On Being Certain – Robert Burton – Lazy Book Review #2

See, I’ve been wanting to write something about Robert Burton’s book for ages.

In my personal exploration of how to Be Less Certain, I was thrilled to find a book on that very topic, seeing as I have a hunch (!) that being less certain can help us to reduce fighting and freaking-out in our lives.

My copy has been sitting here for weeks all underlined and everything.

Except, because it’s a whole book on one of ‘my’ principles/keys/habits/things, I’ve been feeling that I need to write something comprehensive and book-review-ish.

Well, sod that.

Here’s my second Lazy Book Review – which is basically the bits of the book I underlined.

(The headings are the chapter headings.)

I have zero idea if this kind of ‘review’ is useful for anyone else apart from me, but, hey ho. It is very far from a balanced summary of the book, just stuff that stood out.

If you’re interested in cognition, certainty, faith, knowing, conflict and the brain, it’s a good read.

If you’re going to buy it from your local bookseller, please go ahead.

If, however you were going to buy it from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, please use those links, then they pay me a few cents/pennies at no cost to you.

(What? It took me ages to type this – not on my Kindle, you know – I don’t get to get paid for that?)

Note: This turned out to be ridiculously long, so this is part one of indeterminate parts. La la la.

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On Being Certain – Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not – Robert A. Burton, M.D.

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Preface

The revolutionary premise at the heart of this book is:

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing what we know’ arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love and anger, function independently of reason.

The Feeling of Knowing

For simplicity, I have chosen to lump together the closely allied feelings of certainty, rightness, conviction, and correctness under the all-inclusive term, the feeling of knowing. Whether or not these are separate sensations or merely shades or degrees of a common feeling isn’t important. What they do share is a common quality: Each is a form of meta-knowledge – knowledge about knowledge – that qualifies or colors our thoughts, imbuing them with a sense of rightness or wrongness.

The feeling of knowing is also commonly recognized by its absence.

How Do We Know What We Know?

Should the remedy for the absence of the feeling of knowing be more conscious effort and hard thought, or less? Or are both of these common teachings at odds with the more basic neurobiology?

In 1957, Stanford professor of social psychology Leon Festinger introduced the term cognitive dissonance to describe the distressing mental state in which people find themselves doing things that don’t fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold.

Festinger’s seminal observation: The more committed we are to a belief, the harder it is to relinquish, even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. Instead of acknowledging an error in judgment and abandoning the opinion, we tend to develop a new attitude or belief that will justify retaining it.

The most striking shared characteristic of delusional misidentification syndromes is that the conflict between logic and a contrary feeling of knowing tends to be resolved in favor of the feeling. Rather than rejecting ideas and beliefs that defy common sense and overwhelming contrary evidence, such patients end up using tortured logic to justify the more powerful sense of knowing what they know.

Conviction isn’t a choice

Neurologists now accept that the amygdala is necessary for the expression of fear. But the study of mental states that defy precise classification – such as deja vu or a sense of dread – is much more difficult. We have problems both in what to call them and how to standardize our observations. It is easy to recognize a scared rat, but a rodent’s sense of alienation is less obvious.

The Classification of Mental States

The behavioral neurologist Antonio Damasio sums up our present state of ignorance. “Deciding what constitutes an emotion is not an easy task, and once you survey the whole range of possible phenomena, one does wonder if any sensible definition of emotion can be formulated, and if a single term remains useful to describe all these states. Others have struggled with the same problem and concluded that it is hopeless.”

During the height of his mental illness, Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash believed that aliens from outer space were trying to communicate with him. He could not accept a full professorship at MIT because “I am scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.” When a colleague asked him how such a brilliant and logical man could believe such nonsense, Nash replied that both ideas had come to him in the same way. Both thoughts felt right.

And the converse: If you’ve known someone with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), you have seen how they cannot rely upon what they should know to be true. They will repeatedly check the oven to be sure the gas is off, triple-check the locks that they can easily see are already locked, or count and recount their change. It is as though objective evidence cannot trigger a proper feeling of knowing, leaving OCD victims in a state of heightened doubt and anxiety.

Psychologists have recently begun to consider the role of pathological certainty and pathological uncertainty as they relate to schizophrenia and OCD. Both mental disorders have a significant genetic contribution. Could genetic differences play a role in how easily one becomes “convinced” or remains “unconvinced”?

Modularity and Emergence

In Artificial Intelligence models – which are extraordinarily simple in relationship to the most primitive animal brain – the conversion of lower-level information into the final image is accomplished via a series of mathematical calculations within the hidden layer of the neural networks. The precise mechanisms remain a profound mystery and the key to understanding how consciousness arises out of “mindless” neurons.

