Changing Your Mind

 This year I read (or listened to) several pretty good books on changing minds:
- "How Minds Change" - McRaney

- "How to Change Your Mind" - Pollan

- "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy" - Satterfield


In a nutshell, these books suggest 3 major mechanisms:
- Psychedelic drugs, as augmented psychotherapy

- Deliberate self- or therapist- guided thinking, to retrain brain pathways

- Discussions with others, especially trusted people in your circle

Rarely do you change your mind just because you hear something randomly, or somebody forces info on you, or you happen to monitor a debate.  Mostly, you change your mind when you hear conflicting information from a trusted source as part of a believable narrative, and often enough to get past automatic brain filters.

Here is how brains work, more or less:

- You form a belief based on your priors - what you think you already know.

- Somewhere in the emotional part of your brain, this belief gets some tie-ins to topics of interest you already have, and sense of certainly that goes with it....these are surprisingly orthogonal, as you can be pretty sure about stuff that you should know is likely wrong, and less sure about well-supported info.  Hey, it's an emotion, not a quantitative rating (it just feels it).

- When info happens by that matches the belief, you get a mild drip of dopamine, and the brain-paths reinforce just a tad.  This is really easy because we have a strong confirmation bias.

- When info comes along that conflicts, our first tendency is to discard it.  Our brain usually saves us stress and effort by doing this without our conscious brain even noticing.

- If asked to explain and action or statement based on a belief, our prefrontal cortex kicks in to make up a good story.  It like narratives, and it's really good at generating them, and building logical justifications.  It likes hearing narratives, too. 

- If conflicting data comes along frequently enough, or if you've put yourself into a receptive, learning mode, you may perceive conflicting data.  Usually this means 30% conflict info, and it doesn't really matter if this new data is right or wrong.  

- If you do perceive or integrate new data, your beliefs will change.  But since these are at the emotional level, changes to them are not really perceptible to you, as they wag the tail (the prefrontal cortex), not the other way around.  So, you probably don't even notice.

- Your pre-frontal cortex is good at noting changes in other people's narratives and logic, though, and they are good at picking apart yours.  "You've changed", they say.  "No, I haven't", you claim, mildly confused.  Then they try to prove you've changed, and you get defensive, and your narrative engine kicks into overdrive, and so does their.  Fun times!

So, to change your mind, you need to upset brain pathways and build new ones.  Depending on what your goal is, hallucinogenics seems to break open a lot of barriers and enable new paths.  YMMV.

You can inundate yourself with repetitions.  It works pretty well.  Depending on perspective, we call this "brainwashing", or "rosaries", or "daily reflections" or "marketing", or "evangelism", or "French Lessons", or "Q-Anon".  If you hear it enough and repeat it enough, it'll sink in, for good or ill.

You can also be deliberately introspective, and engage your executive layer when you see yourself going down one thought path, and steer to a new one.  This isn't easy, but it's also not all that hard, at least in peaceful situations.  This is the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

This is a really short treatment, and it probably fails to sell the importance and profoundness of the implications.  In fact, most readers are probably saying to themselves, "this is NOT how brains works!  I know mine doesn't!" - and that's your prefrontal cortex narrative-rationalization engine at work.

But then, you'll think "Hmm...this might explain some of those Q-Anon sorts I'm seeing on Twitter.  And hey, that 'super-religious' couple at church is a lot like this, with their list of things they do 3 times per day.  And why is it that 3rd graders have to say the Pledge at school, and line up when a bell rings?"

Think a little deeper, and you might get, "I've always been the same person since I was 16.  But there was that cringey Ayn Rand - John Galt thing for a few years, and I did help vote in that lower tax guy in the 90's, and I used to hate the concept of speed cameras.  And I thought I wanted to be a C-level executive up until 10 years ago.  Why was I that way?  When did I change?"


One final point out of this is that since we can't very well see our minds changing and we know our beliefs and our sense of certainty are suspect, we can't very well trust what our narrative engine tells us.  But we CAN trust that it is pretty adept at critiquing other people's narratives and changes, and they are pretty good at picking at our arguments.

So, if we have an important topic, whether an anecdotal concern about neighborhood safety or a global issue about politics, or something in-between, we should feel encouraged to "bring in the brain trust" and have a group discussion.  Make it people with some existing relationship strength, and add some food to improve attitudes, and dive in. Maybe add a bit of alcohol (not too much), if the tone is tight.

Guess what?  We've just reinvented how people have shared info and come to agreements for thousands of years. 

Let's summarize and bring this together:  one reason our brains have Kahneman's "fast and slow" modes is for efficiency, because active neurons take a lot of power.  As a social species, off-shoring some memories and creating a joint decision-making engine is good for the individual, and for the group.  We're in essence a distributed-computing machine, often running stand-alone.  Perhaps this is even why our brains can afford to shrink a bit with stable civilizations -- there is less we each must remember, there are others to lean on to help think stuff through, and with less brain cell and muscle cell power consumption a few more people can survive the lean times.  We get the ability for lifelong learning, less aggression, and more sex as a bonus.  

Now we know:

- Minds CAN change

- You can change your mind on purpose

- You can change other minds with a lot of work and repetition

- Open-minded groups will tend to do a better evaluation of any topic than one person alone

- Words matter, and our brain assimilates data and makes modal changes we aren't necessarily even aware of

- Power structures come with societal impacts, perhaps some good and some bad

So, knowing what we know, what can we do differently, deliberately?