Growing Blind
16 comments As a child, everything is new, confusing and exciting. You encounter many things you have never seen before, and many things you have seen but for which you have not yet built good abstractions. You see individual data points, but not how they connect. There are many concepts that want to be discovered and put together in a larger model of how the world works, and because it’s fun, that is what you do.
As you grow up, your perceptions gain depth: In your head, you have built up an elaborate model of the world and its structure and behavior. When you perceive, you perceive more than the immediate — you see context. You look at the thing in front of you and you see a computer, a keyboard, its functioning and, below the surface of perception, you know how it relates to other things, people and ideas.
As you grow old, your internal representation of the world gains more and more detail, albeit the rate of incremental updating slows down. Simultaneously, the world outside keeps on changing as rapidly as before. At some point, there you are, trying to interpret data from a world that has changed using a model that is no longer accurate. What can be expressed succinctly in the terminology that your outdated conceptual framework uses is different from that which is simple for younger people, and your framework is no longer an efficient representation of what is out there in the world.
What you see has always been an interpretation imposed on the data your eyes provide, but now your interpretation mechanism is tuned to a world from 30 years ago. When you talk to people and perceive the meaning of what they say, you round to the nearest simple interpretation in your model and reply to that; the actual intended meaning may not be easily expressible within the conceptual language you use to organize your world. You see and hear that which is in terms of what has been. You are growing blind.
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Good point but this way works.
The old people (mid 40’s onwards) settle in with the ideas they pick up and dont allow young / others to change things too fast. This helps avoid the world changing at a much more faster rate (more under control).
Eventually people die out and next generation brings their ideas forward and so on and so on.
I was just this week wondering why my elderly (63 y.o) female friend who used to have the sharpest mind I’d ever come across was insisting in interpreting the current global economic crisis as though it was no different from other crises in the last 100 years. This seems to fit with your explanation.
Your 63 yo female friend has a bigger framework & more experience in which to place the issue. Younger people have a smaller frame of reference. And humans have a much smaller frame of reference than a redwood tree (if a tree could think).
I don’t see how the tree could have a bigger frame of reference. ;)It’s world is in essence static compared to the world of humans. I know this is a bit of an oversimplification. But overall I think the human potential to develope a wide frame of reference is generally bigger than that of a tree :) We gather experience in time and space, not in time only. And by space, I do not only mean in different places, but also by interacting with different people, or generally speaking while acustomizing to different surroundings (especially if adjusting in a self-concious way).
Moreover, I think a good deal of what we experience as children and what is being used to built our models of the world remains valid over hundreds of years. This is, because a lot of what we have to learn is concerned with interaction among humans, which again is based on human nature, which in itself is not that fast-changing. Still I guess we start off blind and end up blind. And we often act blind in between, mainly because most of us do not even acknowledge the existence of the models and assumptions which guide us.
I agree. If your environment does not change in some respect, there is no need to update your internal model if it is accurate.
“Vergesst eure Kindheit nie!” Erich Kästner, Das fliegende Klassenzimmer.
I suppose, this smart man had many things in mind, when he wrote this sentence ans I also suppose, the described phenomenon was among them. To not loose the ability of exploring and discovering the world around you as if you saw it the first time in your life, entirely unbiased (or to use your words: without a model), is as important as using ones experience to make decisions. And one decision could be to refuse the entire model of something and start over building it. I suspect this one as critical: staying suspicious against conclusiveness and remarking when to change how much of your model. Exploration and exploitation.
I’d love to share experiences with a redwood tree, though…
If your model determines what you perceive — the input to your conscious processing mechanism, so to speak — then the option to ignore or change it may not be available.
What kind of misinterpreted information do you have in mind when thinking about elderly people?
I would consider this a general problem, not just one of the elderly. When reading an article, for example, my brain quickly creates a model of what the author might had in mind. On reading further and encountering of contradicting information, it is often only with conscious effort that I start to revise my now highly improbable model instead of looking for the error that would allow me to keep it.
Even worse, the expectations of my brain may be so strong that I see what I expect to see, hear what I expect to hear – without even recognizing the contradiction. Like you said, there is a strong dependence of our perception on the model we already have in our mind. Yet I think it is possible to weaken this dependence by constantly staying aware of the problem and giving ones current model less weight.
I agree that this is to some extent a general problem. I notice the same tendency to build mistaken representations if I don’t make a conscious effort (and even then), but there are reasons why I focused on the elderly. The two hypotheses that I’d draw from the thoughts posted are the following:
First, consciously overriding default models gets harder (or less likely) with age. It may be the case that when there is no strong prior on one model, it’s easier to switch interpretations compared to the case where you have a strong prior based on lots of experience showing that this is the model likely to offer good explanations. Or it may be that, when we’re young, we just don’t have as many complex concepts and that we are therefore more likely to combine more basic concepts, maybe concepts “closer to perception”, more forced to look at what’s actually there.
