Proprioception of thought part 2, Knowing
Dr. Eric Zabiegalski
Author, Strategist, Coach, Friend. Senior Consultant at Avian
Last month we began a conversation about an idea first started by American physicist David Bohm in the 1980’s, proprioception of thought. Described as “self-perception of thought”, it’s defined as thought aided by an awareness and observation of our surroundings and the idea that thought alone (the voice in our heads) should not represent our center for reality in life or truth in decision making, it’s just not enough to navigate our world. Nor should it be the final word in a decision tree involving whether to think, act, or feel a particular way. Its voice, while listened to, should be questioned, quieted, and called upon in appropriate measure and time, aided by awareness and observation in the moment. Humanities sole reliance upon conscious thought as a compass while having a compelling draw can only result in allowing rational thinking to hijack our efforts at a truer reality, shunting our evolution. Why? Conscious reasoning and logic without the centering groundedness of awareness and observation are not enough to interpret the world and the universe beyond. And it’s not using all the mind’s amazing gifts, to the contrary, it only utilizes the basest of its abilities. The world is chaotic and people are a hopeless mess so why care about such things in the first place? The reason is because whether you’re an Epicurean (pleasure seeking), an Epictetian (a stoic), or somewhere in between we all want happiness and if you don’t understand or care about these ideas you’ll most likely never get there.
Physicist Albert Einstein once said “the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift”, I think he was right.
Your faithful brain
Do you remember the quote from the popular National Lampoon movie Animal House? “fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.” In that spirit the brain has flaws, its fiercely faithful, but also chronically lazy and frequently wrong. We need to praise it for tirelessly trying to protect us, for looking for energy saving short cuts and providing comfortingly familiar paths of thought to safely walk us down, but we shouldn’t let it get lazy or jaded, because it will. And we shouldn’t assume it knows everything, Instead, we need to give it new growth stretching challenges and experiences; you know what’s best for your brain not the other way around. Also, don’t let it rob you of your cognitive sobriety by inebriating and enticing your incorrigible ego with thoughts of grandeur and perfection, we are works in progress, never finished products. What is enough to bolster thought and our brain and what should we do? Frequently question thoughts opinion by checking it against other cues. This month, we discuss why thought alone is not enough for humanity to live by. We delve deeper into thought and truth and look at how to tell when we’re on the best, cognitively proprioceptive, path, not only for our benefit but for all mankind.
What we know
There’s a subtle yet important distinction between the ideas of knowledge and knowing, and not knowing this distinction hurts us. I think It’s so important in fact that not knowing this difference most likely robs us of learning and growing, keeping us skipping like a scratched 78 RPM record at the same point in the song. Now, consider that we are social animals and mirror neurons in our brain cause us to imitate one other. My skipping song is likely to be heard, and even hummed, by you, and others, in families, communities, cultures, even countries, its influence is deeper and more far reaching than we know. Such a result not only paints a sad epitaph for an unrealized life, but even for an unrealized species, we are affected by one another.
What we really know
Neuroscientist and Harvard professor Rudy Tanzi says you should never explain your theories, especially if you’re a student at Harvard. Tanzi says we are infinitely smarter in our heads than we are when we speak, why? Even with 100 billion neurons firing in the brain Tanzi says, when we try to vocally reduce what we know to “laryngeal grunt sounds”, we are limited, and we lose much of our brilliance. It’s not just that we don’t know enough, it’s also that we can’t convey with words all that we perceive, nor definitively capture it in an ever-changing picture. Tanzi conveys what Bohm, J. Krishnamurti, Einstein, Chopra, Eckert Tolle, and countless other great thinkers through time also knew, Knowledge (data, facts, and figures) are limited, but knowing, (learning) is limitless. If you’re going to anchor on any single idea in life this is a good one to pick. Yet even with this sage advice we still stubbornly park on current and popular knowledge as the standard by which to measure, judge, act and interact, instead of keeping our mind open, learning, and updating what we know against the ever-changing picture of our world.
