The Emotion Machine

“When we enter a room, we seem to see the entire scene almost instantly. But, really, it takes time to see—to apprehend all the details and see if they confirm our expectations and beliefs. Our first impressions often have to be revised. Still, how could so many visual cues so quickly lead to consistent views? What could explain the blinding speed of sight?”[155]

Answer: we don’t need to constantly ‘see’ all those things because we build virtual worlds in our heads. Hear one of my favorite neurobiologists:

William H. Calvin: “The seemingly stable scene you normally “see” is really a mental model that you construct—the eyes are actually darting all around, producing a retinal image as jerky as an amateur video, and some of what you thought you saw was instead filled in from memory.”[156]

We construct those mental models so fluently that we feel no need to ask ourselves how our brains make them and put them to use. However, here we need a theory about why, when we move, the objects around us seem to remain in place. When first you see the three walls of that room, you might have represented them with a network like this:

However, even before you entered that room, you expected it to have four walls—and already knew how to represent a ‘typical box-like four-walled room.’ Consequently, you ‘assumed by default’ that its edges, corners, ceiling, and floor would be parts of a larger, non-moving framework that doesn’t depend on your present point of view. In other words, the ‘reality’ that we perceive is based on mental models in which things don’t usually change their shapes or disappear, despite their changing appearances. We mainly react to what we expect—and tend to represent what we see as ‘things’ that remain in their places.[157]

If you use this kind of larger-scale structure, then as you roam about that room, you can store each new observation in some part of that more stable framework. For example, if you represent that chair as near the North wall, and the door as part of the South wall, then these objects will have a fixed ‘mental place’—regardless of where you were when you noticed them—and those locations will stay the same even when those objects are out of sight. (Of course this could lead to accidents, if an object was moved without your knowing it!)

For vision, this shows how the space that surrounds us would seem to stay the same when we see it from different views—by linking features in different realms to similar roles in a larger-scale frame. For language, in §6 -1 we saw how this method could make “Charles gave Joan the Book” seem to keep a single meaning when we interpret it in different realms. We introduced the term “Panalogy” to describe such schemes for linking analogous features together.

Student: How do we make new panalogies? How hard are they to build and maintain? Is the talent for making them innate or learned? Where do we place them in our brains? And what happens when one of them makes a mistake?

We rarely make an entirely new idea, because, before you make records of anything new, you are likely already to have recalled some similar object or incident—so then, we will usually copy and modify some structure that we already have. This is extremely useful because, otherwise, we would have no way to get access to that ‘new idea,’ or know which old skills to apply to it. Also, if that older concept already belongs to a panalogy, we can add the new idea as an additional leaf; then it will inherit the techniques by which that older is retrieved and applied.

For example, you can think of a chair as a physical structure whose parts consist of a back, seat and legs. In that physical view, the chair’s legs support its seat, and both of these support the chair’s back.

However, you can also think of a chair as a way to make people feel comfortable. Thus the chair’s seat is designed to support one’s weight, the chair’s back serves to support one’s back, and the chair’s legs support one up to a height designed to help a person to relax.

Similarly, you could also regard that very same chair as an item of personal property, or as a work of art or of carpentry—and each of those various contexts or realms could lead you to represent chairs in different ways. Then, when your present way to think fails, your critics could tell you to switch to another.

However, that switching might cost you a good deal of time—if you were forced to start over. But, if you have grouped those several representations into a panalogy, by linking their similar features together, then you’ll be able more quickly to switch. Indeed, I suspect that much of what we know has been organized into panalogies—so that we can see an automobile as a vehicle, or as a complex mechanical object, or as a valuable possession. We can see a city as a place for people to live, as a network of social services, or as an object that requires a lot of water, food, and energy. Chapter §9 will argue that, whenever you think about your Self, you are reflecting about a panalogy of mental models of yourself.

From where do our panalogies come, and how and when do we develop them? I suspect that the architecture of our brains has evolved so that we tend to link every fragment of knowledge we learn to similar ones that we already know, in analogous aspects of multiple realms—and that we do this so automatically that it seems to require no reasoning.[158]

Student: But wouldn’t that make you mistake whatever you see for something else that it reminds you of? You would always be confusing things.

Yes, and we’re constantly making those kinds of ‘mistakes’—but although this may seem paradoxical, that actually helps to keep us from being confused! For if you saw each object as totally new, then it would have no meaning to you—and you would have no ideas about what to do. However, if each new item gets linked to some older ones—as when a new chair reminds you of previous ones—then you will know some things you could do with it.

If our memories mainly consist of panalogies, then most of our thinking will have to deal with ambiguous representations of things. However, this is a virtue and not a fault because much of our human resourcefulness comes from using analogies.

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