The Cause and the Effect
An Insight into How We Experience the World
J. Y. Gao
ONE OF OUR PRINCIPLE PURPOSES is the creation of models that break down the complexity and ambiguity of the world into chewable, comprehensible chunks upon which our experience of this existence can be built and guided. In the spirit of pertaining to this biological inclination, I would like to share with you in this article a simplified, ‘boxed in’ model of our experience.
I recently watched a Ted talk presented by Will Storr on The Science of Storytelling. During the talk, he made mention of an interesting insight.
“A really well constructed story is a sequence of causes and effects: one change, leading to the next change, leading to the next, leading to the next unexpected effect. And that’s because that’s how our brains understand the world.”
If we explore this comment deeper, I think we might find some profound implications. If we perceive the world through cause and effect, then that, firstly, points back to our brain’s innate tendency to simplify the world into comprehensive chunks. And, if we consider the possibility further, we might realise that indeed, every thought that goes through our minds is, on the one hand, an acknowledgement of a cause, and on the other, a prediction or assumption of the effect. This tendency to reduce our perception of reality into a binary structure enables us to use the same biological ‘programming’ to understand both the physical world and the interior of other people; it forms the basis of our logic. Due to this dualistic epistemology, we can explain our attraction to such things as conspiracy theories – which, in turn, are efforts to identify and, at times, create, however outrageous, causal correlations between a cause and an effect.
Whenever we see an object fall, a sound ding, or feel the cold of the air, smell the smoke of barbecued bacon, taste the bitterness of milk gone bad, our mind immediately jumps to an array of predictions. Did someone throw a piece of paper? At me? I bet it was this person. OR: was that my phone? Was that someone else’s phone? I didn’t feel a vibration. Was it my laptop? You might also notice that during the reactive questions that you conjure within the split second, your senses also await for something else. An effect; a confirmation, perhaps; are people laughing? Did the room suddenly grow quiet? – Is that because Ma’am is about to speak? Did no one notice? When your brain perceives an input from the external world, it combines information from all other senses to correlate an appropriate cause to an appropriate effect. This is how Will Storr put it:
“What your brain is doing is looking for these moments of change, then automatically building a little story about how one change led to the next change.”
This also points to another interesting point. As we are constantly predicting what might happen, and using past experiences to decode, as quickly as possible, the cause or the effect, or the relationship between, some answers are affected by our internal assumptions. Some readers may have seen this example before, but notice this image:
From your first and second glances, squares A and B seem remarkably different in their shade. A is darker, and B is lighter. But in fact the two squares are of the same shade. Through an entire life’s worth of visually seeing the world, we know a shadow makes a spot darker, and so your brain’s ‘best guess’ of the tile’s shade is one that is much lighter in order to compensate. This phenomenon is known as top-down processing and is something that our brain does every second – and not only to our visual experience of reality.
Almost everyone will know of this tiktok clip, and Anil Seth, another Ted talk presenter, explains it this way when he demonstrated a similar example to his audience:
“All that’s changed is your brain’s best guess of the causes of that sensory information and that changes what you consciously hear.”
Of course, the same theory can be applied to explain how professional artists manipulate the audience in order to express a concern. This is most evident in film, where filmmakers use the audience’s previous experiences of film and their experience of the physical world to set up expectations and subsequently confirm or subvert these expectations. This process is seen in the micro – with each cut – all the way through to the overarching story.
Let’s consider further implications of our affiliation with the concept of cause and effect, and our instinctive application of top-down processing as we continue to experience the world and other people so that we might understand when to reign in our abilities and when to utilise them, and attempt to fasten our values in a worldview that is sustainable and unique.
Anil Seth, Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality:
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling:
Green Needle, Brainstorm: