Why we’ll never agree

I hate the eighties. The fashion, the food, the music, the beliefs, the celebrities … oh god the celebrities! The eighties gave us nothing compared to any other decade. I don’t care what you say to me – I won’t budge (and there’s a reason for that).

Nothing is real

We have constructed a world around us. It’s not the real world, it’s made up of multiple truths.

“The hallucinated world our brain creates for us is specialised. It’s honed towards our particular survival needs. Like all animals, our species can only detect the narrow band of reality that’s necessary for us to get by. Dogs live principally in a world of smell, moles in touch and knife-fish in a realm of electricity. The human world is predominantly that of people. Our hyper-social brains are designed to control an environment of other selves.” (Storr, 2019, p. 33)

What we perceive at any given moment is determined by our own perception of the world. We create our own assumptions as we go through life which help us to “survive”. Our brains unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences.

“Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.” (Professor Donald Hoffman, cited in Gefter, 2016).

Blank canvas

We are born with a brain full of neurons, but they start out with very few connections between them. As we interact with the world new connections are made. The connections that are repeatedly used form a coating of myelin which allows electrical impulses to be transmitted quickly and efficiently along these pathways.

One way to look at it is like a road system. You start with lots of isolated towns, then roads start to join the towns together and the more frequently used roads become motorways.

These connections can also be formed immediately after a strong emotional response.

Most of these myelinated fibres are formed by the age of two years as we learn about the world around us. We then have another burst of connection formation when we hit puberty as we have to learn about increasing our chances of reproducing.

We then retain the connections that we use the most and use these to build the world we perceive.

“The brain does much of its pruning between ages two and seven. This causes a child to link new experiences to relevant past experiences instead of storing each new experience as an isolated chunk. Richly interconnected networks are the source of our intelligence, and we create them by building new branches onto old trunks instead of building new trunks. So by the time you are seven, you are good at seeing what you have already seen and hearing what you have already heard.” (Breuning, 2016, p. 122)

Pork pie bias

I love pork pies, I get excited every time I see them. Even the thought of them now makes me feel happy. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, I’m interviewing two candidates and one of them mentions that they love pork pies, then my dopamine will flow and I will inadvertently prefer that candidate over the other one. I won’t know why. I won’t make the connection that my brain has. I will be biased.

But let’s scoot back a few years … to when I was 5 months old … I was (apparently) sitting on my Aunty Lil’s lap being fed pork pie despite never having eaten solids before. That network was built in my brain and has only gotten stronger. Suddenly I’m making employment decisions based on my 5-month-old self’s happy moment.

And it gets worse …

A recent study by Dan Kahan and colleagues (2017) found that the more intelligent you are, the more polarized you become on controversial topics.

You’d think that the more numerate we are then the more likely we would be, when given data, to interpret it as it should be seen and not the way we want to see it. However, Kahan’s study found that politically motivated cognition kicked in, and the higher numeracy participants used the new data to support their existing ideological positions.

Confirmation bias

We become more polarized by surrounding ourselves with people who confirm our beliefs/ biases.

On the morning of the 24^th of June 2016 many people woke up believing that the outcome of the Brexit Referendum would be weighted the other way because they had surrounded themselves with people who thought the idea of any other outcome was absurd. None of their friends on Facebook (or a limited number) were pro leaving Europe so, in their heads, a very small percentage would vote for it. A lot of us felt a shift in our “worlds” that day.

The worrying thing is that as the information we receive becomes more hyper-targeted then the more polarized we could become.

The takeaway

Using an MRI machine, Jonas Kaplan, Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris (2016) carried out an experiment to watch what happened to the brain when people were presented with evidence that alerted them that their political beliefs could be wrong. During the podcast You Are Not Smart by David McRaney, Kaplan said:

“The response in the brain that we see is very similar to what would happen if, say, you were walking through the forest and came across a bear … Your brain would have this automatic fight-or-flight [response] … and your body prepares to protect itself.” (You Are Not so Smart , 2017)

So we actually get a burst of cortisol when people go against our confirmation bias and this deters us from changing our views.

However, it’s not all bad news, we can still re-wire those pathways! We just need to make a conscious effort to do this and create a new habit, which then results in those new synapses becoming coated with myelin.

By realising that our version of the world is not real, we can become more open to other people’s versions.

If you think about it, disagreements, political policies, and even wars are potentially based on events that we experienced when we were 5 months old … and that’s just silly.