In the Beginning
We begin with the issue of thinking. Life thinks! All microbes [single celled living entities] strive to survive, meaning that they must make decisions; ergo think. However, none of these entities have either a brain or a mind – so no one really knows how this thinking happens. There is some evidence that certain subatomic particles also make decisions; for example, photons (light) both goes through a window and reflects off a window. Since there is no known difference between one photon and another, how does the decision get made?
The overriding task of the mind is to produce the next action.
The Organized Entity
Plants and animals of all types make decisions as well – some with brains and some not. So, there is a range of mind activity from very simple to very complex. In life, there is an organizing principle which we will refer to as Mind. The Mind is metaphysical, as opposed to the brain, which is a physical organ. The brain is a tool which carries out the Mind’s expectations. While the Mind has powerful attributes for achieving and sustaining a serene and useful life, in human beings, it also carries some downside. Our concern is with how human beings develop their minds and discover what works and what does not.
What is reality and how do you know what is true? Social media has emphasized what we always knew – some people have some strange beliefs? How do you know that what you believe is sound? The fact is that none of us really knows. Human beings are not proficient at birth and have a long period of learning ahead of them to reach competency. How and what they learn is important.
At birth, a human brain has both dedicated and uncommitted space. The dedicated space [approximately 25%] is prepared to immediately take over the automated sensory and motor functions. Lungs and livers, unless deformed are ready to go. However, while the 75% remaining space is uncommitted – it is functional. It is filled with unconnected and therefore uncommitted neurons. All that is required to connect them is a thought. Once a thought occurs, the neurons connect up in a manner that enables the thought.
Rethinking Consciousness Pages 140 – 141 Adapted
The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons. It may contain about 100 trillion synapses, possibly even ten time as many. In theory then, each neuron has up to 116300 [11630000] synaptic choices available to it. While the principle behind neural networks is that each neuron is extremely simple, but when they are connected together in large numbers, they are capable of great computational power. At a fundamental level, a neuron does nothing more than send a signal. Suppose neuron A is connected by a synapse to neuron B. When A becomes active, it fires off an electrical signal that travels down its length, reaches the synapses, moves across through a chemical messenger, and affects B. If the synapse is excitatory, then the signal boosts an undercurrent of activity already present in neuron B, which becomes a little more likely to fire its own signal. If the synapse is inhibitory, then the signal that moves across will suppress neuron B, which becomes a little less likely to fire off a signal of its own.
Synapses can also vary in strength, some of them able to pass a stronger signal, allowing neuron A to have a greater impact on neuron B, and some of them weaker such that neuron A might have almost no effect on neuron B. At the most reductionist level, this synaptic influence of neuron A on neuron B is all that happens, repeated trillions of times in a large interactive net. Each neuron receives inputs from as many as 100,000 other neurons.
The job of each neuron is to count up those incoming signals and make a decision: given the barrage of input, all the excitatory and inhibitory chatter, the yesses and the nos pouring in at a moment in time, do the yeas or the nays have it? If the yeas have it, then the neuron fires off its own signal to affect the larger network. Each neuron’s job is to make that one decision over and over. Out of that seeming chaos of repeating simplicity comes complex computation.
Commentary
The simple neuron therefore not only decides yes or no, it grades the weight of its conviction and selects the proper channel to indicate this weight. Since the neuron may have to respond a number of times to a single decision after receiving hundreds of thousands of other opinions, it may change the strength, or even the decision, based on the information it receives. All of this happens, of course, in microseconds.
We will not, in this space speculate on the origin of thought, except to state that the Mind, as the organizing principle of the living entity, instigates the direction (will, intent) of the living entity and therefore, the thoughts.
Chains of neurons connect in order to carry out the effects of the thought. Throughout life, these neural networks will connect and reconnect to create an individual reality, based not on what exists, but on how the individual interprets his or her experiences of what exists. Interpretation [decision making] is the key. While a dictionary may indicate that interpret means to explain the meaning – interpret here means to give meaning. We must find a meaning that satisfies or at least satisfices [good enough] our own needs. Thus, a judgement or a decision is made about what the experience means.
