Environmental Factors

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 
own were; any man's death diminishes me, 
because I am involved in mankind. 
And therefore never send to know for whom 
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne

Growing up, who did you parents vote for? Which news programs did they watch and what comments did they make? What kind of neighborhood did you live in? All of these contributed to how you view the world. When people are exposed over and over again to what their parents and friends say, to the way news and media they watch presents information, to the way people are living in their town or city, our brain wiring gets reinforced in particular ways. Most of us go through life unaware that the reality we experience is subjectively our own and is based on how environmental factors as well as genetics shape how our brains interpret the stimuli around us. In a certain sense, the idea that each of us is a discreet individual with complete autonomy of will is false. Each of us is an open system both being influenced by and influencing others.

Reality as a negotiated social construct

We each think we have a privileged, objective view of reality, i.e., we think our own reality is the only correct one, because our reality is all we know.

  • We each think we have a privileged, objective view of reality, i.e., we think our own reality is the only correct one, because our reality is all we know. Convincing someone to take a different opinion using facts that contradict their own experience is so difficult in part because our facts are sourced from what they would consider the unprivileged reality of the other person. In other words, my reality is at odds with theirs so they must be either stupid or crazy. How many times have you had a conversation with someone who had a different worldview and after making your argument you thought (but hopefully didn’t express) “You idiot!”?

    Reality, in fact, is negotiated which means we cannot possibly understand each other unless we understand that each of us experiences it differently. Further, we cannot engage with others to co-create a new reality unless we realize that no one’s view is more privileged than another’s. Whether we agree with someone or not, we all think the way we do for a reason and those reasons are largely driven by the particular ways in which our brains attend to and process information and the particular kinds of information we are exposed to.

Groupthink

Our own individual thoughts can sometimes be abandoned in favor of the group’s.

  • Todd Rose, in his book Collective Illusions, discusses the ways in which our own individual thoughts can sometimes be abandoned in favor of the group’s. For example, when we see a number of people acting the same in a certain way we assume they know something we do not and we then tend to go along with it. This can sometimes be a good thing like when someone spots a shark and runs out of the water and everyone else starts running too. This “conformity bias”, however, can also have significant negative consequences, especially in an age of social media where viewpoints can get magnified and reach larger numbers of people. These days, all it take is a few people with bad information or who are intentionally lying to influence entire populations. After all, someone with a million views can’t be wrong. Can they? Further, our need to belong is so powerful that rather than question the accuracy of the information we are receiving if it is coming from a source we identify with, we will jump through all sorts of mental hoops to accept the information at face value. Or, at the very least, if we do know better, we stay silent. To not accept the information, means we could be shunned or cancelled by the group. This is partly why things like election and climate denialism flourish despite zero evidence of the former, and irrefutable evidence of the latter.

We are a lot like fish. If you ask a fish, “How’s the water?” it will ask in turn, “What water?” The fish simply cannot conceive of any other environment.

Neuroplasticity and Environmental Factors

Our brains are not static. Over time, neuronal connections in the brain can change because our brains have plasticity. Like paths in a forest, those used most become clearer and more likely to be traveled while those used less frequently become less clear and less likely to be traveled.

  • Our brains are not static. Over time, neuronal connections in the brain can change because our brains have plasticity. It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but at the heart of neuroplasticity is Hebbs’ Rule. Hebb’s Rule essentially states “nerves that fire together wire together”. Adjacent nerves that fire in a given repeated sequence over time will form stronger connections. The result of this is that many of our thoughts become habituated, i.e., automatic. This is often a good thing because it saves energy and time. It is why with a lot of practice athletes can make things look effortless. At the same time, this process is responsible for the cognitive distortions that cause us a great deal of trouble.

    Plasticity is self-reinforcing in that frequently used mental pathways cause us to attend to information that bolsters those pathways while ignoring information that does not. Conversely, the neural pathways related to the information that gets ignored, get weaker.

    Can you see how these days, news and social media reinforce how our brains are wired? They offer strongly confirmatory information while also making contrary information seem scarier than it is. Our thoughts, much like choosing a path to go down, will most often, unless we are fans of Robert Frost, chose the circuit more traveled by. With an estimated 95% of our brain activity taking place automatically and out of our conscious awareness we are strongly susceptible to manipulation because we do not know when it is happening.

Our real hope: Meta-cognition

The good news, the thing that separates us fromsheep, is our ability to think about how we think, a.k.a. meta-cognition. We humans have the ability to surface the unconscious processes that drive many of our behaviors such that we become less susceptible to the environmental forces influencing us. With practice, we can make ourselves aware of the ways in which we are channeled into adopting narrowly defined viewpoints. With some effort, meta-cognition and neuroplasticity gives us the ability to actually rewire our brains. In other words, we can habituate new ways of perceiving the world such that we can consciously evolve into a less tribal and more empathic society.