On top of your instincts, which all mammals have, is your mind. Your mind is an incredibly fast learning machine. However, it does come with some restrictions. Most mammals have their own unique advantage that sets them apart. Cheetahs can run really fast. Zebras have stripes so that when they stand together, they look like one gigantic animal to predators. Tigers have sharp teeth, sharp claws and have a digestive system that can process pretty much anything.
What do humans have? Our brains. However, we also can walk on two legs. Those two things worked fantastic up to a certain point. But as our brains kept getting bigger and bigger, a problem happened. Our brains became too big to come out fully formed. Compared to other mammals, we spend a long time in childhood. That’s because we are born before we are fully formed. So on top of our instincts, our brains are super learning machines. But since we lived in the wild for most of our history that presented another problem.
Our brains could either be incredibly accurate, and kind of fast, or incredibly fast, and kind of accurate. The ancient cave people who sat around agonizing over every single decision didn’t last long. So here we are. Our fast thinking brains helped us survive in the past, but that can lead to a lot of mistakes in thinking in the present. How do those mistakes in thinking manifest themselves?
Deletions
Remember the example before about thinking about what to eat for dinner? In order to help you decide, you had to recall all your past experiences. But if you had to go through every single time you ate something, you’d be thinking forever! So one way the brain increases in thinking speed is by deleting certain things it doesn’t think are important. For example, think of a really good movie that you haven’t seen in over a year. Chances are if you watched it again, you’d see plenty of scenes that you either forgot about, or you may have remembered slightly differently, or vaguely. What did you have for dinner last night? How many bites was it? Which bite was the most delicious? Which was the least delicious? If you had to remember everything that ever happened to you in full detail, you’d be a mess!
Distortions
Another way we save on thinking time is we distort what really happened. Studies have shown that up to forty percent of what you experience in your day to day life is not based on what you are seeing “out there,” but what you are remembering “in here.” It works very similar to the cache on your web browser. If you had to download every website every time you visited it, it would take forever. But what happens if you visit a site, and the content has updated? You may be accessing your saved cache instead of what’s actually there. This is kind of the same way the brain works. We see things out in the world, but we perceive things how we think they should be, rather than the way they really are. Often times this gets in the way of healthy relationships. You might be telling your significant other something, and thinking they completely agree with you, but in reality, they are looking at you like you’ve just escaped from the loony bin. But because you expected them to agree with them, that’s what you saw. That’s not what really happened. This is precisely why we goofy humans are so prone to “misread” situations. It simply takes a lot less brainpower, and, therefore, is much faster, to see things the way we expect them than to take the time and effort to see things fresh every single time.
Generalizations
Imagine if when you learned how to ride a bicycle, you only could ride that particular bicycle. Or if you learned how to tie your shoes, you could only tie those particular pair of shoes. Every time you bought a new pair of shoes or a new bicycle, you’d have to go through the whole process all over again! Luckily, we can take the way we learn things, or experience things and generalize them. This allows for a massive amount of flexibility, but it can sometimes keep us from fully enjoying a new experience. This is the type of trap that makes us think that all “X” are the same. For example, if you are a cat lover, you may think that all dogs are the same. But take a dog from an owner who’s had it for years, and replace it with a different dog. They won’t think it’s the same!
Cause Effect Generator
One thing that gets us into a lot of trouble, in a lot of different ways, is a built-in “cause-effect” generator in our brains. This helped us in ancient times very much. This can also be expressed when we think that something “means” something else. Imagine a tribe of people who never knew it was going to rain until they actually felt the water. They might be far from home, get caught in a flood, and die! On the other hand, imagine a tribe that knew that dark clouds and wind “meant” it was going to rain, so they ran home. Even if they were wrong half the time, they would be safer than the tribe that didn’t make the connection. Or a tribe that learned that loud noises “meant” danger. Compared to a tribe where a loud noise didn’t mean anything.
Of course, in modern life, there are a lot more variables. It’s hard to read or watch the news without seeing some headline that implies some cause and effect relationship. In reality, it is very hard to prove that anything actually causes something else, even though it “feels” right. The trouble comes when we start to depend on these cause-effect connections that aren’t really true. In a later section, we will be looking at meaning in much more detail.
Because being able to come up with your own “meanings” for events, it’s highly recommended that you take the time to think about this at least once a day.
Exercise
Choose one event that happened today. Write down three completely different meanings for that event.
Choose another thing that happened today. Write down three different things that could have caused it to happen.
