L.O.G. 186 Bending Reality

Good morning, Greg. Chilly morning by you. Here in Gunnison, it's single digits already in November. That's got to be lovely. Two degrees Fahrenheit, which is double the one degree that we started with yesterday, so it's twice as warm this morning. We have finally – well, I shouldn't say "finally" like it's a good thing – but the Santa Ana winds that typically come in. It's usually a little earlier in the year, but we got those started yesterday, last night, and then a little bit this morning. You get this dry air that comes in and just blows everything around that you have in the yards. It's literally 20-mile-an-hour winds, and your nose is all dried out, your lips are chapped. But it should be in the high 70s today, so that's the good thing.

Wind chill is meaningless at one or two degrees. Yeah, because people just don't understand, when you walk outside, no matter what you're wearing, it immediately turns into a solid, and you're crinkling and crackling when you're walking. So even the air is breaking as you're walking through it.

But it's beautiful, and it keeps out the "chuds," which is always important. Today, we're going to be talking a little bit about sort of vision and perception in the sense of visual analysis and how that works between our eye and brain. I just want to start it off with something: obviously, we've seen the midterm elections just came about. Again, folks, this is not going to be anything political whatsoever. It's just what I consistently see: we always see a lot of news organizations, people post this map of the United States, right? And it's how people vote, and they do red versus blue, Republican versus Democrat.

It's this huge sea of all red, and then around the major metropolitan areas, where population centers are tied up, you see this blue that votes more Democratic. You look at that, and you're like, "Holy crap, how was this election then so close? How did these two candidates come down to they're still double-counting or recount-counting votes, or a runoff election?" But look, if you look at the map and most things out there, like graphs especially that people share, they fall under the category, I think, of a bad data take. It's a bad take on data, or it's a bad representation.

So, visual representation of data with charts and graphs are so powerful. They've gotten amazing; what people can do, especially on new stuff, or where they show over time, or different presentations people show, it's absolutely incredible. The problem is, we glom onto it, right? We love it. We go, "Wow, that's amazing! Holy crap, that's a huge issue I didn't know that!" But if you don't dig into the details, or you don't see what the chart is actually showing, it could be mostly junk. Even when it's not intended – like, someone might add precisely, but that wasn't their original intention. No, not at all. You go back to that map of the United States, it's like, "Yeah, well, look at all this red! How can there be so few Republican votes?" It's like, "Well, the land doesn't vote, people vote."

Exactly. That's a visual representation of the land. "See this huge, massive chunk of red of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, that whole area?" It's like, "Well, that's only less than a million people voted." But this little part over here, that was five million people.

So, you talked about something very specific just before you go on.

Yeah, because you're onto something here. Remember back when Hillary Clinton made the alleged comment about the "flyover states?" That's where they came from, because she was looking at a data set that appeared the same way, and she looked at it by the numbers, and the numbers didn't jive. So she said, "Well, we don't have to worry about that big red expanse," right? Because it's the population centers where the votes are. So, Brian, what happens is you take a non-scientific conclusion based on the visual illusion of that map. Totally get that. I mean, that's – and especially in the midterm, look, you said it yourself, it's a seesaw depending on the administration that's in, right? They didn't knowingly create those maps to fool people, but even the first results that were coming in created a great deal of anxiety in voters, okay? Because they looked at it and saw that huge color and said, "Well, clearly it's a wave!"

And so, no, no. And what obviously happened with the election is what typically always happens: a Democrat president gets elected, then in the midterms Republicans take over; a Republican president, so you see that back and forth. The idea is when you look at this stuff, because it's everywhere, and I just saw another one: there's all this chaos going on – I know you follow this stuff or you're not on social media – but Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Showing these graphs like, "Since he's taken over, the daily average users on Twitter has skyrocketed!" You look at it, then you look at the actual measurements, and it's like, "Okay, you're up like a million people, but there's several hundred million, or maybe a billion people on this app." So you're like, "Point zero one percent. That's statistically insignificant. The change that doesn't matter."

Yeah, but it's a change. But that over time, it would be missed by anybody that didn't have that precise... And since everyone wants to focus on trends, we all pick what that – and you just said it right there – what time it is, because time is everything. That's another unit of measurement, and it's actually one of the best ones, because something changes over time is significant. You can change something from one second or one minute to another, but what does it do over 10, 20, 50 years? So that has to be the measurement, right? So the episode is not about bad data takes and graphs and charts. It's why are they so powerful? Why are they so effective? And they speak to how we process information and what our brain likes and dislikes. So I'll throw it to you on that part, Greg, because I just want to kind of set it up with how strong and significant these are.

Well, there's no better than the newsrooms. They have all these incredible screens where they can do all this stuff that does more harm than good, I think. It really does something because it overwhelms the brain. Yeah, it overwhelms the brain. And every pundit that comes in and talks to their specific image has a great point that they're making with their image, but it's contradictory to how your visual cortex processes information in your frontal lobe.

Let me get into a deeper argument and then I'll come back up. So, I'll deep dive just for a few seconds right now. We're in the fight of our lives with people that barely understand the brain, because the brain is so multifaceted, and there's so much stuff that's going on. So right now, serotonin is the thing that we're reading about and all this stuff, because it has a mood and works on reward system and memory. You have to remember that serotonin is in your intestines for a reason, because it's where things linger. So why is it attached to memory? Because those chemicals are in your intestines before they get out, and that's where you learn long-term memories. Do you get it? And so they're solidified there.

But cortisol – the reason we use cortisol and dopamine is it's like a seesaw, and it's easy for humans to understand. My response to stress is regulated by the increase or decrease of cortisol, and dopamine makes me feel happy and good, so I want to repeat certain behaviors. So I have the anxious "stay away from the oven because it's hot" – there's my cortisol. And I have the dopamine, "look at that turkey on the kitchen table, can't wait to eat!" Until it's literally a stick. So stop using serotonin as that measure. I get it, it's easy to trace, and you can find it in the blood and all the other different things about it, but when it comes to it, I get it, it's a reward mechanism, but dopamine's close enough. And I get it that it works on cognition, but cortisol is close enough.

