Kitabı oku: «The Power of Narrative Intelligence. Enhancing your mind’s potential. The art of understanding, influencing and acting», sayfa 4

Energy Strategies of the Brain
'Economic or economical?' – a question that has never lost its relevance.

What really matters is what happens in us, not with us.

An average person’s primitive reaction – the time it takes from seeing the light in front of their eyes to pressing a button in response – is 250 milliseconds. An average computer responds 750,000,000 times faster. But this indicator does not mean anything if you think about the overall capabilities of our brain and what a talented economist and an unsurpassed designer nature is.

Imagine a piece of thin fabric 2—3 millimetres thick with sides slightly longer than 40 cm. And in this piece of conditional matter, there are about 18 billion nerve cells. This is the cerebral cortex. Is it too many or too few? For comparison, the brain itself contains about 90 billion cells. At first glance, the figure of 18 billion looks solid. But if we take into account that there are almost 4 times more cells in the cerebellum, we can conclude that it is more important for a person to walk smoothly and not to fall than to write poems or compose formulas.

But not everything is perfect in the work of these 18 billion cells. Mental activity, too, has certain limitations – a person can simultaneously focus on only one problem and operate with three aspects of this problem. But this is not the most important thing. What matters, as always, is the energy involved. In the living world, to solve the problem of energy replenishment, its own 'food chains’ are built. People have optimised this process and began to literally grow energy in the fields and breed it on farms.

To meet their other 'requirements’ and 'concepts’, people needed different forms of energy, which they began to extract from the bowels of the Earth, generate at power stations, using the force of moving water or split atoms, and build new 'food chains’ now at the level of interests of entire states and consortia.

The average brain weight is about 2 per cent of the body weight, while it consumes a disproportionate amount of energy – 20 per cent and more. If we present the data in a more familiar absolute form, then the power consumption of our brain processor is slightly more than 12 watts. It is difficult to imagine how much power a computer would need if it had the same functionality as our brain.

The brain never rests, even when a person is asleep. It takes about 350—400 calories a day to maintain brain function, mostly in the form of glucose. The peak of energy consumption by the brain occurs at the age of 5—6 years, when the brain is able to utilise up to 60 per cent of all the energy received by the body.

In the evening, energy consumption is significantly higher than in the morning. This is because as the day’s experiences accumulate, cells and especially intercellular junctions have to expend more energy and conduct signals more actively. Impressions are stored, categorised, catalogued, and transformed into a person’s experience. Ultimately, all this changes the architecture of connections between nerve cells.

During its work, the brain is able to redirect blood to its certain areas, and spikes in energy consumption occur in these areas. This happens when the areas are involved in solving complex cognitive tasks – tasks for which there are no previously learned patterns in the memory, for example, learning a new skill, playing an instrument, or learning a language of a completely different language group. Such spikes can also occur when conditions are constantly changing, for example, in planning a strategy in a game of chess.

With the mastery of the skill and the accumulated experience of its application, a person no longer needs a high level of diligence and concentration. And, consequently, much less energy is consumed. How significant are these seemingly minor spikes in consumption for the brain? And, most importantly, why is the body willing to pay such a high price for brain function – such a substantial amount of energy?

It all started a long time ago. It is at present that people, with certain reservations, have practically solved the problem of hunger. But for millions of years, our human ancestors have constantly faced the threat of starvation. Nevertheless, the body allocates a fifth of its energy consumed to the needs of the brain.

The issue of energy conservation is a matter of strategy for its consumption. The brain is constantly involved in optimising all the processes related to the use of this energy. It is not just the processes of the brain itself, but also those that consume the remaining four-fifths of the energy. The energy of a person’s activity, reactions, actions, and behaviour. Optimisation follows a simple and reliable strategy – why reinvent the wheel every time? – it is more economical to use ready-made solutions or patterns. The main thing is that such patterns already exist or, if necessary, are created and memorised.

People never think about the many activities they perform every day. Even the simplest ones. They brush their teeth, make coffee, and drive a car. But how much time and energy do they spend learning these skills? A person has a giant library of such templates, and it is difficult to say how much energy has been spent to optimise and organise these seemingly simple but necessary actions in his or her head.

There are also actions and processes that we are merely not aware of. The founder of the so-called default mode of brain function, Markus Raichle, explains that the brain is constantly busy building an internal model of the world around it. The model created by the brain acts as a forecast and helps predict and prepare for events. While the predictions come true, the brain does not attract the person’s attention, which would be much more energy-consuming.

