скачать книгу бесплатно
There is still something that can influence people’s behaviour after they have resolved problems with basic survival. Nowadays, this is a tremendous space for influencing and controlling human behaviour through meanings.
When the term 'meaning’ is mentioned, the last link in the chain of its descriptions is reasoning about the meaning of life. People managed to come up with a lot of definitions and designs for this, in their opinion, important concept. It might be, for example: 'This is who you want to be and what you want to create.' Or: 'To be, rather than to seem.' Thus, by the way, people constantly repeat and calmly continue to seem throughout all their lives, and not to be.
Some people present their true purpose as the mission with which they were sent to this world. And the contents of their last report, which has been taking their breath away all their life, will be presented with awe at the heavenly throne. But many, and most of them, perceive their destiny as a series of important, in their opinion, goals, the end result of which is seen as material benefits, position in society, scientific discoveries or mental balance and self-improvement.
But, thank God, everything is simpler. From the point of view of nature, the meaning of life is in life itself. A person’s goal and purpose is to continue to live. From the formula: 'Plant a tree, build a house, have a son,' for nature, the goal is only the latter. All the rest people have made up for themselves, and not because they are bored or narcissistic impostors. This is because the goals of a person’s brain and life goals are different.
The meanings people find in poems, novels, business, painting, politics, or all of them together exist as part of a chosen survival model to realise their primary purpose – to continue living.
Today’s world is a world made up of opportunities and limitations, but a world where ultimately the choice is always up to the individual. The choice is up to his or her models. Previously, people went through rituals, initiations, mentors, teachers, and universities to make this choice. Now, websites, blogs, groups, and subscriptions are used. The impact on humans has increased by an order of magnitude.
In order to understand all this, people turn to their consciousness. Turn to something that they do not know much about, and much less what it is actually intended for. At the same time, people confuse the concepts of brain and consciousness, and these are not exactly the same things.
The task of the brain, as we said, is survival. One of the functions of the brain is consciousness, which allows a person to adapt meaningfully and accurately to changing circumstances, adjust forms of behaviour and create new ones. This conscious adaptation is the highest ability that exists in the living world.
How did people get this unique tool? What is it and how is it designed?
Paradise: The Story of Abdication
When you point your index finger at someone else,
the other three fingers point at you. ― Anonymous
The unique ability to justify oneself and transfer responsibility to the surroundings has been around since the beginning of time, since the origin of man. The most famous story about this tells how the fruit of the tree of knowledge was secretly eaten in the well-known garden in Mesopotamia. Already in this story, humanity tries not to notice important details that affect the essence and immediately focuses on the ending and characters.
But the details speak a lot. First, Adam had certain duties to perform in the garden. Not picking or eating the fruit of the Tree of knowledge was just a condition of stay.
The second important detail is that after the incident, he tried to hide.
And the third – when asked why he disobeyed God, he answered literally the following: ‘The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’
The classic method of transferring responsibility first to the surroundings – Eve, and then higher – to God himself. Eve has the same method as her husband: ‘The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.’
That was all the Creator heard. No, not confession or remorse. But a justification of their actions, an attempt to explain…
Every day we hear hundreds of such responses – at work, at home, on TV, everywhere.
This is the only thing we were allowed to take away from Paradise – our ability to be seduced and then make our excuses and shift responsibility.
The story of the Garden of Eden is a story of abdication of responsibility.
The Basic Design of the Brain
How the 'triune’ brain came into being and what actually happens in it.
…unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall
have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be
taken away even that which he hath. ― Matthew 25:29
The brain is a complex structure that supports human life. Its configuration reflects the entire evolution of living beings, as it contains structures that share life support functions closely related to each other.
The conditional division of the human brain into functional levels has long been proposed. For example, according to ancient Jewish sources, the brain contains 1) Rauch, the hypothalamus, which is responsible for the needs of survival; 2) Nefesh, what is called the limbic system, which shapes feelings, emotions and desires; 3) Neshamah, the cerebral cortex, i.e. intelligence, strategy, philosophy and control over the other two levels.
The ancient Jewish description generally coincides with the modern view of the structure of the brain. Today, it is also schematically and functionally divided into the 'reptilian brain’, 'mammalian’, or emotional brain, and the cerebral cortex. All these conditional levels functionally correspond to the purposes mentioned by the ancient Jewish researchers.