So saying that, what happens when we start seeing those graphs, Brian, is we have an increase in cortisol, okay? Because our body is stressing, because who we want to win, whether we know it or not, it means a lot to our corporeal selves. Do you get it? So in my brain, I'm seeing that information start to come in. First of all, the information is coming in before a vote is counted. And they call Governor Polis for Colorado before one percent of the vote is in! They call it in a landslide and a major victory. Well, how do you think that feels to a normal human that isn't operating at that speed? That's why we miss stuff, Brian.

Our survival brain was set up for a slow, deliberate search of our environment to sense danger. One, auditory, the biggest field then with our hearing. Our visual, then auditory with our hearing, and then finally olfactory with our smell. That's why it goes from the biggest sense to the smallest sense, Brian. So all of a sudden now we're in an environment where we process information so fast that the brain is going, "Wait a minute, I'm with my walker going through the environment, and they're going at light speed!"

And that's also why there's so much – what I classify, and people use the term, "clickbait" out there, or something to capture your attention quickly, or a quick image, or "did you see this?" Because there's so much information we now have to, whether it's advertisers or journalists or whoever, they have to compete for that attention. So they have to – because there's such a small band.

It really is. Exactly.

And so if you can crack the code on what works for meaning, it's hitting my limbic system right away, then I'm going to attend to what that is more so than something else that may be more important. I don't even realize that it's happening. It's hitting that emotional chord.

So, because of our survival system and how we were wired...

But the idea was we – it's sort of in certain levels, right? Normal situation, you're just experiencing the world, there's nothing crazy. But when it's tied to my survival, or I need to hunt for food right now because I'm starving and I need to eat, or there's a predator out there, that window gets very, very small, and what my brain cares about is only a few things, right? And it classifies them, not me. I – no matter how much knowledge and experience and training I have – well, I shouldn't say that. With a lot of training and knowledge and experience, I can overcome or use some of that, some of it, but not the reaction, no. How much it is, how much is going to happen, I get, I can. It's like the baby rattlesnake versus the adult rattlesnake; I don't know how much venom to use, so I'm going to use too much. Same thing with exposure. But the idea is I can only do so many things, and if I'm getting a visual representation that drives some message directly to my limbic system, yes, I'm going to pay attention to what that is, and it's going to be very powerful to me, whether it's right or not.

And so you hit on something that everybody needs to pull over in traffic, get out their yellow pad, and write down: Your visual field sends some information to your brain, but the actual analysis, the prediction, the computation occurs outside of your visual field. So your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala and your frontal lobes, what are they designed to do? They're designed to break down that information and sense-make it so you can problem-solve. So just because your visual field is drawn to something, you think that that's the decision that you want. It's based on the electrochemical neurotransmitters further back in your brain. So the visual field is only part of the story that's being constructed.

So what's happened is advertisers certainly learned it, and now pundits are learning it: that if we attract a visual field and make you pay attention to that little ball of yarn longer, we can influence how you think, even if it's flawed. So I can get you to respond to something just in the visual field without you actually deep-diving mentally to think about it. Why? Because we bypass survival. If we give so many survival images over and over and over, then it doesn't become nuanced anymore. And then, guess what? You forget all of that sensory input and you focus on whatever signal is most powerful. And that signal can be a lie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even if there's no intent behind it, right? Even if it's just – but many times there is, it is intentional. I'm just saying...

Yeah, it is. Exactly. It's intentional for the purposes of attention, right?

Yeah. If you think about news, every single news channel you turn on has what going across the bottom? A scrolling thing. But you have to – and people are like, "Well, why?" Dude, it doesn't matter what it says! It could have random letters and numbers on there, broken up to appear to be words, and it would capture your attention. So they need you to tune in and stay there so they can pay their bills, right? They can charge advertisers more money. And that's why everything is "breaking news." Even if it's breaking news, the time has changed. So that's the issue with a lot of this stuff. So you're engaged whether the substance is any good or not, whether the content that they're putting across has any value or not, you already assume it does.

Now, I think what's happening almost is that now – that happens no matter what – that's going to trigger your response. Now we're sort of learning, I think societally as a whole, about like, "Well, wait a minute here, not everything can be breaking news."

Well, hang on, not everything. But because of time, temporally, right? So our body has regulated that. So just like we regulate different drugs, now they have to adjust to that. And after scrambling and trying to figure out what to do, and there's a zero trust in the media, right? So we'll see what that next evolution is. Maybe it's the augmented reality or virtual reality where now your favorite news host is in your living room, standing there, and you're wearing glasses or something. But the idea is, it strikes us. It's not about the – I don't care what the content is, I don't care what the message is, there's so much going on prior to that, which is why we attribute so much more value to this information, why everything becomes more serious, because it is. Because it's triggering certain electrochemical neurotransmitters. I mean, it's giving me this very primitive reaction to something that if you had just walked up and told me calmly, Greg, I wouldn't have had that. Right. So that's a big thing about this.

And to get back to that data visualization stuff, it's so powerful. And you said it perfectly. I just want to reiterate it. But our eye is there like that camera, right?

That's okay. And it's throwing those images back to the brain and it's going, "But not all the images will ever make it because not all the images are accurate." You're exactly right. And so our brain unconsciously bends our perception of reality to meet our desires or our expectations because it has to. Now, it also runs it through the filter of our past experiences.

Okay, that's what it has to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Explain what you mean by that. What do you mean by it alters our – because I get what you're saying, but I want you to elaborate on what you mean by that.

It alters our perception of reality. It has to, because your first experience of something creates the model for the file folder that you'll have for the rest of your life. So your first experience in school, your first escargot, your first kiss, your first fight, your first sexual experience creates that big file folder, that big accordion file where all of those similar memories are going to be stored, okay? And that becomes the basis for it. So the brain is always considering your ego and your survival. So it sometimes chooses to bend the perception of that reality to meet who you think you are and what you think you need.

Now, the brain doesn't understand fantasy and reality, because there is only one reality to the brain, and that's you in your environment. And so now I also have to filter absolutely every impulse that comes in using my past data set, my past experiences. So that's where "close enough" comes from. We talk about the theory of "close enough," and sometimes it blows people's minds. Stop for a minute, you have to understand that the brain doesn't run on 100% reality. The brain doesn't need 100% reality. It makes decisions and choices well before you ever meet 100%. And as a matter of fact, maybe years later you'll understand and go back and do the math and go, "Wow, I was completely wrong!" It takes time. Hindsight is 20/20, right? That's where it comes from. Exactly.

