Is Seeing Believing?

I had just been initiated into Transcendental Meditation and was very enthusiastic about it. So when during a train journey in India I found myself sitting beside a saffron-clad Hindu monk, i started a conversation with him hoping he would have some insights to share. The swami, who happened to be an ayurvedic physician too, instead began a lengthy discourse on the Indian system of medicine while I impatiently looked for a chance to interrupt. When he stopped for breath I pressed in my favorite topic.

   "Swamiji, what do you think of Transcendental Meditation?" 

He replied gravely, "It is a serious disease but ayurveda has very good medicines for it." Then he continued about the cases of tuberculosis he had treated.

It is possible that in the din of the running train he misheard me. Much more likely, his ears did catch my words correctly, but so involved was his brain at that moment with medical matters, that any sensory input presented to it got processed that way. In other words he was experiencing what psychologists would call a perceptual set or more informally a "mindset." 

Trivial as it is, this incident could be a pointer to some of the more serious problems facing the human species as a whole. Do notions in our minds sometimes make us perceive things differently from what they really are, leading to erroneous judgments and actions? If so, can we do anything about it? Before going further, let us consider the graphic below.

What does it appear to be? Most people would first spot the cup in the center or the human faces framing it. But (try as we can) we cannot see the cup and the faces at the same moment ­–– though we can quickly flip back and forth between them. This is because the picture is only suggestive and it takes some organized effort on the part of the brain to perceive it as a cup or the human faces. Once the brain has become "set" in seeing the cup, it cannot see the faces and vice versa. It may also make us forget another fact –– the cup and the faces are purely the creations of our minds.

What happens in the instance above is that our senses have a straightforward job to just capture outside stimuli such as light and sound which they convert into electrical impulses and feed to the brain. The brain initiates a checking and cross checking process. Within a split second the new information is compared with the already stored memory bank from past experiences. The object is thus identified and the brain sends commands to the rest of the body to make appropriate responses. The accuracy of this identification and the appropriateness of our response depends on how correctly the comparison has been done.

Though this process is practical enough for everyday life, there are occasions when it can hamper us from experiencing and reacting to reality. 

For instance, a mindset can make us mistake a white shirt on a clothesline for a ghost. All that the eye picks up may be a fluttering flash of white. It is the brain that goes through its "ghost database" and plumps up the stark visual input with those extra qualities appropriate for a ghost. The person "sees" the ghost and panics.

Creativity versus mind set

The stimulus-response nature of mindsets also affects the higher faculties of the brain by pre-empting creative thought sometimes under the guise of common sense. If Isaac Newton had such common sense perhaps he would have just eaten the apple that fell on his head and resolved never to sit under laden apple trees again. Similarly, young Albert Einstein wouldn't have pestered his elders with naive questions about time and space. 

Fortunately Newton and Einstein had the depth and freedom of perception far beyond common sense and mankind has been the gainer. In fact Einstein once recapitulated with endearing humility how he came upon his theory of relativity. "My intellectual development was so slow that by the time I started wondering about space and time those of my age had already outgrown it. Naturally I could go deeper into these than they could at a younger age." Outgrown is correct. We do become more prone to mindsets as we grow older.

In creative people mindsets occasionally get resolved through a dramatic process called "insight." The person thinks and thinks about a problem for days and weeks and despairs. Suddenly in a flash the solution appears, often so simple that he wonders why he never thought of it before. 

Here's a little test. Try joining all the nine dots by four straight lines without lifting the pencil off the paper once you start. If you are like most of us, you would have spent an amazing amount of time trying to solve the problem with lines that stay within the imaginary square formed by the group of dots. That square is the mind set. Once that is got over with, the rest is quite easy. It is this ability to overcome the automatic influences of past experiences that makes creativity possible. The solution is at the end of this article.

 

 

A famous mind-set victim

Too much scholarship in one direction can lead to mindsets, a potential pitfall for a seeker of truth, whether a scientist or a philosopher. Oddly, the greatest psychologist of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud, stumbled into it. Freud's brilliant theory of psychoanalysis had won him many disciples, thrilled with this new adventure of the mind. However, by and by he grew so fond of his theories that he found it difficult to tolerate significant improvements in them and started expecting his students to believe his views like religious dogmas. Fortunately Freud's followers too had bright, enquiring minds which permitted psychoanalysis to grow and branch off instead of getting fossilized. 

