Team of Rivals
The computer
scientist, Marvin Minsky, has suggested that minds work via the society-of-mind
framework, writes David Eagleman in his awesome book, Incognito:
The Secret Lives of the Brain:
“Minsky suggested that human minds may be
collections of enormous numbers of machinelike, connected subagents that are
themselves mindless.”
Eagleman takes
that framework further and says it “runs on conflict”! Different parts of the
brain don’t always agree and don’t work cooperatively:
“As a result, you can accomplish the
strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling
yourself to do something.”
Perhaps it’s based
on how evolution works:
“Biology never checks off a problem and
calls it quits. It reinvents solutions continually. The end product of that
approach is a highly overlapping system of solutions – the necessary condition
for a team-of-rivals architecture.”
Eagleman cites the
Stroop test as Exhibit A for this view. Here’s the test:
“Name the color of the ink in which a word
is printed… (e.g.) JUSTICE written in blue
letters… Couldn’t be easier… But the trick comes when I present a word that is
itself the name of a color… I present the word BLUE
in the color green. Now the reaction is not so easy.”
Your reaction is
either outright wrong or significantly slower, right?
“This belies the conflict going on under
the hood.”
Interesting, but
wouldn’t we notice the strain of the contradictory signals in our heads? Not
always. After all, isn’t this the far more common experience?
“Incompatible ideas will result in one side
or another winning out: a story will be constructed that either makes them
compatible or ignores one side of the debate.”
A final example of
the team-of-rivals architecture is the urge to reveal a secret:
“One part of the brain wants to reveal
something, and another part does not want to.”
This clash leads
to interesting behavior:
“A friend might think ill of you… This
concern about the outcome is evidenced by the fact that people are more likely
to tell their secrets to total stranger; with someone you don’t know, the
neural conflict can be dissipated with none of the costs.”
The Internet
facilitates this release via a site called postsecret.com “where people go to
anonymously disclose their confessions”! As with all things interesting, all
answers leads to other questions:
“An open question is why the receiver of
the secret has to be human – or human-like, in the case of deities. Telling a
wall, a lizard, or a goat your secrets is much less satisfying.”
Interesting musings. Still not clear if all these lead clearly somewhere. Maybe so, time will tell. I suppose for now, it is about some psychology way of understanding the mind.
ReplyDelete----------------------
The finish line "An open question is why the receiver of the secret has to be human – or human-like, in the case of deities. Telling a wall, a lizard, or a goat your secrets is much less satisfying" pushed me to imagine something jokingly. Here I go with it: Telling a wall, lizard or a goat your secrets may be less satisfying, but at least the secret will be absolutely safe!"