Such decisions start while the fetus is still in the womb and continue until an hypothesis is created and tested and a ‘theory’ is accepted which gives the individual a personally accepted reality [a model of the world and their place in it, which provides the basis for how they will act]. This theory is usually fulfilled sometime between four and seven years of age. Very young for such an important process and consequence. At this point the process changes from a bottom-up to a top-down methodology and a confirmation bias is used to preserve what we believe. As we shall see, there is an ability to accommodate or adapt to new ideas, but habit can be a problem.
Mind operates on sensations to create information for its own use.
The Process
Notification
The living entity must first have a connection to both inside the body and the outside environment. Human beings do this through their sensory apparatus of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. However, while the senses record enormous amounts of information, we become aware of very little. For example, according to Ray Kurtzweil, this symbolic evidence is limited indeed.
“… what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just a series of outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field. … the optic nerve carries ten to twelve output channels, each of which carries only a small amount of information about a given scene.” “These 12 pictures of the world constitute all the information we will ever have about what’s out there …. We then essentially hallucinate the world from cortical memories ….” Since the other senses are equally parsimonious, we subconsciously take in a great deal of information, but only a minimal amount of it arouses interest. Thus, we are required to abstract the meaning of an experience through a gestalt process.
Gestalt: “The quality of perceiving a complex organization of things or events as an organized whole and also as more than the sum of the parts.”
Perception: The function of abstracting
Only in the case of the so-called ‘lowest’ sense does one find that, a sensation can travel from the receptor to the mind without undergoing a process of evaluation or interpretation in some way. What our sensory and nervous mechanisms, optical and auditory, convey to us is invariably the product of highly complex if totally nonconscious computations which seek to abstract from the chaos of accidental sensory data those data which are constantly coherent in that transsubjective reality which, as we hypothetical realists assume, lies behind sense data.
The essential function of this ‘unconscious reasoning’, lies in establishing a correlation or constellation of certain stimulus data which remain constant in time, and to do this reliably enough to make these patterns recognizable, a process Karl Popper has termed ‘pattern matching’. This basic process of cognition consists in matching a configuration prevailing in incoming sensory data with a corresponding pattern existing in our own central nervous system.
The performance of our computing mechanism consists in making our perception and recognition of objects independent of the need for these impossible conditions of absolute identity. In the strict physiological sense, the actual stimulus is simply light that falls on a rod or cones cell. But our perception of patterns involves a process which is the equivalent of abstraction. – we are dealing solely with relationships and configurations, i.e., with abstractions.
‘Transposability’ is the most important criterion of Christian von Ehrenfels’ concept of gestalt. His classic example is that of a melody that can be recognized at whatever pitch and on whatever instrument it is played. In the same way, the retina has the faculty to pass over all that is accidental and to abstract that which is essential in characteristic of all perception mechanisms as such and forms the basis of the process of observation.
‘Constancy perception’ excludes from its message the color of light – which it has to ‘know’ for this purpose of messaging. Mechanisms fulfilling similar functions enable us to see the size of the image as one of its invariable properties; although the size of the image it casts on our retina decreases with the square of it distance. Other mechanisms perform the remarkable feat of making the place where we perceive an abject appear constant, although the slightest movement of our head, and particularly of our eyes, causes our retinal image of that place to jump to and fro in the most violent manner.
This supreme function of constancy mechanism is quite independent of rational abstraction.
Ethologist and doctors find time and again that a recurrent pattern of individual events, such as a succession of movement or a syndrome of pathological symptoms, is only recognized as an invariable Gestalt after sometimes thousands of observations. We obviously possess a mechanism that is capable of absorbing almost incredible numbers of individual ‘observation records’, of retaining them over long periods, and of evaluating them statistically.
As the jargon of information theory has it: ‘Redundancy of information compensates noisiness of channel.’ In spite of their many similarities to rational actions, all these sensory and nervous processes take place in areas of our nervous system which are completely inaccessible to our consciousness and our self-observation. Egon Brunswik coined the term ‘ratiomorphous’ to describe them, thereby indicating that, although they are closely analogous to rational behavior in both formal and functional respects, they have nothing to do with conscious reason. The ratiomorphous function is vastly superior to the rational function so far as concerns the number of individual items of information it is able to retain.