Knowledge, knowing, and learning
What’s the difference between knowledge, knowing, and learning? You might say one difference is “tense.” Knowledge is in the past tense while “Knowing” doesn’t have a tense, or, if it does, it’s an ever-receding future tense. The difference between knowledge and, knowing, is learning, which is neither static nor in the past, its continually forward moving and forward thinking. How do you make this quantum leap from knowledge to knowing? You start by putting thought in its proper (optimal) place within the rank and file of perception, and then you begin paying more attention to observation and awareness, once you master this, you’re home free. I have a good friend Rob Bogosian who asks each of his MBA students the same question, “what’s more important in your workplace, knowledge or learning?” Undoubtedly, they almost exclusively answer “knowledge.” This answer of the knowing of specific knowledge being more important than learning represents perhaps the biggest mistake organizations and their cultures make and one which keeps them from becoming learning organizations, it hobbles them, and it’s difficult to diagnose and correct, and the problems don’t stop there. There’s something in all but the strongest among us who don’t crave definitive answers and knowledge, and then transmogrify, data, facts, and figures into our own identities, knowledge becomes and defines us. Remember what we said earlier about humans imitating each other, unfortunately “shunning learning” scales easily among groups, organizations, and cultures. Bottom line, the minute we plant a stake in the ground and defend knowledge, identifying with it and validating our existence by it, we lose.
Fantasy, creativity, imagination, and perception
Whats the difference in these ideas? For starters, they are manifestations and expressions of thought, and ultimately comprise part of perception. Secondly, though on the surface they may look similar, they can be very different and are not necessarily interchangeable or mutually exclusive, let’s take a closer look.
Perception
Last month we defined an “optimal perception”, let’s call it cognitive proprioception, as being a kind of self-perception made of awareness, observation, and thought with thought contributing to perception, giving it meaning, but it goes deeper than this. Unpacking these concepts further it can be said that awareness, observation, and thought (perception) are heavily influenced by things like identity, ego, bias, and memory, things brought in and transmitted by thought (more on “perception influencers” next month). This is also where imagination comes in. Imagination is a “re-imagining” or a re-creation of experience through our thoughts creating images and with them either pleasure or pain. These images are made up of reflexes in the mind drawn from memory, disturbing neurochemicals, and triggering neurons in the brain. In this way thoughts imaginative speculations give rise to images and sensations, and we arrive at a continual seamless personal reality by which to navigate life.
Imagination
It can be said that everything we perceive as reality in our world is from the imagination. It’s an “imaging” of what our brain filters through the senses and consciousness is created by this process. Bohm contends that imagination comprises everything from pedestrian day to day thoughts, images, and manifestations of reality (Bohm calls this primary imagination), to imaginings which are fanciful, abstract, and even brand-new.
Fantasy and creativity
Beyond the everyday imagination of rearranging, sorting, and interpreting reality, there are other types of imagination that involve themselves with things that represent a departure from daily reality. Things which are: not necessarily real, may be known or unknown, and things which could be good, bad, or even dangerous to us, these are fantasy and creativity. Fantasy, or fancy, Bohm says, is rooted in the past. You can fantasize about a tropical vacation or about new furniture in your living room, either way you are conjuring up images seen before, somewhere else in your past (from memory) or experiences previously had, heard, thought, or read about. Fantasy can be of great comfort and help or can become dangerous if it slips into everyday perception and merges with the daily filtering of the reality we experience and share with others, imagination can be utilitarian and helpful, or destructive.
Creativity on the other hand while being another form of imagination is not exclusively grounded in or tethered to memories and thought, it’s more of an open, and more importantly, empty space, representing a place holder for anything which might emerge to occupy it. Creativity Bohm says comes from somewhere else and allows our perception to draw from something other than conscious thought, memory, or reflex, it comes from somewhere deeper. Bohm says consciousness is like a vast river but the conscious part of our mind, daily reflexive thought, is little more than a ripple on the surface of this immense river. Creativity occurs when we dive below the surface of consciousness and plunge into the subconscious and connect with something else we cannot reach in the conscious realm, seeing something new, and, perhaps pulling it in from a larger connected universe.
