Month: May 2019

For reasons of survival, human beings cannot think logically when they are experiencing an emotional response; the prefrontal cortex is mostly deactivated and we are moved to action vs. thought. This is fantastic when immediate action is required but it creates a vulnerability when thought would serve you better. And let’s face it, there are not a lot of times in modern life that require immediate mindless action.

But that doesn’t mean that we can over-write or undo millions of years of evolution. When we perceive a threat – consciously or unconsciously – we are initially going to be motivated to run or fight.

And this is how we end up buying a lot of stuff that we don’t actually want. It’s rather remarkable actually. We go looking for something, a car for example, and the sales person shows up, friendly, happy and effectively building rapport. We’re guarded at first, we’ve bought a car before and we know the racket, but parts of our brain that function without our awareness are taking in and processing all the information. After some period of time we open-up simply because there is no actual threat. No one is going to harm us and our life is definitely not in jeopardy.

The sales person will find out what kind of car you are looking for, what your specific needs are and how much money you have to spend; they may not be so bold about finding out this information but you’ll give it to them because normal conversation flows in such a way that we tell people stuff. Effective sales people are going to uncover what they need to know in order to begin to trigger emotional reactions within us. And we give them the tools they need because the sales process is set-up like that.

I am one skeptical human being. Some would consider me to be paranoid and I agree, I am very aware of just how easily an emotional reaction can be triggered. I am not the mark I used to be, but I have had to work like hell to not become a part in this click wirr process. When I bought a car a few years ago the entire process was extremely unpleasant for me. I ended-up with a brutal headache and feeling very sick towards the end of it. I bought the exact car I went in to buy and actually paid a little less for it than I had planned. To an outsider it would have looked like a pleasant experience, a win:win for me and the sales person, and he was an extremely nice and good natured person. But I never let my guard down because I didn’t want to get taken.

When the gas water heater people make their rounds I try to get out of the conversation quickly. I don’t really want to waste their time because there is no way they are going to come into my house and I’ve found that when I do talk to them, the conversation degrades very quickly as I call them on the manipulative things they say. They try to use fear that the water heater that is in our house isn’t up to code; they can’t possibly know because they’ve never seen it. They try to tell me it will save money; modern water heaters are extremely efficient. They say that we are entitled to government grands; they don’t even know if we have a gas heater so they cannot know if we are entitled to anything. They say that they are with the gas company and are just in the neighborhood and would like to give our heater a free check-up; no successful company sends out its technicians unannounced and without a reason.

I can say this, they have been well trained to push the buttons that trigger emotional reactions, which will then lower resistance to what they are selling. Listening to them, it is easy to understand how people get sucked into long term contracts with the gas resellers they represent. This makes me angry because I don’t think it’s fair that people knock on your door and try to make you feel things just so you can buy stuff you don’t want. I suppose I could simply just close the door, but even though I have no respect for what they are doing, they are still human beings and deserve some respect.

And I think that’s the problem with emotional selling, it takes so much energy to combat that it ends up changing how we interact with other human beings and this makes the world a little worse of a place for everyone. These automatic reactions are the result of intensity, recency and an averaging of experiences.

Each one of us has a mental storage capacity that is enormous. We are capable of remembering hundreds of thousands of experiences, possibly millions, and when given enough time, we will be able to access most of them. A few of them will come to mind instantly, these will be the most recent and the ones that are the most intense for some reason, but almost all of the remainder will require a certain amount of deliberate mental. A system being set-up like this is very practical. When we need to make a decision very quickly, it limits the amount of information that comes to mind allowing us to filter through with ease and make a decision. We don’t get bogged down reviewing volumes of information, parsing out context, checking for relevance and reprocessing this for patterns and a relationship to other things that might be useful. The brain is capable of performing these tasks, it just doesn’t do it initially and it doesn’t do it very quickly. But when faced with a life or death situation, or when we need to determine IF something is a life or death situation, bringing to mind the most useful and revealing information that is relevant is the fastest and most effective way to do it.

Initially, three things will come to mind, one right after the other:

The first thing that comes to mind will be the contextually similar things that were accompanied by an extreme emotional reaction. There is a favoring of negative emotions over positive emotions here – things that scared us or made us angry – and the corresponding emotion will be triggered to some extent. Our consciousness will be filled with the memory and our body will be hit with some of the emotion. We will be, in a way, transported back that moment in time and this will ready us to respond to that specific stimuli in the event the present situation is a reasonable copy.