From the practica point of view the perceptual functions of objectivation and conceptualization are the precursors of the corresponding functions of abstract thought.
Thus, we not only are making decisions about ‘world events’, but we are also doing so without very much information. We intuit our interpretation. By intuit, we mean here a ‘gut reaction’, ‘feel it in our bones’ type of experience.
The standard for deciding
The first criterion for evaluating an experience is based upon a measurement standard. What are we comparing? Initially, we have only the standard of life: Life seeks pleasure and avoids pain. Thus, for the first sensory awareness, the fetus probably interprets the experience based entirely on the presence or absence of pain – the utility of the experience is rated by an assessment of pleasure & pain. What is considered fit [good/right] is that which gives pleasure. This criterion also set the stage for emotional values. All decisions made utilizing utility as a conceptual range is also establishing an emotional value.
Once a second experience occurs, a second criterion becomes available – association – this is or is not like that. Now, having more than one experience, the individual has comparable elements, but continues as well with the basic criterion – utility [good/bad]. The gestalt abstraction moves to the forefront with this step.
Over time the use of these two criteria leads to a third criterion, categorization – the grouping of schematic experience by emotional value and context. These schemata are multiply intertwined and complex and allow for cognitive integration and blending.
These processes of experiencing and evaluating go on throughout life, but those that are learned [habituated] early in life make up the basic theory of meaning, and a change from bottoms-up to top-down and the creation of a confirmation bias, used to avoid new information, becomes the norm.
How this learning [habituation] actually occurs is better understood, perhaps, from a biological perspective.
It is well established that brains are made up of two basic structures — neurons and synapses — and that together they form extensive ‘neural networks’ that perform all psychological operations such as thinking, learning, memory and emotion. These network operations both drive and are in part driven by motor activity. Neurons are the individual brain cells, of which there are estimated to be around 100 billion in humans. Synapses are the connections between and among neurons, and there are thought to be about 100 of them connecting the average neuron to its neighbors. That makes 10 trillion synapses in all — enough to encode and store all the information that comes our way many times over
Neuroscientists have discovered that our brains are physically altered by what we experience, interpret and thus learn. It is as if the chips in your computer were actually rewired somewhat every time you ran a program. The ‘event’ that has just occurred has become part of your experience and has been added to your personal learning history. This begins a process in which some of the synapses in your brain become more efficient in transmitting signals to the ‘downstream’ neurons they’re connected to, and others become less efficient. These local efficiencies are called synaptic weights. The synaptic weights represent the habituation of automaticity.
As life goes on, synaptic-weight patterns change. The experience is encoded by a change in the pattern of synaptic weights in some network or — most often — an interconnected, overlapping set of networks in your brain. This change constitutes your memory for the event — including all of its implications and ramifications. This all goes on without much conscious effort or even awareness on your part. Because the newly altered networks are interconnected and overlapping, they constitute an intricate ‘filing system’ for memory retrieval. When in future any encoded aspect of what you have learned about becomes personally relevant, several or all of the affected networks can be activated
Gregory Edleman goes a step further and proposes that an evolutionary process takes place. Not one that selects organisms and takes millions of years, but one that occurs within each particular organism, and within its lifetime, by competition among cells, or selection of groups of cells for attention in the brain. This biological theory of the mind, which he calls neural Darwinism, or the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection [TNGS], serves quite well as the underpinnings for the management of cognitive change.
Any change in the process of thought offers the opportunity to change the future process. If we were to replace the thought – “I am stupid!” – with the thought “I need to study harder to get better grades”, and habituate the second thought, we create in the brain two alternative networks. Since the person is likely to choose thoughts that are more satisfying and gratifying, the replacement thought is likely to be used, and disuse of the prior thought would weaken the neuronal network. It is this exchange of thoughts that offers the opportunity of changing the emotions and thereby influencing new behavior.
The biological theory developed by Gerald Edelman at the Neurosciences Institute at Rockefeller University called Neural Darwinism, or the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection suggests that a unique neuronal pattern of connections is created and then, experience acts upon this pattern, modifying it by selectively strengthening or weakening connections between neuronal groups, or creating entirely new connections. He further suggests that the brain is a “selection” system. It evolves not by changes in a constant set of neurons but by selection what the individual believes are the most valuable neural groups among those that exist since birth. And the elementary unit of this process is not the single neuron, but the neural group.
