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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday! My name is Emilee O’Leary, my favorite place in the world is my family’s cabin in northern Minnesota, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned about patterns after repeatedly biting the same spot on the inside of my mouth.
Fun Fact
I’m going to be talking about cognitive biases in this episode, so I thought it’d be fun to explore the phrase The Pathetic Fallacy. This literary device refers to the intentional, or unintentional, personification of something without a consciousness, such as nature or an inanimate object. Mostly in a joking way, I do this a lot with computers. Because my family brings their electronic devices to me to fix quite often, they’ll often say things like, “This stupid thing won’t let me log into my account!” I’ll pretend to cover the quote ears of the device and say, “Shhhh! It can hear you!” Haven’t you ever felt like an inanimate object is conspiring against you? People often do this with nature, too, saying that clouds look menacing, indicating that the weather is transforming in such a way to bring on subjectively bad weather. But the clouds themselves are not menacing, it is your perception of their appearance that is menacing.
In science, the term pathetic fallacy is used when discouraging figure of speeches that inaccurately portray a natural phenomenon. Sometimes when trying to explain things in a way people will understand, we anthropomorphize, or attribute human characteristics to something non-human. In doing so, the explanation will often lose its validity while still relating the essence of a thing. A very commonly used example of this is how NASA explains Newton’s first law of motion. NASA explains that a moving object, due to its mass, wants to moving. But we have never seen evidence to support the fact that an inanimate object has the cognitive ability to want anything. So even though it gives you an idea of what’s happening, it’s inaccurately stating that the object itself is choosing something that it clearly does not.
Mistake Pathways
I learned a phrase this week called mistake pathway. It was described as the rut our brains fall into when we make repeated mistakes. Because our brains are naturally programmed to reinforce learned behaviors, it remembers when we whiff.
At the opening of the episode, I said that I learned this lesson after continuously biting the inside of my mouth in the same spot. You know what I’m talking about, right? It happens the first time totally by accident, but then the wound gets in the way and you accidentally agitate it again. And then, somehow, you just keep biting that same spot over and over! Eventually it does heal, but for a while it is almost something you cannot control.
As another example, I did this a lot when I first started driving… My mom would tell me to take a left turn and I’d take a right turn. I was fifteen years old, I’d known my rights from my lefts for over a decade, but I was a new driver! I was re-learning the things I’d known for a long time in a very different paradigm. I started panicking every time she would use right and lefts and I would make another wrong turn. I remember, specifically, approaching an intersection near the house I grew up in… I knew how to get home. I knew that I needed to turn left and cross over the bridge, but she told me to take a left at the light and I panicked and turned right instead!
Those kinds of mistakes haunt me the most, but after reading the article about mistake pathways, then doing some further reading to understand the concept more clearly, I realized that it wasn’t something that had to own me. It was a genuinely new idea to me that to avoid making the same mistakes doesn’t necessarily require us to learn from mistakes.
This article posited the idea that learning from our mistakes is a dangerous notion to hold onto. Sometimes by focusing on the mistake we made the time before, we are more likely to make that same mistake again. Scientists call this error learning.
Our brains love patterns. They love it so much we will often look for things that aren’t there. My fun fact of this episode was about the pathetic fallacy, which attributes human characteristics to non-human entities… We anthropomorphize nature even further by thinking we see things that aren’t there. We see a demon’s face in a dust storm on Mars. We see human silhouettes at the edge of the woods during an oncoming storm. We pick out shapes in the clouds.
But it extends beyond our sight. We look for patterns through conspiracy theories, through religion and white noise on a radio receiver. In his book How We Believe, Michael Shermer argues that the brain is a belief engine, a machine that looks for and finds patterns, makes connections, and creates meaning out of what we think and see and perceive. Believe it or not, there are terms for believing you see something that isn’t there, or not believing in something that is there.
Perceiving patterns in random data is now commonly referred to as patternicity, a term Shermer coined and which scientists treat as an error in cognition. This comes in the two forms I just stated: type 1 is finding a non-existent pattern, and type 2 is the opposite of that, not recognizing a real pattern when there is one.
While our brains are really good at looking for patterns, sometimes we become married to the idea that we have to find patterns or meaning in everything. Did you know there’s a term for that too? It’s called apophenia. The tendency to see patterns in random data.
What does this all have to do with mistake pathways? Lately, patterns have been getting me into trouble. I’m in the process of learning how to live without my dad, who died unexpectedly at the beginning of February. A lot about life since then has been about breaking old habits, about changing processes and finding a new normal.
I didn’t really realize until the last several weeks how reliant I am on patterns and processes, but I couldn’t figure out why I was going through the same cycles of sadness when I knew better than to open the same wounds over and over. I thought that wound had healed? Why did I scratch it again?
One thing my mom and I have been noticing and talking about lately is how the stages of grief aren’t so much a step-by-step thing. It’s not that you get over denial and then tackle anger. The stages of grief, for us, work more like a fluctuating Venn diagram, in which certain stages overlap one week, we get passed whatever is in our way, and then two or three more arise and overlap. After we think we’ve gotten over one, it re-emerges in a different form, coupled with a different stage and bearing different challenges.
Here’s what I learned.
So many of the lessons I’ve been learning since my dad died have a common theme, and that theme is the importance of being in the moment, and the lesson I learned here is not a far cry from the others. The longer the grief stretches on, the more I see how easy it would be to just give in to the sadness and despair, to kick on autopilot and let all the patterns in my life take over. I’ve developed enough routines that I could coast through most of the day, engaging only to ensure my drive to work is safe, that I say enough to co-workers to keep them appeased, and to remind myself to eat and bathe.
Is it easier to push all those emotions down? Is it easier to ignore the pain and try to live as though I can’t feel it? When these thoughts rear their ugly heads I stop and slap my cheeks and ask myself, “Is that what I really want out of life? Is that what my dad would have wanted for my life?”
Patterns can be used as a mechanism of avoidance or they can make a grieving person even sadder than they already are, but what I learned through my discovery of this mistake pathways concept released me from both… but it requires me to stay in the moment, to fully engage in the here and now in order to take advantage of these lessons.
My brain is designed to look for and gravitate toward patterns, so there is nothing inherently wrong with me or what I’m going through. [Explosion sound]. Shocking, right? But what does this mean? It means that I don’t need to feel guilt for evaluating avoidance versus wallowing in sadness. It means I don’t have to make excuses for my situation. But, most importantly, it means I don’t have to be bound to my grief because of my pre-existing patterns.
But it did reveal to me that my brain is sensitive to the patterns it learns. It can learn mistakes easily and it takes a long time to smooth out the ruts that form from those mistakes, but it’s not impossible to overcome. Instead of trying to learn from my mistakes, however, or avoid pre-existing patterns, I must intentionally forge new paths, new grooves in my brain. And the way to do that is by removing myself from autopilot, to become present in every moment, and to stop lying to myself about how my old patterns are affecting my new normal.
There’s nothing wrong with the old, except a major variable has changed… and I must account for it.
I’m Emilee O’Leary and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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