So what happens is your brain doesn't need the entire picture, you're done. The brain doesn't need to see the lion; it sees a shadow in your peripheral, then it smells predator-like smells, and it sees bones laying on the ground. With that enough, that 60 to 80% of core reality, your brain then creates a story immediately and sends you that story through chemicals that goes, "Holy crap, your bones start shaking, you want to piss or poop!" So it says, "Hey, these triggers are very fast," just like the triggers for deceit are triggered by the hypothalamus because your hypothalamus doesn't want you to lie, right? Because it's contrary to how the tribe has to survive. Yes. So those things happen so fast that they happen before we understand that our perceptions of reality have been altered by external triggers that we are not in control of. And that's why I mean, unconsciously, there is no subconscious, it's an unconscious trigger. So in other words, there's certain thresholds in our environment that wave at us and say, "Danger, warning!" And unless we find out if their ML (Machine Learning) or MD (Medical Doctor) Co is, our body runs on the survival. That's when all of a sudden we're sitting there and we see the car pull into the driveway, we don't go, "Oh, it's a UPS guy." We go, "Oh, it's an armed home invasion." Why could we do that? Why would we do that? Because our brain is constantly setting us up for a potential survival situation.

And this is the root cause that I get so [expletive] about these talks about AI and VR. We've worked in that realm for many, many years, and we have bona fides. There is no AI, because artificial intelligence is a thing we just haven't achieved yet. It's a great thing to talk about, but we're not there. Machine learning, we're getting well...

Yeah, yeah, well that starts with that. And it's not – and in very, very, very small narrowed context, it can work, but General AI, absolutely not, nowhere near that.

So, but the reason I want to start from there is we just spent time on Milo's time, thank you Milo, at IACP in Dallas, and we got to see a lot of what's out there for technology. And Brian, I will tell you, this is one, put it on your calendar, because I make predictions all the time, and I'm right a lot more than I'm wrong. I know you probably follow that. But the reason – there's the game, you remember the game that you play with your daughter right now, Brian, the memory game where you put a bunch of cards out and you pick one and you go, "Did you remember where the other one is?" And if you get it wrong, you flip them both over. Okay, what does that do to your brain? Your brain needs to pattern recognize. So once your brain understands pattern recognition, it can then ultimately understand the analysis that's necessary. But your brain doesn't need the analysis at the very beginning. That's why some triggers are so powerful at the visual field. They warn you early. You don't have to have a complete picture, hence the theory of "close enough."

So what I'm telling you is we're in virtual reality wearing these hoods because we want to equate it for so close to the reality that we have the smells and the screams and the sounds and all that other stuff. But that's not how your brain works. It would be better to go into a simulator and set little patterns over time that the brain can capture. That's why chess teaches us strategy. That's why checkers teaches us how to operate in a limited, restricted environment where if we make a mistake, our characters are taken from the baseline. Do you understand why games are so important to the brain? So why don't we do that when we're going to AI and VR? So augmented reality should be giving us clues over and over, and they don't even have to be real clues, just so your brain understands, "Hey, it's 'Where's Waldo?' And today, Waldo's got a gun." Or "It's 'Where's Waldo?' And today, Waldo has fentanyl." Did you get my most basic point?

No, and would you say that we are primed, in a sense, psychologically primed, to jump to conclusions without all the information? Obviously.

Yeah, absolutely. And when I say "obviously," I want to say "obviously" from a historical perspective, because you can take every study in the world and find out we're much better at deciding quickly on things that we think are going to have an immediate impact than we are on taking a knee and taking the time and waiting until more results are in. That's why we also felt during the elections that it was rigged. Why? Because it sense-makes. We looked at it and it looked like, "Hey, there was a red wave!" But then at the end of the day, it's part one, and we said, "Somebody must be lying to us."

So is it – well, that's – that's a no-no. The second part is perfect, because that's how we justify things. It's not that we were wrong in our prediction, it's a conspiracy. So for everybody else, "they lied to us, and they manufactured..."

It's always someone else's fault.

But it has to be somebody else's fault! Of course my brain cannot understand when it's my fault, so it bends the perception to meet our desired outcome. And so, a lot of times, seemingly our failed attempts at pattern recognition, right? So we're primed as humans, again, for pattern recognition; it's everything. That's why Human Pattern Recognition (HPPR) is the most important thing you'll ever learn.

And so the idea is – and we, of course, tie everything back to the survival system, as I would. I try to say this without ever wanting to come across as talking crap on different things, but yes, if you're learning a concept, anything to do with psychology and sociology and anything that we're talking about or other people are talking about, and you can't tie that back to your limbic system and some sort of survival mechanism, I'd be real careful about going down that road, because it's probably going to get proven wrong later on.

And remember, we know little about our brain's methods, but what we do know about it is that it's consistently based on survival mechanisms to predict likely outcomes, to mitigate our use of essential calories on non-essential things.

And what you said earlier too, sort of at the beginning, was about you explained how everything is based on some prior known, right? So yes, so we don't – unless you're a little kid, little baby especially too, you know how you look down at kids and, especially the younger they are, they look at a situation or person, they kind of do that head tilt and they're looking at it, and then they look up at you and they look around? They don't have a file folder or something to draw on for that specific situation. So what are they primed to do? They look at it longer because they're trying to process it, and they don't know what something is. And then they're looking at you, maybe the parents, in their environment. It's the difference between, you know, Mom and Dad reacting, the kid comes barreling into the living room, falls on the floor, slams their head against something, right? And then what's the first thing they do before they start crying? They look up. So if you do that, okay, what's happening? The baby starts crying. If you do the "Hey, get up, you're going to be fine!" and now the kid's still kind of hurt, but they're like...