It is up to the infant animal, to create its own categories and to use them to make sense of, to construct a world – and it’s not just a world that the infant constructs, but it’s his or her own world, a world constituted from the first by personal meaning and reference. The personality of the individual is just such a construction, built upon the ‘categories’ that make up the schema which make up the whole person.
Thus, experience itself is not passive, a matter of ‘impressions’ or ‘sense-data’, but active, and constructed by the organism from the start. Every perception is an act of creation. This perceptual generalization is dynamic and not static and depends on the active and incessant orchestration of countless details. Such a correlation is possible because of the very rich connections between the brain’s map connections, which are reciprocal, and may contain millions of fibers. A continuous ‘communication’ occurs between the active maps themselves, which enables a coherent construct such as ‘chair’ to be made.
The outputs of innumerable maps not only complement one another at a perceptual level but are also built at higher and higher levels. The brain ‘categorizes its own categorizations’ and does so by a process that can ascend indefinitely to yield more generalized pictures of the world, providing a world view; or in our general terminology – a theory of meaning.
During this on-going process of ‘learning’ the brain develops categories by selectively strengthening or weakening connections between neural groups. Experience ‘selects’ one configuration of neural groups out of all the configurations that are possible.
Neural groups ‘compete’ to respond to environmental stimuli. Each brain is therefore different, depending on the stimuli that it encounters during its development and the decisions it chooses to believe.
While a Theory of Meaning, which gives a sense of reality to the individual by giving them a perspective of who they are and how they fit into the environment in which they live. This reality is not necessarily true. In fact, since most of the basis for the Theory develops before we reach the point of left-brain dominance and language, it is often quite naïve.
In addition to naivete, the individual has very little information with which to work. Our sensory apparatus conveys symbolic evidence of sight, sound, touch, taste and/or smells in a manner which can arouse the consciousness, but not much more. The information we do have is modified by significant people in our environment but is personally and secretively our own.
What does it mean?
Upon arousal, the experience must then be interpreted in a way that makes sense enough to satisfy (or satisfice) our organizing principle. Based on prior experience or intuition, we create a conceptualization of the experience – we give the experience meaning. We represent this meaning as though it were ‘true’ (factual, correct, accurate), yet we cannot normally even describe accurately what we experienced. Thus, the ‘meaning’ given is generally a story, a map or model of what might have occurred but is ‘highlighted’ by our own speculations and opinions.
A meaning, story, map or model is a conceptualization of an experience told in symbolic language that will help the user come to the same experience the creator of the meaning, story, map or model had. The meaning story is not the experience itself… No map is the experience it describes.
Maps can be metaphors for anything we experience. A map models reality but is not reality itself. The whole point of any map is to be useful, not to be true.
Take a map of your city and lay it on the floor; find the spot you are right now on this map and place your finger on that spot. Conceptually, you might say, ‘I am here’. If that were literally true, then a huge finger would come out of the sky and squish you into the floor. Of course, you don’t get squashed, because the map is not the territory. How to Create a Mind
It is impossible for any map to be complete or completely accurate, … The map is not ‘truth’, …
The degree to which we judge a map to be good is the degree to which we can use it without being deceived or misdirected. A map is a story, and if you wanted to think of it this way, you could say that these stories want to be believed. It would hardly be comfortable to find that your reality was not true; except, of course, it can be improved.
The Focus of our Personally Accepted Reality
The stories are about every conceivable subject that one may have; and the information in many ways is conceptually blended so that the whole theory have overlap. Many of the thoughts are about practical matters: restaurants, baseball or mathematics, and note; you eat at sporting events and sports analytics are all about the mathematics. But except for those thoughts about employment or religion, the information is mostly grist for the mill. The real driving force for your personal reality has to do with thoughts about you and comparison to thoughts about others.
There are eight [08] categories of experience in which anxiety may be triggered that are both simple and obvious:
a. Matters of size, strength, ability, skill;
b. Dependence/Independence;
c. Competition;
d. Sense of self;
e. Personal Attractiveness;
f. Sexuality;
g. Issues of seeing and being seen;
h. Wishes and fears about closeness.