The second thing will be the most recent thing that was contextually similar – the context being determined by the last time we crossed the threshold into the physical / geographical space or a location – entering a room, getting into our car – or that is defined by a metaphoric meaning – going to work, talking to a spouse or sales person. Things that happened longer ago have less salience than the things that happened more recently, and the things that happened moments ago will take on a much greater portion of our awareness.

The final thing that comes to mind will be a sort of average of all of the situations that were close enough to the present situation in terms of context, language, emotional state, and a match on any other information that the brain deems as relevant. These will be thrown into a pot, mixed together and formed into a prototypical or representative case that called into mind in response to the sensory data that the present situation provides.

These three things impact the brain in slightly different ways and have different response curves. The emotional one will be first and if there is no negative component it will fade away very quickly. If there is a negative component, it will linger for longer, and if fear is the primary component, it will begin to shut down higher level cognitive processes as a fight or flight response takes over. There is a small window here in which the other two responses can mitigate the response and allow the emotional hijack to fade away. If recent experiences have shown the situation to be safe or if the average experience has been deemed to be safe, the hijack will be reduced.

This is why cognitive behavioral therapy or systematic desensitization is so effective at helping people gain a higher degree of control over their thoughts and reactions. Through repeated exposures that have a positive or neutral outcome, the brain begins to factor them into the average which will begin to lessen the severity of the response.

Assuming that there is no emotional hijack, the recency wave will peak next and fade away, quickly followed by a slow peaking average wave, which will remain for a lot longer before trailing off slowly. What ends up being perceived as reality will most often be a combination of the average and the sensory information. So long as a response is taken quickly, the process for this moment ends and there will be very little deeper searching of long term memories.

The average wave is interesting because it will be comprised of the things that happened more often and things that happened once or twice may not be included. If these single or infrequent happenings are critical for decision making, the person will need to hold off action for a while to give their brain the opportunity to activate these memories and bring them to mind.

This is the process that my brain goes through when there is a knock at the door and I see someone who is trying to sell me something when I open the door. They are not threatening, but I am on a heightened state of awareness because of what has happened before and fairly recently – someone just like them, in a context identical to this, tried to make me feel scared that there was something in my house that was no longer at up to code and could kill me. So without so much as a moments conscious thought, I’m already a little bit angry. When the average of all of the experiences like this fills my mind, I’m only slightly less annoyed and ready to tell them “no thank you” and “good bye.”

In general, these interactions are never as bad as the worst one was, they are fairly transactional once they say their bit and I reply to them based on how they are treating me. The only ones that are in anyway bad are the hot water tank people or the energy resellers, the telecom people are selling a service that they cannot match our present provider on, the political candidates and real estate brokers know that they won’t ever get my vote or my business if they are pushy or rude. And the religious people get thanked for their time and efforts as I politely say “I don’t feel like talking about it.”

At this point, the only door to door sales people that are able to trigger me into an emotional buy are the kids who are selling cookies or raising money for something, or who knock on the door asking to wash my car or shovel the snow from the driveway. They will get money almost every time and I have even paid them to not touch my car as an attempt to reinforce their entrepreneurial efforts.

What is most interesting to me is how Heather doesn’t have any problem listening to people try to sell her things or with their attempts to trigger an emotional response in order to get her commitment to buy. She actually enjoys it because she’s very aware of her internal state and feels it immediately when someone is trying to manipulate her. I’ve heard her complement sales people on their tactics, point out what they did and tell them “no thanks, I’m not buying anything from you.” All without any rage or obvious level of agitation, and even with some enthusiasm for having learned something new.

Heather and I are very different emotional operators. Historically I have been a much more empathetic person, with a tendency to feel emotions to a larger extent and for a much longer duration. She has as wide an emotional spectrum as me but is much more compassionate in terms of how she feels in response to the actions of other people and her perception of their immediate experience. I have only seen her angry once and I have never seen her behave in a way that would be viewed as inappropriate or out of place. The episode of anger was directed towards someone who was completely out of line and in desperate need of some social correction. The consequence of our differing ways of processing emotions is that, while I am more inclined to have a larger first response in terms of emotionality based on my previous experience before it fades to a more objective assessment of the immediate situation, her first response is very low or non existent in terms of emotion because her interpretations are well calibrated with reality. Someone trying to manipulate your emotion is only a threat IF they are successful and trigger a response. They have no power over you when you maintain control of your emotional state. Someone who is actually dangerous will not rely on slow methods to gain control, they will use force right from the very beginning.