Brian, you're onto something. You're onto something. Kids in a restaurant hearing another kid cry will look and they will begin to mirror-image that emotion and cry. Why? Because it's their survival trait. But they can't learn from that kid, so they'll look to the adult. Why? Because the adult is a bigger, older version of them. They've survived longer than I have. And so, why do we revere sage-grade leaders in our environment? Because they've lived longer than we have, and our survival mechanisms inside of our body and our brain look at that and say, "They must be onto something." That's why when the article comes out with the 104-year-old woman in Vladivostok that smoked cigars, eats bacon fat, and drinks whiskey every day, we think that's amazing.

Well, that's it! Because why is it amazing? Because our survival brain says that's contrary to everything I've ever learned. There's a new one that just came out, it was a Chinese man who ran a marathon in three and a half hours, and he was chain-smoking cigarettes. Oh my God! So everyone looks at it and goes, "Oh my God, this guy's a beast!" Which, especially if you're in the military, everyone had that guy in their unit that could run three miles in 15 and a half minutes, come across the finish line, vomit, slam a beer, and start smoking cigarettes. And you're like, "Well, how do I get on that level?"

But you're onto something, because my brain has to take reality and exactitude, and it has to say, "I can't achieve that, so what can I achieve that's close enough?" And humans constantly cut corners and constantly do that, so we have to embrace it. So since everything is based on some sort of prior known to me, or some baseline, or some experience, and then I'm primed to do pattern recognition for one, but also get to a conclusion very, very quickly, that's what my brain wants.

It reminds me of, remember when we had Reed Berkowitz on here? He was talking about the QAnon conspiracy and why people fall for it. And his perspective from these alternative reality games that he's built and plays and done all this amazing work, but he said in it, he built this game, and then there was something on the wall, it was like a cross sword or a wooden thing, that people would walk past, and no one could get past it. Everyone who played his game that he built thought it had some sort of intrinsic value and was some Easter egg or something in there for them to find or to use. And it was literally part of the set decoration. And he was like, "Holy crap!" He was watching this going on. People cannot get – he's like, "Tell them!" He's like, "No, that has nothing to do with the game." And they're like, "Oh yes, it does! We know it's okay, come on!" And he had that sort of epiphany moment. And that's everything that we're talking about, because based on what they know, it would be in a typical game. And you've summed it up one time before where I said, where you said, you asked someone, "Hey, did you believe it when you see it, or did you see it when you believed it?" And I think the second is more true.

The second is more true. I'll tell you why. Thanks for keeping a toll on those Greg-isms. But, Brian, let me take you back. I'm just going to start talking about mine now.

Exactly, exactly.

Well, I'm old and I'm going to die so you can have them. But listen to me, everybody in the audience that is a male and everybody that's a female that's ever watched a male in their teens, you've had this experience: we make a mixtape – and now people don't understand what tape is anymore, just make a playlist, same thing, okay? So back then, you made a mixtape, and the first one was Peter Gabriel "In Your Eyes," and the next one was whatever song, and yet everybody had a Boston "More Than a Feeling." And I'm dating myself, but folks, think about what I'm saying. What you did is a part of that song spoke to you. It was you bending the reality of the person that created that song to meet your expectations. And you sent it to somebody else and they were like, "What the [expletive] is this?" They were actually going, "Well, that was very nice of you, but what is this goofy thing that he sent me? None of this makes sense!" But in your brain, you sat there and cried and you played it and you said, "This is why you left me!" Brian, reality is occasional, and it's a symptom of how we invoke and involve our baseline in an environment to our understanding of what's next, because we're petrified from the moment we're torn out of the womb. We're petrified that we're going to die. So every single thing in our life has to have significance. Why? Because we're so much smarter now, and things happen so much quicker now, and survival hasn't been challenged now. So we equate us with being so novel and different that our life must have meaning in the greater picture of life. And that's where we go wrong, and that's why we're disappointed, that's why people commit suicide.

So let me just throw this in, an additional thing at you. So let's talk auditory for a second. We still read articles every day where the people didn't equate the gunshots, the sound of gunfire, with danger. Why? Because when we're on the range practicing, we're holding the gun. When we go hunting, we're holding the gun. Rarely do we ever build a file folder where we take a school bus full of kids and park right near the range and have them fire a pistol, a shotgun, a high-powered rifle, and an automatic weapon. Why? Because if we don't have a file folder, we choose a file folder from television or video games, and it's inaccurate. And our brain doesn't care if it lands on a blank file folder, it'll make up the answer. And so that's why there's mistakes.

No, no. And what you brought up was a point that our experiences are so contextual, they're so context-based. So even that, remind me, the whichever the one in Nebraska a while back, Omaha, I think, the mall shooting where there was even an off-duty police officer in there and was like, "Yeah, I thought they were fireworks," or "I thought balloons popping." It's like, "Yeah, you know the distinct sound of gunfire and rifle fire, how did you not do that?" And it's just that if I only experience that on a range in training, then my brain categorizes it and goes, "Okay, that's a normal sound. Yes, here, this is where you expect to hear it." So in here, it has to be something else. It can't be that because it's not in this box.

Right. We're not at that location, right? And it didn't match my perception of reality at that time in that place. And so that's the danger in the [expletive] training that's going on. And there's a lot of crappy training out there. Look, anybody that's ever read "Situational Awareness" then goes away and says, "I'm going to have my own company." Look, you're dabbling in science. It's not a black art, it's not a ninja skill. Simple physics, simple physiology. Come on. And so I'm tired of hearing that because what that does is that builds that false sense of reality into my simulation. So if my simulation is based on your training and your training is this, then guess what? I have a one-pump chump view of Survival City. That's why the shoot-don't-shoot simulators have to come out of equating actual events and go to creating patterns. Patterns in the brain. When these things coalesce, it's more dangerous when they're not there. When these things coalesce, that person's probably going to take a swing at me or pull a gun on me.

And what you're saying with that too is, actually, you're actually making it simpler in a training environment, because I don't – you need to replicate all of these different situations. What I need to do is show you – and when I mean "you," your brain – the elements of what could be, and it'll take the ball and run with it. It will be able to identify those elements in another situation.

Right. Exactly.

It's the, "This is what a bear track looks like. Oh, okay, I can see that. So now no matter where I go, I know when I see that, there's a bear here, or was here, and I now, because of that one thing, I need to be either A) leave, or B) be at a higher level of alert because I know this is in the environment right now."

