Expectations

Lately I’ve been working my way through the Ted talks that focus on the brain. What they all stress is the role of patterns. Life is action. Knowing where any given pattern of action is headed is the general objective. The measuring and naming we’ve been so consumed with is just description. It freezes the continuous motion in one place and time. As David Bohm once pointed out, the concern with the names of things that results from the dominance of noun-centered language took the intellect down the rabbit hole of believing things are more important than events and treating ideas as fixed things. Bohm felt that the truth of any theory required an aesthetic judgment. This depends on relations within a context. The emphasis on relations in the visual arts can build awareness of context and sensitivity to significant patterns. The brain recognizes overall shifting patterns through the feeling of what’s unfolding. You can’t understand the way the brain works just by thinking about its parts or its chemicals. The flow of energy is an action involving many parts. Now that imaging techniques allow us to watch it we might take serious steps in understanding it. Patterns create expectations. Expectations are a primary requirement for perception. Inability to see at birth is more a matter of having no previous seeing to inform what is sought, than of any problem in the system itself. The system is there to be primed with the features of the world it will need to decode. Caretakers, as patterns of movement from above, lay the groundwork for the meaning of above and below with its emotional tone of dependence. The further association of light above and needing light to see builds the positive nature of “up” in our minds. In later life, we conceive of an improvement in our condition as “moving up” and a host of other familiar phrases. This need to “rise above” negative patterns is one of the essential points in Alfred Adler’s philosophy of motivation, that the difficulties of life can be the spur to achievement and high expectations are more conducive to accomplishment than low. When he coined the word “lifestyle” he referred to the patterns of action in an individual’s life and eliminating the ones that are self-defeating. Humor resists expectations, twists away from the predicted meaning. Illusion is a close cousin, running against the expected direction. Surprise stimulates dopamine which stimulates more curiosity. This is why the cultivation of humor and the pleasure of visual illusions is so good for our minds. It opens the mind to the new and promotes flexible thinking.