The key to emotional selling or to combating emotional buying is logical thought because rationality helps people rank the importance of whatever is occurring. Sellers using these tactics are trying to gain the upper hand by creating a state that favors impulsive or rash decision making. An emotional hijack is the most effective way to do this, and it helps to complete a sale when the person is selling the solution to the proxy cause of the emotional response. Note, the cause of the response is the words / communication of the sales person and the proxy cause is the thing that they are talking about.

For example, the water heater guy is trying to get me to buy a new water heater by making me afraid that my present heater is no longer up to code and is therefore dangerous. He’s presenting the problem and the cure to something that is not a problem in need of a cure. The code change he was making reference to was an update to how gas pipes are labelled. There is nothing unsafe about anything. The ministry just made the determination that better labeling of gas lines would be more helpful. Of course I didn’t know this when he knocked on the door, but since our utility supplier hadn’t told us anything, I was confident there was no actual safety concern. When the sales guy told me my life was in danger I just replied with “good, if something happens you get to be right and I won’t ever have to talk to you again. Now get off my property and stop trying to scare people into buying crap from you.” This isn’t as good a response as what Heather would have had, but she asks me to answer the door because she gets a kick out of hearing what I say when someone’s efforts to make me afraid instead trigger anger.

The best approach is to take your time to allow your brain to surface as much information as it can and to allow whatever emotional response might be triggered to run its course and for your body and brain to return to baseline. This might mean not buying something at that moment in time and missing out on any first visit incentives. It might mean having to buy the product / service elsewhere. But doing it is going to mean that you will buy only the things that you want to buy and that these things will be YOUR choice. Your past will be used to shape your decision making – all of your past, not just the recent past or the experiences that were highly emotional – which will lead to better choices based on reality and actual need.

The 1990 movie “Jacobs Ladder” is about an American soldier who has returned from Vietnam under some sketchy circumstances. As he tries to get his life in order and move forward he starts to experience a growing number of odd and unsettling things. These leave him shaken, and since some of them seem to be related to his time in the war, he grows more curious about what happened. As the movie progresses he starts to realize that his memory has some huge gaps in it and the continuity problems began on a specific day while his platoon was stationed somewhere in the Vietnam jungle. SKIP AHEAD three paragraphs if you have not seen the movie and want to avoid finding out why his life became so bizarre.

The climax of the film centers around what happened on that day. In an attempt to turn human beings into the ultimate fighting machines the Army scientist manufacture an LSD-like drug they call the ladder – the main effect of it is to trigger primal fear within the user. The rational is that fear is the source of all anger and if a soldier is angry, they will fight with more aggression – think about how a cornered wild animal seems to throw a switch that redirects their flight energy into fight energy that causes them to do a 180 and to violently attack whatever has cornered it. Something is going to die in the next few seconds and the cornered animal is going to do everything it can to make sure it isn’t it.

During the day in question, the soldier are hanging out, talking, eating, smoking, playing cards, etc…. You hear some helicopters flying over that one of the soldiers comments are not expected. Over the next few minutes everyone begins to start acting differently. A few of them run off screaming, one of them begins to look terrified, the rest of them just seem to go to pieces. There’s a fast forward and the main character is seen in the jungle holding his gun clearly looking for the enemy. Suddenly there is some action and he is stabbed. At the end of the film it is revealed that he was mortally wounded by another member of his platoon because the ladder worked so well that the soldiers were unable to perceive anything other than threat and viewed any other person as the enemy. There is no such thing as logic when you are completely overcome by a fight or flight response, so there was no way they were going to be able to discern their platoon mates from their actual enemy and everyone began to attack the first person they saw.

This is the problem with empathy and it is why our species is much better served by compassion.

