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Refraction. The Science of Seeing Differently ”is a book by neuroscientist Bo Lotto, in which he tells why we do not see real reality and how the peculiarities of our perception affect creativity, work, love, and relationships with loved ones. We are publishing a fragment about what beliefs exist in our life and why they are so important to us.
We are very lucky that the brain in the process of evolution has learned to create beliefs, while the bulk of them seem to be the same as the air we breathe - invisible. When you sit down on a chair, you are sure that it - and usually it does - will not break under you. Each time you take a step, you know for sure that the earth will not leave from under your feet; the foot will not turn up; that you put your foot far enough forward and correctly redistribute the weight for the next movement (since, after all, walking is actually a continuous process of falling). These are inherent beliefs.
And if you constantly had to think - how to walk, how to breathe? Or think about all the other extremely useful, unconscious things that your brain does without any effort. Chances are, you wouldn't budge.
This is partly because we are only able to direct our attention to one task (in neurophysiology, this is called "local" information). But besides this - due to life priorities - if you had to think about absolutely all the operations necessary to maintain your own existence, you would not even be able to sleep normally, since most of the time you would probably spend thinking about how to my heart was beating and my lungs were breathing. For the fact that you do not have to constantly worry about how to maintain your heart rate, you should thank the brain, which acts as a command center, governing the built-in physiological "beliefs" of the body.
The need to spend a significant amount of mental energy on such a task is extremely disadvantageous for survival in a constantly changing world. Actually, in the course of development, we did not adapt to such a perception. So what really drives our perception ... in the very past that is being set free? The answer is this: it is a set of basic mechanical beliefs that the human race has been developing in itself for many, many millennia until now. And this is true not only for breathing, but also for sight. We, like other animals, are born with many beliefs (for example, about the laws of physics), they are passed on to us with mother's milk. <…>
The reality that we see as a projection onto the "screen" of perception begins with the flow of information perceived by the five senses. This stimulus (one or more) creates a series of impulses on your receptors, which move into the brain (incoming information) and spread through different areas of the cortex and other parts of the body until they finally stop at what triggers the reaction (motor and / or perceptual ... although the line between the two is thinner than it is thought). In fact, this is all neurophysiology in one sentence, but the main thing here is in essence.
What you are currently experiencing or experiencing is just a steady pattern of electrical activity transmitted through the brain; it is a non-romantic view of perception, but quite accurate.
Throughout life, electrical circuits that are created in the head as a response to stimuli become more and more "stable", and in physics this is called an attractor [An attractor is a potential state of a system to which it evolves. - Approx. ed.]. Desert dunes or a whirlpool in a river are examples of attractors, even our galaxy is an attractor. All of them are stable schemes that have developed as a result of long-term interaction of many individual elements. In this sense, they have their own stable energy state, or moment (in which it is difficult to move them), which turns out to be the most natural in order to continue to exist in it (although the state of the brain of children is not as stable as that of adults).
The task of evolution is to select certain attractors, or, more precisely, a sequence of the most useful attractors.
Electrical circuits are created by neural pathways that connect different regions of the brain ... this infrastructure of connections is like a highly convoluted and vast highway. The schemes created increase the likelihood of some actions and reduce others. Studies have shown that the more such communications, the more diverse and complex beliefs (for example, the more stable vocabulary and memory). At the same time, despite the abundance of connections in the brain and their importance for perception, the number of neuroelectric impulses received and used during life is very small. This is because, as a matter of fact, their potential is almost endless.
These cells in the brain make up your Cartesian self. When I say "Cartesian," I mean "related to the French philosophy of Rene Descartes," who was an adherent of the "mathematical" view of human consciousness. Here are the origins of his famous phrase Sogito ergo sum - "I think, therefore I am." Your thinking, and therefore your existence, depends on the cells that make up the "railroad network" of pathways in your brain, where electrical circuits, like trains, travel along their reflex arcs. Trying to count the number of these cells is also an interesting story.
For many years neuroscientists have been writing and rewriting the same number: there are 100 billion neurons in the brain. A very nice, round and weighty number. But it turned out to be wrong. No one ever wondered where the number 100 billion first came from, and every scientist who referred to it assumed it was correct.
The reason is terrible, but quite understandable: they heard it from someone else. An amazing irony: it reflects our innate inclination towards whole numbers, and 100 is just round. But that all changed in 2009 when Brazilian researcher Dr. Susana Erculano-Huzel took an innovative approach and proved that number was wrong ...
This common truth, which inadvertently was taken as a fact, turned out to be a scientific meme. (I'll go into more detail about memes later.) Erkulano-Huzel examined four brains voluntarily donated to science with a new method of turning them into liquid. And she found that there are about 14 billion cells less than we thought, that is, the same number of neurons that are in the head of a baboon monkey. Despite a slight decrease, 86 billion is still a large number. Therefore, the thinking, and therefore the existing, you are all these neurons and their communication with each other (of course, with the rest of the body and the environment: do not think that you are just the brain).
But back to the relatively tiny number of electrochemical circuits involved in perception. The cells that make up your brain make 100 trillion connections. This is a staggeringly large number, but what does it mean? Because the possible connections form the likely reflex arcs that in turn condition the behavior, what is at stake is how you react ... what you perceive and whether that perception is good or bad, original or, to be complacent, bold or careful.
That is, we are talking about the opposition of possible reactions and actual ones, and there are an incredible number of the former.
For example, imagine that the human brain is made up of 50 cells, not 86 billion. (Ants have about 250,000 brain cells, so if we had 50, we would become rather primitive organisms.) And if you take these 50 brain cells, each with 50 connections, and assume all possible ways of their connection, then the number possible connectomes (sequences of connections) will be higher than the number of atoms in the universe.
And that's only 50 neurons! Now imagine all the possible circuits that could form 86 billion brain cells with 100 trillion connections. This is an infinite number. At the same time, the number of our sensations is by no means infinite: it is just a tiny subset of what is, in principle, probable. Why? Because our beliefs come to us from experience.
Experience-driven tendencies determine and limit the number of synaptic pathways leading to thoughts and actions. Therefore, the relationship between the stimulus (input) and the resulting neural circuitry (output), which is perception, is limited by the architecture of the brain's network. The resulting electrochemical structure is a direct confirmation of the empirical formation of the brain by trial and error. It is a lattice of possible reactions, created through experience, over time from a second to a millennium, through interaction with a poor and rich environment. And our reflex arcs are limited not only by the body, but also by the environment. Empirical situations layered on human history are passed on in you, which means that much of the experience that shapes the brain of your frog (and turkey) is done without you at all.
Combine your species-level experience with your empirical life story to create your own unique tapestry (or more accurately, a built-in hierarchy of beliefs). They will allow you to survive while at the same time threatening to restrict the electrical flow - that is, the ideas generated by reactions.
In short, beliefs make you who you are. That is, most of what you perceive about your conscious personality will be in jeopardy if at some point it is questioned.
From the book “Refraction. The Science of Seeing Differently. "Bo Lotto.
