One man came up with a long sequence of button-pushing that made no sense to anyone but himself.
One girl came to believe that she had to tap the ceiling a certain number of times to get points.
When she left the room she was exhausted from jumping up and down.
Our brains are meaning machines.
What we understand as “meaning” is generated by the associations our brain makes between two or more experiences.
We press a button, then we see a light go on; we assume the button caused the light to go on.
This, at its core, is the basis of meaning.
Button, light; light, button.
We see a chair.
We note that it’s gray.
Our brain then draws the association between the color (gray) and the object (chair) and forms meaning: “The chair is gray.”
Our minds are constantly whirring, generating more and more associations to help us understand and control the environment around us.
Everything about our experiences, both external and internal, generates new associations and connections within our minds.
Everything from the words on this page, to the grammatical concepts you use to decipher them, to the dirty thoughts your mind wanders into when my writing becomes boring or repetitive—each of these thoughts, impulses, and perceptions is composed of thousands upon thousands of neural connections, firing in conjunction, alighting your mind in a blaze of knowledge and understanding.
But there are two problems.
First, the brain is imperfect.
We mistake things we see and hear.
We forget things or misinterpret events quite easily.
Second, once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold on to that meaning.
We are biased toward the meaning our mind has made, and we don’t want to let go of it.
Even if we see evidence that contradicts the meaning we created, we often ignore it and keep on believing anyway.
The comedian Emo Philips once said,
“I used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body.
Then I realized who was telling me this.”
The unfortunate fact is, most of what we come to “know” and believe is the product of the innate inaccuracies and biases present in our brains.
Many or even most of our values are products of events that are not representative of the world at large, or are the result of a totally misconceived past.
The result of all this? Most of our beliefs are wrong.
Or, to be more exact, all beliefs are wrong—some are just less wrong than others.
The human mind is a jumble of inaccuracy.
And while this may make you uncomfortable, it’s an incredibly important concept to accept, as we’ll see.
The Dangers of Pure Certainty
Erin sits across from me at the sushi restaurant and tries to explain why she doesn’t believe in death.
It’s been almost three hours, and she’s eaten exactly four cucumber rolls and drunk an entire bottle of sake by herself.
(In fact, she’s about halfway through bottle number two now.)
It’s four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.
I didn’t invite her here.
She found out where I was via the Internet and flew out to come find me.
Again.
She’s done this before.
You see, Erin is convinced that she can cure death, but she’s also convinced that she needs my help to do it.
But not my help in like a business sense.
If she just needed some PR advice or something, that would be one thing.
No, it’s more than that: she needs me to be her boyfriend.
Why? After three hours of questioning and a bottle and a half of sake, it still isn’t clear.
My fiancée was with us in the restaurant, by the way.
Erin thought it important that she be included in the discussion; Erin wanted her to know that she was “willing to share” me and that my girlfriend (now wife) “shouldn’t feel threatened” by her.
I met Erin at a self-help seminar in 2008.
She seemed like a nice enough person.
A little bit on the woo-woo, New Agey side of things, but she was a lawyer and had gone to an Ivy League school, and was clearly smart.
And she laughed at my jokes and thought I was cute—so, of course, knowing me, I slept with her.
A month later, she invited me to uproot across the country and move in with her.
This struck me as somewhat of a red flag, and so I tried to break things off with her.
She responded by saying that she would kill herself if I refused to be with her.
Okay, so make that two red flags.
I promptly blocked her from my email and all my devices.
This would slow her down but not stop her.
Years before I met her, Erin had gotten into a car accident and nearly died.
Actually, she had medically “died” for a few moments—all brain activity had stopped—but she had somehow miraculously been revived.
When she “came back,” she claimed everything had changed.
She became a very spiritual person.
She became interested in, and started believing in, energy healing and angels and universal consciousness and tarot cards.
She also believed that she had become a healer and an empath and that she could see the future.
And for whatever reason, upon meeting me, she decided that she and I were destined to save the world together.
To “cure death,” as she put it.
After I’d blocked her, she began to create new email addresses, sometimes sending me as many as a dozen angry emails in a single day.
She created fake Facebook and Twitter accounts that she used to harass me as well as people close to me.
She created a website identical to mine and wrote dozens of articles claiming that I was her ex-boyfriend and that I had lied to her and cheated her, that I had promised to marry her and that she and I belonged together.
