleus emerge in which neither nature nor spirit are open and transparent and where both can become open and transparent only through the further working of that self-conscious will and, indeed, through the long drawn-out cultural process, the goal of which is very remote. For consciousness alone is that which is open, that to which God and anything else can reveal itself."

Sources

R. W. Fevre. The Demoralization of Western Culture: Social Theory and the Dilemmas of Modern Living. London: Continuum, 2000. p 196.

Calvin Luther Martin, In the Spirit of the Earth, p 24

Alan Watts. Nature, Man, and Woman (1958). New York: Vintage Books, 1991. p 8.


Antonio R. Damasio. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books, 1998. p 90.

Jonah Lehrer. How We Decide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. p. 23.

Norman Mailer. The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House, 2004. p. 142.

G. W. F. Hegel. Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Translated by Robert S. Hartman. Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1953. (Originally 1837.) p 74.

Quotes on the mind watching itself

We all have some level of self-awareness about our own thoughts. On a minimal level, this simply makes us conscious beings.

"I posit two theorems: (1) The mind is all the information in the brain. (2) Consciousness is the brain's awareness of some of that information." - 
J. Allan Hobson.

Beyond that, we face difficulties in maintaining the awareness in a deep way and on an ongoing basis.

"It occurred to me: awareness no more permitted its own description than life allowed you a seat at your own funeral. Awareness trapped itself inside itself." - Richard Powers

"In observing the operation of his own mind, incidentally, Galton was faced with the 'difficulty of keeping watch without embarrassing the freedom of its action'." - Douwe Draaisma

If we persist, we may be called "intellectuals."

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself." - Albert Camus

"Tetlock found that the most important difference between fox thinking and hedgehog thinking is that the fox thinker is more likely to study his own decision-making process. In other words, he thinks about how he thinks..." - Jonah Lehrer

Sources


J. Allan Hobson. The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes its Mind. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1994. p 203.

Richard Powers. Galatea 2.2. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995. p. 217.

Douwe Draaisma. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past. (2001) Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans in 2004. Cambridge University Press, 2005. p 3.

Albert Camus, quoted in Forbes.com, quoted in The Week, August 10, 2012, p. 17.

Jonah Lehrer. How We Decide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. p. 242. See Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, Princeton 2006. Based on Isaiah Berlin's classic essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox."

Quotes on attention and focus

Jennifer Senior:

“There are biological underpinnings that help explain why young children drive us crazy. Adults have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, while the prefrontal cortexes of young children are barely developed at all. The prefrontal cortex controls executive function, which allows us to organize our thoughts and (as a result) our actions. Without this ability, we cannot focus our attention. And this, in some ways, is one of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with little kids: Their attention is unfocused.

But again: Children themselves do not perceive their attention as unfocused. The psychologist Alison Gopnik makes a distinction between a lantern and a spotlight: The spotlight illuminates just one thing while the lantern throws off a 360-degree glow. Adults have a spotlight consciousness. The consciousness of small children, on the other hand, is more like a lantern. By design, infants and preschoolers are highly distractible, like bugs with eyes all over their heads. And because the prefrontal cortex controls inhibitions as well as executive function, young children lack compunction about investigating every tangential object that captures their fancy. ‘Anyone who tries to persuade a 3-year-old to get dressed for preschool will develop an appreciation of inhibition,’ she writes. ‘It would be so much easier if they didn’t stop to explore every speck of dust on the floor.’"

Maggie Jackson:

Attention is an organ system, akin to our respiratory or circulatory systems, according to cognitive neuroscientist Michael Posner. It is the brain's conductor, leading the orchestration of our minds. Its various networks – orienting, alerting, and the executive – are key not only to higher thinking but also to morality and even happiness.

Yet increasingly, we are shaped by distraction. [William] James described a vivid possessing of the mind, an ordering, and a withdrawal. We easily recognize that these states of mind are becoming less and less a given in our lives.

* * *

If our three networks of attention – orienting, alerting, and the executive – are comparable to an organ system like digestion, then orienting is akin to a cognitive mouth, a gateway to our perception, the scout. Orienting is focus deluxe, the acrobat that allows us to perceive something new, swivel our attention to it, and determine its importance.

* * *

Alerting is the gatekeeper network, the caretaker who turns the lights on and off in our cerebral house. Simply put, alerting is wakefulness. It comes in many flavor,s from a coma to a coffee buzz, and is as necessary to life as the air that we breathe. Still, the study of alertness has long received short shrift, aside from focusing on how long workers can stay awake. "I don't think people have realized how difficult and complicated the alerting process is," Posner says. "It's a very complex state."

* * *

"Kids are always told to pay attention, but they don't know what that means," Tamm says. "One of the most critical elements is giving them a common language for what it means to pay attention." A language of attention. Only when we speak this language can we bestow on others the irreplaceable gift of our attention.