Okay, but why did I send you a picture of the bear print on the side of a box where it was tearing in, then a bear print on the cement, and then next to another next to it like it was Hank, right?

Yeah, yeah. It was, "Hey, this is the paw print of it."

Yes, "But this is the propane tank!" And I'm like, "That's not the propane tank I have on my grill right outside! That's a propane tank!" Exactly, that's massive. But the idea is so your brain can turn it around like the Hoberman sphere and create comparisons, because the comparison means that I sense patterns. And when I can sense patterns, I will know when I see that pattern again, and I'll go, "Holy crap, I'm in trouble!"

And I'll give you a perfect example to stick with the bear analogy. So I was down outside of Lake City. We're on a Jeep tour. We're way back in the woods going up to this beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains, and there was a baby bear that was in the tree. And the baby bear was looking, and all the guests thought it was wonderful and videotaping, and the baby bear started clamping its jaws really quickly, a loud clapping sound. And I said, "Okay, we got to get out of here!" And they're like, "What's going on?" Well, my history with that clapping sound is that's saying, "I'm afraid," and Mom hears that and comes charging.

Gotcha. Okay, so that's a wonderful indicator.

It was powerful enough. Powerful enough that it changed my DNA, and we ran for the Jeeps and got out of there. And nobody else sensed it, but they sensed my fear. Right? You see what I'm trying to say? So that's how societies are supposed to work. Even if you don't have a well-developed file folder for the event, you looked at me, and I'm the guy leading the tour, and I started getting freaked out and saying, "We got to get out of here!" Do you understand how that's supposed to work? So one match can light that, Brian, and all the other people in the room sense...

You know what? You got to have – you got to have that one guy, you. And that's – you know, you're taking – but me sitting there, I have another example I want to tell, but like, I also can't kind of talk about it yet. I would. But like, I was in a medical center, and this doctor was a leading doctor in this specific field. And so this is an area where I'm, you know, I'm in a medical – I'm in a hospital, basically. I don't know crap about this, right? I don't know what these charts say, right? Completely out of my element. I have no idea. But I saw his reaction and went, "Holy crap, this is amazing! This is going to be a good thing!" Because the way this man, who was very stoic, baseline, very specific and scientific, and wonderful person, got so excited. He was attempting to contain his excitement. I knew things were good. So I didn't know what the screen said, I didn't know what anything said, I could just take that from the environment.

And so that was a basic form of pattern recognition to sense-making, problem-solve, and conduct predictive analysis on what he's likely going to do in the next nanoseconds. Yes, visual field, impulse only. Before – how do you, why do we say orientation is so important? Yeah. So when we're talking about situational awareness, if your situational awareness class didn't include a section on orientation and functional, and functional field of view, then you know it's a charlatan magic trick in a parlor somewhere. And some people go, "Yeah, but isn't it okay to get a little situationally aware?" Not if you don't understand what to do with the patterns. So the analysis portion is the other shoe dropping. So orientation: your brain oriented that this learned person was responding in a positive manner towards something. Now, they were exuding oxytocin, even though you didn't know it, your brain smelled it. Do you get what I'm trying to say? And your brain equated it with previous file folders for that person being happy, with other people that you've seen happy. Your brain makes these judgments so quickly and then fills in the gaps that you have in your memory and throws in your past experiences. People go, "Well, how can you have an unconscious bias?" Well, the unconscious bias exists because you have gaps in your memory and you're predisposed to fill those gaps with your past experiences, right? Not the person I'm observing. So, of course we're going to be biased, we can't not be biased, right?

But our bias is linked to survival recognition biases, right?

Yeah. Cognition is learning. Cognition is how we learn, and think about how we're learning. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So metacognition and cognition are two sides of the same coin. And people don't understand that. That cognition is the thinking part, acquiring knowledge, understanding things through thought and playing with them in my brain and experiences and having my senses impact them. And then metacognition is thinking about that and understanding why I prioritize certain things in my environment in a specific manner. So if you don't have a cognitive portion to your learning, then you're leaving stuff on the table. Do you get what I mean? I mean, I can't imagine a course that doesn't understand brain chemistry and then take it to cognition and then understand why file folders for the real event are so important. But they don't have to be the real event. They just have to be cognitively "close enough" so my brain's trigger mechanisms kick in and I go, "I remember that. That's dangerous. I remember that roar, I don't want to go out there because there's a lion out there."

Right. Yeah, those are the things. The gunshot analogy is a perfect coin. You don't need a shot spotter when you've got human – shot spotters are great for after the event, but a human should quickly be able to pick up on that auditory trigger. Why can't we? Because we don't train to it. So, are you telling me that I should actually have a training session with my crew where instead of going to the range, we go a couple hundred meters away from the range and listen to what it sounds like?

I'm saying that, absolutely. And does a high-powered rifle sound different than a shotgun? Yeah. And does your brain need that nuance? No, but it needs to know that there's a difference between a car backfiring and a gunshot. Do you get what I mean? So, Brian, let me give you one more example to tie that together. If you've got young kids, which you do, and your kid has never been out and felt the power of getting a flat while you're driving a car – happens a lot less inside the country, and a lot less now because tires are built better – but if you've never had that feeling, and you've never had to pull over and get all the component parts out to change that tire and actually do that, you will be [expletive] around and cracking your knuckles and in danger and crying on the side of the road and on your car for the auto club. So why should we do it? Because if I do it once or twice, my brain will have, "Hey, I can do this." We'll have a success model, we'll have an expert model because I have a mentor there. And guess what? We're likely to be able to overcome those hardships and more hardships in the future.

We had a kid that was down the road from us, Brian. We've got very few neighbors and very few roads, and he had a new Mach 1 looking Mustang-style car, yeah, and he was standing by trying to get a signal, and there's no signals out here. And Shel and I pulled up and we go, "Hey, you having some car trouble?" And he goes, "Yeah, I'm not sure what it is, but I'm calling my dad." Okay, why did he call his dad? What are his file folders?

Yeah, "Dad solved everything!" Everything. And solves everything. And he had the hood up on his car. You know, modern cars, you lift the hood up, there's nothing you can handle other than the windshield wiper reservoir.