Empathy is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” while compassion is defined as “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.” In a metaphoric way, empathy allows us to become another person by taking on their feelings, or our interpretation of what their feelings are. This is very different from compassion which has us remain as ourselves and experience our version of concern for someone else. There is no blurring of the boundaries between us and them, allowing us to remain in control and more rational about what we are experiencing or our interpretation of it. The risk of an amygdala or emotional hijack is much lower when compared to the risk level when an act of empathy triggers fear or anger.

The maintenance of boundaries is critical when dealing with challenges because detachment or separation from a situation is very important for objective problem solving. There is a tendency for the number of solution choices to drop dramatically the closer one gets to the events. A normally very pragmatic person can be left incapable of anything other than a “hulk smash” reaction to something when they are part of it while those on the outside will see many alternatives that do not involve the destruction or elimination of a “threat.” The passage of time will also have the same effect. The massive reaction today will probably seem over the top in a few hours or a day later when the person can see that they could have just said “thank you, I’m not interested” and closed the door.

Having too much empathy causes us to relate too much with one of the two parties in a conflict. This comes at the cost of being able to maintain the idea that the other party is an equal and therefore entitled to the same respect and rights that we are bestowing upon the person we are connecting with. This makes sense, we are actually feeling what we believe the person is feeling, which will trigger us to respond to the other person as though they are actually acting towards us. But there are two sides to everything so our hyper vigilant quest of complete understanding for one party causes their experience to take on a disproportionately large role in our understanding of the situation or conflict as a whole.

Of course, we are wrong with whatever it is we are feeling in terms of empathy because we are NOT the other person and we have very little understanding of the context that led to things being what they are. While it might be true that IF we found ourselves in that situation we WOULD feel a specific way, this should beg the question, would we ever find ourselves in the situation? There is a very good chance that somewhere along the way, before things got were they are now, we would have done something different that would have change the course and eliminated what is presently occurring from the list of future possibilities. The context piece of it is very important because it is rarely visible and therefore very hard to bring to mind, particularly when the amygdala has hijacked our brain.

Not all people who are suffering are victims; or at least not all people who are suffering are being victimized. This is a very important fact to consider, one that empathy doesn’t really allow for. Emotions are a strange thing in that it is a lot easier to be angry at someone else than it is to be angry at ourselves and the anger towards others will last a lot longer. The context provides important information about how each person arrived at this moment and it will clearly show the level of responsibility each person has for what is going on. Very often, the person who is suffering has made a series of bad decisions, one after the other, leaving them with the choice of this bad thing or that bad thing. When they had the opportunity to create a future that didn’t have this situation as one of the possible outcomes, they made a bad choice.

This can be a tough pill to swallow because it does land like victim blaming and dogmatically adhering to it does kind of remove compassion from the equation. It also seems like a very “right wing” view of the world, and it might be. And none of these things, even if they are all true, make this perspective incorrect. I’d argue that the moment someone sees themselves as the cause of their situation marks the beginning of their situation improving. There is no power in being a victim. Life is DONE to victims and their only choice is to put-up with it while feeling worse and worse. But the growing negative feelings only serve to hijack their logical thinking to an even greater degree, leading to fewer solutions and more “victimization.”

There are some real victims, people who have found themselves in bad situations with no good options through no fault of their own. People who would have done something else if they knew what as actually going on. These people need assistance, which is best fueled by compassion. Feeling pity or concern will allow you to remain helpful because you will not become overwhelmed with whatever feelings being empathetic causes to come to the surface.

This is the same approach that should be employed with dealing with people who are suffering as a result of their own poor or lazy decision making. In fact, empathy will only be counter productive with these people because it will cause you to miss critical clues about context that are needed to restore their sense of control and autonomy. Consider the case when someones computer crashes causing them to lose a lot of work. There are two ways to look at this situation. The first is to see the person as a victim of bad luck, and to empathize with them. You’ll feel disappointment and anger, and this will lead to a strong sense of bitterness. The second way is to see the person as having played a role in the situation through one or more of their actions. You can be compassionate towards them, it really sucks to see the screen go blue and know that the last few hours of your work has just disappeared. But you don’t need to live their negative feelings and cultivate a sense of bitterness that you’ll bring with you into the rest of the day. This isn’t helpful and will only do harm.