Jacob Needleman:

And here is the morally revolutionary point: the true, genuine initiator of all moral action is the attention. It is our attention that can free us from the thrall of our egoistic reactions, our fears, our fanaticisms, our paranoia, our delusions, our hatred. It is our attention that can master our reactions, liberate us from slavery to our opinions, enlist the service of our body beyond its cravings, its childishly impatient hungers and impulses. It is our attention that can love without having to 'like,' that can call for the sacrifice of our personal interests in the name of a greater good. It is not just that 'I am my attention'; it is that Man is conscious attention. In short, we are morally obliged to become a being capable of morality! We are obliged not simply to love, but to become able to love – which means to remember our attention and to care for it.

J. Allan Hobson:

If you lend any credence to the brain-mind paradigm...the idea that we can voluntarily alter our physiological responsiveness to pain should not seem that outlandish. We know full well that when we daydream, internal generated visions replace externally generated ones. With this simple act we are controlling perception. Why, then, should we not be able to redirect attention from external to internal so that pain stimuli are either cancelled or denied access to the higher levels of our consciousness?

Sources

“The parenting paradox.” From the book “All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood” by Jennifer Senior. Ecco, 2014. Excerpted in the Week, April 11, 2014. p. 37.

"A Nation Distracted." Maggie Jackson. Excerpted from Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Reprinted in UTNE. March-April 2010. pp. 51, 52, 54.

Jacob Needleman. Why Can't We Be Good? New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007. pp. 140-141.

J. Allan Hobson. The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes its Mind. (Originally 1994). p 245

Consciousness illuminating, expanding, contracting

Consciousness, according to Hodgson, is:

"the foam thrown up by and floating on a wave...a mere foam, aura, or melody arising from the brain, but without reaction upon it."

The light of the mind replaces the light of the sun. Andrei Platonov:

"At that time Prokofy was already sitting over his revolutionary papers from the town, the lamp lit despite the bright day. The lamp was always lit before the start of a session of the Chevengur revolutionary committee and always burned until the end of discussion of all questions. In the opinion of Prokofy Dvanov this formed a contemporary symbol, showing that the light of solar life on earth must be replaced by the artificial light of the human mind.
"

In principle, the mind can reflect everything that is. Norman Cousins:

"The human brain is a mirror to infinity."

But there are things the mind does not comprehend because there was never any evolutionary advantage to being able to do so. Frank Jackson:

"Epiphenomenal qualia are totally irrelevant to survival. At no stage of our evolution did natural selection favor those who could make sense of how they are caused and the laws governing them, or in fact why they exist at all. And that is why we can't.
"

Literacy narrows the consciousness. A literate culture becomes more visual, individual, personal, reasoned, and engaged in linear thought, according to John A. Hardon:

"There may be value in listing some of the changes that take place whenever a people become alphabetically developed. From being oral and auricular they become literate. The eye replaces the mouth and ear. From a strong sense of community, they become more individualized. Their consciousness becomes more personal, locked up within themselves; their visual functions are intensified; intuition is replaced by rationality, and the world of linear space and time becomes normative of reality."

Non-quantitative thought such as "intuition" may need to be re-taught. Francis P. Cholle:

"How come classes about intuitive skills are still so rare in business schools? A first answer seems obvious: we are culturally uncomfortable with what's not exact and what cannot be demonstrated. Even if research shows that many successful business minds use intuition, it remains hard to conceptualize intuition and make it a tangible capacity that can be taught and measured."

Gut instinct. Our body is assisting our thought, but maybe not doing all the thinking, as Antonio Damasio says. Damasio notes that, instead of churning out possible consequences on paper, we get "gut feelings" that speed the decision-making process by eliminating calculations that would prove unpreferable or useless. However: "Somatic markers do not deliberate for us. They assist the deliberation."

The brain cannot be separated from its environment. Jonah Lehrer:

"Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, famously compared the human mind to a pair of scissors. One blade was the brain, he said, while the other blade was the specific environment in which the brain was operating."

Perhaps for this very reason, we cannot, or rarely do, recognize our environment. David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash:

If you were to interview an intelligent fish and ask her to describe her environment, probably the last thing you would hear from your hypothetical piscine interlocutor is ‘It's mighty wet down here!’ Some things – especially those all around us – are taken for granted. They constitute the ocean in which we swim.

Sources

Hodgson, "Time and Space," London, Longmans Green, 1865, p 279, quoted by C.J. Ducasse, The Belief in a Life After Death, p 77

Andrei Platonov. Chevengur. Translated by Anthony Olcott. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978 (written 1928). p 232.

Norman Cousins, in Human Options. Quoted in Spiritual, But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America. Robert C. Fuller. Oxford University Press, 2002. p 110.

Frank Jackson. "Epiphenomenal Qualia." originally printed The Philosophical Quarterly 32, 1982, p 127-136. Reprinted in Problems in Mind: Readings in Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, ed Jack S. Crumley II, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 2000. p 556-563. quoted p 561.


John A. Hardon. Christianity in the Twentieth Century. New York: Image Books, DoubleDay, 1972. p 29.

Francis P. Cholle. The Intuitive Compass: Why the Best Decisions Balance Reason and Instinct. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012. p. 33.

Antonio R. Damasio. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books, 1998. p 174.

Jonah Lehrer. How We Decide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. p. xvii.

David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash. Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature. New York: Bantam Dell, 2005. p. 137.