You know, most vehicles now, it's like you can't even actually – they're putting, I mean, to that point, there's actually legislation out in California that manufacturers are required to – it's like a person has a right to work on their own vehicle, so you have to make it so that people can fix something if it goes wrong. I mean, you actually have to pass legislation to get auto manufacturers to even do that. But no, that's a great example.

And so the whole thing is, and then what typically the questions are, it's like, "Okay, well, great, but how do I counter that? How do I understand that? What can I do about this?" And that's always a difficult question. So let's stick to the specific example: okay, I have some form of data visualization, a chart, a graph, a thing that someone's showing me. And it's like, how am I supposed to determine, how do I know, how do I filter through what's junk and what isn't? What they're trying to do is – and because even if there's no nefarious intent behind it, there's, maybe someone is just trying to prove a point, right?

I always start with, "What's the point you're trying to prove here and what are you showing me?" Because you actually brought stuff up about, not explicitly, but about anecdotal evidence and storytelling and what it is. And when you get this stuff, especially when studies come out about something, and everyone wants to jump on the latest study, and it's like, "Dude, this is some new finding! Give it 20 years and see exactly!" Wait, no, wait, don't jump in. But the idea is, I look at it in one sort of framework: Is this anecdote you're telling me, this story, does it truly represent some form of data, some data set? Or are you just relying on the story? Because the story is supposed to talk about the data, but what ends up happening is there's not a whole lot of data there, so we'll just create a really good story, and now everything relies on this one story.

It's something that comes out every freaking year about a new thing, about, "Oh, they're putting fentanyl in kids' candy at Halloween! They're putting..." Dude, no, they're not! Drug dealers are here to [expletive] make money, okay? They're not hiding drugs in there that would negatively affect their business model for one, and their customer base for two. But that comes from those stories of a guy who poisoned his own kid but thought it'd be good to poison a bunch of other kids so it didn't look like him. It was these stories.

Exactly.

It's like that's never happened or it happened once and someone did it intentionally.

What you just did is you did Gödel and theory. You did both of those. Folks, look him up, Gödel, and specifically, and Gestalt psychology, reification, regeneration, all that stuff. That's great. What you just did is you just waded through that at street level. And I would say this is how I sum up Brian Marren's point: Don't allow a visual illusion to create cognitive dissonance. Don't allow a visual illusion to create a cognitive illusion, because they're not the same thing. So turbidity in your environment requires investigation, not conclusion. So why, I have to account for that turmoil, that turbidity, that anxiety, but I don't have to say, "This is the exact cause." I can get away with it being the proximate cause and still learn something.

And that is my point on gosh darn virtual reality and augmented reality and shoot-don't-shoot: don't let a visual illusion get in the way of the cognitive illusion. What's my ultimate goal? My ultimate goal is to learn how not to get into that situation. But all the machines that we've seen are designed to shoot your way out of a bad situation. So which is more important, Chief of Police, Town Manager, City Attorney, listening to our call on your way to work? Which is more important: being able to shoot your way out because you made all those mistakes and now you're at zero, you're on the X, or predicting the X and avoiding it a little bit at a time over time for all your personnel, which makes the most sense? So therefore, the training that you do, look, when you're shooting a first-person shooter, and Shelley and I absolutely love the oldest first-person shooter, and every week when Shelley and I sit – and everybody, the oldest model – the idea is what we're trying to do is create an exactitude, compute, and make a precise prediction of what's about to happen and mitigate it. And that's why we love it, because the game allows us over and over and over to get that dump of dopamine when we do well. It gives us the cortisol anxiety when we're moving up on a target. And it's ever-changing in our brain, which means that we can get all the stuff that we want to in a safe environment in our living room. But we understand the difference when we walk out the door into our environment. So training doesn't have to equate reality. Training has to equate a lesson. It has to be Aesop's Fable over and over, Brian.

Well, that's why we – you know, there's this partnership – I know we're not talking about anything Milo or the other companies and everything, but I get that. But the reason that we're frustrated with the industry is because the industry standard is so low. It's high to create granularity and low on creating learning. Would you agree? You get what I'm trying to make?

Yeah, that goes back to –

So my first introduction into that world was back in what, 2008, or whatever, the whole Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) thing. But the idea is, and everything since then is, the graphics have gotten better, the headsets and all the gear have gotten smaller, the batteries last longer, the user interface is way better. It's all of that stuff. And no one solved the hard problems of actually, "What are you trying to learn? What's the lesson here that you're trying to...?" Because you talk about Aesop's Fables, and that's the idea behind a lesson. So the lesson should be, "Here's the lesson," and you should be able to apply that one lesson in a number of different situations, backwards and sideways. And I should also be able to give you five lessons on a table, and you should be able to match the lesson that we're studying to which of those five, and, "Yeah, this is most relevant."

Well, and you understand that, and that's cognition right there. That's cognition, and that's conceptualizing your – the information you learned. Exactly. Anyone can do analysis. This one is instinctively relevant, right? Because analysis is mostly junk and worthless, meaning it's just anyone can talk and – I'm using air quotes – "analyze" the situation. Conceptualize that information. So if I teach you one thing, that one thing, hopefully, you can use that in more than just one situation, right? More than one, right? Why do we go back? It's the easier it becomes to learn. Okay, so why don't we rush in and give first aid to a patient that's laying on the ground? Because before we do the initial patient survey, we have to make sure that the baseline around that individual is safe. Because we don't want to fall victim to the same thing that happened to that person: confined space entry, gas, gunshot, electrical shock.

So if you understand that, what you have is the first part is the pattern. I know this person is under duress or stress or dying or dead. And we have the analysis: What could have caused that? What's the most likely? But more importantly, because time is of the essence, what's the most dangerous? So a video game and a shoot-don't-shoot game should equate thinking and cognition and decision-making rather than just the Jack-in-the-Box surprise, right? Were you able to overcome it with an increased level of violence or intelligence and acumen?

Well, and so it's not necessarily the reaction or the process or procedure, it's what was the – they should focus on what was the decision made, right? Because you can practice, like you just said, for the first aid one. Okay, you can do all kinds of different training on first aid, and saving someone's life, and there's different levels you can get to. I mean, that's great. It's, "Why did you make this decision at this time? Explain to me what went into your thought process to arrive."