Second, the unconscious updating mechanism slows down with age. The way I imagine this is that, when we sleep (dream?), our brains build new abstractions and restructure our concepts such that they better match our experiential data. This, I’d suggest, decreases with age — the brains of the elderly don’t build as many new concepts and they don’t restructure their model of the world as much as young brains do. Older people also seem to sleep less & less well, but here I don’t know where to draw the causal arrows, if any.
Of course, this is speculative and I wouldn’t bet much money on any of the two hypotheses, much less on any particular explanation.
Picking up on the first comment by Jason, from a slightly different perspective, I would argue that it’s not really a problem:
Imagine nearing 50 and still feeling every day like the world is new, confusing and exciting. If you never reach a comfort zone, albeit one that might be a deception, you’ll live your whole life in fight or flight – which seriously impairs your ability to go out and do some of the things our genes and wiring tell you are important. Stargazing is fine, but at some point you’d better also gaze into the eyes of someone else and decide to send some rough copies of yourself into the world.
The important factor is that there must be a generation coming after the one that’s starting to encrust in its mindset. And thankfully, teenagers have this distinct appetite for rebellion which only gains in strength the more static and boring all those old people are. So while they’re growing blind, they’re opening the eyes of their children, whether they realize it or not.
Considering that this whole process appears to have gone on for thousands of years now, might it just be a very well working model from an evolutionary point of view?
It may not be a problem for you if your goals coincide with those we ascribe to evolution, but is that the case? My wiring tells me that I’d rather keep on updating my beliefs at a reasonable rate than to slow down and grow blind, even if this way comes with its costs.
My comment was mostly aimed at the question of whether this is a problem for humanity as a whole.
As for the individual, thankfully, we’ve been gifted with enough flexibility to get over and above our genes. If we really want to. So, for the individual person, there should be a chance to escape the circle – if you consciously structure your life in the endeavor to do so.
The danger of course is, that in the process of updating your beliefs, you might stumble upon the thought that leaning back and working with what you have might actually be a good idea and never get over it. The update to end all updates so to speak.
Maybe one could invent a yearly test: If you answer the same as last year, you loose.
I have doubts about how possible it is to escape the incremental failure mode of growing blind. (In particular: “If your model determines what you perceive — the input to your conscious processing mechanism, so to speak — then the option to ignore or change it may not be available.”)
Testing is a good idea, but it’s more easy to come up with joke tests than with actual ones. Testing for accurate inferences and good belief updates takes time if you want to disentangle it from things like world knowledge and speed of thought.
Notwithstanding that you’re the resident cognitive scientist here to design such a test, wouldn’t a jokey test do already? We’re talking about someone who’s well aware of the inherent dangers of getting older. What he/she then needs, in the end, is not so much a proper scientific test, but a reminder of what you want to be and that it will always require a conscious effort not to become part of the herd.
“Have you read any books you thought might not reflect your own views on a matter in the last 12 months?” would be a decent starting point, I think (of course, the answer Yes would be a good thing, even if given in subsequent years for this specific question). The point, after all, is to keep an open mind, not to switch one’s mindset at every whim (even if that’s still my current modus operandi at this point, I cannot actually recommend it).
As to “If your model determines what you perceive — the input to your conscious processing mechanism, so to speak — then the option to ignore or change it may not be available.”:
I dare say that no such mental model of the world is ever complete enough to fully assess any new input. As long as you’re presented with challenges from an angle you had not pre-considered and you cannot put into any of the categories you’ve built, an opportunity will present itself to either change your model, the aim in this exercise, or to just dismiss the new piece of information.
This, if nothing else, should be a decision up to one’s conscious choice. And an easy one at that, if one wishes to keep up one’s self-image as an intelligent (or rather: intellectually honest) being. If you discard input, instead of just putting it in the wrong category, you’ve truly outlived your own purpose of a scientist. Thankfully, or hopefully, at least in academia, there should always be enough peers around to call out such ignorance.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/04/26/inside_the_baby_mind/?page=full
The older you get, the larger the number of categories that are available to you. The more categories you have, the more likely it is that one fits the input well enough such that it doesn’t look like you need to think about this categorization, even if the world has changed such that your categories are no longer good.
In the case where no good interpretation of the input is obvious, where you do need conscious thought, whatever you come up with is composed of what you have learned before. If what you have learned before offers bad parts, i.e., favors empirically unlikely interpretations, you’re out of luck. This epistemic disadvantage is part of how I explain to myself why wrong beliefs are so widespread.