SSI Thought Letter: Vol. 1 Issue 2
You’ve heard the phrase, “Fox running the henhouse,” and probably seldom gave it a second thought. We viscerally get why we use it in analogy and metaphor. However, there’s cognitive interference, and if we’re not tuned in, we can’t process it to its logical conclusion. The noise of cultural bias can keep us from hearing the whole story.
The most important message gets scrambled. Farmers and foxes have the same objective for the hens and their eggs. Only the particulars of the process are different. The hens get psychological safety from the farmer. The fox provides authenticity. In either case, the hens figure it out in the end, but only then. It’s about outcomes. Outcomes don’t happen until the end, whether for individuals, groups, or organizations. Yet, humans differ from chickens in one important way. We can facilitate desirable outcomes.
This SSI Thought Letter is a first exercise in sociologically “retuning” to demonstrate how we might alter our cognitive landscape for the specific purpose of achieving a different view of the phenomena that affect us. One objective of the Sociological Safety™ concept is to inform an evidence-based approach to improved outcomes (results) and to model measurable progress at sociological levels (process), not merely to achieve an individual safe and enjoyable experience along the way to the rotisserie. This is one facet of SSI, learning to create small models for evidence collection, conducting ourselves as if we were investigators walking the sociological grid.
As mentioned in Issue 1, grammar and syntax play a role in getting to Sociological Safety™ concepts. Unapologetically, this SSI Thought Letter Issue 2 continues to lay a grammatical groundwork for discerning how Sociological Safety™ should figure into life well in advance of the two-minute warning. It starts with a few ways humans collect information.
Seeing Things Differently: “Retuning”
The brain is the most sophisticated object in the known universe. Today, scientists can see what the brain does better than ever. Yet they are still pretty much like chimpanzees in lab coats poking the vast array of elevator buttons in the Burj Khalifa in Dubai to see where it will take them. Scientists using fMRI can see the neuronal arrays light up like elevator buttons and they can make some grand inferences about what the elevator is doing at that moment or guesses about what the elevator will do when they push them. When it comes to information, cognition, and memory, most of our ideas and representations of what the brain actually does and how it does it are sketchy at best, often suspect and debated. SSI will rely on the mainstream metaphors, analogies, representations, illustrations, mental models, and accessible conventional research as a basis for discussions about the brain, mind, and the reality it perceives. They’ll have to do, for now.
The miraculous spherical eyeball provides nearly 180-degrees of our front-facing horizontal field of vision. Our eyes can focus on objects immediately near us and those at a distance. In tandem with the special sensory optic nerve, our eyes can feed the brain-mind tremendous amounts of information continuously. The brain detects it all and then chooses what visual information will register with the conscious mind, deflect, or route elsewhere.
My ophthalmologist explained the brain’s information intake dynamic when I reported a “floater” in my eye. It was disconcerting, but it didn’t threaten my vision upon medical examination. He explained that it would most likely “disappear” in a few months but would still exist within my field of vision. The brain can ignore it, block it out, treat it as “noise,” so I would become unaware of it then remain so.
To accomplish that doesn’t require any training, eye exercises, therapy, or medication. It just happens. If and when I exercise my prerogative to see it, all I have to do is “retune” my brain to focus on it, and I will become visually aware of it any time I wish. It will sometimes wander into my field of vision on its own, but only until I refocus on other matters at hand.
Pretty cool. Happily, that has turned out to be the case, at least for now.
As it happens, that is true for other special sensory functions as well, and for much of the information continuously flowing to us through those special sensory nerves and nerve systems. You’re probably so focused on this incredible inaugural Thought Letter content that you’re not at all aware of the room temperature air moving against the fine hairs on the back of your hand, forearm, or neck or the gentle sound and sensation of your respiration, or the force of 1G of gravity firmly pressing your anatomical feature of choice against the cushion upon which you’re resting.
Well, now you are conscious of it. But not for long.
The brain will reroute all of that into the background momentarily as you retune to focus on this reading. It’s a phenomenon called filtering, or “selective attention.” Our brain/mind can perform this feat of channeling information into the foreground and background in quite a few ways. Not surprisingly, when called upon to do so, the brain can change the way it focuses almost instantaneously to “retune” itself to perceive things, make sense of things, and understand them, sometimes in new ways. Listen to this brief video from Chris Holdgraf ‘explaining how “pop-outs” work and how he recorded a brain “retuning” process as it first fails to pull meaning out of garbled speech but gets retuned (recalibrated) to understand it.
The video shows us a form of reexamination (restatement) that helps us with making sense of something we’ve heard but didn’t understand, getting clarification, then overlaying it on what didn’t make sense to us the first time.
