Our Prediction Machines (it's all in your head)
Why do we take action, or not? And why we do we face regrets?
Hello again dear readers. As they say in Indonesia, Apa kabar? (What’s the news? Or what’s up?)
Let’s get started:
Increasing neuroscientists are telling us that the mind is a forecasting machine, a dark and wet device that never really sees the objective world, but instead builds predictions around both sense data and memories. In other words, the map is not the territory. We never have direct access to the territory because we need a mind to interpret both what’s in front of us, and to be safe, we rely on a history of previous interactions to hopefully make the best judgements.
Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a kind of passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the whole of human experience, from the way we interpret a person’s facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.
Nothing we do or experience — if the theory is on track — is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.
Given the trillions of neuron connections in our very impressive brains, it’s odd that we don’t always make the right predictions. If your actions over time are repeated with the same biases, then we inevitably reach a state of mind that incorporates —among other things — the notion of regrets. Why do such smart prediction machines end up putting us into such uncomfortable states of mind?
“In the short term, people regret their actions more than inactions,” he said. “But in the long term, the inaction regrets stick around longer.”
“The failure to be your ideal self is usually an inaction,” said Gilovich. “It’s ‘I frittered away my time and never got around to teaching myself to code or play a musical instrument.’”
One element of this conundrum is that ideals are not easy to crystallize, or package:
“…ideal-related regrets tend to be more general: Be a good parent, be a good mentor. “Well, what does that mean, really?” Gilovich said. “There aren’t clear guideposts. And you can always do more.”
Like any good machine we don’t like when things aren’t specific enough.
When it comes to experiencing a new culture, the maps are not as reliable. The roads might be switched (English roads versus the USA), the currency is strange, names are in another language, the list goes on. This can be frustrating but also opens up new opportunities. The maps we make in a foreign land have less history behind them. This can obviously lead to mistakes — getting lost, cultural exchanges ending in embarrassment, overpaying a vendor, etc. But guess what? It’s a new map! It’s fresh, which means you are seeing things in a new way.
Which also means its harder to build regrets into that noggen of ours. Regrets, after all, are creations our minds make over relatively long stretches of time.
Later,
Neill
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