Failure in any of these areas can trigger shame and anxiety, just as success can bring on a moment of pride. Obviously, if you believe that you are hopeless, helpless and/or worthless, you will have some serious problems in living. And that stress will be increased when you think about future prospects. How can you be expected to achieve if you are so flawed?
A specific focus occurs when individuals appraise themselves and others. Comparisons are made in which the individual not only decides on the performance of others, but metacognitively decides on how others judge their own performance. Such thoughts gradually shape themselves into a theory of self and others which affects the way in which we relate. In a similar way, we develop thoughts about success and failure. We determine the causes of our success or failure and attribute these causes to internal or external influences. These attributions affect our expectations of what will occur in other experiences. Thus, thoughts about appraisal are fundamentally linked across all of these factors. If I think that other people don’t like me, I may then consider my own worth as being less than satisfactory. If, in the extreme, I consider myself to be worthless, my success must be externally caused, while my failures are because of who I am. I certainly could not expect much in the future. This ‘attitude’ about self/others, success/failure, etc. Creates a specific aspect of my personality.
The negative triad, therefore, is a belief that one is severely flawed.
Hopelessness occurs when someone does not believe a particular desired goal is even possible. It is characterized by a sense that, “No matter what I do it won’t make a difference. What I want is not possible to get. It’s out of my control. I’m a victim”.
Helplessness occurs when, even though s/he believes that the outcome exists and is possible to achieve, a person does not believe that s/he is capable of attaining it. It produces a sense that, “It’s possible for others to achieve this goal but not for me. I’m not good enough or capable enough to accomplish it”.
Worthlessness occurs when, even though a person may believe that the desired goal is possible and that s/he even has the capability to accomplish it, that individual believes that s/he doesn’t deserve to get what s/he wants. It is often characterized by a sense that, “I am a fake. I don’t belong. I don’t deserve to be happy or healthy. There is something basically and fundamentally wrong with me as a person and I deserve the pain and suffering that I am experiencing”.
Obviously, the contrasting positions of optimistic hope, competence and being valued have dramatically different potentials for success, happiness and serenity.
If you have a negatively oriented theory of meaning, anyone who indicates that your personally accepted reality is not valid may be considered a bad person or an outsider. There is danger in shining the light on another person’s map if the other person does not wish you or him/herself to see the light. Shining the light or conscious awareness into deep, dark places within is not without its risks: resistance can develop. The warning signs include tension, judgements and negative emotions, all of which result in a shutting down of the reason faculty and a rejection of inputs that might lead to illumination. Nonetheless, enabling a person to consciously and rationally think through an abstraction as a detective or scientist can be an exciting and fulfilling experience, particularly if one reaches a more balanced and rational conclusion.
In the final analysis, all of us are flawed in some way and we can only work to improve or accept that situation.
Reality
The organization of one’s reality gives an index of the potential for happiness and serenity in the process of living. Decisions about what to like or not like, hate or love, etc. can enhance or deteriorate the capacity for happiness. The capacity for suffering increases with every ‘negative’ thought in the model. But there is also a capacity for redemption if the thoughts can change.
What is reality?
One should not pretend that these personally accepted reality conclusions are ‘true’, in terms of some absolute, unchangeable understanding that will be correct for all time and in all places. Theories are not supposed to be confused with ‘the truth’. Psychologically fit individuals work toward truth, knowing it can never be attained.
The unwise are those who keep following their old thoughts, even though they know they will get disoriented. These are the people with ‘problems in living’. With perhaps the exception of the Buddha and the Messiah, all of us have had some degree of problem, but much of this is not significant. However, increasingly, we seem to find that more and more people are believing more and more significant falsehoods more and more strongly, and the mind behaves ‘as if’ these stories were true.
What is worse, perhaps, is that as these negative beliefs linger, the Mind trains the body to respond.
