Life Inside Your Cognitive Construct

The Beatles sang, “We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.” Northeastern University professor and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett suggests we live in a cognitive construct. She says we are always predicting what will happen. “A bunch of neurons make their best guess about what will happen in the immediate future, based on whatever combination of past and present that your brain is currently conjuring.”

She calls what we conjure up “a carefully controlled hallucination.” She doesn’t mean a LSD-based yellow submarine, or a schizophrenic hallucination. She means the day-to-day, moment-by-moment cognitive construct we create and live in. She says, “It’s an everyday kind of hallucination that creates all your experiences and guides all your actions.”

We have two systems that try to keep us safe. One is conscious and one is non-conscious. The non-conscious system is focused on the present. That’s the system that makes us freeze in our tracks when encountering a snake, and doing so without any consciousness of the snake. The other system, our conscious protective system, is focused on the future. It may be about the future years from now. It may be about the future a second from now. But it is always the future. It is interested in the present only as something to sample and use as input, a starting point when predicting the future.

Once our conscious system samples the present, it drops the present and moves on to the future. Since it takes only an instant to sample of the present, and potentially endless time to figure out the future, we easily become immersed in the prediction process. Our focus on the future pushes awareness of the present aside.

I wonder if you are thinking, “I don’t do that.” Really? Consider this. You are solidly on terra firma. You have a flight coming up. You are predicting you will be anxious on the flight. As you predict anxiety, you experience anxiety. You prediction of the futures has just changed your present. So, you do that.

Also, you know from past experience that predicting what you will feel on the plane causes greater anxiety than the anxiety you feel when you are actually on the plane. On the flight, if the air is smooth, you stop projecting the future. Amazingly, you notice the present. Since you haven’t visited the present for a while, you check it out. What is going on? Nothing. Ahhh. That’s nice.

But if the air is not smooth, guess what? You sample the present moment. The plane is going up and down. You don’t like this, so you try to stop sampling the present. Your non-conscious protective system, the one that is always focused on the present, forces you to notice the downward motions, even the slightest ones, even if you don’t want to. Why? Because, if you are on a ladder, any downward motion - as well as any shaking - predicts falling. Though downward motions and shaking mean nothing whatsoever when flying, you are not a pilot. You can’t appreciate that these motions and shaking do not mean danger. Because downward motions and shaking mean danger when up on a ladder, your non-conscious protective system reacts to downward motions and shaking up in a plane as danger.

So, when the air is not smooth, your conscious protective system samples the turbulence going on in the present - which you erroneously regard as dangerous - and uses it to project the future. If you project the turbulence could get worse, you feel anxious due to worrying it will get worse.

Your conscious system samples your new present: anxiety! Anxiety means something really bad could happen. Now, you project that something really bad could happen. The plane could fall out of the sky. Your conscious protective system projects that as a possibility. You non-conscious system reacts to the life-threatening code attached to falling out of the sky and releases more stress hormones. You get hyper-aroused. You might even panic. Again, your projection of the future has changed your present.

By the way. Why did I refer to cognitive construct in the title of the newsletter? Because both Barrett and Joseph LeDoux regard fear as a cognitive construct, or part of a cognitive construct. They regard your conscious protective system as a cognitive construct-producing machine. It is always predicting the future. The future it predicts is a cognitive construct. It is not real. It may become real. It may not become real. But whether it comes real or not in the futures, when your conscious protective system creates the cognitive construct of your plane falling out of the sky, it presents it to your mind’s eye in the present. Your amygdala reacts to the highly negative emotional valence code attached to the falling-our-of-the-sky cognitive construct. Stress hormones are released that cause hyper-arousal. Now, because hyper-arousal took place when your life was threatened, your conscious protective system predicts that you may be about to die.

So there you are on the plane. When it was smooth, you were fine. Now it is bumpy are you are upset. The cognitive construct available you have available to you informs you that you are about to die.

But wait. There’s more. The plane starts to descend. Even though you are still in the air, even though you were just focused on a cognitive construct that you were about to die, and even though landings account for most airline accidents, your conscious protective system skips forward in time to a new cognitive construct, a near-term prediction that the plane will land and you will be back on the ground. Though you are still 100% in the air, you feel a huge sense of relief!

Barrett is right. We hallucinate. We create cognitive constructs and hallucinate that we are in it. Our hallucination is our reality.

Can we understand that the cognitive construct we live in is something we made up? If so, we might take it less seriously when we fly. If you are a surgeon, you make really good cognitive constructs about what you do in the operating room. Your cognitive constructs when flying may not be so good. If you run a business, you make accurate cognitive constructs about the marketplace. Add a grain of salt to your cognitive constructs in the air.

Your pilots make really good cognitive constructions about where the plane is going. They may not make good constructs about surgery or the economy. Unless you, yourself, become a pilot, you will never make accurate cognitive constructs about what your plane is about to do. Until you finish pilot training and then have a few years of experience, you are truly wasting your time if you have the audacity to think you need to build your own cognitive constructs about what the plane is doing when you fly. If you worry that your pilot will get it wrong, what are you going to do? Take over the plane? I hope not. There is no chance that you will get it right. So, do what you’ve heard so many times. “Sit back and relax and enjoy your flight.”