One girl came to believe that she had to tap the ceiling a certain number of times to get points.
When she left the room she was exhausted from jumping up and down.
Our brains are meaning machines.
What we understand as “meaning” is generated by the associations our brain makes between two or more experiences.
We press a button, then we see a light go on; we assume the button caused the light to go on.
This, at its core, is the basis of meaning.
Button, light; light, button.
We see a chair.
We note that it’s gray.
Our brain then draws the association between the color (gray) and the object (chair) and forms meaning: “The chair is gray.”
Our minds are constantly whirring, generating more and more associations to help us understand and control the environment around us.
Everything about our experiences, both external and internal, generates new associations and connections within our minds.
Everything from the words on this page, to the grammatical concepts you use to decipher them, to the dirty thoughts your mind wanders into when my writing becomes boring or repetitive—each of these thoughts, impulses, and perceptions is composed of thousands upon thousands of neural connections, firing in conjunction, alighting your mind in a blaze of knowledge and understanding.
But there are two problems.
First, the brain is imperfect.
We mistake things we see and hear.
We forget things or misinterpret events quite easily.
Second, once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold on to that meaning.
We are biased toward the meaning our mind has made, and we don’t want to let go of it.
Even if we see evidence that contradicts the meaning we created, we often ignore it and keep on believing anyway.
The comedian Emo Philips once said,
“I used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body.
Then I realized who was telling me this.”
The unfortunate fact is, most of what we come to “know” and believe is the product of the innate inaccuracies and biases present in our brains.
Many or even most of our values are products of events that are not representative of the world at large, or are the result of a totally misconceived past.
The result of all this? Most of our beliefs are wrong.
Or, to be more exact, all beliefs are wrong—some are just less wrong than others.
The human mind is a jumble of inaccuracy.
And while this may make you uncomfortable, it’s an incredibly important concept to accept, as we’ll see.
The Dangers of Pure Certainty
Erin sits across from me at the sushi restaurant and tries to explain why she doesn’t believe in death.
It’s been almost three hours, and she’s eaten exactly four cucumber rolls and drunk an entire bottle of sake by herself.
(In fact, she’s about halfway through bottle number two now.)
It’s four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.
I didn’t invite her here.
She found out where I was via the Internet and flew out to come find me.
Again.
She’s done this before.
You see, Erin is convinced that she can cure death, but she’s also convinced that she needs my help to do it.
But not my help in like a business sense.
If she just needed some PR advice or something, that would be one thing.
No, it’s more than that: she needs me to be her boyfriend.
Why? After three hours of questioning and a bottle and a half of sake, it still isn’t clear.
My fiancée was with us in the restaurant, by the way.
Erin thought it important that she be included in the discussion; Erin wanted her to know that she was “willing to share” me and that my girlfriend (now wife) “shouldn’t feel threatened” by her.
I met Erin at a self-help seminar in 2008.
She seemed like a nice enough person.
A little bit on the woo-woo, New Agey side of things, but she was a lawyer and had gone to an Ivy League school, and was clearly smart.
And she laughed at my jokes and thought I was cute—so, of course, knowing me, I slept with her.
A month later, she invited me to uproot across the country and move in with her.
This struck me as somewhat of a red flag, and so I tried to break things off with her.
She responded by saying that she would kill herself if I refused to be with her.
Okay, so make that two red flags.
I promptly blocked her from my email and all my devices.
This would slow her down but not stop her.
Years before I met her, Erin had gotten into a car accident and nearly died.
Actually, she had medically “died” for a few moments—all brain activity had stopped—but she had somehow miraculously been revived.
When she “came back,” she claimed everything had changed.
She became a very spiritual person.
She became interested in, and started believing in, energy healing and angels and universal consciousness and tarot cards.
She also believed that she had become a healer and an empath and that she could see the future.
And for whatever reason, upon meeting me, she decided that she and I were destined to save the world together.
To “cure death,” as she put it.
After I’d blocked her, she began to create new email addresses, sometimes sending me as many as a dozen angry emails in a single day.
She created fake Facebook and Twitter accounts that she used to harass me as well as people close to me.
She created a website identical to mine and wrote dozens of articles claiming that I was her ex-boyfriend and that I had lied to her and cheated her, that I had promised to marry her and that she and I belonged together.