Much of what we take in as ideas (as opposed to hard facts) throughout our educational and professional lives can initially sound garbled, even unintelligible at first exposure. Like when I walked in 15 minutes late to my first Biology 101 class. I walked out 15 minutes early and never returned, but I still remember the complex unintelligible chalkboard and lecture.
Our life’s early education and professional learning curves can be a process fraught with information overload plenty of noisiness in the background. On top of cramming overwhelming amounts of new information for exams or business projects, learning is compounded by the pressing need for speed under time constraints, on top of the routine stresses of daily life.
When we don’t or can’t take the time to go back for clarity, valuable information registers as something more useful than background noise but something less useful than fully encoded concrete knowledge. The memory of its garbled nature gets stored with it, as well. It all becomes part of our experience, like my abandoned first Biology class.
Assumptions appear to compensate for seeming information gaps by filling in the blanks to help process what we’re seeing for retention when we don’t truly “get it” but assume it must be meaningful. We do roughly the same thing visually, filling in with “pattern-seeking.” Researchers find that “the brain does not simply process or filter external information, but also actively interprets it” on the fly.
Pattern seeking involves interpretation, which is rooted in our experience-based assumptions. That helps us to conclude how the brain manages its bandwidth. It has upper (too much) and lower (insufficient) input control limits, at which point it handles information differently than it does within the “just right” band. The brain filters out extraneous information near the upper limit. It supplies “missing” information near the lower limit by interpreting what’s there.
We’re not always able to interpret on the first run. Holdgraf demonstrates a similar phenomenon involving auditory interpretation. He confirms, “Your brain tries to get around the problem of too much information by making assumptions about the world,” Holdgraf said. “It says, ‘I am going to restrict the many possible things I could pull out from an auditory stimulus so that I don’t have to do a lot of processing.’ By doing that, it is faster and expends less energy.” Once shown what’s important, the brain intelligently recognizes and subordinates the extraneous information and adroitly processes and subsumes the speech information in the auditory signal in a way that makes sense in our broader linguistic experience.
We live with a torrent of sensory input. Our brain-mind filters, sorts, interprets, categorizes, and stores it. The brain enables us to use it for reasoning and decisions consistent with immediate, near-term, and long-term goals. The brain routes it all into conscious or subconscious levels then files it away. We budget our conscious bandwidth, devoting the closest attention to information relevant to our needs, leaving the filing and encoding of the rest to subconscious processes.
What about when it’s time to get information back out?
Memory/information retrieval and recall has a process as well. We’re seldom called upon to remember, rethink, or even challenge everything we know, but it does happen occasionally. On a day-to-day basis, though, every idea we’ve ever picked up in school, in our professional learning circles, and daily life is still safely tucked away in there. As marvelous as our brains are, there is no exit. We can’t eject what we’ve taken into it, even from childhood. So it’s all there, waiting to be triggered for shipment to the brain’s memory recall loading dock.
However, with experience and history at our backs, when the occasion to make a decision arises, we can retrieve information, old and more recent, recall what we know of its validity, combine them with what we’re seeing now, apply it to current needs or goals, calculate the possible outcomes under current circumstances. Suddenly we can hear or see old information, especially ideas, with new clarity. No longer garbled or unintelligible background noise, as it may have once been, it all combines in a way that it now makes sense to us. We might encounter a circumstance that prompts us to recall something our parents told us decades ago and think, “Oh! So that’s what they meant!”
In some cases, perhaps we understood basics, but not higher-level meaning and application. We struggled with the real sense and application of concepts, maybe for years (or simply buried them out of range for our routine thought processes) until our cumulative knowledge and experience provided the basis for “retuning.” We achieve a “pop up” [eureka!] moment when we “get it.”
If there ever was a time when a “pop up” was needed, 2020 was it. The Diversity Paradigm’s biggest flaw may have been creating more cognitive “noise” than either solutions or even accidental relative safety. In our next issue, we’ll share an InclusiveWorks pop-up that will demonstrate a way to cut through a good deal of noise and increase the clarity of the more important informational signals we receive day to day in our work and lives.
“Why do people create extra representations to help them make sense of situations, diagrams, illustrations, instructions and problems? The obvious explanation — external representations save internal memory and computation — is only part of the story. (“Kirsh, D. Thinking with external representations.” AI & Soc 25, 441–454 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-010-0272-8)
The next issue of SSI Thought Letter will continue with this topic to help us “retune” and better understand the real-world implications of Sociological Safety® with external representations. The objective is so that “all us chickens” in our respective henhouses can better distinguish the foxes from the farmers, with a retuned view of our future.
