Читать книгу The Power of Narrative Intelligence. Enhancing your mind’s potential. The art of understanding, influencing and acting - Арсен Аветисов - Страница 17

Anyone can be put in prison for ten years without

explaining anything to him, and somewhere in the back

of his mind he will know why. ― Friedrich Dürrenmatt

The most significant and primary function of our consciousness is to adapt our abilities to the model that contributes to survival, or to create a new survival model according to our abilities.

The ability to adapt in today’s world of concrete jungle is significantly different from the features of human adaptation in the wild, where they had only to adapt to food chains, pulling out of them the favourite links that satisfy their growing appetite and already suitable for the developing culinary mastery and needs.

Today, adaptation is no longer a situational mimicry or an evolutionary improvement of organs and physiological processes. Today, adaptation cannot be a passive expectation which follows environmental changes. Today, no matter how strange it may sound, modern requirements for adaptation are already a person’s anticipation of non-existent changes and practical interaction in models of the expected future.

Human consciousness is capable of creating a certain image of reality, modelling this image and admitting into it something that does not actually exist in the real environment. The world around us is represented by hundreds of thousands of interconnected processes. A person can adjust and rearrange these processes in their mind, change their essence and detail, simultaneously build a completely different reality in their perception, and create their own virtual mental maps.

Later on, based on these visual maps, it is safe to build your strategies, calculate plans and only then act. All this is the first and foremost ability of consciousness. But not the only one. There is another, and also an important one.

Nature has rewarded humans with a unique ability to visualise and imagine anything. Thanks to this ability, people can plan the actions of an upcoming hunt or the tactics of a football match, describe to themselves the interior of a house or the structure of a business they want to open. People can also recreate in their minds pictures of what happened to them and relive these moments in their imagination. Can imagine and admire or, on the contrary, become frustrated and upset. Can become so upset that they fall into a deep depression and, even worse, bring themselves to the point of wanting or trying to take their own life.

Thanks to imagination, a person can experience emotions and thoughts not only from events that have already happened to them but also from those that have not yet occurred.

A person can feel guilty both for the past and for the future. Guilty of anything, and that makes his condition unbearable. Experience something that does not exist or has not happened, and feel guilty about something that has not happened yet. This ability of consciousness comes bundled with imagination and the ability to visualise.

Nature is not at all interested in the question of who is to blame. Nature does not have the concepts of 'guilt’, 'judgement’, 'moral responsibility’ and similar terms invented by people. Nature has one purpose and meaning, which it puts into the appearance of any living thing on the planet. This is the continuation of life. Suicidal behaviour and depression of a person, according to nature, do not contribute in any way to their reproduction and the fulfilment of this single and most important goal.

Hence, another important function of consciousness is the ability to find excuses and explanations for yourself in any situation. Even after confessing to the most serious crime, a person always finds indirect culprits for his or her terrible action. It can be a dysfunctional family, bad company, government policies, weather, circumstances, and so on and so forth. The unique ability to explain and justify oneself surpasses all other human abilities. A person does not even notice how this happens because it works as perfectly and reliably as it does independently.

A simple question: 'Will you help a stranger who has felt ill in the street?' will be answered in the affirmative by the overwhelming majority of people. But if the respondents are walking down a street and see a passer-by who has become ill, then before realising the necessity to help, they will ask themselves a lot of different questions. All of them will be about one thing: how to find excuses for why this time they are not going to help.

For example, they may assume that this person is a tramp or a drug addict. This will immediately reduce the degree of their responsibility for the fate of the sufferer. Or they will start looking around and, seeing other eyewitnesses, will say to themselves that surely someone has already called the ambulance. And even if they are doctors themselves, they will think about criminal liability for malpractice. And only after all this, the sufferer has a chance to get help.

Despite the fact that a lot of things happen quickly and imperceptibly in us, it is directly dependent on the questions that we ask ourselves at these moments.

For example, very often motivational messages and publications use the expression 'If not you, then who?' But in the human brain, this question, based on the specifics of its work, actually sounds very different: 'If not me, then who?' That is, we need to find that someone else.

People try to explain everything to themselves. Explanations are a certain component of the system of the world around them. This sense of consistency gives them a greater sense of certainty about the present and future. This gives people confidence and, consequently, they are less stressed and less prone to depression. Surveys have shown that during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was uncertainty that most people were concerned about.

To sum up, the cerebral cortex, where our consciousness is for all practical purposes located, has many abilities and two main functions – to purposefully adapt to changes in the environment and justify the decisions and actions chosen for this adaptation.