The feeling of knowing is universal, most likely originates within a localized region of the brain, can be spontaneously activated via direct stimulation or chemical manipulation, yet cannot be triggered by conscious effort. These arguments for its inclusion as a primary brain module are more compelling that those postulated for deceit, compassion, forgiveness, altruism, or Machiavellian cunning. One can stimulate the brain and produce a feeling of knowing; one cannot stimulate the brain and create a politician.

Perceptual Thoughts: A Further Clarification

Spend time reminiscing with a sibling and chances are that you will uncover dissimilar acccounts of what you thought were shared childhood… I have a friend whose sister published her memoir of her childhood; while reading it, my friend kept checking the jacket photo to be sure that it was his sister who had written the book… None of us have an instinctual belief that our memories are this fragile.

The Pleasure of Your Thoughts

Stick the most rational of the rationalists in a poker game, hook up a lie detector to his subconscious, and you will hear the silent supplications. Oh, poker lord, give me an ace.

According to the tortured odds of wishful thinking, the knowledge that nearly everyone else has lost only means that your chances of winning must be greater. (“Let’s play that slot machine. It hasn’t paid off in days, so it must be due.”)

The general principle equally applicable to the worst cocaine addiction, stamp collecting, or idle musings is that for a behavior to persist, there must be some brain-mediated reward.

If through snap judgement or insightful deliberation, you avoid a charging, hungry lion by scurrying up a tree, you have concrete evidence of the value of your thoughts. The lion slinks away and settles on gazelle tartare for lunch You climb down from the tree feeling that you have learned something. The feeling of knowing and the decision to climb the tree become linked together in the neural network labeled “what to do in the case of a charging lion.”

The feeling of knowing and the related feelings of familiarity are as integral to learning as the visual system is to seeing, the olfactory system is to smell, as basic as mechanisms for fight or flight. Feelings of strangeness and unfamiliarity can warn us that we are making a wrong turn in our thinking.

Thoughts have become more complex and abstract; much of what we think about today has no clear answer, no obvious cause-and-effect result, and isn’t easily measurable.

Our Catch-22: In order to pursue a new thought, we must feel the thought is worth pursuing before we have an supporting evidence or justification.

Otherwise, we would only consider ideas we already know to be correct. But what would the reward be for a new or unique idea? We talk of the pleasure of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but this presumes that what you are acquiring is bona fide knowledge. Proceeeding without any sense of a thought’s value isn’t a high-priority activity… “What’s the point?” is nothing more than thought’s reward system switched to off.

Most physiological reward systems are measured with a stopwatch, not a calendar. With fight or flight, you know pronto whether running away was the right choice. Cocaine and gambling are now rewards. No one ever listened to Bach with the goal of experiencing enjoyment in a month, or told a joke to make you laugh next year.

The problem [with pursuing an unproven thought] is that we need a reward strong enough to tide us over until our thoughts can be verified. And, to be convincing, it must feel similar to the feeling we get when we know a thought is correct and can prove it (As in getting the right phone number).

Enter a spectrum of bridging motivations ranging from hunches and gut feelings to faith, belief, and profound certainty… Say hello to abstract thought’s subliminal cheerleader.

A central conflict of civilization – basic urges versus more level-headed and considered responses – is ultimately a contest between immediate pleasures and longer-term rewards.

In order to pursue long range thoughts, we must derive sufficient reward from a line of reasoning to keep at the idea, yet remain flexible and willing to abandon the idea once there is contrary evidence. But if the process takes time and a repeated sense of reward develops, the neural connections binding the thought with the sensation of being correct will gradually strengthen. Once established, such connections are difficult to undo. Anyone who’s played golf knows how difficult it is to get rid of a slice or a hook.

Once firmly established, a neural network that links a thought and the feeling of correctness is not easily undone. An idea known to be wrong continues to feel correct.

Might the know-it-all personality trait be seen as an addiction to the pleasure of the feeling of knowing?

[Richard Ebstein's] hypothesis is that people engage in more risky or exciting behavior in order to stimulate a less responsive dopamine-based reward system.

If the fundamental thrust of education is “being correct” rather than acquiring a thoughtful awareness of ambiguities, inconsistencies, and underlying paradoxes, it is easy to see how the brain reward systems might be molded to prefer certainty over open-mindedness.

Can we learn to sense greater pleasure out of feelings of doubt in the way that some people derive more pleasure from questions than answers?

The feeling of knowing, the reward for both proven and unproven thoughts, is learning’s best friend, and mental flexibility’s worst enemy.

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And now? A pretty butterfly. Look…!

*embarrassed at the depths of his nerdiness*