When you allow yourself to be compassionate, you will very quickly start to solve the problem and empower them with the responsibility of implementing the solution. In this case, a computer crash shouldn’t mean the loss of hours of work because everyone KNOWS that computers crash and should be taking the steps to preempt the consequences of this happening. Those who have not backed up or saved their work are completely responsible for whatever work is not available to them once the computer reboots. It isn’t Microsoft or Apples fault, nor is it the fault of the company that makes your computer. Operating systems are complex, powerful, and fallible. An individual transistor is simple, a collection of a billion of them isn’t. Complex things throw errors and you need to know this when working with something that is complex. There is a non zero chance that any complex thing will stop working in the next second so given enough seconds it IS going to break down. Save your work often, back-up you work often and back-up your back-ups often. If you choose not to do this, when the complex thing breaks down and you lose the last few hours of your work, it is gone because YOU made the choice to make the most of your bad luck.

This doesn’t mean that you laugh at the person who didn’t look after their work, but you shouldn’t ever empathize with them UNLESS you are willing to really feel what it is they should be feeling. Saying “stupid piece of crab” or “useless bloody operating systems” as you cultivate an anger that is directed towards a computer is entirely the wrong thing to feel when someone loses their work as a result of a computer crash. While that might be a pure expression of empathy, it isn’t an accurate reflection of reality. In this case, empathy should be having the rage sent inwards for NOT saving their work and backing things up. The expression of emotion onto something that is external is an effective way of not feeling the consequences of the truth, but it is a lousy way of making the future any better than the present.

And this is one of the main problems with empathy, it doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation and is based only superficially on the context and the history leading-up to the moment in question. It cannot be said that your feelings are wrong because they are what you are feeling, but it is fair to say that they are not appropriate when they are not based on all of the events that contribute to the situation. When someone doesn’t take responsibility for backing-up their work and the computer crashes, being compassionate towards them, by acknowledging their disappointment and maybe offering to help them look for any auto recovery versions of the work because you have a more clear head about things, is the only course of action that makes sense, and the only one that might possibly help them find the lost work.

The other area in which empathy is exceptionally problematic is in the realm of conflict. Specifically when it comes to taking sides, because it is impossible to take both sides of an argument at once. Human beings cannot be objective processors the moment they start to feel what they believe one of the sides in the conflict is feeling. In fact, the longer they stay in an empathetic state, the more subjective their interpretation and perceptions will be. If they spend long enough there, they will be able to manufacture hatred, rage, and complete contempt for those on the other side of the conflict; all while having very little access to the context and the history of the events that lead up to the escalation.

This does not mean that every conflict is justified, nor does it mean that no conflicts are justified. The second world war was absolutely needed to happen to stop the actions of those who started it. Hitler was awful, his ideas were wrong, and his solution to things wasn’t grounded in a version of reality that was shared by anyone. However, and I’m not making excuses here, when you take a look at what happened after the first world war, the second world war seems almost inevitable. How Germany was treated throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s was both the result of too much empathy for those who were effected by WW1 and a complete lack of compassion for the German people who didn’t have anything to do with starting the war. They were simply people who were trying to carve out lives for themselves in exactly the same way as the people from any other country that found itself involved in the war. When the ruling class starts a conflict and the entire country is made to pay for it afterwards, there is almost no way to avoid future conflicts because the population is eventually going to grow tired of the punitive measures they are forced to endure for something they had no hand in starting. This is why the end of most of the wars since WW1 have had the winning side provide finance and participate in the recovery efforts.

On a much smaller scale, empathizing too much with either side of a conflict is going to dramatically reduce your ability to actually be of service in terms of offering solutions or helping to broker peace. The other side will be bad, evil or untrustworthy, and this will fuel suspicion and animosity, which will trigger a greater emotional reaction and keep the cycle going.

As unappealing as it seems to the other side, having compassion for both groups is critical for cooling things off and putting an end to strife. It is a lot easier for outside parties to approach the issue with compassion vs. empathy BUT not impossible for those who are involved in it. When it happens, a strong characteristic of compassion alters the dynamic in a powerful way. Compassion, like empathy, humanizes the person we are relating to. But unlike empathy, compassion for the other is possible (thus ensuring the ongoing objectivity) and once it is triggered, it is nearly impossible to not approach the situation from a more objective and balanced point of view. When this occurs, the vilification of others becomes much more difficult and the notions of right and wrong evaporate to be replaced by differences in opinion based on different perspectives or access to different information. This will allow both sides to track into the specific challenges and the key players in the conflict. Hitler was accurately determined to be evil, along with a number of his supporting players, but the German people were not lumped into this bucket because of the objective assessment compassion allows.