Freud on TIME cover
at the height of his
popularity in the 1920s.

Possibly Freud’s mindset had another origin too. He had permitted his theories to be identified with himself and thus unconsciously felt any attack on them as a personal attack on him. This must have triggered strong retaliatory feelings––the same way we feel deeply hurt when any concept we identify ourselves with, such as our sexual identity or religion, is questioned. Removing mind sets becomes doubly difficult once strong feelings get attached to them. If Freud, with all his intuitive grasp of the puzzles of the brain could become a victim, what about us, lesser mortals? 

The fact is that mind-sets affect us much more than we realize. Many can be triggered to very early childhood. Origins obscured, we may feel, think and unwittingly behave under their influence assuming we are being rational. 

Among the deepest, earliest and strongest of such mindsets are our perceptions of what we are. We form such naïve perceptions during childhood –– even form a life plan! –– and spend the rest of our lives living up to them, as if under their spell. This is the basis of Transational Analysis (TA), founded by Eric Berne who explained the whole concept in his best seller "Games People Play". TA offers a good explanation of why some people are consistent winners, some others consistent losers and still others seem to change their orientation drastically in midlife, as if under a strange spell. TA gives rational explanation for "fate." Our fate is not written before our birth. We ourselves write it as small children and then forget about them, but still follow them, spellbound. TA calls our childhood mental programming which relentlessly leads us to a preplanned fate, our "life script", which we achieve through our everyday actions by playing constructive and destructive "games" over and over again. Enacted repeatedly, these games powerfully reinforce our mind-sets about ourselves, binding us more and more to our self-composed fate.

Bound down by intense feelings these deep mindsets are the hardest bugs to remove––even to find. We may have to dig deeply down to their roots and weed them out. TA tries to do that by analyzing our everyday interactions with others and give suggestions to modify them so as to change our "script." While TA does a good job of identifying them it is not nearly as successful in removing them. Why? Due to a sad truth: *the vast majority of people who suffer, deep down, do not want to change. They want to remain with their mind sets.*

Our daily interactions are mostly with other people. This causes mutual reinforcement of each others' mindsets. This gets spread over to the larger society, which plays its role by reinforcing mindsets, many of them destructive. If everyone around us keeps perceiving and thinking the way we do, we get added confirmation that we are right. This is how social evils like caste system and sexism still linger on in spite of all scientific evidence to the contrary.

Incidentally, another myth created by overzealous democrats is “everyone is equal.” The error of social mindsets such as caste in India is that they stifle individual potential by assuming that each person is fit only for a prefixed duty in life. Over the centuries this caused an enormous wastage of talent and is the main cause of the backwardness of South Asia. 

One important reason for the tenacity of such social evils is that they facilitate people in power. Politicians and religious leaders are quick to emphasize them to motivate people in the direction they want. Trifling with such emotion-charged mindsets can be lethal as history has proved time and again.

 Mindsets are Not Always Bad!

Despite the havoc they wreak, mindsets do have some important functions and help our survival individually and socially. Social mindsets give stability and direction to society. It is when stability turns to rigor mortis and direction a blind one-way, it would be time to examine the relevance of the mindset which caused it. Intelligent vigil and self-examination help, by giving us the freedom to choose what to keep and what to discard. 

At personal levels too, mindsets are not that bad. They get us through the routine chores of life with minimum time and energy (habits) and help us avoid the plight of the centipede that
Wondered which leg came after which
And so lay distracted in a ditch.

An everyday example of the usefulness of mindsets is in front of us right now––the ability to read fast. If you are not so sure, stare at any long word on the screen for a few minutes. You may find the word slowly losing its meaning and becoming a jumble of letters. Staring at an individual letter can cause the letter to start to look unfamiliar. (Incidentally, the more familiar the word and older you are, the more time it would take for the meaning to disappear.) This happens because we have learned to associate a word with an idea (often a picture), an association which becomes increasingly persistent as we grow older. The letters which constitute the word act as a combined trigger to retrieve the idea from the filing cabinets of our brains. Thus we can perceive either the letter, or the idea, but NOT both at the same time –– just like that picture of the cup and the faces!

Had we no such mindset, we would have to mentally trace the shape of each letter, then assemble them into a word, then search for its meaning ...

… and it would take weeks to read this.

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This work (text only) by Sajjeev Antony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.