Over the course of our lives, we collect millions of memories, which get stored in both the conscious and unconscious parts of our brains. Some of them are pretty obvious and dependable, but most drift into an amalgamation of thoughts and feelings that are recessed in a sort of filing system in our brains. Circumstances we encounter can trigger those memories, often in ways that we’re not aware of in full. These memories also get stitched together into a fabric that makes up our view of the “real” world. But how “real” is this world?
When I was young, we used to have “sock hops” after our junior high school basketball games. And in those days, we really did dance in socks so we wouldn’t mess up the gym floor! Given that there were virtually no LGBTQ students who were “out,” the boys would invariably line up on one side of the room and the girls on the other. It was almost always expected that the boys would ask the girls to dance, and so at some point you were expected to walk all the way across the gym floor, in front of all of your friends, and ask a girl to dance. If she said no, you had to walk all the way back, again, in front of all of your friends.
And on the whole walk back, what were you thinking? More often than not, it was something like “I’ll never do that again!”
Flash forward twenty-five years. You are working for a company that is having an annual conference. You are asked to call an important community member to invite them to the event. You sit down at your desk and pick up the phone, and all of a sudden you feel a wave of nervousness sweep through you. The act of invitation has triggered a fear of rejection. It is almost like somebody entered your internal jukebox, hit “D7,” and that song of fear began to play. Did you choose to feel a fear of rejection at that moment? Or did the fear of rejection simply “happen”? Could it have been that the name of the woman you were calling reminded you somehow of the name of the girl who rejected you at the dance, or any of a hundred similar connections?
These kinds of triggers are around us all of the time. A memory may be triggered and we cannot say why it was triggered. I’m sure almost everybody reading this has had an incident when you were walking somewhere, driving a car or doing almost anything, and “out of nowhere” you start thinking about something you haven’t thought about in a long time. Without our realizing it, something has jogged that memory. It might have been something that passed in our peripheral vision, or a smell or sound or bump in the road. Memories are constantly being triggered within us.
Here is one example of a seemingly “random” memory trigger. I was working out at the gym one morning and listening to my iPod. My iPod has more than 24,000 songs on it and sometimes I just put it on “shuffle” and songs will play at random. I might hear a song that I haven’t heard in a few years. That was exactly what happened on this particular morning. A Neil Young song that I like came on; in fact I even played it a second time. I listened to eight or nine more songs and then showered and dressed and got in my car. At the stop light, I had a thought about a health food store that was a couple of miles down the road that my wife and I used to go to but that I hadn’t been to in a good while. I decided to drive that way, not even remembering the store’s name. When I pulled into the parking lot, I saw the store, which is named “Harvest Moon.” Which happens to be the same name as the Neil Young song I played twice! Coincidence? Perhaps, but I don’t think so.
This is the way our minds work. Different things get linked together, along with all of the memories and feelings associated with those things. When we meet somebody and say, “There’s something about that person that I like,” that person is probably stimulating an old memory of somebody or something that was positive. If that memory link is to a negative stereotype that we have been exposed to in our past, the same applies.
Over the course of the past couple of decades, we have experienced an explosion in new research about the way our minds and brains work. The ability to use technology in new ways has permitted us to not only to watch the brain in action in a more robust fashion than ever before, but also has allowed many more brains to be tested. This has helped us begin to understand the way we think in a much more acute way. And what we are seeing is anything but “logical.”
As a diversity and human resources/management professional, my interest in this research is completely practical. How can we take what we have learned from the mind and use it to better understand our relationships and organizations, so that we can make more conscious decisions? What actually changes our behavior? One thing that feeds our predisposition to act unconsciously is our tendency to rush ahead before we truly understand what we are dealing with at that moment.
I like to use dieting as an example of behavior that is not always so well thought out because it is such an obvious one that applies to so many people. For years I struggled with my weight, fluctuating between gaining and losing as much as forty pounds. Even when I was heavy, I knew exactly what to do: eat less and exercise more. With the possible exception of a few people, that formula is pretty dependable. It wasn’t until I looked behind the curtain, so to speak, that I began to understand why I eat (in my case, eating is related to stress and fatigue), that I actually had a chance to stick with a sensible weight loss regimen.
To deal with an issue, we have to know what we are dealing with in the first place. So, let’s talk about the real issues we deal with on a daily basis.
We have known for a long time that the world we see is shaped by our experience. In the simplest of terms, two people wander up to a snake. One says, “Cool! A snake!” The other immediately says (or feels), “Oh my God! I’m going to die!” The snake is no different, but each person’s experience with the snake is obviously very different. And the background through which they see the snake shapes those experiences.
Throughout our lives, we are exposed to countless experiences, numerous teachings, and also certain paradigms that we have been told are “true.” All of this makes up an ideological structure, a kind of internal “book of rules” through which we process the world we see. That book of rules can then both consciously and unconsciously influence our behavior, and in turn, what we experience. We develop a certain schema, which is a system through which we organize and perceive things that we encounter.
We all have schema. I am a musician, having sung and played in a Rock and Roll band for more than thirty years. My wife is a fantastic watercolorist. We may be listening to a new song and she is thinking “great song!”, while I’m listening to how the instruments play off each other, or the way the voices harmonize. Then we go to an art gallery, and she looks at a painting and begins to describe “the shadowing that they’re using, and the way they combine the colors and use splatter effects . . . and so on” while I look and say, “Pretty picture!”
Think of something similar that applies to you. Do you have a hobby or something you are particularly fascinated with or that you enjoy doing? Haven’t you noticed how easily you spot things related to that when they occur around you?
Let me show you what I mean. Take a look at the picture on the following page (figure 2.1). It was designed many years ago by Karl Dallenbach, one of the early pioneers of experimental psychology and the editor of the American Journal of Psychology for more than half of a century. See if you can make out a discernible image.
Perhaps you saw something you recognize in the picture? Or maybe you did not. Now turn the page and look at the next image with the picture drawn in a way that is easier to see (figure 2.2).
Can you see the cow? Now go back and look at the original picture. It is almost impossible to not see the cow, isn’t it? Something that was invisible just minutes ago is now inescapably in your line of vision.
This experience is often referred to as perceptual organization, the ability of the mind to organize information around a common unifying idea. Once you have been shown that the cow is indeed there (by looking at the other