The first and most ancient level is the 'reptilian brain’. It appeared 150 million years ago and is responsible for three main functions related to individual survival. The first function is security. Instant solutions that determine the degree of danger using the 'fight-or-flight’ algorithm. This widely used formula for responding to danger does not mention another possible option – to freeze.
The second duty of the 'reptilian brain’ is actions related to the search for food.
And finally, its third function is activities aimed at the continuation of the species, which includes finding and identifying objects suitable for reproduction.
The 'reptilian brain’ is constantly in operation, but a person is not aware of its activity, because the main indicator of the effectiveness of this brain, its KPI (key performance indicator), is speed and reliability, and not awareness. Awareness is as energy-intensive as it is slow and ambiguous. You can get eaten before you even think about it.
Above the 'reptilian brain’ is a structure called the 'mammalian brain’, or emotional brain. These structures appeared about 50 million years ago and help individuals survive in the group.
The emotional brain is the brain of social relations that helps structure a herd, tribe, pride, group, or society. Power and submission are behaviours that are shaped by this particular level. This brain is also involved in procreation activities, but in a specific form: to make an impression – to get an impression.
The 'mammalian brain’ is the centre of striving for superiority, seen as a resource for the exclusivity of the distribution of genetic material. Its structures allow a person to 'understand’ pets and be fascinated by 'communicating’ with them, and this 'understanding’ is, in a certain sense, true. It is this level that is responsible for a person’s experience and attention.
And finally, about two million years ago, the topmost level appeared: the structures responsible for the function called consciousness. If everything is more or less clear with the previous levels, then there are various misconceptions about the work and purpose of this level.
Most people imagine that the functions of consciousness include such important abilities as planning, developing military doctrines and scientific theories, writing novels and poems, writing theses and painting, creating movies and gambling. But all of the above and much more are just related elements, a by-product that arises in the process of its main activity and its main purpose – conscious adaptation to changes in the environment.
Explain and Justify
A reluctant lawyer – why a person is never guilty.
Anyone can be put in prison for ten years without
explaining anything to him, and somewhere in the back
of his mind he will know why. ― Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The most significant and primary function of our consciousness is to adapt our abilities to the model that contributes to survival, or to create a new survival model according to our abilities.
The ability to adapt in today’s world of concrete jungle is significantly different from the features of human adaptation in the wild, where they had only to adapt to food chains, pulling out of them the favourite links that satisfy their growing appetite and already suitable for the developing culinary mastery and needs.
Today, adaptation is no longer a situational mimicry or an evolutionary improvement of organs and physiological processes. Today, adaptation cannot be a passive expectation which follows environmental changes. Today, no matter how strange it may sound, modern requirements for adaptation are already a person’s anticipation of non-existent changes and practical interaction in models of the expected future.
Human consciousness is capable of creating a certain image of reality, modelling this image and admitting into it something that does not actually exist in the real environment. The world around us is represented by hundreds of thousands of interconnected processes. A person can adjust and rearrange these processes in their mind, change their essence and detail, simultaneously build a completely different reality in their perception, and create their own virtual mental maps.
Later on, based on these visual maps, it is safe to build your strategies, calculate plans and only then act. All this is the first and foremost ability of consciousness. But not the only one. There is another, and also an important one.
Nature has rewarded humans with a unique ability to visualise and imagine anything. Thanks to this ability, people can plan the actions of an upcoming hunt or the tactics of a football match, describe to themselves the interior of a house or the structure of a business they want to open. People can also recreate in their minds pictures of what happened to them and relive these moments in their imagination. Can imagine and admire or, on the contrary, become frustrated and upset. Can become so upset that they fall into a deep depression and, even worse, bring themselves to the point of wanting or trying to take their own life.
Thanks to imagination, a person can experience emotions and thoughts not only from events that have already happened to them but also from those that have not yet occurred.
A person can feel guilty both for the past and for the future. Guilty of anything, and that makes his condition unbearable. Experience something that does not exist or has not happened, and feel guilty about something that has not happened yet. This ability of consciousness comes bundled with imagination and the ability to visualise.