The ladder in Jacobs Ladder was a fear creating drug. It eliminated the possibility for compassion or an objective assessment of what is going on because when fear is involved there is only “me,” “them,” and the rest. The rest is everyone and everything that presents no threat and is ignored into non existence. The only thing that comes to mind is the threat – them – and the only thing to do is to take massive action to run away or to destroy the threat.

Under normal circumstances we have the ability to expand this binary reaction dynamic by avoiding an empathic reaction and preventing ourselves from getting lost in the experience of feeling our perception of other peoples feelings. This will give us the clarity to see things for what they are and to consider the role each person played in creating the present situation. We will be able to care and relate to the people involved, but we’ll not get lost in blaming other people for things that they didn’t have very much to do with. This is much more helpful to the person who is suffering because we give them understanding but do not give them permission to remain locked in a less than ideal situation. In the end, showing compassion for others is an act of caring that can help to move them through something they do not like by reestablishing the link between their actions and the outcomes they are experiencing. It reveals to them that they have the power to change their circumstances simply because it prevents you from getting wrapped up in the emotions that crush objectivity and reduce clarity and options.

There is no drug called the ladder, but too much empathy might be a fairly good behavioral proxy. We all have the power to choose between compassion and empathy when faced with someone who is suffering. If we really want to help them, we will choose compassion and take whatever steps we need to in order to show that we care for them. They’ll know that they are not alone while being certain that we are committed to helping them move past whatever the miserable experiences is they have found themselves in because we will be standing beside them and not, metaphorically, INSIDE of them.

Watching episode 3 of the final season of Game Of Thrones was a mixed experience. The battle has seemed inevitable for the last few season and the series has built the tension up dramatically over the last six or so episodes. I’m not going to spoil it other than to say that the battle happened at night and during a snow storm of sorts. Who won? It doesn’t matter for the purposes of this article.

The show in general is a visual masterpiece. It is filmed in a number of different locations and doesn’t rely too heavily on CGI to generate spectacular scenes. Green screen is used a lot and there are some CGI / post production components but the producers make use of reality as much as possible in terms of make-up, costumes, and real buildings. When I think back on some of the episodes and what they brought to the screen it really is breathtaking. Top marks needed to be given for the quality of what appeared on the TV screen week after week.

That was not the case on Sunday and I noticed my mind drifting off onto the experience of watching as opposed to being lost in what I was seeing. This was annoying to me, given the build-up of the battle that was being depicted on screen. The show took a full year off to film, edit, produce, and do whatever was required to make sure it was exceptional. This was evident in the first two episodes of the season and for portions of this one, but once the call to arms was sounded, the waiting to ensure the high quality seemed to have been pointless.

From a story-line perspective, it was decent, and held-up. The action was fantastic, the tension arc was outstanding and even though it is a show that has dragons and the ability for dead people to be reanimated like zombies, there wasn’t anything about the story that was too over the top that broke the spell or forced the viewer to suspend reality past the boundaries of what I was willing to do.

The problem I had with it was just how difficult it was to see. It was really dark. It was as though it was a battle that was occurring at night – which it was – during a snow storm – which it was – before they had invented electrical light – which it was – and the only source of illumination was fire – which it was. It was very authentic, and that is what is what made it really hard to watch.

When I say hard to watch, I don’t mean hard in an emotional way – like it was making me sad or angry. I mean hard in an energetic way. It was draining to watch because the normally super crisp details and HD clarity wasn’t there. While it was clear that people were fighting, it wasn’t clear who those people were or what the outcome was. The exceptions to this were when key characters got killed or did some killing. As I write that, I suppose that I should have used that as a tell that something important was about to happen. Oh well, maybe I’ll rely on that the next time I watch something that is only marginally brighter than dark.

