The Russia-Ukraine war playing out on television these last two weeks has produced a helpless feeling of not being able to help. Yet, it has motivated me to explore alternative ways to be of use. This essay represents a small way of using what I know to consider future answers to such conflicts.
The 21st century is well on its way to becoming the era of translational biological information. This means we are applying the vast amount of knowledge gathered over the last century to change the world for the better. Our modern economy, law, politics, and the military reflect this process. These are several of the many institutions in society that owe a great deal to the growing understanding of the mind. Advertising, marketing, focus groups, negotiations, ethics, law, and intelligence work—all rely on awareness of how we think and decide. From genetics to personalized medicine, the study of the human mind sits at the edge of a truly transformational time. We know well the link between malnutrition and depression, while we learn more every day about the role depression plays in mild cognitive impairment. Other findings, such as the effects that microbiome bacteria in our stomachs have on cognition, are nothing short of extraordinary.
For the past century and a half, we have learned that changes in our brain result in modifications to the mind and to our personality. Tools to study and learn these brain-mind relationships, such as deep brain stimulation, have moved us from indirect to more direct mapping. We have discovered ways to know how people decide and think, and how it is we communicate with each other. A more recent development in neuroplasticity is that modifications to our personality can cause changes to our brains. Mindfulness meditation to manage stress rewires unhealthy circuits in the brain, such as the HPA axis response.
What such insights have produced is not only a better grasp of how information processing affects perception and cognition but how, through extensive training, we can extend our personal and sociocultural boundaries. Neurotechnology, one of the new sciences in this contemporary world, has developed methods for treating and repairing soldiers injured in battle. It has figured out how we move cursors across a screen through the power of thought and how to control an advanced prosthetic arm in the same way. Neurotechnology restores the sensation of touch to an individual with severe neuro-degenerative injury.
The consequences of this new science, however, are not always positive. In the name of national security and warfare preparation, neuropsychological training also eases individuals into controversial tasks, such as killing. Thoughts control the flying of drones. Pharmaceuticals help soldiers forget traumatic experiences or produce feelings of trust to encourage confession in an interrogation. Thus, the weaponization of biological information raises ethical concerns.
The dual use of scientific information for good and bad ought not to prevent us from extracting lessons on how to avert conflict. Given all the current clashes, it is an opportune time to ask whether there is anything in the biological treasure trove of knowledge that can help us deal with conflict or even how to avoid it.
Optimal prediction in decision-making is one innovative way to prevent conflict. Imagine being able to anticipate the plans of others, especially adversaries, and forestall, or prevent those efforts? Could we have stopped the Ukrainian war had we known that Russia would invade the country? Is it possible to stop any conflict if we know the problem before it happens? The rational answer would seem to be yes. Interestingly, the human brain evolved for “optimal” prediction in decision-making, turning Homo sapiens into one of the most successful species to survive a violent and uncertain world. It sounds reasonable, therefore, to ask whether there are lessons in this evolution that we can extract for more general use?
Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, based on neurologically inspired theories of uncertainty, have led to proposals suggesting human brains are sophisticated prediction engines. This means the brain generates mental models of the surrounding environment to predict the most plausible explanation for what’s happening in each moment and updates the models in real time. According to Andy Clark, a cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, “You experience, in some sense, the world that you expect to experience.”
We assume the major function of “looking into the future” through prediction, preparation, anticipation, prospection or expectations in various cognitive domains is to organize our experience of the world as efficiently as possible. The brain-mind is optimally, not perfectly, designed to cope with both natural uncertainty (the fog surrounding complex, indeterminate human actions) and man-made uncertainty (the man-made fog fabricated by denials and deceptions). We do this by conserving energy while reducing uncertainty. This ability evolved to support human intelligence through continuously matching incoming sensory information with top-down predictions of the input. Analysis of the temporo-spatial regularities and causal relationships in the environment produce top-down predictions or expectations—something known as Bayesian inference.
The brain uses this knowledge of regularities and patterns to make a model or the “best guess” about what objects and events are most likely to be responsible for the signals it receives from the environment. This “best guess” goes through an iterative process of minimizing the mismatch (i.e., correcting the error) between expectancy and reality until it reaches an optimal solution. Mental models are forms of perception, recognition, inferences about the state of the world, attention, and learning, which are beneficial for more pertinent reactions in the immediate situation.
In this perspective, mental states are predictive states, which arise from a brain embodied in a living body, permeated with affect and embedded in an empowering socio-cultural niche. The result is the best possible and most accommodating interaction with the world via perceptions, actions, attention, emotions, homestatic regulation, cognition, learning, and language.
A predictive machine requires a high inter-dependence of processes, such as perception, action, and cognition, which are intrinsically related and share common codes. Besides the feedforward, or bottom-up, flow of information, there is significant top-down feedback and recurrent processing. Given the levels of ambiguity and noise always present in the environment and our neural system, prior biases or mental sets become critical for facilitating and optimizing current event analysis. This occurs whether it concerns recognizing objects, executing movements, or scaling emotional reactions. This dynamic information flow depends on previous experience and builds on memories of various kinds, but it does not include mnemonic encoding. Indeed, the more ambiguous the input, the greater the reliance on prior knowledge.
The predictive model of the brain has been successful in explaining a variety of mental phenomena, such as inattention and distraction, beliefs and desires, as well as neural data. Sometimes, though, the brain gets things wrong because of incomplete or inaccurate information, and this discrepancy can cause everything from mild cognitive dissonance to learning disorders to anxiety and depression. But our survival is proof positive that whatever strategies we learned are highly effective in navigating a world of uncertainty.
Here are eight lessons regarding the predictive brain that may be helpful in dealing with conflict:
- Recognize your use of mental models. To deal with uncertainty in the world requires creating mental models in which we map our understanding and expectations about cause-and-effect relationships and then process and interpret information through these models or filters. Mental models become critical for facilitating and optimizing our responses to current events.
- Understand your mental models. Recognize that complex mental processes determine which information you attend and, therefore, mediate, organize, and attribute meaning to your experience. Your background, memories, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms strongly influenced this dynamic process.
- Withhold judgment of alternative interpretations until you have considered many of them. Expertise, and the confidence that attaches to it, is no protection from the common pitfalls endemic to the human thought process, particularly when it involves ambiguous information, multiple players, and fluid circumstances.
- Challenge, refine, and challenge again all your mental models. Discourage conformity. Incoming data should reassess the premises of your models. Remain humble and nimble. Be self-conscious about your reasoning powers. Examine how you make judgments and reach conclusions. Encourage “outside of the box” thinking.
- Value the unexpected. It reveals inaccuracies in your mental models. You cannot eliminate prediction pitfalls because they are an inherent part of the process. What you do is to train yourself on how to look for and recognize these obstacles, view them as opportunities, and develop procedures designed to offset them.
- Emphasize factors that disprove hypotheses. Increased awareness of cognitive biases, such as the tendency to see information confirming an already-held judgment more vividly than one sees “disconfirming” data, does little by itself to help deal effectively with uncertainty. Look for ways to disprove what you believe.
- Develop empathy and compassion. Put yourself in the shoes of others to see the options faced by others as they see those options. Understand the values and assumptions that others have and even their misperceptions and misunderstandings. Then, act.
- Change external circumstances instead of trying to eliminate everyone’s biases. Mental models are resistant to change primarily because they reflect the temporo-spatial regularities and causal relationships found in your environment. Restructure the setting and it will affect your perceptions.