Flexibility
Mental flexibility is the ability to see a situation or a set of facts from different perspectives. This is a learned trait and is influenced by both internal and external factors.
Our brains are hard wired to have limited flexibility, so the exercise of flexibility goes against the grain. If you touch something hot, you pull your hand away. This reflexive response is inescapable for most people. When Hollywood wants to demonstrate a person's complete control of himself, they will often show a person deliberately holding his hand over a lit match.
Higher cognitive processes, such as organizing thoughts and emotions into a coherent internal matrix, requires decisions...what to keep in and what to leave out; what correlation is causation, what is coincidence. Once done, viewpoints calcify, making changing perspective extremely difficult. Some see this as a virtue, others as a vice. When presented with evidence supporting your position, you accept it; evidence to the contrary is dismissed.
Mental illness is often a matter of flexibility disorders. A depressed person sees all life through the lens of depression. I remember one elderly woman, in a nursing home due to intractable depression, sitting in her room crying about how nothing good ever happens to her. A nurse opened the door and brought in a large, beautiful plant with a card identifying the giver as a long forgotten neighbor who just heard of her plight and wanted to remind her that others cared greatly for her. The old woman smiled, laughed, and was overwhelmed with happiness. Her husband told me later that the happiness lasted for about 30 minutes. She then went back to her same mantra of how nothing good ever happens to her. Patients with schizophrenia, delirium and perhaps mania have excessive flexibility, thoughts and emotions flowing without control, making it impossible to grab onto reality. A patient yesterday, in the throws of DTs, was gazing all around the room, muttering, laughing, crying, trying to make sense of the continuous flow of thoughts and perceptions, unable to find the real from the imagined.
If you are too flexible, you will be swayed by anything that comes your way. You will not have any anchors, any north stars. If you are too inflexible, you will not be open to alternatives. Since each of us is fallible, you will be most lucky if some of your errors do not seriously negatively impact your life.
What are reasonable anchors? DocBrain believes that ethics is a good place to start, perhaps with some variation of the golden rule. The second is to consider goals. Goals should be related to maximizing truth and pleasure (best seen in the long term). Data can be of some help, but all data is flawed and care needs to be taken to make sure you are not seeing things as you want to see them or as someone else wants you to see them. Lastly, you should take time to reflect on any positions you are attempting to calcify in your brain. Then, you should continue to test them for validity. While an exception does not necessarily exclude a general principle from being approximately correct, multiple exceptions should lead to a reconsideration or refinement of your theories and hypotheses of the world.
Simply put, it is healthier to have an open mind. Closed minds are the norm and the most common cause of conflict, while overly open minds are the most common cause of indecision. We probably could do with a little more indecision and a little less conflict in the world.
Our brains are hard wired to have limited flexibility, so the exercise of flexibility goes against the grain. If you touch something hot, you pull your hand away. This reflexive response is inescapable for most people. When Hollywood wants to demonstrate a person's complete control of himself, they will often show a person deliberately holding his hand over a lit match.
Higher cognitive processes, such as organizing thoughts and emotions into a coherent internal matrix, requires decisions...what to keep in and what to leave out; what correlation is causation, what is coincidence. Once done, viewpoints calcify, making changing perspective extremely difficult. Some see this as a virtue, others as a vice. When presented with evidence supporting your position, you accept it; evidence to the contrary is dismissed.
Mental illness is often a matter of flexibility disorders. A depressed person sees all life through the lens of depression. I remember one elderly woman, in a nursing home due to intractable depression, sitting in her room crying about how nothing good ever happens to her. A nurse opened the door and brought in a large, beautiful plant with a card identifying the giver as a long forgotten neighbor who just heard of her plight and wanted to remind her that others cared greatly for her. The old woman smiled, laughed, and was overwhelmed with happiness. Her husband told me later that the happiness lasted for about 30 minutes. She then went back to her same mantra of how nothing good ever happens to her. Patients with schizophrenia, delirium and perhaps mania have excessive flexibility, thoughts and emotions flowing without control, making it impossible to grab onto reality. A patient yesterday, in the throws of DTs, was gazing all around the room, muttering, laughing, crying, trying to make sense of the continuous flow of thoughts and perceptions, unable to find the real from the imagined.
If you are too flexible, you will be swayed by anything that comes your way. You will not have any anchors, any north stars. If you are too inflexible, you will not be open to alternatives. Since each of us is fallible, you will be most lucky if some of your errors do not seriously negatively impact your life.
What are reasonable anchors? DocBrain believes that ethics is a good place to start, perhaps with some variation of the golden rule. The second is to consider goals. Goals should be related to maximizing truth and pleasure (best seen in the long term). Data can be of some help, but all data is flawed and care needs to be taken to make sure you are not seeing things as you want to see them or as someone else wants you to see them. Lastly, you should take time to reflect on any positions you are attempting to calcify in your brain. Then, you should continue to test them for validity. While an exception does not necessarily exclude a general principle from being approximately correct, multiple exceptions should lead to a reconsideration or refinement of your theories and hypotheses of the world.
Simply put, it is healthier to have an open mind. Closed minds are the norm and the most common cause of conflict, while overly open minds are the most common cause of indecision. We probably could do with a little more indecision and a little less conflict in the world.
posted by DocBrain at
4:10 AM
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