Nature is not at all interested in the question of who is to blame. Nature does not have the concepts of 'guilt’, 'judgement’, 'moral responsibility’ and similar terms invented by people. Nature has one purpose and meaning, which it puts into the appearance of any living thing on the planet. This is the continuation of life. Suicidal behaviour and depression of a person, according to nature, do not contribute in any way to their reproduction and the fulfilment of this single and most important goal.
Hence, another important function of consciousness is the ability to find excuses and explanations for yourself in any situation. Even after confessing to the most serious crime, a person always finds indirect culprits for his or her terrible action. It can be a dysfunctional family, bad company, government policies, weather, circumstances, and so on and so forth. The unique ability to explain and justify oneself surpasses all other human abilities. A person does not even notice how this happens because it works as perfectly and reliably as it does independently.
A simple question: 'Will you help a stranger who has felt ill in the street?' will be answered in the affirmative by the overwhelming majority of people. But if the respondents are walking down a street and see a passer-by who has become ill, then before realising the necessity to help, they will ask themselves a lot of different questions. All of them will be about one thing: how to find excuses for why this time they are not going to help.
For example, they may assume that this person is a tramp or a drug addict. This will immediately reduce the degree of their responsibility for the fate of the sufferer. Or they will start looking around and, seeing other eyewitnesses, will say to themselves that surely someone has already called the ambulance. And even if they are doctors themselves, they will think about criminal liability for malpractice. And only after all this, the sufferer has a chance to get help.
Despite the fact that a lot of things happen quickly and imperceptibly in us, it is directly dependent on the questions that we ask ourselves at these moments.
For example, very often motivational messages and publications use the expression 'If not you, then who?' But in the human brain, this question, based on the specifics of its work, actually sounds very different: 'If not me, then who?' That is, we need to find that someone else.
People try to explain everything to themselves. Explanations are a certain component of the system of the world around them. This sense of consistency gives them a greater sense of certainty about the present and future. This gives people confidence and, consequently, they are less stressed and less prone to depression. Surveys have shown that during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was uncertainty that most people were concerned about.
To sum up, the cerebral cortex, where our consciousness is for all practical purposes located, has many abilities and two main functions – to purposefully adapt to changes in the environment and justify the decisions and actions chosen for this adaptation.
Energy Strategies of the Brain
'Economic or economical?' – a question that has never lost its relevance.
What really matters is what happens in us, not with us.
An average person’s primitive reaction – the time it takes from seeing the light in front of their eyes to pressing a button in response – is 250 milliseconds. An average computer responds 750,000,000 times faster. But this indicator does not mean anything if you think about the overall capabilities of our brain and what a talented economist and an unsurpassed designer nature is.
Imagine a piece of thin fabric 2—3 millimetres thick with sides slightly longer than 40 cm. And in this piece of conditional matter, there are about 18 billion nerve cells. This is the cerebral cortex. Is it too many or too few? For comparison, the brain itself contains about 90 billion cells. At first glance, the figure of 18 billion looks solid. But if we take into account that there are almost 4 times more cells in the cerebellum, we can conclude that it is more important for a person to walk smoothly and not to fall than to write poems or compose formulas.
But not everything is perfect in the work of these 18 billion cells. Mental activity, too, has certain limitations – a person can simultaneously focus on only one problem and operate with three aspects of this problem. But this is not the most important thing. What matters, as always, is the energy involved. In the living world, to solve the problem of energy replenishment, its own 'food chains’ are built. People have optimised this process and began to literally grow energy in the fields and breed it on farms.
To meet their other 'requirements’ and 'concepts’, people needed different forms of energy, which they began to extract from the bowels of the Earth, generate at power stations, using the force of moving water or split atoms, and build new 'food chains’ now at the level of interests of entire states and consortia.
The average brain weight is about 2 per cent of the body weight, while it consumes a disproportionate amount of energy – 20 per cent and more. If we present the data in a more familiar absolute form, then the power consumption of our brain processor is slightly more than 12 watts. It is difficult to imagine how much power a computer would need if it had the same functionality as our brain.
The brain never rests, even when a person is asleep. It takes about 350—400 calories a day to maintain brain function, mostly in the form of glucose. The peak of energy consumption by the brain occurs at the age of 5—6 years, when the brain is able to utilise up to 60 per cent of all the energy received by the body.
