Failures of our educational system

I believe that the rise of Trump (and others like him) is a failure of our education system. I would like to point towards one very specific aspect of this failure.

It's becoming more and more evident that our thinking can be flawed in numerous ways. We can make choices through emotions alone. We tend to overemphasize the needs of the immediate present over the future. We actively look for information that confirms our conclusions and disregard valid information that goes against them. Having disagreements and genuinely considering ideas we disagree with feels uncomfortable and we avoid it often. The list goes on and on. This is a small sample.

Now consider this; how many people are actually aware of these failures of thinking? How many people actually know about concepts such as cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias? How many people are aware of the findings that giving into our hatred, anger, fear, and demonizing the "others" actually FEELS good at a neuro-chemical level and gives us a hit of dopamine?

Essentially, how many people are aware (at even a very very basic level) that we can so easily be irrational and make poor decisions? We should create required courses in colleges and universities on how we can fail at thinking. We should have courses that teach us about irrationality and foster a basic level of self awareness about our thoughts and emotions.

Until we actually teach people to think about their thinking, the situation will not improve. People like Trump will rise again and again.

Outdated Evolutionary Responses

Evolutionary psychologists consistently emphasize a central theme; the human mind evolved and was shaped during a time period that contained environmental pressures that are no longer relevant today, and as a result, our responses to many modern problems are often times wrong. There are numerous ways that this phenomena manifests itself. Many times, the outcomes of our behavior are detrimental. For instance, the lack of any meaningful human action for addressing global warming and environmental degradation in general is one major context where this issue is strongly prevalent. Another context is how people respond to verbal confrontation and handle themselves during arguments. For instance:

arguing stirs up our fight-or-flight response. Once biological arousal takes over we start to feel the effects of nature's mechanism that prepares us for aggressive action. To understand our patterns of arguing, we need to learn about fight-or-flight arousal. Once we recognize the signs that we are in an aroused state, such as pounding heart and increased muscle tone, we may realize how often even trivial arguments are triggering full-blown biological responses. An argument about a TV clicker can seem to our mammalian brain as threatening as a lion leaping towards our throat.

It's clear why such needlessly intense responses to verbal confrontations are problematic; the nature of the problem (a simple verbal confrontation) does not warrant the intensity and seriousness  of the response. We do not need our bodies to go into fight-or-flight mode to deal with situations that  don't even pose a remote threat to our safety. We do not need our stress hormones flaring up. The fight-or-flight response has evolved to deal with emergencies and it's mistakenly being used to deal with relatively trivial everyday matters. Such a response can "protect us from threat, by physically preparing us to fight for our life or run for it. It can come in handy when there’s, say, a bus hurtling towards us and we need to get out of the way. It’s not so handy when the issue is that of Oreos, or more specifically, that someone has taken the last one."

Once our emotions and rational thinking are "hijacked" via the flight-or-flight mechanism, our rational and more restrained side "gets sidelined in favor of the more primitive, automatic, unthinking part. As a result, there’s likely to be yelling, personal sledging and aggression. Nobody listens and nobody is heard."

Additionally,

in situations of high stress, fear or distrust, the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down. And the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. The body makes a chemical choice about how best to protect itself...we default to one of four responses: fight (keep arguing the point), flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus), freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him)

None of the responses offered by the fight-or-flight mechanism make sense in most professional, interpersonal, and social situations. The severity and inappropriateness of the response often times leads to misunderstanding, unnecessary arguing, lack of cooperation, and hurt feelings. What makes the situation even more problematic is that our brains actually reward us for giving into these irrational responses because "when [we] argue and win, [our] brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes [us] feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right."

Ultimately, once a discussion turns into an argument or any sort of verbal confrontation, "It's no longer an exercise in logic and reasoning. It's just a fight. And being in a fight brings its own frame of mind, a whole set of attitudes, expectations, and conditioned reactions that go along with arguing. As soon as that happens, no one cares who is right and who is wrong. All that matters is who is friend and who is foe."

