Thursday, 29 February 2024 ------------------------ In the second chapter, they explain the theory of how, unconsciously and in realtime, the brain makes predictions and simulations to make sense of the outside world which includes our inner bodily sensations. From past experiences, our brain is wired. In this wiring, patterns emerge, neural patterns. These patterns, they call concepts. This can be things such as how you remember what a baked bean is. How it looks like, how it smells, how it relates to other concepts like toast. The brain uses these concepts to make sense of new input, you living life. Dreams are interesting to think about in regards to this. They show us how good the brain is at running simulations. From my understanding, the concepts constructed in our brain fundamentally influence how we perceive the physical reality, how we dissect it, categorize it, what we pay attention to. I was sort of getting the idea of how we categorize the colors of the rainbow spectrum differently throughout cultures and time, in the same way we do with other things such as taste, smell and sound. This is why music you didn't grow up with from a foreign culture can sound like just noise to you, likewise with taste and smell preferences. What I also gather is that not only does this impact how we percieve the world but the brain will hallucinate to make up for imperfect data as it constantly tries to make sense of a reality, that if you think about it, makes no sense without our constructed concepts. Some time ago I was following a meditation where you make conscious effort to just observe you surrondings without attaching any concepts to it, not dissecting things into objects but just see it as a full canvas of colors and lines. Now this is really hard and you'll notice how quickly your brain just starts making sense of it such as seeing a table, a chair, walls, and so on. Now I started doing this a lot in my daily life and for a very brief moment, my whole world suddenly felt completely foreign. I felt as if a was in some bizarre, alien reality. I became deeply terrified. I stopped doing it after that but I never looked at the world the same way again, always having it in the back of my mind that reality, the one our brain constructs, is just that, a reality with constructed concepts on top of the raw physical reality. I guess that is in tune when people do reality alternating drugs, they come out of it differently because the spell or illusion of what is normal is broken. Now me just learning about this theory of how the brain works and adopting as the best understanding I have of how the brain works, make me pay attention to reality differently now. Will my brain now seek out confirming patterns to this because my brain now starts to relate this to other things. I was thinking how some time ago when I had a negative outlook on life how I was more prone to see things as hostile and in my dreams I made up hostile encounters with people like arguments, but also things like being chased by police or losing ground in war with fear of the enemy closing in. Then I relate this with how I experience the world now after practicing loving kindness and having privilege to be selective of what input I receive like not following death and destruction far away that I have very little control of. Because it has been a while since I've had a bad dream and I much more prone to notice how kind and beautiful people are (or can be). What I'm trying to say is this just me now dissecting things in a way that aligns with my concept of how the brain works. Like that fallacy called recency bias or something like that where you start seeing patterns and making some sort of connection with things but that it is just coincidence that you assign meaning to. At the very least, it is something to be mindful of and to remember theories like these can only be simplified models of reality and do not capture the full picture, but gives us a hint or a direction to make a little more sense of it. But I like this theory presented, especially from a practical standpoint because it gives us great agency in that we can very much shape how we construct reality, and can form it to serve us best. On that point, the book goes on to talk about how emotions are like these constructed concepts. That they are not some predefined things from our past evolution that gets triggered but that they are inherently constructed by us in many possible variations just like other concepts are from our experience and the culture or social context influencing those experiences. Emotions are concepts our brain constructs to make sense of our bodily sensations and the context they occur in. This suggest that we have something to say in how we construct our emotional responses. This speaks to me because it reminds me of a technique I learned somewhere that is if you are attending something, especially something your unfamiliar with, it is common to feel anxiety and thing of all kinds of scenarios of what may happen, but by deliberate or conscious effort you can turn the anxiety into excitement by reframing to something positive, getting to try something new, turning it into something to be curious about. I experienced this easening my anxiety. I don't know how much it relates to the idea of th brain constructing emotions but I think it relates to the idea that if one takes more agency, control of the concepts the brain constructs, we get more to say in how our emotions are constructed. But taking control is not easy, it requires awareness of the process, noticing it, and making a conscious effort to rewire. I guess one does that by our thoughts, when we're in the situation but I think also changing our environment to one that doesn't reinforce the concepts we want to change. How to do this in practice and what are the challenges of reconstructing our concepts is something I want to understand better. I have a hunch that it can be near impossible to do if one is in an environment that is not serving you, at least if you're starting from scratch but then maintaining the rewiring or reconstruction is more tolerable but still requires maintenance. It is hard to change alone when from what I understand that our shared concepts play a vital role in our social functioning. Tricky situation.