In the evening, energy consumption is significantly higher than in the morning. This is because as the day’s experiences accumulate, cells and especially intercellular junctions have to expend more energy and conduct signals more actively. Impressions are stored, categorised, catalogued, and transformed into a person’s experience. Ultimately, all this changes the architecture of connections between nerve cells.
During its work, the brain is able to redirect blood to its certain areas, and spikes in energy consumption occur in these areas. This happens when the areas are involved in solving complex cognitive tasks – tasks for which there are no previously learned patterns in the memory, for example, learning a new skill, playing an instrument, or learning a language of a completely different language group. Such spikes can also occur when conditions are constantly changing, for example, in planning a strategy in a game of chess.
With the mastery of the skill and the accumulated experience of its application, a person no longer needs a high level of diligence and concentration. And, consequently, much less energy is consumed. How significant are these seemingly minor spikes in consumption for the brain? And, most importantly, why is the body willing to pay such a high price for brain function – such a substantial amount of energy?
It all started a long time ago. It is at present that people, with certain reservations, have practically solved the problem of hunger. But for millions of years, our human ancestors have constantly faced the threat of starvation. Nevertheless, the body allocates a fifth of its energy consumed to the needs of the brain.
The issue of energy conservation is a matter of strategy for its consumption. The brain is constantly involved in optimising all the processes related to the use of this energy. It is not just the processes of the brain itself, but also those that consume the remaining four-fifths of the energy. The energy of a person’s activity, reactions, actions, and behaviour. Optimisation follows a simple and reliable strategy – why reinvent the wheel every time? – it is more economical to use ready-made solutions or patterns. The main thing is that such patterns already exist or, if necessary, are created and memorised.
People never think about the many activities they perform every day. Even the simplest ones. They brush their teeth, make coffee, and drive a car. But how much time and energy do they spend learning these skills? A person has a giant library of such templates, and it is difficult to say how much energy has been spent to optimise and organise these seemingly simple but necessary actions in his or her head.
There are also actions and processes that we are merely not aware of. The founder of the so-called default mode of brain function, Markus Raichle, explains that the brain is constantly busy building an internal model of the world around it. The model created by the brain acts as a forecast and helps predict and prepare for events. While the predictions come true, the brain does not attract the person’s attention, which would be much more energy-consuming.
But if something happens that does not correspond to the forecast, the person will certainly pay attention to it. For example, if you step on the steps of an escalator that is not working, you suddenly feel something like a jolt. According to the brain’s prediction, which has been confirmed a hundred times, the escalator should work, and the brain compensates in advance for the acceleration that the body experiences when it gets on the escalator.
Any changes are an incredible expenditure of energy. The simplicity of transformations, which people are assured of in childhood, which they dream of in their youth, and which they meet when they are mature, this simplicity becomes unbearable for people. It repels them when they learn the value of this so-called simplicity.
After all, in the end, for the sake of change, you always need to get rid of something, sacrifice something and rebuild something. Or, even more critically, build from scratch. And in fact, only the brain can conceive how much energy will have to be spent on this. One form of earning energy is saving energy. Changing yourself is expensive.
People claim to be lazy and content with their status, providing various explanations and citing potential difficulties or clearly unsolvable problems. The imagined difficulties per se serve as a convenient excuse for their lack of action.
People are not willing to pay for changes, but they cannot admit it to themselves. It is not necessarily people themselves who are against change, but rather their brain’s resistance to it. The visual cortex, the area of the brain responsible for imagination and mental visualisation, consumes so much energy that a person is not even capable of imagining it. This is also one of the reasons why people are not inclined to think about or consider something unless they absolutely have to.
Depending on the willingness to spend energy on thoughts about what is happening around them and in decreasing order of this readiness, people can be divided into three groups: those who manage what is happening, those who observe what is happening, and those who are surprised by what is happening.
Hence, if you encounter someone who is constantly surprised, then they are not ready to change anything that surprises them. Patient observation demands more energy, and creation and management are the height of waste. However, it is precisely this energy waste that drives human development.
Do We Really Think?
Where the illusion begins or where it does not end. Our maps of a world that does not exist.
Watch your words, they become your actions. ― Lao Tzu
The extent to which a person is surprised by events correlates with the activity of their thought processes. The term 'thought processes’ itself appeared as an attempt to describe the activity of the human brain. Nowadays, much is known about the origins and locations of these processes compared to the last millennia, but we still do not have a complete understanding of how people think.