So, show your work. Great. All right, you got the answer, you apply. "If I choose not to decide, I still have made a choice." That's an important value. You have to add value. Why do you think we spend so much time, you and I, supporting one of our colleagues with their after-action review research? Because that's hugely important. An after-action review is an external manifestation of how your brain acquires knowledge, understands it, and equates it with experience. That's all it is. What you do inside of your brain every single day with little bitty chemical reactions that you don't even notice over time is what that AAR process is. So why don't we streamline training to train for pattern recognition? Because people still don't fully understand what it is.

And you're doing that and potentially coming to – you could potentially be coming or drawing the wrong conclusion or drawing the wrong lesson from a situation, right? You can draw an unreasonable conclusion.

Or that's what training should overcome through cognition and metacognition is the AAR process. You get it? And it's really that simple. If you want to take a look at it on the tabula rasa and say, "How do we inform file folders? Can I go in and fix a corrupt file folder on my Rolodex?" If I come to a blank, then my brain will go off and pick something at random. We can't afford that if we're a cop or a first responder or a brain surgeon. So we have to create robust file folders for likely events, not for the real event, but likely events, and we can apply it to more than one event.

But we also have to not just look at it at a very tactical level, right? So a perfect example is, it's funny, the "insurgent" – we had a bunch of dog treats that we just bought. We have a little bin, like this little closed thing that we put it in. And then the one little package that we had kind of open, didn't fit in there, but we were open. We give her a little one every once in a while, we give the dog one when she does something right. So the insurgent was like, "Oh man, if we put them right here, Bailey can get to them when we're not home or anything." I'll be like, "Okay, yeah. So where should we put it?" "Well, let's put it right here," and she was like, "on this other shelf so that it's harder for her to get to them." I was like, "Yeah, but do you see that she can still see exactly where that bag is?" She's like, "Yeah." It's like, "Well, why don't we put it in a place where she doesn't know where it is and can't ever see it? So she'll never even attempt to go for the bag of treats in the first place, not just say, 'Oh, let's just make it a little bit more difficult for them to do that.'" So she's thinking as a kid, tactically, right there in the moment. But then I have to sit there operationally, strategically: What would make more sense in the long run? Because if she never sees it and doesn't know it's there, she's never going to be tempted to do it in the first place. So it's just a way of looking at things.

We do that, "Well, let's just turn the handle on the stove this direction." It's like, "Well, why don't you put it on the back burner so the kid can't ever reach it in the first place?" It's like we don't think like that all the time. We think very tactically, in the moment, right there in the situation, at that very, at sort of "bang" right.

Which is Kahneman. Which is all Kahneman. And why Kahneman did so great and won the Nobel. And he should have. When you take a look at Thinking, Fast and Slow, most people talk about that book, they've never read it. And the people that have read it don't understand it, because what they do is they go, "Oh, that's a type one, this, that's a type two question." It's like, no, what he was saying is that certain implicit and explicit decisions are made without your knowledge unconsciously by your brain, and those are the ones that you have to train for. And other things, you have the temporal ability, the time to break them down over time and make a rational, better decision. Sometimes your fastest decisions will seem irrational, but in the moment, it was best for what your brain perceived as the threats. So we need to work on what the threat looks like. And the threat doesn't have to be a person. The threat can be a thing. It can be a cue. It can be a cluster of cues.

And that's why that part-task training informing the practical application – for example, what we're trying to get the industry to understand is the practical application is the shoot-don't-shoot machine that you walk into. But if you don't have part-task training leading up to it, your brain is not going to categorize the new knowledge into the KSAs (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities) that you need to compartmentalize in your brain for a reasoning ability, for future sense-making.

Or we oversimplify it. "Okay, well, there's a fire, throw water on it." It's like, "Well, what if it's a grease fire?"

Right, right. "Is there a maximum distance for a fire extinguisher and why do I have to test fire it?" Again, you're exactly right.

And so we kind of, we look at it too simply sometimes, and we don't focus on what decisions are made. We want to focus on what reactions are when something occurs or a menu, "Hey, you have these three options available." It's like, "Well, I need to just inform if I – if I get you better, Greg, at making a better decision, if I've trained you in all these other skills, you're good. You don't need more training in those skills, you need more training in how to apply those skills in nuanced, new, novel situations."

You're exactly right. So, listen, that's sometimes where an app can be helpful and where training can be helpful remotely. Because I'll give you a perfect example of that. Way back in the day, when I was a cop, I was trying to lose weight all the time too, because you live a [expletive] lifestyle of overexposure, underexposure, "I'm bored," "I'm excited," and you're eating fast food and you're drinking too much. And so the guy that did the dancing to the oldies and the aerobicize – Richard Simmons, yeah – had a set of cards, and the cards came out, and I carried my cards with me all the time. And it was the cards on what I could eat that day, and he gave me ideas: "I need to eat this, that, and the other." Okay, that was very good because I had a stupid base for that.

Now, what I liked about the Richard Simmons program back then, folks – I'm dating myself – is that if I went to a new environment, like I went to Arby's, he would put on a card, "Hey, don't fear Arby's! Here's a couple of things you can put together at Arby's that aren't going to go over your daily requirement, but you got to stick to these." Cognition is not just learning it and acquiring the knowledge, but understanding how to apply it in a specific situation. So when we talk about having a cognitive division, we're talking about arguing what you and I have been arguing now for 55 minutes: that people don't truly understand the power of training, and training all starts with pattern recognizing. So if I saw that red and blue map starting to form as the first results were coming in, I didn't get a hit of cortisol or dopamine because my brain knew to wait, because it's way too early to call. And you're saying, "But why do they hire all those people?" Because you're tuning in and eating the popcorn, and the more talkers they've got, and the more people that are contrary to that talker, the more you're going to stick with that channel. Do you get it? Don't allow that visual illusion to inform your cognition.

And the diet one is a perfect example. If I sit there and say, "Greg, you can – you need to – you have to eat, you know, you're only allowed to have 50 grams of fat today, and 100 grams of carbs, and I need you to have 100 grams of protein," whatever those numbers are. That's difficult, because then you're looking at everything. But if I go, "Hey, about 30% of your total calories should come from fat or carbs," or whatever, you can adapt to that because you've got a picture of types of things that contain that.