How Your Thoughts Program Your Cells: There are thousands upon thousands of receptors on each cell in our body. Each receptor is specific to one peptide, or protein. When we have feelings of anger, sadness, guilt, excitement, happiness or nervousness, each separate emotion releases its own flurry of neuropeptides. Those peptides surge through the body and connect with those receptors which change the structure of each cell as a whole. Where this gets interesting is when the cells actually divide. If a cell has been exposed to a certain peptide more than others, the new cell that is produced through its division will have more of the receptor that matches with that specific peptide. Likewise, the cell will also have fewer receptors for peptides that its mother/sister cell was not exposed to as often.
The Best Brain Possible: So, if you have been bombarding your cells with peptides from negative thoughts, you are literally programming your cells to receive more of the same negative peptides in the future. What’s even worse is that you’re lessening the number of receptors of positive peptides on the cells, making yourself more inclined towards negativity. Every cell in your body is replaced about every two months. So, the good news is, you can reprogram your pessimistic cells to be more optimistic by adopting positive thinking practices, ….
Potential Correction
If we are to correct these problems and this path for individuals and the culture, we will need a major paradigm shift. There is no disease or pathology; no ‘mental illness’. We need no drugs or medication to affect the mood. We will need to enable people to change the way they think. And through cognitive behavior management, we can effectively accomplish this goal, although it is up to the individual to decide whether they will make the change.
Belief works at an unconscious level. But consciousness can be used to enable the development of a more balanced and rational belief. Change is obviously more difficult for the habituated mind, but the solutions are available and will increase as the technology becomes more prevalent. The major new approach to the culture should occur within the educational system. Teachers are theoretically trained to teach. If each elementary school in the country had a Good Choice/Bad Choice: Stop and Think program in kindergarten, first, second and third grades, all students would be grounded in language concepts for handling difficult others with the added gain of uniting the ‘victims’ into an influential group. For those who have difficulty adjusting to school, Myrna Shure’s program of Interpersonal Cognitive Problem Solving; I Can Problem Solve provides a proven skill for such students.
For teachers, training in Psychological First Aid (PFA) would be a minimum requirement. Crises is an appropriate time for developmental changes in one’s theory of meaning but is often cause for more traumatic failure because of the first intervention being fear and sympathy for the individual rather than support for the expectation of recovery. The teachers can also use a cultural program such as Life Space Crises Intervention, providing common conceptualization and language as well as useful interventions oriented towards success.
The Neuro Generation – adapted: The brain is in a constant state of change, a dynamic entity that has the ability to rewire, reprogram and heal itself. In the near future, EEG-fueled augmented reality/virtual reality applications and software will open up new potential for neurofeedback systems that involve using EEG to identify abnormal brainwave patterns and then training the brain to change negative patterns. AR/VR glasses, headphones, headsets and caps can be integrated into EEG technology to provide a way that individuals will be able to choose among options simply by thinking. Teaching teachers with little or no psychological training to handle crises emergencies could mean the difference between the student emerging stronger from trauma or plunging into despair. The goal, of course, is to determine if multiple practice sessions in this virtual scenario enhance cognitive performance and memory retention under pressure. It is very clear that results come from a two-part process: neurostimulation combined with high-quality training. The potential is very optimistic.
In short, the K through 12 system of teaching must include a culture of social competence which helps to channel all private accepted beliefs to have a common sense of growth and development. The role of the medical doctor must return to its initial focus of ruling out any physical pathology that may exist. Having identified such physical issues, the individual may still require training rather than medical intervention, and school is the rationale location for such involvement.
Conclusion
In this very short version, we have outlined how each individual creates his/her own reality, in a very vulnerable time with very difficult implements. S/he then struggles to both learn (habituate) and remain accessible to newer useful concepts, while achieving in an environment that may or may not be supportive. Despite it all, most of us turn out to be relatively civilized.
We have not spent much time indicating just how cognitive behavior management works for individual clients except to indicate that it is not a defect model and is under the complete control of the client. We recognize that every individual behaves in ways that reflect what s/he believes are his/her own self-interest. However, it should be noted that we have other methods (police) to deal with issues of behavior that are beyond the bounds of the law.
Finally, we suggest a new paradigm to deal with behavior and start with the youngest members of society. It is our belief that if we train them well, we will help to correct most of the disturbing thoughts and habituate them to positive thinking. Within twenty years a cadre of optimistic thinkers could change the society.
July 2026