An Ecology of MInd (7 page)

The class laughingly agreed that the work did convey the essential concept of a chair with an oval object.

"Now," continued Dr. Pearson, "the instructions were to draw what you saw in the picture that was projected. The picture does not show the chair in side
view. It shows an almost three-quarter view. The back of the chair has visible slats, and you show only a single vertical line. There are clearly four
legs, but you have drawn only two. When given a task to draw what you observed, you provided a conceptualized symbol of the chair and watermelon. You did
not draw what you actually observed. In this act of communication a simplified conceptual symbol is what got communicated to your audience, and I would
suggest even to yourself. You have ignored or reinterpreted what you saw and instead drawn something more in line with your mental construct. The construct
superseded the reality for you. You can argue that our artist just can't draw, but he did draw well enough to convey the concept of a chair with an oval
object on it very clearly. I would argue that it is more a perceptual misdirection that is present in all human minds than a lack of artistic ability. Hold
final judgement and bear with me for a few minutes."

He brought up the next image. "Let's look at this drawing. It shows a chair from the three-quarter view. It shows the slats in the back of the chair, and
you can see the watermelon or oval shape sitting on the seat. Some of the top of the seat is shown as well. It also shows four legs. This seems to show the
reality of what is seen more than the concept of a chair. It also took more time to produce. There is still something odd about it when you look at it
though, isn't there? What is it that is off?"

The class assessed the drawing, and a couple of people called out "The legs look off."

"Exactly, while there are four legs drawn, they are drawn as being the same length. If you look at the original image of the chair, you will notice that
because of perspective, the legs actually look shorter at the back of the chair. Again though, the artist knows conceptually that the chair legs are the
same length, so rather than draw what she saw, she communicated the concept instead. Once again, while to a lesser extent, a mental construct of a chair is
communicated instead of what is actually observed."

He moved on to the other two drawings. "When you see these drawings, they look more like the photo of the chair and watermelon. The back slats are there.
All four of the legs are drawn with the appropriate legs shorter. The drawings show what you actually see when looking at the picture. This drawing here
even has some shading to show how the light falls on the chair and watermelon. So the more you keep your efforts free of pre-existing mental constructs or
summaries, the closer what you see and communicate are to reality."

"This substitution of pre-existing mental constructs is easy to see in artwork. This is especially true in untrained artists. Think of how most kids of
about age five or six paint a picture. There is usually a blue strip at the top of the page for the sky, a green strip at the bottom of the page for the
grass and the people and other objects placed haphazardly between the two. What they paint is the mental construct. They know the sky is up above. They
know the grass is down below, and they know everything else is between the two. They can look anywhere around them and see that the sky meets the ground at
the horizon, but what they draw is altered by what they already know. The sky is above, and is put at the top of the page. The ground is below, and is put
at the bottom of the page. It is a great example of pre-existing mental constructs taking precedence over reality."

"The same is true when beginning artists draw faces. They invariably draw the eyes too close to the top of the head because they know the eyes are at the
top of the face. In reality, if you actually look, they are clearly half-way between the top of the head and the chin."

"That there is more being demonstrated than just the person's artistic ability was shown in an experiment. One group of people was asked to draw a person
as seen in a photograph. A second group drew the same photograph, but with it turned upside down. What was found was that the drawings made from the
upside-down photo were much more accurate representations. Simply changing the orientation of the picture forced them to deviate from their mental
constructs. They concentrated more on drawing the individual shapes that made up what they were seeing than their internal construct of a person. In other
words, sometimes looking at the same information in a different context can help to bypass the altering of reality in your brain that you normally get."

"In our previous artistic examples we used photos with an ordinary subject matter. If we sometimes have difficulty observing and communicating
uncomplicated items with precision, try to imagine how much harder it is to observe and communicate complex items or concepts accurately."

"It is easy just to say "be on the lookout for incorrect thinking." It is not always that simple, however. You do not yet understand how insidious and
nearly invisible the process of making wrong assumptions and classifications can be."

"What we have just been looking at is a simplified description of what is actually an unimaginably complex process that nobody fully understands. New bits
and pieces in the process are discovered all the time. What is discovered is often much different than we would have predicted. I mentioned a few times the
idea of "to notice" as in, noticing discrepancies or irregularities. What is involved in "noticing" at the brain level? It is actually far more complicated
than you probably realize. I'll give you some examples that show a glimpse of the process."

"Often in conducting research for neuroscience, the people examined have experienced some sort of trauma, accident or stroke, which has caused a change to
brain function. One reason for this is that some things are easier to see by their absence than by looking at the whole process."

"The first example is a case of a man who experienced a stroke. It was observed after the stroke that the man no longer "noticed" things on his right side.
There was no failure in vision; he just did not notice them. If they were pointed out to him, he would, then notice them, but not on his own."

"In an experiment, he was asked to recreate a relatively simple drawing of a house. He drew a fairly good representation of the house in the drawing but
only the portion of it that was on his left side. He totally ignored the right side of the drawing and did not include it in his copy. He did not even
notice that his drawing was incomplete. When the right side of the sample drawing was pointed out to him and brought to his attention by the researcher, he
saw it and was amazed that he had missed it, but he was unable to notice it on his own."