But if something happens that does not correspond to the forecast, the person will certainly pay attention to it. For example, if you step on the steps of an escalator that is not working, you suddenly feel something like a jolt. According to the brain’s prediction, which has been confirmed a hundred times, the escalator should work, and the brain compensates in advance for the acceleration that the body experiences when it gets on the escalator.

Any changes are an incredible expenditure of energy. The simplicity of transformations, which people are assured of in childhood, which they dream of in their youth, and which they meet when they are mature, this simplicity becomes unbearable for people. It repels them when they learn the value of this so-called simplicity.

After all, in the end, for the sake of change, you always need to get rid of something, sacrifice something and rebuild something. Or, even more critically, build from scratch. And in fact, only the brain can conceive how much energy will have to be spent on this. One form of earning energy is saving energy. Changing yourself is expensive.

People claim to be lazy and content with their status, providing various explanations and citing potential difficulties or clearly unsolvable problems. The imagined difficulties per se serve as a convenient excuse for their lack of action.

People are not willing to pay for changes, but they cannot admit it to themselves. It is not necessarily people themselves who are against change, but rather their brain’s resistance to it. The visual cortex, the area of the brain responsible for imagination and mental visualisation, consumes so much energy that a person is not even capable of imagining it. This is also one of the reasons why people are not inclined to think about or consider something unless they absolutely have to.

Depending on the willingness to spend energy on thoughts about what is happening around them and in decreasing order of this readiness, people can be divided into three groups: those who manage what is happening, those who observe what is happening, and those who are surprised by what is happening.

Hence, if you encounter someone who is constantly surprised, then they are not ready to change anything that surprises them. Patient observation demands more energy, and creation and management are the height of waste. However, it is precisely this energy waste that drives human development.

Do We Really Think?
Where the illusion begins or where it does not end. Our maps of a world that does not exist.

Watch your words, they become your actions. ― Lao Tzu

The extent to which a person is surprised by events correlates with the activity of their thought processes. The term 'thought processes’ itself appeared as an attempt to describe the activity of the human brain. Nowadays, much is known about the origins and locations of these processes compared to the last millennia, but we still do not have a complete understanding of how people think.

The act of thinking is linked to human cognitive activity. Thinking includes components such as attention and perception, forming concepts, making judgements and reaching conclusions. Individuals carry out this process using words and images. Essentially, the thinking process is akin to having a conversation with oneself. If people continue to react to the world around them without asking questions or seeking answers, there will be no end to their surprise. Their instincts, rather than their ideas, will shape their behaviour.

But we already do know something important about thinking. For example, the fact that thinking is strongly influenced by associative memory. Associative memory is a kind of personal library of what a person has seen, heard, felt, and done. Most of this library is compiled and classified without conscious human control, so we can only guess what is presented in it and in what form.

Opinions, judgements, preferences, tastes and decision-making systems are built based on this library. When a person forms an opinion about what is good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or not, all this is determined not so much by what they see, smell, or hear, but by what is already present in the memory, how similar experiences have been labelled and rated, what images and words have been used.

Therefore, to some extent, language and its well-established encodings and patterns are to blame for the simplistic perception of the world around us and the very quality of human thinking. At the current rate of development, a person actually needs more words to formulate problems. No one expected that with the advancement of technology, thinking would not be deployed at the same rate, but on the contrary, would be limited. While people today possess significantly more knowledge compared to previous centuries, the language used to convey and elaborate on this knowledge is much poorer.

The 'mental library’ also comes with its own set of issues and peculiarities. People can explain their daily decisions and actions to themselves based on their past experiences, present conditions, and the overall context. But the problem is that they may have initially incorrectly identified these circumstances and situations stored in their 'library’. This can lead them to access the wrong shelf and end up in the wrong place, which can have serious consequences at times.

A person’s thinking can be influenced by numerous factors. One of the factors, the influence of societal goals and corresponding behaviours, was mentioned above. Adaptation to the chosen community and the fear of being excluded from it is an important aspect of a person’s sense of security. The desire to be recognised within a particular environment, whether chosen independently or by chance, shifts much of the personal responsibility to what is commonly called the circumstances, such as nationality, company, group, or family.

This negates the person’s idea that the reason why they found themselves in a certain society and in certain circumstances is in themselves. But, in the end, a person chooses where and with whom to live and unconsciously fears losing it. And they are not so much afraid of losing, as they do not want to change anything familiar.

Even though deep in their minds people are always ready to be happier in a new place, they are often held back by those 'superhuman efforts’ required to make this change. People sometimes do not even dare to think about the unknown future.

