The Shaping of Human Tools: Part 3: How people respond and act

Welcome to part 3 of this series. If you are looking for a way back to the beginning you can go to the Introduction which has a table of contents or just to the the previous section.

While the internals of the human mind are still beyond our complete understanding several factors have combined to allow me to model its behavior with some accuracy for these purposes. This model is the synthesis of what has been learned from studying the physical structure of the brain and those who are trying to duplicate its functions for use in robotic systems that need to learn and adapt with a lot of NLP thrown in. Below is the model of human responses I use in my training programs, for simple reference I tend to think of this as the “Black-Box” model.

In the Black-Box model of response behavior I consider that humans tend to encode repetitive tasks or conclusions into their “hardware” and that from the point of view of the conscious mind the inner workings of these become opaque.  In engineering such a system is known as a “Black Box” indicating that its internal workings are unknown and must be deduced from outside observation.

The human brain appears to be a large network of neurons that are free to form connections to each other in three dimensions. There is some evidence that as we learn these connections between the cells of our brain become physically thicker and stronger in some directions and not so in others, forming a map of our knowledge.

Actions that are in accordance with these more efficient connections are literally faster than unfamiliar or unused pathways. Eventually these preferred reactions become so efficient that they sort of become automatic. It would take a deliberate effort of will to suppress that reaction. This is one of the core benefits of practicing something. I use the blanket term reflexes for this result.

Any situation or stimulus that doesn’t have a reflex or is too complex to be encoded as a reflex is processed by the conscious mind. While the conscious mind has an incredible ability to make decisions about handling novel or unknown situations it is slow compared to reflexes and there is a limit to how much it can handle at one time.

The ability to create reflexes over time is one of the great strengths of the human mind. It allows us to function more efficiently and represents an important aspect of learning. These created reflexes are slower than the ones that are deeply written into the human body they are still much faster than conscious decision making.

Think of it this way… the more you do something the more engrained those pathways in your mind become. The more deeply those pathways are engrained the less you have to “think” about using them.

An example is the act of catching a ball. When you first tried it you were slow and clumsy. You got hit with it or dropped the ball often. Your brain had to attempt to solve complex spatial relations calculations in real time and simultaneously control your arm and body to make the catch. Your conscious mind was not up to the task because it is slow, very slow considering the speeds of the world we live in.

Over time you got better at it as more and more of the processing was being encoded into your brains physical structure by the process of learning. As those items were thus encoded they became a subroutine or reflex that your conscious mind could call upon. These reflexes run much, much faster than your conscious mind. The more that gets encoded the more your brain has left to handle the rest of the problem.

In the end, the entire process of catching a ball became automated. Once that happens you can catch balls all day while using your conscious mind to do a multitude of other tasks like listening to music or holding a conversation – or making decisions about where to throw the ball once you catch it to win a game. It goes further; once you have that reflex then it becomes generalized. Not only can you catch a baseball but your body will quickly react to catch a wide range of “semi ball like objects”.

An example is the act of Driving a car. Another example many of us can relate too. It seemed complex and overwhelming in the beginning but later on it is easy. When the conditions on the road become significantly different than what we are used to, like when it is snowing or raining, the reflexes gradually lose their ability to help us and driving becomes a difficult task again.

It is easy to see how these concepts apply to reflexes that involve physical actions, but is the same true for more complex decisions? It seems that it is though the experimental verification is somewhat lacking.

In my experience, complex decisions and moral/ethical concepts go through a similar process of imprinting or learning. I know that for myself when I was younger I spent quite a lot of time weighing  my actions in the context of my developing morals and ethics. Over time I spend much less time on such things as those responses I would find morally objectionable simply do not occur to me on the conscious level as possibilities for action.

For these complex types of decisions and situations then discipline is the more applicable strategy. Whether internally or externally imposed discipline can be used to imprint complex responses into the brain. These responses are slower than reflexes and more subject to conscious modification or control but significantly more flexible and still provide an efficiency increase over completely conscious processing.

An example is chess: When learning to play chess one finds quickly at the lower skill levels that it is a bad idea to leave your King exposed to the front. As the number of games lost to this situation mounts many players develop a distinct reluctance to make any move that will expose their King to the front because of this. We may say that this player is “disciplined” in that they do not make casual mistakes leaving their King open when tired or distracted.

The interesting part of this is that there are many situations where it is perfectly safe and advantageous to make such a move. As ones skill increases they may know this intellectually but they often will retain a sense of unease at the prospect. This unease is not beyond conscious control the way a reflex generally but the power of the imprint remains noticeable.

There are many possible situations where this type of discipline can be useful in training the submissive to serve optimally. It can be used to instill instincts and tendencies that can improve performance and attitude. Discipline can be instilled to combat a natural tendency to laziness or to overcome an innate shyness for example. Most importantly discipline can be used to help the submissive control inappropriate emotional responses.

Just like conditioned reflexes, discipline helps the mind create automatic or semi-automatic responses that can leave the conscious mind clear to make decisions. Self discipline to control panic can go a long way to helping someone respond appropriately in a dangerous situation.

On to part 4, Punishment and Reward…

Image note: The associated image is used under the Creative Commons license at this link, and was taken by Alex Lines and posted on Flickr.