A fundamental error in popular neuropsychology, dating back to Plato’s idea of the soul as driving a chariot pulled by two horses, has created illusions about human cognition which are driving the world of humans out of existence. The greatest illusion is that there is a fundamentally irrational part of the human brain, and a fundamentally rational part. That is not the case though.
Folk psychology and popular science have created a story of a brain that evolved as houses are constructed. First, the basement evolved in reptiles, later the ground floor evolved in mammals, and late in evolution, the first floor evolved in so called higher primates.
It is believed, that all the really dirty stuff is located in the basement. This is where our inner reptile resides, ready to lash out or escape, when something threatening occurs. A little less dirty, yet still quite irrational, is the ground floor. This is supposedly where our inner emotional mammal resides. This part of the brain is termed the limbic system. On top of it all is the first floor. This is the neocortex, and this is where the really smart stuff is supposedly located.
When we react irrationally, it is believed that we were hijacked by one of the other floors in the house. However, the brain is not a house, and nothing is hijacked, because everything we do has a rationale behind it, but rationality is in the eye of the beholder.
The beast in the basement
It is believed that the bottom of the brain, the basement, runs the primitive stuff that has to do with the body, and it is believed that the bulwark against the beast in the basement is the rational first floor of the brain.
This line of thinking divides the body into the primitive and the brain into the sophisticated, but this is a philosophical fantasy with no grounding in biology. From a biopsychological perspective it is obvious that it works the other way. The brain serves the body, so in essence, rationality is in the service of “the beast in the basement”.
We have no default inborn rational system that can keep the inner beast in check, what we have is a sophisticated cognitive system that serves the “inner beast”.
The primary purpose of a central nervous system is to facilitate action in the service of metabolism. How the body is faring, is of the utmost importance to the brain, because without a well-functioning body, there will be no living human.
Dual system thinking, or one system thinking
One popular theory of cognition is the system 1 and system 2 theory. It states that cognition can be intuitive, fast and mostly irrational (system 1) or logic, slow and mostly rational (system 2). This idea was popularized by Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”.
Kahneman´s work builds upon the discoveries that he and his colleague Amos Tversky did in the early 1970s. They discovered that humans were not that rational after all. The rational human, homo economicus, was a common belief at that time, and still is in neoclassical economics.
So called dual process psychologists proposed the idea that there must be two systems in the brain then. Because they could not believe that humans are all irrational. However, there is no reason to believe that we have a default rational system in the brains “first floor”. What Kahneman and Tversky discovered was not a faulty system of the brain, it was a central part of how it works.
Unfortunately, this was not how it all played out. Ancient ideas of cognition and brains did not end at the beginning of the 21st century, in fact, now everybody seems to know and believe them.
The system 2 was quickly connected to the brain’s first floor, the neocortex, and it has informed leadership, politics and mental health work ever since. However, did we get better organizations, better policies, or mentally healthier people in those years? Not really. And perhaps, one of the reasons that we have failed is that the idea of the brain as a house with rational and irrational floors is simply not correct.
The implications of a different brain
The common belief is that we must be as rational as possible, and that the rational resides in the neocortex, the frontal-most part of the brain. However, contemporary computational neuroscience is showing us a very different use of cognition, and a very different type of brain.
It shows us that the purpose of the neocortex is not to control or inhibit the irrational parts of the brain, the purpose of the neocortex is to control that the reality we would prefer, is the reality we get through the senses.
The brain is, in this view, seen as a feedback-control system, which means that it tries to make sure that it gets the feedback it is looking for. Around 80% of neural signals in the brain are feedback-control signals, which means that they go from top to bottom. Hence, more signals travel from the frontal cortex to the senses, than the other way.
This is because the brain does not passively wait for signals from the world, and then generates outputs, it actively looks for signals in the world by engaging the body.
It is, as Jakob Hohwy calls it, self-evidencing. It looks for evidence proving that its beliefs about the world are true. So, if I, for instance, don’t like a colleague, I would automatically and actively look for evidence proving my belief.
This happen because if I can find evidence for my beliefs, it makes the world a predictable place, and predictability means low uncertainty, and the overall computational goal for a living being like me, is to minimize uncertainty by maximizing predictability.
Hence, we do not get hijacked by the amygdala or any other so called “primitive” structure residing in the lower floors of the house, what happens when we react, is that our version of reality was violated and now we are incentivized to bring back events in the world to our preferred state.
The autopilot
What most of us think of as rational, is rational from our perspective. It makes sense, because it is our belief, and our beliefs are rational to us because they make the world predictable from our perspective.
However, what we think is rational thinking, is mostly extremely fast (200-300 millisecond) cognitive appraisals of the world. These appraisals single out what is relevant and what is salient in the environment, and they guide our behavior and thinking, and it is done so fast, that most of the time we don’t even notice.
Cognitive appraisals are being facilitated by cortical networks (top of brain), and when something does not fit the preferred inputs, the brain mobilizes the body to counteract. And this is how most of what we do in life happens: Pretty much on autopilot.
We live most of our lives in the service of the appraisal models we build when we grew up. These models developed to predict sensory input by behaving in certain ways, and these ways of behaving are pretty much what we would do for the rest of our lives, unfortunately without noticing.
The cure
Adult and constructivist developmental theories have for long shown that it is possible to transcend the default autopilot, but not by activating the rational part of the brain, but through development.
Appraisal models change when we change behavior, and we can consciously change behavior, something that most of us probably think we do, but which is not that common, because it demands quite a lot of situational awareness.
We call this action inquiry. It is the ability to become aware of the fast appraisals that run the show most of the time, but without us noticing. However, we cannot do it alone. We need help by being immersed in communities where high-quality feedback and inquiry flows freely.
We cannot think ourselves out of all the problems we have created, because thinking serves “the beast”. Thinking is the result of fast appraisals, not the cure to them. Becoming gradually more aware of how our own cognition actually works, makes it possible for us to notice just how fast our brains try to take control over the situations we find ourselves in.
Our brains serve self-evidencing, and they recruit our consciousness for that purpose. They persistently look for evidence that tells them that they are correct. To break out of that loop, we must actively practice self-awareness individually and in groups, and we must do it most of the time. Because, if we don’t, we are fooled to believe that we are in charge. And this is why the world is such a mess. We are running on autopilot most of the time, and we don’t even know it.