Making sense of making sense
In which we dip our toes into various theories of cognition and try to put them on and see where they lead us.
If I look back at the last several years of my life, I can pinpoint three separate ideas that I have encountered around human cognition that have dramatically reshaped how I see myself and the world:
the concept of “vertical development”
the concept of “bilateral cognition”
the concept of “perception priming”
The curious thing about these ideas is that they don’t fit well together.
Reminds me of how the Standard Model of particle physics and the General Relativity theory of gravitation are both extremely fecund in modeling and predicting the behavior of systems at vastly different scales, but they are largely incompatible with each other. It suggests that there has to be more to this that we’ve yet failed to understand.
I am stupendously unqualified to even attempt to conceive a “grand theory of cognition” which would merge these three concepts into a consistent model. Here, I’m just going to write about them, both to clarify them together for myself and in the hope of triggering some resonance in others.
Vertical Development
I wrote about this before (in Copernican Shifts and in The Hidden Superpower of Separation) so I won’t expand too much on this (go read those posts if you’re intrigued).
The idea of Vertical Development is fascinating to me because it separates “personal growth” into two dimensions: the horizontal one is the one in which are “sensemaking abilities” stay the same but we obtain more information to elaborate with. To me, this feels like a language model which architecture and number of parameters stays the same but gets trained or fine-tuned with more data. The structural capacity stays the same, the pragmatic fitness for a particular activity improves with more data and training.
The vertical axis of development is different: it’s not “more information” but rather a phase transition of the way of making sense of such information. We see this always with children as they get older: they don’t just learn more things but they are able to reason on those things differently. To me, this feels like retraining a different (bigger) model on the same data: the overall sense-making capacity increases. Curiously, when this happens, the pragmatic fitness for a particular activity might actually decrease (!) because now we have more capacity and (relatively) less data to train it with.
Vertical development is often accompanied with a sense of confusion and loss: this additional sense-making capacity is not being put to good use yet. It’s sloshing around. It’s like the cognitive equivalent of that awkward feeling early teens of walking around in a body they don’t recognize as their own anymore because it is changing more rapidly than their own ability to make sense of it.
Bilateral Cognition
The human brain is composed of two hemispheres. These two hemispheres are connected by the “corpus callosum” but the number of connections there is many orders of magnitude different than the interconnections inside the hemispheres. It’s effectively an “hourglass” neural architecture.
The old theory of “left brain logic - right brain emotion” has been consistently debunked, but the book “The Master and his Emissary” depicts a compelling tale of modern neurophysiological insights into how the two hemispheres effectively use different ‘cognition modalities’ to interpret the same information. Making sense of those signals is therefore a battle where the two hemispheres try to compete by inhibiting the interpretation of the other.
The book proposes that these two modalities are dissective for the left hemisphere (trying to make sense by sequencing and abstracting) and wholistic for the right (trying to make sense by embracing the whole, the gestalt). The book’s central thesis is that our society is getting lost because the left hemisphere (the emissary) believes to be good enough to run the show but it’s really the master (the right hemisphere) that should. Unfortunately, modern society prices and rewards dissective sense making rather than the more enlightened gestaltic one.
In all honesty, it doesn’t feel like it matters (at least to me) if the concept of lateralization of brain function is real and such functions are genotypical and persistent. What I found fascinating is the notion that our sense making abilities are effectively the result of an internal battle between two different modalities trying to inhibit the other.
This feels true to me at a deep and fundamental level.
There are meditation techniques that I use to try to at least sense the inhibition imbalance between my two hemispheres and activities that I do that appear to work well at rebalancing them (intense physical activity, most of all).
Perception Priming
The last of the key ideas around cognition revolves around the notion that the stories we tell ourselves about the interpretation of reality shape such interpretation. It is not really “what happens” but “how we interpret what happens” that shapes how we reason about it.
This feels highly counter-intuitive: how is it possible that our interpretations influence our interpretations? isn’t that a chicken-egg problem?
Sensemaking is effectively a repeated game. We don’t just make sense of something and discard it: what we interpret influences us and shapes our further interpretation.
In his exceptionally superb (no, for real) commencement speech titled “This is water” David Foster Wallace pronounces that:
… the real value of a real education that has (almost) nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness. Awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us all the time that we need to keep reminding ourselves: this is water.
Awareness here for him doesn’t just mean paying attention but directing our thoughts. Having control of our attention. Having agency over our own repeated game of interpretations.
David struggled incessantly with this and it’s probably why he was able to describe it in such vivid and poetic terms. It is not without deep sadness that we realize that his own awareness of his need of awareness wasn’t enough to save him from his own mental health daemons.
Now what?
We like to believe that reality is an objective truth and that our sensory journey of trying to make sense of it is equally objective and reproducible: another person, receiving the same inputs, would draw the same conclusions, make sense of them in the same way.
Each of these three idea suggest (even in isolation) how this can’t possibly be the case. We are influenced by our level of cognitive development, the imbalance of our hemispheres and the stories we tell ourselves. That’s even without considering all of the primal needs for basic mental health like sleep, food, shelter, companionship and agency.
So how can we make sense of our ability to make sense? How do these various ideas influence each other?
Can we prime ourselves into more capable forms of development? Can we prime ourselves into a more balanced bilateral stance? Or from a different angle: can a larger sensemaking capacity increase or decrease our ability to retain a balanced bilateral stance for longer?
I am able to make sense of all this just as little as ChatGPT is able to make sense of my attempts to draw it
and yet I feel inexorably drawn by an unquenchable curiosity around all this… to what end? I honestly don’t know.