"While this is an example of abnormal brain function due to damage by a stroke, it raises the question of what is actually happening in the brain to make
the person notice or not notice something. And note that the discrepancy required an outside observer to make the man even aware of the flaw. What might
normal, undamaged brains be missing and not "noticing?"

"In the next example, the test subject had experienced brain trauma due to a boating accident. It was observed after the accident that the test subject was
totally blind on the left side of the visual field of both eyes. This meant she could not see items that were to her left, unless she moved her head or
eyes to put an object in the right side of her visual field. Do you follow me on this so far?" There were a number of nods so Dr. Pearson continued.

"An interesting thing occurred during one particular test. In the test, there was a spot on a piece of paper, and she was told to focus on the spot. The
researcher then moved a circle on a stick in front of the test subject's left visual field that she could not see. This blindness was tested and was
ascertained to be real. As mentioned, she could not see things there. She could, however, tell the researcher with ninety percent accuracy in which
direction the circle on a stick that she could not see, was moved. She could tell with a high level of accuracy, whether it moved left, right, up, or down,
but not see it."

"In our third and final example, the test subjects were random people on the street and not individuals with some sort of focused brain damage. In the
experiment, a researcher approached individuals at a bus stop and asked questions about the times and route for the bus that stopped there. While the
person was giving the researcher the information, two other researchers walked between them carrying a large piece of drywall. As they passed between the
researcher asking for the information and the person giving it, the researcher switched positions with one of the people carrying the piece of drywall
between them. The person now getting the information was a totally different individual than the one the bystander had been giving it to a moment before."

"The switch was made in the span of about two seconds. A surprising fifty percent of normal, non-brain damaged individuals did not notice that it was a
different person they were talking to."

"I don't know exactly what the results of our three examples mean in terms of barriers to reality. It does seem obvious that seemingly simple processes
like noticing something are not straight forward at all. There is more involved than a direct transfer of all information available to our memory or
consciousness. A reasonable question would seem to be, “What sorts of flaws, omissions or distortions are involved in this process that we are not aware
of?"

"It should now be obvious that much of what we observe, and think, is not a simple process. The incoming information is not unaltered and pure. Our
resulting conclusions, beliefs and world views are therefore, not true and accurate in all ways."

“I would like you to remember this. I will keep returning to the idea of existing mental constructs altering reality throughout today’s seminar. As I
mentioned earlier, through the day, I will be showing examples from history and your own experiences, of some of the effects of these and other barriers."

"I will be using the examples to perform the same function for thought, that turning the photo of a person upside down, does to improve drawing accuracy. I
will be trying to force you to look at things in a different way than your pre-existing constructs to gain a more accurate understanding of reality.
Turning the photo gives a noticeable improvement, but it does not turn everyone into a Michelangelo or Rembrandt. The examples will not totally transform
your way of thinking, but they will help."

"Okay everyone, good work. Let's take a short fifteen-minute break. I promise when we return I will relate some of what we learned to some historical
examples to keep Professor Wales happy and content."

THE BLEEDING STOPPED. NOT GRADUALLY, it just stopped. He looked confusedly at the wound and while greatly relieved, he did not understand how or why it had
done that. He wasn't dead as far as he knew. He lay there thinking about it for a moment. He had just thought about the bleeding stopping, and it had.

He looked at the spear wound in his belly and thought "Heal." Again, he had a vague impression that his mind reached out and touched ... something. He was
amazed and frightened to see the wound fill in and close. His skin grew across the wound and sealed it. The pain from the spear wound was also gone, and he
noticed that the pain in his head had vanished as well.

He got up and felt his stomach. There was no sign of a wound other than the clotting blood on his skin. He was confused and did not understand what had
happened or why. He looked around, and concern about it was driven out by the sight of the dead bodies of his entire tribe around him. He wandered around,
dazed by the death of the people he knew. He saw his father's body with a number of wounds. He ran over to him and thought "Heal." Nothing seemed to
happen. He tried thinking it and even yelling the command but there was no change in his father's body.

Rising to his feet, he began to check the camp further. He found his mother's body and that of Sinjee. Sinjee's youthful beauty was destroyed by the bloody
dent in the side of her head with grey brain matter showing through in places.

It was the same through the whole camp. His entire tribe, virtually everyone he knew had been brutally and efficiently killed. The camp itself was mostly
destroyed and looted.

He wept for a long time, and his grief felt like a physical wound in his guts. His whole world had been ripped away from him and changed in so many
horrible ways that he was having a hard time thinking anything useful. Finally, when the sun was starting to get very low in the sky, he crawled into what
was left of a tent of sewn hides and curled into a ball and thought of his loss until exhaustion claimed him, and he fell into a troubled sleep.

The next morning he was awoken early by the need to relieve himself. After, he sat in the cool fall morning air and thought as the sun came up. There had
been no warning that he was aware of before the attack. His people had not come across any of the No Chins for quite some time. The only thing he could
think of was that they had attacked for trespassing on lands that they saw as theirs.