Because now I go, "Oh, I see!"

Yes. And you can fit those in the bucket now. I go, "Oh, I see what you're saying, even if I'm on the road." So, "Yeah, I'm eating a chicken breast here, that's a different percentage versus this burger here has more fat, but I know where that falls in now for the rest of my day."

Right. And it's not that you're going off a specific menu, "can only eat these things," or "only have this." It's, "Here's all of the things you can do if you follow this framework." Framework example: you and I stopped at the Wynkoop to have a beer downtown Denver. We've got all this training, and I ordered the fish, but I was smart enough to say, "I don't want the chips, I want some veg." And the person was fine. But the piece of fish I got was that thick, breaded. You get what I'm trying to say? It's more breading than fish.

Yeah. And Brian is – Brian is nice about it. He's like, "You're not really going to eat that, are you? I mean, you might as well just eat a gosh-darn chicken-fried steak or whatever with fat gravy."

Well, what happened though is I got it stuck in my mind: "Fish is fish." Well, fish isn't fish. And so cognition to metacognition: I have to take that lesson and personalize the lesson. So the example of the pattern, yes, all fish isn't fish. This grilled fish is better for me, and as a matter of fact, this grilled fish without these other things. So I know we're talking about diet now, but we're not. We're talking about your life. We're talking about training with firearms and training your kid to change that tire on the freeway so they can get out of harm's way. These are the new survival skills. And we cannot allow our visual field and advertising to fool us that we're any safer. So that's the thing.

So it's sort of to tie it back, and we always – you know, because I said, "All right, well how do I avoid these things?" And then you have to have some sort of process, procedure, or training, or ways to look at things, right? And that's always the difficult part is, "What is this person's intent? What are they trying to show to me? Is this really – is this a sensational thing that I'm looking at? Did I have an emotional reaction to this?" Because if I had an emotional reaction to some chart or graph or visual thing or story that I read, maybe that was the point. Maybe I was trying – I have to find out why.

So the opposite of what you say is absolutely true. So if you're looking for intent in others to determine the level of danger, then you have to understand the relevance of your daily actions by being what? By being intentional.

If you're not intentional...

In your environment, intentionally. You get what I'm saying? So there's a lesson right there. We could do a separate broadcast on being intentional, showing up for the moment and being there. And it reminds me of, all this whole reminds me of someone – I don't want to say her full name, but, you know, our good friend from back in the day, Vicky. You said, "The brain doesn't speak English or words, it speaks synapse," right? So it fires on – its firing synapses all right, or synapses are firing all the time, and it's recalling things and it's grabbing information from areas, and it's putting something together. So what we often think is a clear, concise image, picture, idea, or belief is often a bunch of information chunked together to give me something to talk about or an answer in this defined context. And it may not be as accurate as we think it is.

And so I – that is the essence of good training and being able to compute relevance of the training and predict how I can use it in new and novel circumstances or to improve my efficiency in human behavior and human performance in my day-to-day life. You can't go back and fix things, but you can fix things now that are going to impact your future.

And that's why we talk about predictive analysis being so huge, Brian, is avoiding those pitfalls can make us stronger and smarter and faster and harder to kill. And that's our ultimate goal. That's what we do every day.

Yeah, yeah. Well, there's one hell of a discussion. Now I'm hungry too. I'm going to talk about that. Okay, I'm actually going to start working. Yeah, so I don't know. Yeah, I thought we covered a lot. We started with this whole understanding, your visual kind of feel and representation of the world kind of is made up by your brain, and we talked about that in a number of different ways. Sort of actually kind of leads on to the last episode about why we miss those little things. I think it's another extension of that. But hopefully, if you're listening, you were able to take away something out of that. And if you have any questions, obviously, always reach out to us at thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com.

We also kind of give more examples and talk about different topics on the Patreon side as well for The Human Behavior Podcast. There's even more on there, and you can go back through everything we've posted since we started that. So there's endless amounts of information for only a couple bucks a month; you probably won't even get through it all. But there was – oh, excuse me – a lot in there. And I think the point of it too is to understand what it's like when we teach, you know, and when we're at a training course that we're teaching now. It's obviously different than this. This is just us talking versus having a very deliberate and intentional and meaning behind everything that we do. But, right, KSAs. But the whole point is we start out by opening the aperture, right? It's supposed to, you know, to blow open to – JFK, right, someone right there – to really expand, just blow out your aperture to understand there's a lot more going on here. There's a lot more things that are happening. I am not always fully in control of the decisions I make. Most of that happens unconsciously, tied to my survival system, my limbic system, and that's heavily, heavily influencing what I do, and I don't even realize it.

So it's not to say, "Well, what? I'm supposed to just sit around, wait for more information all the time?" It's not what we're talking about, not at all. The idea is just understanding some of the limitations and capabilities helps. That alone gets me a little bit more informed. It allows me to take another lens of like, "Wait a minute, is this really what it is, or do I have to dig deeper?" And that alone is a starting point, and then we build in a framework on how to make decisions.

But we're selling flashlights, Brian, because what we're trying to do is we're trying to illuminate those parts. Look, almost always our brain is going to generate a matching view of reality and our reality. But daily, thousands of times a day, it manipulates reality to suit our existence. If we don't shine the light there, then we'll be fooled. And guess what? Just the way life is random, we could be fooled at the wrong time and become a victim. And that's what we're trying to avoid. That's true situational awareness.

Yeah, and like you said, it's shining the light in those areas I don't understand or don't know. Right, like in my pants sometimes...

There you go. I hear noises. I don't know what that – I don't know. So I get the flashlight out, I get Meg's mirror. Oh God, that's on that – on that note, we don't want to change it. We have to pay for that one. We don't want to turn this into a Meg episode. So, damn it.

Well, thank you everyone for listening and tuning in. If you've made it this far, you are a true, true champion, I guess. But reach out to us, and we can talk about more things. Or if you have something else that you've seen before and want to send our way to get our thoughts on it, please do: thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. So, we thank all of you for tuning in, and please don't forget that training changes behavior.