A Piece of Cerebrum: To Ignore What’s Disconcerting
Should I stay or should I go now?
(yo me enfrio o lo sufro.)
If I go there will be trouble.
(Si me voy – va a haber peligro.)
And if I stay it will be double.
- The Clash
As humans, we naturally fret the unpredictable. If we can’t reach out, metaphorically grab it and expect it, personal reluctance sets in and delays our step forward. It’s just easier, and more mentality soothing, to deal with what is a certainty, even though few things are. This means that when we do make predictions, as many of us do daily, it feels disconcerting and mentally disruptive when we feel or are told we are wrong.
Our internal prediction engine is purely selfish. We attempt to predict our world and future scenarios based on information we’ve personally acquired. This process takes place mainly in the cerebrum, which is the part of the brain that locates patterns. When the cerebrum’s function is interrupted with a sense of doubt, as I described above, fear is triggered.
As conditioned creatures, this is a partial explanation to why Groupthink occurs, spurting a sort of animal collective when we are faced with ambiguity in large communities. Even if we feel wrong about an idea, it’s soothing to believe that other people still agree with us. It creates a safety net for our volatile prediction engine.
The thing is, this whole psychological phenomenon is artificial. We create it outside reality.
My point and theory is that fighting for an individual cause can be as much of a psychological roadblock as it is a social one, and that the science behind irrational emotion as much of an illusion as the non-existent social pressure.
That’s why psychological battles require finding a delicate mental zone where it’s less about comfort and prediction, but more about control. The fallacy of human emotion is that we over-dramatize our own process. Once you ignore it, you’re already past it.
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