Why would you pay millions and climb into a tin can sealed from the outside with a hand wrench and piloted by a Bluetooth gaming controller and descend into watery depths? The smartest of us make inexplicable decisions. Here’s why.
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In the early 2000s, neurologist George York at the University of California, Davis and Dr Robert Pearl, professor at the Stanford Graduate Schools of Business and Medicine, were looking into why people make seemingly irrational choices. They named the resulting phenomenon ‘brainshift’. Brainshift in this context refers to a neurobiological sequence that distorts an objective perception of reality. It happens, they reported, under two circumstances: high anxiety and the expectation of high reward. Once the perspective is distorted, the actions and reactions that follow, seem reasonable and rational to the doer, but not to be objective observer. Their research found that people tended to go with responses others gave because it gave them a parietal sense of comfort and alignment. Differing from the group consensus gave people anxiety and triggered fear. Even when alone, people tend to go with the majority view to avoid standing out, or being left out. So we’d go with what an endorsement says, which is why incidents like the Fyre fest or chit funds happen, when someone known endorses it, it tends to catch on as a trusted thing to do.
In Buddhist psychology, mind studies, this distinction is categorized as mistaken and deceptive, the two distortions of conceptual and non-conceptual mind. Non-conceptual mind is that which directly perceives the object. Thus, it cannot be a mistaken mind. The conceptual mind perceives the generic image of the object (such as through recollection, memory, reflection, inference, through narration, etc). Since it does not deal directly with the object of perception, i.e. it is secondary knowledge, it is capable of distortion. Mind studies refer to two kinds of distortions: mistaken mind and deceptive mind. Mistaken mind is that which is mistaken with reference to the object of apprehension, and this is also necessarily mistaken with reference to the object of appearance. Deceptive mind is mistaken with reference to the object of appearance, but not necessarily of apprehension. For example, you see a flower. This is your direct perception. You close your eyes and think about the flower you just saw, or draw from a memory of the flower, this is your conceptual mind. The latter has the capacity for distortion. The ways in which it may be distorted, are you either saw it wrong, perhaps there was a particular filtered light in the room, and you saw the yellow flower as pink. This is a deceptive mind. You haven’t apprehended it wrong, you saw it wrong. But what if the flower looked real but it was actually plastic? You also apprehended it wrong, which means you also saw it wrong. These errors of perception influence the way we view the world. When we are not paying attention to our mind, and the ways in which we perceive wrongly, we create confusion for ourselves in everyday life.
These distortions present in various ways. We are always looking for reviews, for recommendations, for others’ opinions, references whether for candidates that we interview for jobs, for movies, or for trips, adventures, and explorations of the world. We assume that when something comes to us ‘highly recommended’ it is therefore ‘safe’. So, we receive secondary, not primary, information, and we use that as the basis for our actions, adding an additional layer of removal from first-hand knowledge. We use this method in friendships, in how we gossip or consider people we barely know, and in filtering out opportunity. We are largely content to follow public opinion and others’ recommendations without seeking first-hand information for ourselves. We would go to a doctor who was in the news, we would pay high prices at a restaurant or resort a celebrity frequented, or trust someone who rubbed shoulders with eminent people in power, or who have the ‘right credentials’ meaning they seem to have gone to the right schools or move in the right social circles. This is essentially how many a scam gets pulled off, whether it’s Elizabeth Holmes and the funding she raised for Theranos, or Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX scam, or many a start-up that promises big, and fails to deliver. We don’t ask the questions because we are satisfied with the secondary information.
We are perceiving invalid objects, we are mistaken in our relationships to those objects, and we have a distorted sense of self. This might include and overestimation of our ability to get out of a catastrophe, boosted by the idea that we have money to throw at a problem. It might be that we assume that because we have a certain status or public role, we are protected from things that affect other (whom we perceive as lesser than us?) people. And it could be that this inflated sense of self relies on others to provide information without having to do the hard work of knowing for oneself. If one keeps outsourcing knowledge, “oh, we can google it”, or expect others to provide us the information in chewable nuggets (reviews) and we use those as our primary sources, we never really know ourselves for sure.
The cure to this is what neuroscientists refer to as neuroplasticity i.e. the ability of the brain to adapt and change with fresh input of knowledge. The more we are open to correcting our perception, adapting to fresh input, to observing, listening, questioning and find out for ourselves, the better the base of knowledge on which we proceed to act will be. Meditation, clarification, mind tools that helps us know our subconscious influences, and help us perceive correctly are vital to the process of making good decisions.
5 ways to consider what you perceive
1. Is what you perceive directly the object? Or is it a relay/narrative/summary of its generic image? For instance, are you observing the stock or reading a summary?
2. If it is being relayed to you (such as a news item or report), what can you question about it? Does it have agendas, loyalties, hidden references, objectivity?
3. Is its appearance true? You’ll know this if it seems the same to others as well.
4. But what if others are also mistaken right now? Is it objectively the same through time, or does it change form, shape, appearance, have other characteristics (as you would investigate a company’s equity not just at the current moment but over time).
5. If the appearance seems fine, are you understanding the data correctly? How can you verify or confirm this? Asking others, looking at historic timelines, research, speaking to people, checking your own biases and theirs, using meditative means that keep your mind open to new information, unhurried and unbiased actions, adds to your skillful means.