The experience was not uninteresting. Even though the show was missing a lot of what makes it great and very easy to watch, the difficulty I was having in seeing what was happening on the screen served as a strong contrast to the normal viewing experience. I found that I began to care less about what was going on and started to become critical of the premise of the show. It wasn’t that I wanted any or all of the key characters to die, it was closer to not caring about the outcome one way or the other. One side is going to have to win and the sooner they did the sooner this visual black hole would end. The premise that I have always been willing to accept as just a part of the show started to receive the brunt of my critical internal dialogue. Dragons do not exist so their abilities are not constrained to any historical or factual set of rules or guidelines. But my skepticism was building about them and their imaginary powers. They breathe fire when they exhale but somehow they are able to exhale for a long time, even when they had been flying all over the places and should be breathing really hard? Their fire wasn’t just flame, it was like spraying napalm that continued to burn for a long time afterwards. How can they have an unlimited supply of that?

I didn’t get critical all at once, it was a slow build. Initially I just wished that thing were brighter, then I wanted to see things better, and then the frustration arrived and grew. On the screen was the unfolding of an epic battle that had been festering for 7 seasons and in my head was an annoyance that was growing with each passing minute of almost invisible action.

At around 30 minutes in, the amount of energy I was spending trying to see and figure out what was going on hit the “too much to bother” level and I disengaged.

What’s interesting about it, is the finding that people have better recall of text that is harder to read than they do text that is visually highly contrasted and very crisp on the page. Ease is a problem when it comes to short term memory and the tougher things get, the better our recall tends to be. I would imagine that there is a level of difficulty that represents the upper threshold of what people are willing to tolerate when it comes to working their way through difficult text, and that this level is related to the incentive the person has for putting in the work. I have no doubt that if I was going to be tested on what happened during the episode and that there was something on the line, if knowing would actually matter, that I would have been able to keep at it for longer. But there wasn’t any incentive for me to keep doing the work. In fact, the effort that was required actually served as a disincentive to keep manufacturing whatever meaning I had created that allowed me to remain interested. It is entirely possible that watching it was so draining that there was no energy left over to do the mental work that is needed for the suspension of disbelief.

This is a common enough occurrence. People who are highly engaged are willing and able to continue to work hard towards an impossible goal but only as long as they are able to maintain their belief that it is possible. The moment reality breaks through, they view their efforts for what they are and they check out. The process is very much like the experience I had. The amount of effort that is required to sustain the belief increases in a relative sense – either because it requires more units or because fewer units are available to do it because they are being siphoned off and directed onto something else. Once the relative effort hits a certain level the foundation begins to fall apart and the weight of the belief causes it to collapse leaving reality to stand uncontested.

Human beings are programmed to understand what they are experiencing, and are more than willing to take some very big steps to construct a coherent narrative interpretation of what is going on. Entertainment relies on this quality. Without it watching a play or reading anything other than nonfiction would be a waste of time because we would only be capable of perceiving what was going on as being fake. The context in which we are viewing the make-believe stuff serves to prime our brain with the information that makes watching or reading possible. There is a piece of us that is completely aware that it is a play or a work of fiction, but the volume of that part is dialed down allowing us to get lost in what we are experiencing. It isn’t that we do not know that it is fantasy, it is that the part of us that cares is being actively suppressed.

Being aware of reality is a natural operation while ignoring it is not; this is almost a paradoxical situation in that it costs more energy to suppress reality than it does to accept it. The consequence to this fact is that we will only suppress reality when there is an incentive to do so. In this case, the incentive is reward chemicals that are released in response to the thoughts or the type of thinking that only flow when reality is suspended. It only works when we get something out of it and when what we get out of it is much greater than the cost of what we have to put into it.

Imagine that it takes 20 mental units of energy to suspend reality. However, the chemical reward that this can lead to is worth the equivalent of 50 units of energy. This is a positive experience and is therefore something that the brain will be more inclined to perform in the future. After enough of these experiences, the brain will have learned that suspending reality is always worth the initial cost because of the magnitude of the reward. This is why consuming fantasy literature or entertainment is a learned experience; it is available to everyone who has a brain that releases reward chemicals in response to the changes in thinking that suspension of reality facilitates AND who have enough experiences of the pairing of the stimulus and the response. If anything is missing the person will remain fixated on reality and will never have a reason to transcend into the realm of fantasy entertainment.

