My reading has led me down the rabbit hole of neuroscience of late. Specifically, the neuroscience behind storytelling.1 By the way, did you know the human brain can receive 11 billion bits of information every second, but can only process about 50 per second? 50/11,000,000,000 = ? Yeah, I can’t comprehend that either.
So why bring up this piece of micro-trivia? Simply because everything, well almost everything, we know is wrong. Not wrong-wrong, but an illusion of … reality. It gets a little sticky here but try and follow me for a moment. The point is we are only seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting a fraction of the sensory pallet because it’s just too much.
Our brains contain 86 billion neurons or cells and they are connected by 528,000 miles of synaptic wiring to receive our five (?) sensory inputs. Some sensory signals are processed faster than others ( up to 400 feet per second), but the main function of the brain is to filter out most of that mess and create some kind of story we can understand. The reality of our individual worlds is all created in the dark, inside a spongy mass contained in the bony sphere balanced on top of your neck.
Our brains filter out almost all of what is coming in, take what’s left, and paint something you already expected to see. Like a rainbow. How do we know what a rainbow is supposed to look like? We learn it.
For example, you don’t see color out there in the world, because it does not exist. Atoms are colorless. What we “see” is a blend of the inputs of the three cones (red, blue, and green) scattered in the back of the eye, our retinal movie screen. But we are among the handicapped members of the animal kingdom. Most birds have six cones, mantis shrimp have 16, and bees can see the whole electromagnetic structure of the sky. Russians are raised to see blue differently and experience eight-striped rainbows. One of their lesser illusions.
Color is a lie, but a functional one, perhaps developed evolutionary -years ago to help us see ripe fruit and function more efficiently in our environment. Don’t even ask me how dogs smell bombs and cancers.
So what’s my point? Simply this, we live in a made-up world, like a movie in which we are the hero, the main character. Our beliefs are structured to a large part on what we have experienced and what we have been told. Things that make sense to us are in tune with our beliefs and we call those things facts. If we encounter things that don’t mesh with our beliefs, our brains get busy discrediting that information as untrue.
But facts are facts, right? Fire is hot, ice is cold, and everybody knows the earth is round. Or do they? Seems there are still two camps on this, believe it … or not. Some facts are shared, and some are not.
So if something as basic as the shape of this rock we are standing on is still up for grabs for some people, consider a more important question, one being asked all over the world right now. The one being asked at ballot boxes all over the world. Not today, but soon; soon enough to change your reality.
What is the best way for humankind to conduct itself going forward? Democracy or Despotism? This is a choice about the freedom to make choices. Making choices is often hard: people have to think, gather information, debate the pros and cons, make compromises, and reach a consensus. And, accept a few mistakes along the way, it’s not a perfect system. Only one system is always right. Despots determine that for you. Might is always right, everything else is wrong.
This might be an easy choice if everyone all had the same facts, the same reality. But clearly, that is not the case. The next time you talk with someone who has different facts, don’t try to tell them your facts are better than theirs because you both live in separate realities. Remind them that Freedom is being able to decide what is right and what is wrong, for you, for me, and for each one of us. Because the reality is, that we are all different, and we are in the same boat together. One Planet; One Love.
The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How To Tell Them Better -Will Stor
We’re all on this tiny blue rock, spinning together in the darkness of space.
As you likely know neuroscience is my jam so this started off speaking my language of sensory processing. I didn’t think it was going where you landed, but a great pondering, none the less. A couple of neuro factoids….did you know that the amygdala of fanatics (of any stripe) is much larger than the average person, making their fear response more reactionary? ….also one of the key indicators (diagnostics) of autism is a sensory processing disorder. They take in much more sensory info than most of us, causing them to get overloaded, which shuts down other systems. There is a good argument that we are all getting overloaded with too much input causing us to react in horrible ways. I could believe that the people who would vote for a dictator would go there just to have someone take over and shut down the noise. It’s all too complicated to think it all through for some unfortunately.