We just make it all up!
If I were to tell you that what you think you think is not what you think, you would probably answer; “how the hell do I know what you think?”.
I don’t, But what I do know is that your thinking is separated into two distinctly different modes of thinking and they don’t always work in harmony.
How do I know?
Well, tests carried out by neuroscientists, Michael Gazzaniger and Roger Sperry, on patients who had had the two hemispheres of their brain separated by cutting the connective tissue (the corpus Callosum) showed that the right side thinks differently from the left. Whilst it’s not quite as cut-and-dried as that, there are functions that either side carries out that the other has no knowledge of.
The right hemisphere, which controls the muscles on the left side of your body, is mostly responsible for more of your creative, conceptual, holistic and intuitive thinking. Let’s say it’s more emotional.
The left Hemisphere, which controls the muscles on right of your body, tends to be more responsible for analytic and logical thought. It has reasoning and language skills, and has the ability to act as your personal narrator. It makes it up! It confabulates stories, after the event to make sense of what it has observed and perceived. Let’s say it’s the rational partner.
We know this to some extent because of severe sufferers from epilepsy would sometimes have the connective tissue between the two brain hemispheres, the Corpus Callosum, cut. This was helpful in dramatically reducing epileptic seizures. Mostly, after their operations, their behavior afterwards appeared to be reasonably normal and meant that epileptics could lead relatively normal life. But there was a side effect. As Gazzaniger’s experiments demonstrated, if you showed something only to the right hemisphere (the right eye without the left eye seeing) and not to the left, such as a glass of Coca Cola, the patient would get up to get a drink, without knowing why they were getting up. Yet, when challenged, they would say because they were thirsty. Their brains had justified their actions with a story that fitted their behavior, but without knowing what motivated their behavior. Their brains had post-rationalized their behavior in order to make sense of their actions.
The implication is that behavior happens first and the explanation, the cause and effect, follows. Actions often happen before we attach meaning and understanding. We make logical meaning, stories, out of events that have already happened. these stories are made consistent with our world-view. It would seem we have no access to reality in real time!
This has also been shown to be the case with fMRI scanning. Action is taken a few milliseconds before the signal to process the action lights up in the conscious brain. There are massive implications with this. What we believe we are consciously in control of, may not be the case. Are we really able to consciously decide what actions we take? And if the presumed cause of the action follows the effect, does this mean that there is no such thing as (truly) free will?
Now, I admit, it does seem crazy that we think about the thought after we enact the behavior. It seems counter-intuitive. But it isn’t if you think that there is a type of thinking that happens before you know it.
Confabulation is telling a story that is fictional, whilst believing it’s true. It seems we do this all the time in order to make the world into a coherent story that fits with our world-view. But it “feels” as if we have control.
That feeling of control in decision-making and in behavior is a very persistent illusion, so persistent that it’s hard to get your mind around the facts. But it is just that, a persistent illusion. We only have conscious awareness of the things a part of our minds have already enacted.
It seems to me that emotions, beliefs and habitual patterns of thinking may be how this happens, because they’re faster. If our actions inform our habits, belief sets and emotions, and this is on a continual feedback loop, then we have the illusion that we “decide,” consciously what our actions will be. This, therefore has implication for the self-stories we construct in our minds.
We construct “self-stories” in the delayed space between emotion, habit and behavior and the explanation (the story) of that action. Events happen (or we do it intuitively) and then the conscious mind seeks to find the explanation. This then feeds back into our beliefs and habits and affects our future behavior. Behavior is followed by explanation. This seems to run totally counter-intuitively to how it actually feels! We think, decide and act, don’t we? Yet this may explain why decision-making isn’t just a matter of rational logic.
The good news is that we probably have the ability to “change our mind”, by changing our behavior. It is an indirect method but there is in fact there is a lot of evidence that shows this is the case. For instance, experiments have shown that if you force yourself to smile, you will feel happier. By changing the behavior you change the mindset (and eventually your world-view).
The neuroscientist David Eagleman has a great way to conceive this split-brain dilemma. He imagines us, our brains, as riotous and rebellious parliaments which are locked in a battle for dominion. The end result of this battle is, behavior.
The truth lies locked away in complete darkness, hidden deep inside our brains, in our Thalamus and Hypothalamus, over which we have no direct conscious control.
We confabulate and use stories to find explanations for events that have already happened in the outside world. It appears that what we thought was reality is actually a story we make up in order to string together a pattern of events so that it has meaning that fits into our prevailing world-view. It’s easy to see how some events, particularly those that don’t seem to fit the expected story-pattern, can throw our belief systems into complete disarray.
It’s also easy to see why so many people suffer with a confirmation bias where the evidence is made to fit into our view of how things in the world are. (Think religion and big (or small) political ideas. Nobody likes to admit they’re wrong, so it’s better to skew the “facts” to fit our view).
Perhaps this is another reason why we are compelled to make stories; we need to make sense of our world. The way we do that is to make stories that end up shaping the world.
That moment of cognitive dissonance is a major contributing factor in a creative thinking process and a major factor in changing mindset. Creativity by it’s very nature, is disruptive.
It’s strange and illogical, but it seems it’s true.