Loops, lies and Reykjavik

Brain shenanigans on the road

I’m in Reykjavik, where I was last in 2008. But it feels like I’ve been here a lot more recently, because I watched some Icelandic noir series set in the city last year. It reminds me of when my English boyfriend and I went to New York, and he said midtown Manhattan felt pre-experienced, like he was just visiting a Law and Order episode rather than an actual place. 

It’s not so much that our brains don’t always distinguish between representation and reality as that they don’t distinguish between different orders of representation. When I look around Reykjavik, my brain is creating an immersive ‘reality’ based on the data of my senses, various inferences, and anything else that it thinks is relevant. But that immersive experience is still one that is being manifested from inside my skull. Short of complex brain scans, the main difference between that simulation and what we call a hallucination is whether most people are experiencing a similar simulation. And when my brain creates that simulation for me, all the past experiences/representations I’ve encountered can also be pulled in as relevant data, including the murder of a fictional Icelandic ballerina.

If this effect can be a bit strange when travelling, it can be positively pernicious when it comes to our views of ourselves. Not only do our brains supply the simulation, but they're also doing it in the midst of a lifetime of accreted assumptions about who we are. Plus, any new data we take in is heavily filtered by cognitive bias, which ensures we only give import to information that fits the conceptual schemas we already carry. This is one reason that you can be told you are smart your entire life and still feel like you need to wake up and prove it afresh every fucking day. It’s why praise can feel like a momentary reprieve that wears off way too soon. It’s like we’re trapped in a closed loop that we don’t even know is a loop, because we think it’s just the world. 

And that dynamic means we don’t think to look for evidence that might disrupt the loop. Why would we look for data that doesn't fit this narrative, when we're so sure the narrative is true? It’s not just that we don’t know what our unknown unknowns might be. We don’t even know that there ARE unknown unknowns.

One of my jobs as a coach is to unearth the unknown unknown unknowns that you can’t, simply because it's your brain that buried them in the first place. For us to make the deepest changes, I need to be able to see specifics about the particular self-attacking reality your brain is creating.

But if you’re on my list, I can predict at least a few faulty things your brain is probably saying to you on the regular, because most high-intelligent, high-anxiety brains lie in pretty similar ways. 

One of these lies boils down to You don't push yourself hard enough. This lie is the reason we install our own internal drill sergeant, who we hope will fix this problem for us. Unfortunately, his so-called help is pretty counterproductive, plus lie is flexible as hell. It can expand to accommodate any level of achievement. I’ve heard versions of it from Ivy League PhDs and people who have run multiple successful startups. It keeps us from noticing any evidence that we are NOT unfocused, lazy, undisciplined and lacking in drive. 

In the workshop I ran last week, we took a cognitive pry-bar to this lie by considering the following series of questions:  

• When is a time you could have given up but didn’t?

• What were you thinking that kept you from giving up?

• What do you feel when you think that now?

• How might things change if you thought that on purpose today?

Every single person who attended was able to think of an instance when they refused to give up, and the thoughts they found when they started looking were miles from their usual stories about themselves. Things like: I know what I’m doing or These people have no idea what I can do or Too many things have aligned to make this possible for me to quit now. The feelings created by these thoughts were things like determination, excitement, confidence, self-trust, and optimism. 

These are the kind of perspectives you can locate outside of your usual thought loops once you approach your brain with a different set of prompts. Because it’s all in there somewhere—every heart-felt compliment you’ve received, all the times you’ve been proud of yourself, hard things you’ve done against the odds. We may not open the file very often, but there’s an entire archive of good things about us indexed and at the ready. We just have to remind ourselves to ask.