Can the walls come tumbling down?

Big Frank hosted the Social Adventurer's Meetup at his home. The discussion centered on the genuinely sane person as personified in the article by S.I. Hayakawa. Big Frank is not going to try to summarize the entire discussion of the group. However, he will center his few comments on issures relating to "walls". Hayakawa contrasts two forms of security: the static and the dynamic. "The static concept of security may be pictured by thinking of the oyster inside its shell, the frightened person behind his neurotic defenses. The main idea in the static concept of security is to build up lots of protective walls and then to sit still inside thim. The search for security for many people is the task of building and mending walls around oneself. On the other had, the genuinely sane person - the fully functional person, is capable of letting the walls come down, of not relying on set phrases, inflexible rules - never do this, or avoid that. They admit that each person, each situation, differs from its previous manifestion, and they allow for flexibility and change. The 'normal' (not fully functional person) deals with people and situation, not as they are, but via rigid categories that they impose on them. For them the map is the territory, people never change, situations are only what they first appear, and what happened in the past will always happen again. These are not realities encountered in life, they are only encountered behind rigid defensive walls of those living behind static lines of defense - people who don't experience life as it is, but rather as it is in their minds. It is the difference between a person who lives in a catalogue that freezes people, situations and relationships in predetermined categories (abstactions rule here not facts), and those who allow for change, for differences, and for truth to emerge - a truth beyond their preconceptions, a truth that exits outside their walls. In this case, as the group discovered, that defensive person maintains their vulnerable self-concept, impregnable behind its defensive walls, but living in a fictional world completely unconnected from realty and all the richness of life that comes with it.

Thinking and Choking

Big Frank is reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer - a book on understanding human decision-making. He makes use of recent findings in neuroscience in showing how it is that we make decisions. One of the interesting aspects of this is the interplay between emotional and rational choices. Sometimes the emotional comes quickly (the intuitive option) but often our rational side mistrusts that and begins to analyze us into error. As Lehrer puts it: "(One of the problems with feelings is that even when they are accurate they can still be hard to articulate.) Instead of going with the option of what feels best, a persons starts going with the option that sounds the best, even if it's a very bad idea."

In the mid 1980s Consumer Reports rated over 40 strawberry jams and ranked their results from 1 to 40. A California psychologist then tried a similar experiment with his graduate students. He chose four jams that had been rated 1st, 11th, 24th, 32nd, and 44th by the experts and asked his students to rank them. His students ranked the jams in the exact same order as the experts. Then he asked a different group of students to write out criteria to be used in ranking the jams and then to rank them. These students ended up ranking the jams in the exact reverse order - the worst as best and vice-versa.

What's going on here? The psychologist explained it this way: "that 'thinking too much' about strawberry jam causes us to focus on all sorts of variables that don't really matter. Instead of just listening to our instinctive preferences - the best jam is associated with the most positive feelings - our rational brain search for reasons to prefer one jam to another." People talk themselves in to liking the the worst over the best - they trip over their own minds: they choke. They relied too much on their rational brain, proving that there is such a thing as too much analysis, and this cuts one off from the wisdom of the emotions, "which are actually much better at assessing actual preferences."