Nonsense - Jamie Holmes - Part 1

Nonsense - Jamie Holmes

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 143

  May 23, 2017 

Book 43 - Nonsense - The Power of Not Knowing
Jamie Holmes (2015)
 Part 1 - pages 1-62
Reading Time - 1 hour

This book isn't on my 2017 reading list either but... it looked intriguing and... off we go. So... here's the thing, our brain doesn't like uncertainty (no surprise there). Our mind erects barriers to things that it doesn't know. The trick is to move from stressful apprehension to calm curiosity - to venture into the unknown. We learn way better from calmness than from stress and anxiety. In the face of ambiguity... our minds snap shut. We have a need for closure and if we encounter a partially meaningful situation, one full of ambiguity, our minds will try to find an answer... because any answer is better than no answer and the confusion that comes with that. Some people are intolerant of ambiguity and apparently that is a sign of an unhealthy mind. We have a need to resolve uncertainty and to make sense of nonsense but... what matters most is how we deal with what we don't understand.

Cause the thing is... we see what we expect to see. They've done experiments with playing cards... where the researchers reverse the colour of the suits... so you might get a red spades or a black diamond. They flash these cards to some poor people and see what happens. Turns out our preconceptions actively distort our experiences. Our minds are constantly filtering and simplifying the information with which we are bombarded every day. This filtering is based on a working theory of what we're going to encounter... black spades and red diamonds. When we don't encounter that... our mind either makes us see what we expect or... we just can't compute it. The key here is that belief is the engine that makes perception operate. We have beliefs about the world... and we then "see" things that confirm our beliefs... whether they do or not. Our expectations and assumptions bend and warp the world we see. Which is kind of freaky.

When reality and our views don't line up... we are in an uncomfortable place which is rooted in a cognitive dissonance. A subtle physical anxiety is generated and that motivates us to establish order after encountering disorder. Basically... we have a coherent meaning-making system that responds to incoherence in a predictable sequence:

• some event happens that disturbs our sense of order and consistency
• we enter a state of anxious vigilance and collect clues from our environment
• then can move to assimilate the event (into what we know) or move to accommodation (adjust our beliefs to make it fit)
• then affirm our beliefs and can get more strident in them

This explains why, when our beliefs are challenged, we can get even more intolerant of opposing beliefs and push our point of view even more strongly.