Joanna Young, over at Confident Writing started people thinking about persistence, and that got me seeing how hanging-in’s not always a brain’s noblest attribute. Have you seen the opposite sides of persistence too?
When Einstein stated that reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one, he opened a new segue for the brain to cultivate perseverance. How so?
We change our reality whenever we risk acting in it’s opposite directions. Treat a person well who treated you poorly, for no other reason than to try this out, and watch your brain rewire for a new reality and a new day.
Old assumptions die hard, and they often persist in ways that make us miserable. It’s because they settle into the brain’s basal ganglia and pop up as truth each time some event pokes at a related topic. Take the guy who nailed you in uncaring ways.
Your brain stores messages such as: That guy is out to get me. Each time you replay the scene where he did you wrong the brain goes to work storing more permanent false realities about his hurtful character. Did you know the human brain has a natural propensity for ruts where flawed assumptions live, and that we daily make choices to either default back to – or override mental ruts?
Research also shows how we activate the working memory as a tool to leapfrog over persistent illusions that mask as reality. I wonder if Einstein knew the science behind his genius? You?
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This is really very great information. Thanks for sharing with us.
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The perceptions we have of reality and the brain connection to beware of that person who was aggresive or did us wrong has strong roots in evolutionary biology.
We must remember that our evolution took place (brain and body) on open plains in hunting and gathering early agarian societies. Our brains are set to percieve large objects in a large world our perception of reality is based upon what we evolved for surivival.
Illusionary perception is from the thought that we all percieve what we percieve differently, I wonder how what we view is in common to othes.
We all have this ability to re-connect our brains to percieve that same object in many different ways. My opinion of what causes this perception shift is our reltationship with the object. For example the “man is out to get me” his perception could be, “you are out to get me, the world is out to get me, I am hungry” what the reciprical perception is and must be is that this person is minimally due respect.
Once we start to view people as autonomous entities that are the same as me, our brains will percieve persons in that way.
although we are still stuck with what our perception of personhood is?
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How I wish that “our brains didn’t keep so persistent with unhelpful attitudes and beliefs…”!
At least mine seems to have a brain of its own!
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Incidentally, how does one contact you? It would be of help if you could put in a ‘contact’ box. Why I wish to contact you is to send you this separately, but since I am unable to, I paste it below.
“Unspoken assumptions and implied
information are important to both the
perception of
a trick and its subsequent reconstruction.
Magician James Randi (“the Amaz!ng Randi”) notes
that spectators are more easily lulled into
accepting suggestions and unspoken
information than
direct assertions. Hence, in the reconstruction
the spectator may remember implied suggestions
as if they were direct proof.
“Psychologists Petter Johansson and Lars
Hall, both at Lund University in Sweden, and
their colleagues have applied this and other
magic techniques in developing a completely
novel
way of addressing neuroscientific questions.
They presented picture pairs of female faces to
naive experimental subjects and asked the
subjects to choose which face in each pair they
found more attractive. On some trials the
subjects were also asked to describe the
reasons for
their choice. Unknown to the subjects, the
investigators occasionally used a
sleight-of-hand
technique, learned from a professional magician
named Peter Rosengren, to switch one face for
the other-after the subjects made their choice.
Thus, for the pairs that were secretly
manipulated, the result of the subject’s
choice became
the
opposite of his or her initial intention.
Intriguingly, the subjects noticed the switch in
only 26 percent of all the manipulated pairs.
But
even more surprising, when the subjects were
asked to state the reasons for their choice in a
manipulated trial, they confabulated to
justify the
outcome-an outcome that was the opposite of
their actual choice! Johansson and his
colleagues
call the phenomenon “choice blindness.” By
tacitly but strongly suggesting the subjects had
already made a choice, the investigators were
able
to study how people justify their choices–even
choices they do not actually make.
Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik,
“The Magic and the Brain,” Scientific
American,
December 2008, pp. 77-78.
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Thanks Joanna, it’s so fun to think of an opposite angle of topics and it surprised me to see how the brain uses persistent in ways that we’d rather not follow. It’s the wonder of a good day, when folks like you nudge us to rethink common assumptions about a wonderful word such as persistence.
Thanks for the follow up Ellen. I can’t help thinking it would be rather more helpful if our brains didn’t keep so persistent with unhelpful attitudes and beliefs… but I guess the ability to persist does serve us well in other ways, with things we do want to make happen, and behaviours we want to cultivate.
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