The act of thinking is linked to human cognitive activity. Thinking includes components such as attention and perception, forming concepts, making judgements and reaching conclusions. Individuals carry out this process using words and images. Essentially, the thinking process is akin to having a conversation with oneself. If people continue to react to the world around them without asking questions or seeking answers, there will be no end to their surprise. Their instincts, rather than their ideas, will shape their behaviour.
But we already do know something important about thinking. For example, the fact that thinking is strongly influenced by associative memory. Associative memory is a kind of personal library of what a person has seen, heard, felt, and done. Most of this library is compiled and classified without conscious human control, so we can only guess what is presented in it and in what form.
Opinions, judgements, preferences, tastes and decision-making systems are built based on this library. When a person forms an opinion about what is good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or not, all this is determined not so much by what they see, smell, or hear, but by what is already present in the memory, how similar experiences have been labelled and rated, what images and words have been used.
Therefore, to some extent, language and its well-established encodings and patterns are to blame for the simplistic perception of the world around us and the very quality of human thinking. At the current rate of development, a person actually needs more words to formulate problems. No one expected that with the advancement of technology, thinking would not be deployed at the same rate, but on the contrary, would be limited. While people today possess significantly more knowledge compared to previous centuries, the language used to convey and elaborate on this knowledge is much poorer.
The 'mental library’ also comes with its own set of issues and peculiarities. People can explain their daily decisions and actions to themselves based on their past experiences, present conditions, and the overall context. But the problem is that they may have initially incorrectly identified these circumstances and situations stored in their 'library’. This can lead them to access the wrong shelf and end up in the wrong place, which can have serious consequences at times.
A person’s thinking can be influenced by numerous factors. One of the factors, the influence of societal goals and corresponding behaviours, was mentioned above. Adaptation to the chosen community and the fear of being excluded from it is an important aspect of a person’s sense of security. The desire to be recognised within a particular environment, whether chosen independently or by chance, shifts much of the personal responsibility to what is commonly called the circumstances, such as nationality, company, group, or family.
This negates the person’s idea that the reason why they found themselves in a certain society and in certain circumstances is in themselves. But, in the end, a person chooses where and with whom to live and unconsciously fears losing it. And they are not so much afraid of losing, as they do not want to change anything familiar.
Even though deep in their minds people are always ready to be happier in a new place, they are often held back by those 'superhuman efforts’ required to make this change. People sometimes do not even dare to think about the unknown future.
Overall, people try not to think that all possible consequences of their choices and ideas will eventually be marked with a single stone with two dates – when they enter the process of the constant need to choose and adjust, and when they exit from it.
But there is another important detail, an issue that a person does not notice or tries not to delve into, again due to saving energy when thinking. The question is as follows: ‘Has the person determined his or her own choice, or have others done it for him or her? Not the circumstances, not the weather, but certain people with certain interests.’
People know that there are many methods of influencing their behaviour. They believe that within a family or small group, they also can influence, mistaking for influence their ability to give orders or the forced submission of others as a result of dependence on them.
Yet, along with this, people do not know much about how illusions, which they willingly believe, are professionally created. Similarly, they are unaware of how and in what situations they become highly suggestible. People do not understand why they tend to follow leaders and why they seek relief from stress in group cohesion or collective faith. They do not know the whole system, but they have heard about the existence of some methods used by corporations to influence employees and by the state to influence everyone. However, they do not fully comprehend the details of this system and are inevitably influenced by it.
Influence techniques are a powerful weapon in the hands of people who pursue their goals and interests. This is also a dangerous weapon if the interests of these people differ from the interests of society. Using the society itself, 'public opinion’ can be formed. Like a collective neurological imprint, the 'public opinion’ can be permanently fixed just as a photographic fixer was used in the processing of film or paper in the analogue age. Anyone who was an amateur photographer at that time remembers that the image is short-lived without fixing. Extremely short-lived.
If for a moment we imagine that every person is a kind of neurological robot, the carrier of an infinite number of constantly fixed photos, then everyone around you is an eternal prisoner of these ideas, value systems, certain scientific paradigms and mass illusions.