However, for those who have learned to find the experience rewarding, it is not without its limits. There is a cost associated with generating the reward, and the cost must be paid before the reward is released. Human beings have a propensity to be more loss adverse than they are reward seeking, and this creates an interesting phenomena in terms of sensation and perception. The ratio of loss to gain is one : two meaning that a loss of one unit is equal to a gain of two units. This is the general break-even point marking the boundary between when someone will do something that takes effort because the gain is worth it and when they will not take an action because the gain is not worth it. For example, we’ll put in 50 units of effort to get 110 units of reward, but we will not put in 50 units of effort to get 90 units of reward. The math is fairly straightforward although the timing of the rewards does not necessarily need to be immediate once the learning has taken place. If we were to get 50 reward units now and get another 100 units later, so long as we believed that the 100 units later were the result of spending 50 units now, we would have no difficulty perceiving this situation as a win and making the effort. This delaying of gratification is also a learned skill so the notion of investing effort for future reward is something that tends to come into play a little later in life.

The 2:1 ration is a perceptual thing in that it is the threshold that separates costs from losses. It is of big narrative significance because it alters the meaning we give to work / effort / actions. As long as the reward at least 2 times greater than the amount of energy we have to put in, we view the effort as a cost. Since things of value have a cost, we are accustomed to paying a price for things. The lower that price is relative to the value we get out of them the better; and it is not uncommon for something that is priced too low to be viewed as less valuable than it is. This means that we do not necessarily want the things that are handed to us and that we are actually more inclined to want something more when its price is slightly inflated. There is a sweet spot or range within which we are willing to work at varying degrees to get the value of something. Above it we perceive it as worthless and below it we view the effort we need to put in as a loss.

The lower threshold is about 1:2 in terms of effort to reward. There is some variability at the exact point, but narratively it can be defined as the point at which the cost of something is experienced as a loss. It’s an entirely relative thing but that does not change the dynamics at all. All things being equal, if the reward increases the cost can increase by a factor of 0.5. If the reward decreases, the cost will need to drop by a factor of 2. If the cost increases, the reward will need to increase by a factor of 2 and if it decreases, the reward can drop by a factor of 0.5. When one of these things does not occur AND when the ratio of cost to reward drops below 1:2, the costs become losses and the transaction will no longer be viewed as favorable. There is a small margin in terms of the time it will take before the brain makes the decision to abandon the transaction but the window is very small and dependent upon the size of the ratio – 1.1:2 will be tolerated for longer than 1.2:2 and a 3:1 ration might result in an immediate end to their participation in the behavioral transaction.

Past experience will pay a role in someone’s interpretation of reward and in their willingness to delay gratification. Those who have a longer track record of positive transactional ratios or who have a number of experiences that support the notion of delayed gratification will remain engaged for longer than someone who has little or no experience with either one of these elements; both generally, but more specifically with reference to the context of the current situation. However, most people will reach a breaking point eventually and once it has been crossed, the transaction ends and will only be reactivated when the ratio improves again to move the outcome from loss to cost.

This is what was at play for me while I watched this episode of Game Of Thrones. I have been more than willing to put the energy into suspending reality given how I have learned that doing so can lead to immediate and future rewards – consuming fiction has been rewarding and I have gotten a lot out of watching this series. Up until about 9:20 pm the ratio had been favorable and I had not minded putting in whatever effort was needed to keep me watching because the reward had been predictable and large enough to consider this effort a cost. However, the ratio dropped below the critical threshold which threw the costs / losses switch in my head. I very quickly burned through whatever good will that had been built-up and my brain was no longer willing to waste the effort that was needed to suspend reality or figure out what was happening on the screen. And that was it, the spell was broken and I instantly became aware that I was watching a TV show about make believe stuff that cannot and will not ever happen. The laws of physics flowed in and altered my perception of what I was able to see on the screen so I stopped. It suddenly became kind of silly, far-fetched, and unimportant.

The episodes director, Fabian Wagner, doesn’t believe that there was a problem. He suggested that the lighting was by design and used as a way to aid in the story telling. Everything that was important was visible, even if it was a little tougher to see than normal. He made some other comments about it that aren’t helpful. Suffice it to say, what was broadcast WAS what we were supposed to see. A collection of people took a look at the final product and approved it for distribution. I’m not a film maker and am only a fly by night fan of the show and not likely the person they were targeting with this episode. I am a lot less engaged than a diehard fan and may lack the specific commitment to put in the effort that was required to manufacture the information low picture quality failed to supply. True fans probably did the work and remain lost in the battle of until it was won.