Overall, people try not to think that all possible consequences of their choices and ideas will eventually be marked with a single stone with two dates – when they enter the process of the constant need to choose and adjust, and when they exit from it.

But there is another important detail, an issue that a person does not notice or tries not to delve into, again due to saving energy when thinking. The question is as follows: ‘Has the person determined his or her own choice, or have others done it for him or her? Not the circumstances, not the weather, but certain people with certain interests.’

People know that there are many methods of influencing their behaviour. They believe that within a family or small group, they also can influence, mistaking for influence their ability to give orders or the forced submission of others as a result of dependence on them.

Yet, along with this, people do not know much about how illusions, which they willingly believe, are professionally created. Similarly, they are unaware of how and in what situations they become highly suggestible. People do not understand why they tend to follow leaders and why they seek relief from stress in group cohesion or collective faith. They do not know the whole system, but they have heard about the existence of some methods used by corporations to influence employees and by the state to influence everyone. However, they do not fully comprehend the details of this system and are inevitably influenced by it.

Influence techniques are a powerful weapon in the hands of people who pursue their goals and interests. This is also a dangerous weapon if the interests of these people differ from the interests of society. Using the society itself, 'public opinion’ can be formed. Like a collective neurological imprint, the 'public opinion’ can be permanently fixed just as a photographic fixer was used in the processing of film or paper in the analogue age. Anyone who was an amateur photographer at that time remembers that the image is short-lived without fixing. Extremely short-lived.

If for a moment we imagine that every person is a kind of neurological robot, the carrier of an infinite number of constantly fixed photos, then everyone around you is an eternal prisoner of these ideas, value systems, certain scientific paradigms and mass illusions.

William Blake once said: 'I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s’. Nowadays, to create your own system of vision of the world or even preserve it is very, very difficult.

A person’s perception of reality is shaped by the information transmitted to the brain. For centuries, people communicated through gestures, shouts, drums, smoke signals, and clay plates, which can be seen as forms of technology. The emergence of a primitive printing press was revolutionary for its time.

Even in today’s digital age, people continue to create their analogue worlds through paintings, symphonies, sculptures, songs, novels, and poems. These artistic expressions not only serve as art but also as materialised information about the world. Information that all this time, as they think, has created a reality for them and has kept them safe from themselves. Everything from Renaissance paintings to Andy Warhol, from myths of the ancient Greeks and classic novels to contemporary bestsellers, contributes to a system of artefacts, concepts and judgements, which has helped people to protect themselves from the surrounding chaos and is called culture.

The words 'culture’ and 'cult’, having the same roots, are completely opposite in their meaning and impact on individuals. People are always more inclined to create a cult rather than putting in the laborious effort to maintain a higher level of culture, and the lower the level of culture, the more likely a cult is to be created. A cult can be formed around anything, even something as mundane as a mobile phone, and attract a large following of fans. It is surprising to think that more people might know about iPhones than about the Mona Lisa.

People, as depicted in films like The Matrix or Inception, use their brains to create their own models of the universe and a map of the world. This virtual map is not specific to any particular area, and it is uncertain who created it – whether it was themselves or someone else. The information age has significantly enhanced the speed and quality of replicating such maps. The widespread availability of personal impact has multiplied the range of interpretations for any phenomena or events, some of which may stem from others’ perspectives.

People have stopped deeply analysing facts and evaluating them using logic and common sense. It is easier and more economical to simply believe in the presented interpretations, consequently making it even easier to convey these interpretations to them, provided you know how.

Two out of Six
How we can be convinced of anything. What you see depends on how you see.

There are no facts, only interpretations. ― Friedrich Nietzsche

The average person looks without seeing, listens without

hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves

without physical sensation – and speaks without thinking.

In the last half-century, a significant amount of research has been conducted and numerous discoveries have been made. These findings have allowed humans to reconsider their understanding of themselves and their current experiences, even while reading these lines. Some of these studies aim to offer insights into what defines a person and shapes their self-perception. The key objective is to comprehend the factors influencing human behaviour and how it can be done.

The following study explains how people perceive, store, and use information. Canadian psychologist Allan Paivio had long been studying memory psychology, particularly how humans remember what they see, hear, and feel, and how their memory and the above-mentioned associative library are formed. Based on his observations, Paivio proposed the idea of a dual-encoding system.

Humans have two main perception systems – visual and verbal. These systems work simultaneously to create independent ideas about what they see and hear, generating specific codes for each system. The visual code created by the system handles problem-solving in the space here and now, while the verbal code works with abstract symbols, aiding in representing something in perspective, space, and the current time. Additionally, each of these systems is hierarchically self-organised in the perception of information, interacting at four levels.

