Читать книгу Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson - Страница 36

Essentially, the brain is an associative pattern-matching organ, whose job is to predict patterns like those we’ve previously encountered. These predictions—what we think of as thought—are based on existing concepts, each formed through prior associations. Throughout our lives, we become attuned to perceptual information in the ambient environment and the accompanying possibilities for action. This perceptual information comes to us through various sensations—smells, sights, sounds, increased blood flow, and so on—all of which are transformed into electrical and chemical signals in the brain, that match (or don’t match) with our existing concepts. We build concepts upon concepts, starting from the most basic ability to recognize faces within days of being born to the ability to exclaim “a virus wiped out my PC”—a phrase that would be meaningless to someone who didn’t grow up with the modern social constructs that make this phrase meaningful.

What we think at any given moment is a construction based on a lifetime of personal, social, bodily, and environmental experiences.

For an overly simplistic analogy of what all this looks like (but sufficient for our purposes), imagine a cardboard box full of tangled Christmas lights. Each of the tiny bulbs represents a single neuron. If you were to count them, your box might contain about 300 lights. (For reference, your brain has around 86 billion neurons!) Now, imagine that at any given moment, a number of these tiny lights, among the tangled mass of unlit lights, are flickering on and off. These are the neurons being activated, constructing a simulation based on various sensations. Whether you are looking “back” at a memory, making sense in the moment, or imagining future plans, your brain is activating these neurons—turning on a pattern of lights in your box—such that they collectively bring to mind prior concepts. When we mention a perceptual pattern, it’s not at all like retrieving a file from the file cabinet. Rather, it’s like activating this constellation of lights—your neurons—that fire together in that moment to create your present simulation.

Understanding cognition in this way helps you see how unrelated information—such as when magicians misdirect your attention or marketers anchor with higher prices—influences what your brain perceives; these sensations affect which lights get activated. Understanding thought in this way also helps you understand the malleability of memories; if you recognize that every time you “dig up” a memory, you are simply reactivating a bunch of these lights (activating neurons), you can see how memories would change with time. It’s easy to understand how some neurons may no longer activate while new ones have been added to and become part of the memory. This also helps to explain how multiple people can witness the same event yet walk away with different accounts—present circumstances (a triggering event) recall different concepts for different people.

When we talk about designing for understanding, and more specifically attending to every association (whether it’s a story, a drawing, or something else), we’re ultimately concerned with the concepts and prior associations that this activates for an individual. We just asked you to imagine a box of Christmas lights. We could have also included, in this book, an illustration of that box. Either way, you brought that concept to mind. That’s the takeaway.

But let’s unpack this a bit more. Below are three things you should know about the brain as a perceptual organ. When we talk about shifting the cost of understanding, it’s easy to focus on outward things—the stories we tell, the maps we make, how we interact with things—but to really get what’s going on, let’s first turn inward, to understand the changes facilitated by these outward things.