Your mental models tell you what to think and how to act

All of your thoughts and actions are the results of your mental models

You can´t function without mental models. When you start growing as a child, you do not have many models. The amount of them starts to grow. And finally, you have hundreds or even thousands of mental models as an adult. Your thinking becomes more complex and you see the world differently compared to your childhood. Your models are always updated. Most of your mental models affect your unconscious mind. This is why most people cannot figure out that all of their physical actions are based on their mental models too. If you want to throw a ball, your brain needs to have a chain of mental models to move all the necessary parts of your body to achieve your goal of throwing the ball.

Your view of the world is based on your mental models

You have your view of the world. This view is your latticework of mental models of the world. It consists of your mental models that are the results of your learned facts, previous stimuli, experiences, and current situation. Your response to different stimuli produces different actions or thoughts. They are both context-dependent. It means that your responses vary depending on the current stimuli and previous choices and experiences. For example, if you have made a decision month ago, it could be different today in the same stimuli and in the same location because you have had different experiences between these two decisions. There is a possibility that your mental models today are different than a month ago. There might be only a slight change or a big one.

Your view of the world is never complete

Your view of the world is imperfect. You cannot have a complete picture of the world, because it is too complicated. You can have a close to perfect view of your surroundings if you are isolated, but the world out there is always incomplete. You have at least hundreds of different mental models in your head. You might not describe them as models but they are models in their imperfect sense. Some models are closer to the truth than others. Different people have different models that are closer to reality than other people. For example, my mental model about the latticework of mental models is closer to reality than yours and your mental model about how well I can write is probably closer to the truth than mine because I suffer more from overblown ego than you do.

Your life is a result of your mental models and randomness

You can have close to perfect mental models and the result of your life can be an absolute tragedy. Your outcomes always have an element of randomness. Your life can end by standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, you can do everything right and meet a stranger accidentally that is a terrorist or another kind of nutcase and he will shoot you to death. Some randomness can always change your life completely. I am not saying that it is the most likely outcome, but it can happen. You can only raise your odds to get the outcomes you want. Nothing is ever certain. You have to always think about the odds that your mental models are the best possible ones in the context you are using them. And you have to remember that your odds are never a hundred percent. The best odds of being right you get from the best principles of the most important intellectual disciplines like physics, biology, mathematics, etc. These models are universal and withstood the test of time even though they have been proven right only in the last centuries. If you need to improve your models and you probably do, these models should be first in your list. Most of them you can find here.

This is all for a while. I wish you a great summer. I will back at some point in time.

-TT

Are emotions simulations?

The title has a question mark because scientists are not unanimous about what emotions really are. This text is based on the assumption that a theory of constructed emotion is right. A classical view says that emotions are constant biological components that have grown in millennia and they have been developed by the survival instincts needed a long time ago. A theory of constructed emotion sees things differently. It sees emotions as learned and created social agreements based on your experiences, immediate stimuli, and culture. This theory makes you more responsible for your own behavior.

Neurons and emotions

A classical view talks about emotion fingerprints. According to it, you have the same facial and bodily expressions about emotions. This means that your muscle movement tells others everything they need to know about your emotions. A theory of constructed emotion disagrees with a classical view about this. According to it, emotions don´t have any physical fingerprints. For example, anger doesn´t look the same in the facial muscles all the time. The classical view believes that the same neurons and their synapses in the brain create the same facial expressions that express anger or other emotions. According to a new theory, different neurons and their synapses can create the same emotions, and varying facial movements can express the same emotions like anger in different contexts after different experiences and social agreements. Different neurons have different purposes according to this new theory.

Context, experiences, and social agreements

According to this new theory, your immediate surroundings, previous agreements, and social agreements construct emotions together. Your emotions depend on your environment. You can show your anger or feel it differently depending on where you are. You can express your anger differently at home and at work. Emotional expressions are tied to specific environments. You can express your anger to someone else differently depending on your immediate surroundings. Another person can show their anger to you differently at home than at your office. You give different meanings to different occurrences based on your previous experiences. When you have experienced anger on the bus, you can expect that you will experience it again on the same bus, even though your other surroundings are different. Different cultures can have different expressions for different emotions. For example, Asians have different facial expressions of anger than people who live in Western countries. They have learned to express their emotions differently. One of the most important things to understand is that people construct their emotions differently and it is very hard to know what others are feeling all the time.

Simulations

All your senses provide you with stimuli all the time. Your brain uses your past and present stimuli and compares them to construct simulations. Then your brain chooses stimuli that are relevant to your current situation and throws other stimuli away. Your senses do not provide reactions, they provide simulations based on current stimuli through your senses and some previous simulations that have created different neural patterns in your brain. Then it chooses the most probable simulation that is the sensory input you react to. It adjusts you to the current situation. The primary tools for your brain to understand current situations are your previous experiences. Cultural differences are based on different previous experiences. And these culture-dependent experiences have created different social agreements based on different cultures.

Your simulations are your neural patterns. They guide your actions and produce meaning for the stimuli you experience through your senses. When your neural patterns describe emotion simulations, your brain constructs emotions. Your brain actively constructs emotions based on your sensory inputs. It doesn´t just react to inputs. Without previous experiences and simulations based on them, you couldn´t make any sense from your current sensory inputs. They would just be meaningless noise. Sometimes your sensory inputs help you to have a meaning for your current stimuli and your brain constructs an emotion. Sometimes it does something else like produce an action.

This is an interesting theory. It makes sense, but I have no idea if it is a fact or not. If you are interested in learning more, you can read Lisa Feldmann Barrett´s book: How Emotions Are Made or watch her TED talk about the theory.

Until next time,

TT