Consider these examples below. What is something in common among them?
All these reasons have been used in court of law to successfully defend a murder!
Sometimes the stuff that's going on in your body can dramatically influence what goes on in your brain. And sometimes what's going on in your head will affect every single outpost in your body.
As a strategy to make things easier when dealing with messy, complicated problems, we think in categories.
We take things that are continua, and we break them into categories. And we label those categories. And we do that in various settings because it could be extremely useful.
A classic continua, the continua of color -the varying wavelengths that take the rainbow from violet to red. And there's an infinite number of spaces in between.
We have rules in English that you can divide the continua here and here and that's what you call a color. You take a continua, and you break it into boundaries.
It makes it easier to store the information away. Instead of remembering the absolute features of something, you simply say, it's a ___ .
How do you know that's the case?
Because go and take people from other language groups, where their language arbitrarily divides the rainbow at other points with completely different color terms,
and they remember different profiles of colors differently than an English speaker might.
We don't have a clear-cut category. Thinking in categories makes it easier for us to remember stuff.
And it makes it easier for us to evaluate stuff. So that's a classic sort of response that we have cognitively to complicated things.
First, You underestimate how different two facts are when they fall in the same category.
For example, consider realm of language differences -there is a continua of sounds that humans can make. And different languages draw boundaries at different points as to what counts as similar sounds or different sounds. An example of this -apparently in Finnish, people do not differentiate between the sound of a B and the sound of a P, whereas we have no trouble with that. Eg - Bear and pear sound the same to themTh, because they have B and P in "same category".
Second, You overestimate how different they are when there happens to be a boundary in between them.
For example, Dramatic difference between scoring 33 and 34 marks on a test because they fall in fail and pass category.
Third, When you pay too much attention to boundaries, you don't see the big picture. All you see are categories.
You happen to do a particular job for years, follow a particular religion or practices from childhood, and eventually you are over emphasizing the importance of the bucket you happen to live inside of and thus, suddenly everything is explained by a gene, a neurotransmitter, a childhood trauma, a living inside one bucket. Any bucket that you spent time in, that becomes the most convenient way of explaining anything.
Resist the pull to think categorically.How difficult it can be? And it is really really difficult. Few quotes to show just how much some of these folks don't understand that
First quote
"Give me a child at birth from any background, and let me control the total environment in which he is raised, and I will turn him into anything I wish him to be-- whether doctor, lawyer, or beggar, or thief."
This was John Watson, 1912, one of the founding fathers of the school of psychology called behaviorism.
This notion that if you could control the rewards, the punishments, the positive, the negative reinforcements,
you could turn anyone into anything you want,whether doctor, lawyer, beggar, or thief.
But that isn't the case. We know that's not possible. All you have to do is throw in one other factor, like a lot of protein malnutrition during fetal life,
and you're not going to be able to do that.
Three out of four, John’s own children attempted suicide and had psychological issues that they attributed to them being raised by their father’s theories.
Second quote
"Normal psychic life depends upon the good functioning of brain synapses. and mental disorders appear as a result of the synaptic derangements.
Synaptic adjustments will then modify the corresponding ideas and force them into different channels. Using this approach, we obtained cures and improvements but no failures."
This was Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist who invented frontal lobotomies in which to adjust somebody's synapses, you slice off the front third of their brain or so.
And something that was done to tens and hundreds of thousands of people who had absolutely nothing wrong with them.
Received Nobel prize.
This was one of the darkest chapters where psychiatry gets in bed with idiology. It was massive criminal destruction of people’s brains.
Third quote, worst of them all
"The selection for social utility must be accomplished by some social institution if mankind is not to be ruined by domestication induced degeneracy.
The racial idea as the basis of our state has already accomplished much in this respect.
We may, and we must, rely on the healthy instincts of the best of our people for the extermination of elements of the population loaded with dregs."
This was one of Hitler's main scientific propagandists. living pathologically in a box-- a box that doesn't even exist-- having notion of race, and ethnicity, and genetics, and all of that, saying let me fix that one.
Scientist named Conrad Lorenz - founding fathers of ethology. He went to his grave saying there is nothing wrong in what he did.
These are not minor crappy scientists. These are the most influential people of the last century coming out of science in many ways living pathologically inside their own buckets and how they could explain the entire world.
Our goal is to resist the temptations to think inside a bucket. There are not even temporary buckets, there are no buckets. That will be our goal.
The first one is recognizing circumstances where there is nothing fancy about us whatsoever.
We are just like every other animal out there. The challenge is to accept that.
Example: Wellesley Effect: Women staying closely together tended to lengthen and synchronize their cycles. They would synchronize unless they were having close intimate relationships with a male, in which case they are desynchronized. And what's most cruel of all is, it's not random who synchronizes to who. The studies tend to show that the individual who is more socially outgoing, extroverted, dominating, is the one who synchronizes the other one. And it works this way in all species, humans, goats, sheeps, dogs, cats, pigs rats, and all the way down.
Second challenge is going to be circumstances where we appear to be just like everybody else, all the other organisms out there, but we do something very different with the similarity.
Example: Two humans, sitting at a table, absolutely silent, making no eye contact, playing chess.
If these happen to be the right two individuals in the middle of a chess grandmaster tournament, these people are maintaining blood pressure for six hours running that you only see in a marathon runner.
Going through burning thousands of calories a day doing nothing more than thinking. Taking down an opponent's queen will have the exact same physiology as some male baboon on the Savannah just ripped the stomach open of his worst rival.
And we're doing it there just with thought.
We get stressed by the inevitability of our mortality. We get stressed by reading something awful that has happened to a child on the other side of the planet.
We get stressed by somebody zooming past us in some sports car, and we decide that we are now economically inadequate and you have never seen the person’s face, just the car.
We get stressed reading about something awful happening to a character in a novel.
And on the flip side, we can feel compassion and empathy for a loved one. But we can also do the same for someone on the other side of the planet in a refugee camp.
We can feel compassion for a member of another species. We feel badly when our pets are injured. This is a whole realm of things that we could do that nobody else does.
Third, which is when we are doing something that no other animal out there has anything remotely similar to.
Example: You have a couple. They live together. They come back at the end of the day from work. They talk. They eat dinner.
They talk some more. They go to bed, and they have sex. They talk some more. They fall asleep. The next day, they do the same exact thing.
They do this every single night for 30 days running. Hippos would be repulsed by this!
Hardly anybody out there in the animal kingdom has non-reproductive sex, let alone day after day. And nobody else out there talks about it afterward.
This is the whole novel domain of human behavior-- language use, aspects of our sexuality, this profoundly damaging human uniqueness of some individuals confusing aspects of sexuality with aggression.