MINDMODELS: YOUR PORTABLE REALITY

A story circulated many years ago in the psychiatric community about a man who came to visit a psychiatrist, claiming that he was dead. He’d been telling his friends and acquaintances that he was dead, and he made a habit of referring to himself in the past tense. The psychiatrist was unable, using ordinary counseling procedures, to shake him loose from his attachment to the morbid idea that he was dead. The psychiatrist decided to provide the patient with a very powerful emotional experience that would disconfirm his faulty concept of himself as a dead person. He asked the man to stand in front of a mirror, roll up his sleeves, clench his fists tightly, and say with emphasis, “Dead men don’t bleed.” He asked him to practice this procedure a dozen times every day, and then to return at the same time next week. The man faithfully carried out the instructions, practiced diligently, and returned the next week. The psychiatrist asked him to stand in front of the mirror, roll up his sleeves, and repeat the procedure. The reason for having him clench his fists was to cause the veins in his forearms to distend. As the man repeated the statement “Dead men don’t bleed,” the psychiatrist produced a small scalpel and nicked the vein at the inside of his arm. Blood spurted out of the vein.The patient looked at the blood trickling down his forearm, and with an astonished expression, exclaimed, “By God! Dead men do bleed!” We human beings carry around in our heads our own portable versions of reality—a model, or actually a huge inventory of models, that represent the parts of the world we’ve experienced so far.The fact that each of us has our own mind full of memories seems so self-evident as to deserve no further thought.Yet it’s one of the most fundamental and significant facts of all about our existence as a species. Without our memories—our mental models of the parts of reality we’ve experienced—we couldn’t function in even the most primitive way. Our cave-era ancestors could never have survived to sire the generations that led to us if they weren’t able to remember which animals were their prey and which were their predators, and countless other facts about their environment and their functioning in it. If you didn’t have a memory model of your house, for instance, how could you find your way back home whenever you left? How could you recognize your car, your place of work, the coffee shop where you meet you friends, your spouse, your children, or your relatives? People with profound loss of long-term memory often can’t call to mind even the standard mental models that we take absolutely for granted. We’re constantly accumulating these mental models as we keep living. Some people continue to accumulate them—it’s called learning—throughout life, while others tend to slow down and lose their curiosity and eagerness to learn. Our ability to think and to cope with our experiences depends on the size and richness of the inventory of mental models we’ve accumulated and can put to use as we need them. We know, of course, that every one of our mental models is a very limited replica of reality—a proxy for what we understand some sample of reality to be. All mental models are limited, flawed, distorted, and contaminated. Most of them work well enough for us to make use of them in our lives. But when they no longer represent reality in a sufficiently meaningful way, they affect our mental performance. Much of what we recognize as human maladjustment, ranging from mild eccentricity to downright craziness, is caused by “mangled models”—distorted versions of reality from which we think and react. People with adjustment difficulties have typically constructed a particular collection of mindmodels that drastically misrepresent reality, and that cause them to perceive, reason, conclude, decide, and behave in dysfunctional ways. We can think of human beings as functioning mentally at various points along a spectrum, or continuum of mental competence, which is basically practical intelligence for the sake of discussion, we could further divide human beings—including ourselves—into three broad camps, in terms of their levels of practical intelligence (not to be confused with “IQ”–type intelligence. The Insane. At one end of the figurative bell curve of human mentality, we have the certifiably “crazy” people. Some people don’t like to use the term “crazy,” but it’s a popular word, we know generally what it means, and it works. Crazy people the insane, if you prefer—are muddled thinkers: their muddled models prevent them from functioning successfully in the typical environments most human beings have to cope with.When they become crazy enough, the rest of us get to lock them up for our own good. The Sane. At the upper end of the figurative bell curve we find the very sane people, those who have somehow learned to cope at a very high level of effectiveness and who’ve learned not to get co-opted into the craziness in the society that surrounds them.They’re meta-thinkers: they think about thinking and they’re more highly conscious of their own mindmodels, and that enables them to think more effectively than others. The “Unsane.” In the broad middle of the bell curve we find most of society—the “normally maladjusted” majority. They function well enough to get along in the world; they grow up, find mates, hold jobs,raise families, save for their retirement, and are generally convinced that they “think for themselves.” They’re reflex thinkers: they think mostly with “standard” models, pre-established archaic patterns they learned early in life.The models we carry around in our heads dominate our thinking incessantly. At any instant, we form our thoughts from two sources,usually simultaneously: what we’re taking in through our senses, and what we’re calling up from memory—our models. We automatically combine these two channels of information as we decide what to do. We call on our mindmodels so regularly, so routinely, and so habitually that they sometimes provide the largest share of the raw material that we think about. Visual illusions provide a compelling way to illustrate the dominating effects of our learned models on our perceptions, reactions, and conclusions. Consider the arrangement of elements in Figure 3.3. Do you “see” a star? Of course, there’s no star there.What you “see” is a memory model your brain superimposes over this ambiguous figure.The five black circles with the wedges removed offer what psychologists call a subjective contour: the suggestion of a figure that your brain seizes on to make a real figure—at least “real” enough for it to conclude that it knows what it’s looking at. Consider this: We don’t actually see reality.What we see are the retinas of our eyes. Our brains have been looking at our retinas for so long that they believe the retinas are reality. Consider, however, that colorblind people see a different reality than full color perceivers see. On the few occasions when I order a steak in a restaurant that doesn’t specialize in steaks, I find it amusing to observe how food servers are sometimes locked into the standard models they’ve learned. When the server asks, “How would you like your steak cooked?” I usually reply, “I’d like it to be just slightly pink at the center.” Almost invariably, the server will offer one of the standard steak-cooking categories: “Medium?” he or she will ask, expectantly. Presumably I’m supposed to ratify the conversion of my model of a steak to the restaurant’s model. My usual response is, “You can call it whatever you like, but I call it slightly pink at the center.” At this point, the furrowed brow and the confused look lead to another try: “How about Medium Rare?” I reply “You can call it whatever you like, but I call it slightly pink at the center.” I can imagine the mental wheels spinning as he or she tries to force-fit my model into the standard steak-cooking model. I may also politely remind the server, “May I presume that if it’s not slightly pink at the center, the cook will be willing to redo it?” Almost invariably, the server will write down one of the standard categories. Then, of course, the cook transforms the server’s model, which was transformed from my model, into the cook’s model.The steak typically comes out overcooked anyway, usually falling somewhere into the well-done zone. These are simple and commonplace examples, chosen for their illustrative value. But at various other levels of behavior and social interaction, our mental models operate in just the same way as our recognizer circuits that see the star or the “medium” steak.We tend to see, in people and situations, what we’ve programmed our brains to see. Forcing people and situations into our mental models is the basic mechanism of prejudice, bigotry, and intolerance.When one person or a group of people demonizes another, accusing them and attributing various disreputable motives to them, there is a strong tendency to perceive selectively. The antagonist tends to perceive and remember evidence that reinforces the stereotype and tends to overlook or minimize evidence that contradicts it. An interesting news story a few years ago described a courtroom incident, in which an attorney was lambasting two physicians in a malpractice suit. Just before he finished his characterization of them as incompetent, self-serving, money grubbing hacks, he was suddenly stricken with a severe heart attack—an acute myocardial infarction. The attack surely would have killed him if the doctors hadn’t leaped to his rescue, administering first aid, and calling for medical assistance. When the attorney left the hospital, he dropped the lawsuit.