Given this information on how we seem to be "wired" to respond to even the slightest hint of verbal aggression, our goal should be to hijack the hijacker and cut off our automatic aggressive response before it has a chance to do damage. Consider the implications in professional settings where we need to work with strangers. If we are interacting with someone whose cooperation we need, what should our response be when we sense aggression from them in the form of a condescending or disrespectful tone? Should we match their tone and be aggressive in return? Given the information previously discussed, this would be a very poor course of action to take. Such a response will give the person in front of us a reason or the opportunity to allow the more "primal" parts of their brain to take over and sabotage their reasoning. Once this happens, we have lost the person and they are very unlikely to play along and comply with our requests. For all practical purposes, both their body and mind are now responding to us as if we are the "enemy" and we are literally putting their physical safety at risk. During such a state of emotional and physiological arousal, the last thing on the person's mind is to cooperate with the "foe" in front of them; an emergency mode has been activated and cooperation has been thrown out the window.

The proper response to the above situation is to do our absolute best to keep our calm and not allow the person to detect even the most minute evidence of aggressive behavior or tone. If we do not give their body and mind the opportunity to go into a "self defense" mode then they are much more likely to cooperate with us and treat us as a potential friend instead of an enemy. Maintaining emotional restraint under emotionally charged circumstances is easier said than done but the rewards greatly outweigh the immediate costs.



Sources cited:

http://www.mental-health-survival-guide.com/arguing.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/karen-young/brain-during-an-argument_b_7540148.html

https://hbr.org/2013/02/break-your-addiction-to-being/

http://theweek.com/articles/454234/how-win-every-argument

The Experiencing Self vs the Remembering Self

I recently embarked on my very first backpacking trip. Up until this point, I had only gone camping and short distance hiking on trails that were 5-10 miles in length. Backpacking essentially combines both hiking and camping and it can be an intense experience depending on various factors such as the length and difficulty of the trail, the weather, and how many nights of camping are involved. For my trip, I went backpacking on the Lost Coast Trail, which starts at Mattole and ends at Black Sands Beach. The trail is located in Shelter Cove, CA and the total distance is about 26 miles.  It took us 3 days of hiking and 2 nights of camping to finish the trail. The average weight of our backpacks fluctuated between 25-35 pounds depending on how much water and food we had used up. The majority of the trail involved hiking through sand, and rocky shorelines, which made the hike much more difficult (although also more beautiful). The entire experience is hard to describe but I can confidently say that I was challenged and pushed to my limits at an emotional, physical, and mental level.  Even as my legs were ready to give out and I was thoroughly exhausted, the views were so picturesque that I was still able to properly admire them.

Throughout this whole experience, a reoccurring idea refused to leave my mind during the toughest portions of the hike. This particular thought gave me the ability to look past the physical pain and exhaustion of the present and it granted me the strength to keep going when I genuinely felt I was completely depleted and could not keep moving. I was thinking about the idea of the remembering self and the experiencing self. Professor Daniel Kahneman describes the concept in his TED Talk:

...we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches -- you know, when the doctor asks, "Does it hurt now when I touch you here?" And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that. Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness.

The idea is a bit more complicated and nuanced than the part quoted here but for the discussion at hand, no further details are necessary. By reminding myself that there can be two distinctly different selves, I was able to look past the troubles of the present. During my lowest points when I felt like giving up and I was fatigued, I consistently remembered that once this experience was over, I would be thoroughly proud of myself for taking on such a challenge and not giving up. I knew that my remembering self would properly frame the experience in a positive light and I would ultimately grow as a person. As I currently write down these thoughts, with my remembering self in full control, my predictions have come true. I am in fact very proud of having had the courage to take on this challenge and to see it through. By "tricking" my experiencing self into looking beyond the present and imagining how it will feel in the future, I was able to distract myself from the harsh reality of the present and essentially pull the more pleasant future back in time. The idea might sound a bit ridiculous and abstract but it did work for me and it could perhaps work for you as well.

The next time you find yourself in a difficult situation, try to remember that you have two selves that have control over defining your reality and ultimately, your happiness. Do your best to look past the present and imagine how your future self will view the current experience. By focusing on the potentially more pleasant future, you can make your present experience more bearable and perhaps meaningful.

With that said, here are some pictures from the hike itself and a few bonus photos from the San Francisco Botanical Garden.