You decide
While doing some early morning writing for this article just a few days ago I had my ear buds in and a familiar song came on the radio. As I wrote, a thought came to my mind that my mother died on this January day many years ago, it was not a thought I had intended to produce or was consciously thinking about. As I continued writing my thoughts went back to the familiar song playing and an associated thought that my mother, also like me, liked this band and their upbeat music. Curious of the year of the song, I did a quick internet search and, revealing a picture of the album cover I had seen many times through the years, discovered the song was written the year of her death. A few moments later my wife entered the room and, sitting beside me, asked what I was doing. I told her I was writing and then shared the funny coincidence of thinking of Jeanne on this day, and of the song, and the album. Looking at my phone and seeing the picture of the album she then asked, “Is that the album cover?”, “yes”, I said. She then said emphatically “look at the artwork, that’s a Cardinal”, she said. “Cardinals are an ancient symbol that departed loved ones are near!” I looked at her, and at the picture, and unexpectedly, I began to cry, but this time (perhaps for the first time) they were tears of comfort, and happiness. It’s funny how thought, the human mind, and the universe work. Was this experience a simple case of noticing, hyper-noticing, and sense-making or something more? You decide.
We’re not done
What have we learned? We know from last month’s discussion that thoughts are physical mental representations of experience, and they are ephemeral, transitory, and repeating. It’s worth repeating again that albeit subtle, thought is a physical reflexive movement in the brain, and not some ethereal otherworldly experience, thought is muscle reflex of the brain not much different than a knee jerk or a flinch. And thought is also a matter of chemistry. Neurochemicals in the brain, dopamine, serotonin, and others, are released in response to outside stimuli or inside thought and we respond in varying emotive ways. Have you ever been inexplicably obsessed over something to the point in which it became all consuming? Young teenage love perhaps, or a new car, and then, just as quickly and mysteriously, it wasn’t important to you any longer? You may have even thought “this thing is dead to me” when only a day earlier you were pining away desperately for that love, or that automobile, that’s an example of the brain being flooded with neurochemicals. However, despite this there is also something more to thought than chemicals, reflexes, firing neurons, and memory, something profound which we have only begun to understand.
I have a yoga instructor friend in San Diego named Soraya who agrees that most thoughts are based on memories of past experience and offers an additional perspective which further explains the struggle we all have in living a truer reality. Thoughts, Soraya says are also based on projections of future experiences. While awareness and observation are deeply rooted in the present, thought isn’t paying attention. Thought compulsively wants to ping pong from memories of the past into projections of the future, also based on memory and future bets of what might be. Fueled by thoughts emotions and the anticipation of pleasure, pain, excitement, or fear, it’s a troubling way to live Soraya concludes. Our mental, emotional, and physical health depend greatly upon cultivating an ability to live more and more in the present. That means thought rooted in and informed by awareness and observation, making healthy and balanced use of both remembering the past and predicting the future. Soraya says there is so much more to us than our thinking minds, the trick is to step out of the compulsive back and forth of past to future and discover the intelligence and ease of a living founded in the present, informed by awareness and observation.
With careful practice we can achieve Bohm’s proprioception of thought, (self-awareness of thought), and humankind can step out of its past animal behavior, step around its mechanical and rational present notions and future bets and transcend into a yet conceivable future. One in which awareness, observation, and thought work together in perfect accord to bring us out of our isolated and fearful confusion, bring us truer happiness and contentment, and welcome us into the light of a wonderfully connected universe.
Dr. Zabiegalski is available to talk to your organization or venue about ambidexterity research or speak informatively and eloquently about organizational culture, leadership, strategy, learning, complexity, business neuroscience, creativity, mindfulness, talent management, personal success, emotional intelligence, Action Learning, or storytelling. Contact Eric about a talk, keynote presentation, workshop, or coaching today!
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3 年Insightful article. Thank you. Was interesting to read your definition of knowledge, knowing and learning. Without any focused research and just from life experience, I tend to think that Knowledge is static, in the past, as in THEN and THERE. Knowing is without tense, it is in the HERE and NOW and the integration of such knowing moments over time would constitute the process of learning, until it becomes codified as knowledge.
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3 年Brilliant!
Author, Strategist, Coach, Friend. Senior Consultant at Avian
3 年Thanks Octavio Arroyo Zavala tell me your thoughts! And please share. ?? Eric
Author, Strategist, Coach, Friend. Senior Consultant at Avian
3 年Thanks ?? Elizabeth Harvey please share any thoughts/comments and share ?? vr E