Firstly, at the initial level, the information is received and sensory processing takes place. This stage is known as perception.

Secondly, at the next level, the processed information connects with the existing long-term memory system to find associations related to the incoming information.

Thirdly, at another level, elements similar to the received information are activated in memory, and therefore this level is called the associative level.

Finally, at the fourth level, the verbal and visual systems interact with each other to represent the conclusive reference of the received information, storing it in long-term memory as an image that is assigned a designation, or vice versa, as the name that the image corresponds to.

To summarise what has been said, each word in any statement has its particular referent – a notion. When something is mentioned, the symbol of the designated object is correlated with the objects of extra-linguistic reality.

The reality created and stored in a person’s mind can equally likely belong to the real or imaginary world. For memory to function, a person needs to be able to imagine and name the reality. The entire process of perceiving, categorising, memorising, and presenting information depends on a person’s experiences, subjective assessments, images, and judgements about the environment. This is also known as a person’s world view.

The simplest confirmation of Paivio’s theory is that using both visual and verbal channels can improve the accuracy of recalling studied material. In other words, people learn better when information is not only told to them but also shown. The films should have both sound and subtitles. This concept has been recognised since school, as visual stories are often easier to remember than just reading the material. How people perceive the world is influenced by their life positions, beliefs, ideals, and rules. Their world view created by them shapes their actions and makes them meaningful and purposeful.

Historically, individuals adopt several types of world views. The world view, used in daily life, is the so-called everyday world view. The formation of this type of world view dates back to primitive society, when thinking was based on imaginative perceptions of the world. From this came the mythological world view, exemplified by the mythology of the ancient Greeks, familiar to everyone. Creating myths, people spiritualised and likened material objects and various phenomena to humans. Such a world view is sacred, secret, and magical. This world view has survived to the present day.

The next stage of forming a person’s world view is based on the belief in supernatural forces. One example is the religious world view. This is a much more rigid version of judgements and ideas combined with a system of moral commandments. Such a world view helps support a person’s models of ethical behaviour.

And finally, the next stage of forming a world view is the philosophical world view. This is a complex systemic way of viewing the world, where the human mind is assigned the highest role. If myth is based on emotions and feelings, philosophy is based on logic and evidence.

As time passes, the information that a person possesses undergoes changes. It becomes distorted, and as perspectives shift, it can evolve into something else. It is natural for us to understand that a person’s perspective is constantly being shaped and improved as life progresses. This may seem familiar and understandable at first. However, there is a subtle but significant detail in all of this, which becomes apparent when you provide precise definitions of the concepts and processes mentioned above.

The first concept is a person’s attitude to the surrounding reality. It is expressed in moods, feelings and actions, that is, it has an emotional and psychological basis.

The second is a set of views on the world, i.e. cognitive-intellectual concept, our doctrine of the surrounding world.

When people visualise their idea of the world, their attitude (emotional and psychological) goes up to the level where it becomes their set of views, their cognitive and intellectual doctrine.

This is a crucial point for understanding the mechanism that underlies the influence and creation of an objective or distorted picture of the external world in the mind.

Information about the world is received through the six sensory channels: vision (eyes), hearing (ears), taste (tongue), smell (nose), touch (skin), balance, position in space, weight, etc. (vestibular apparatus). Through these channels, we receive and conduct a preliminary analysis of information about the world around us.

Some things can be done from a distance, for example, through seeing and hearing. Other senses like touch, taste, and smell require direct contact or proximity. If one sense is impaired, other senses can compensate for it. For example, individuals with poor eyesight might have highly developed hearing and smell. This happens because the brain constantly seeks information and utilises all available sensory channels to do so. The information gathered creates a sense of security.

Until recently, all senses played relatively equal roles in shaping this sensory picture. People not only relied on sight and hearing but also on touch, smell, and taste. Not too long ago, they would literally taste gold coins and touch, smell, and try on objects when making purchases. The more sensory channels used, the more objective our perception of the world around us becomes.

How many of the six senses do people use to perceive the world in the last quarter of a century, compared to how many have been used over the past millennia? It turns out that with an increase in the amount of information received, the multichannel nature and, consequently, the objectivity of its perception decreased.

Now, a lottery which lures you to guess five numbers out of 36 is a game of chance and luck. The odds of winning are lower than the margin of error. People mostly rely on only two out of the six possible senses for their perception. The likelihood of accurately perceiving reality is probably still higher than winning the lottery. But to what extent?