For a while, I have been playing with this idea that balance is different than I learned it was. Balance is a verb. What most people think of as balance is actually equilibrium:

Equilibrium refers to a state of balance where opposing forces, influences, or processes are in a stable condition with no net change over time.

And specifically, when they say balance, they really mean static equilibrium, like sitting in a chair. You are at rest, and you still stay that way until something or someone comes along and causes you to move.

While this might sound ideal and restful, there is a feature of equilibrium that is often overlooked. It is vulnerable. If you’re sitting in a chair, someone can sneak up behind you and tip you over with little effort.

Balance, or dynamic equilibrium, however, is effortful. It is an active process and more closely mirrors how our bodies and our brain actually function. Standing on one foot is an act of balance. The two hemispheres of our brain, the rods and cones in our eyes, even our two feet are constantly in a dance of competitive cooperation. They push on each other and test each other to create better answers and better results.

My theory is that by becoming aware of this dynamic dance of life, I can live a more satisfying life instead of lamenting or resenting that my life is not effortlessly “balanced.”

Not only do I not get static equilibrium for free, I am beginning to believe I don’t want it. I am beginning to see life as a dance, where my goal is to find the sweet spot between leading and being led.

For my part, one of those domains is how to balance my beliefs in faith and my beliefs in engineering. Now I am not talking about atheism vs. Jesus, but more, where do I find useful, practical information on how to best live?

Faith, for example, is the belief in the absence of proof. In some absolutely sense, that sounds like a recipe for willful stupidity. However, I have found in raising children that having faith is extremely valuable. Why should you not believe they can learn to do something before they have proven they can do it? Or that they can become someone awesome before they have proven it? Waiting for proof can be a life-sapping, cynical, and frankly miserable way to live.

However, and here’s the balance, it is also unwise to just take everything on faith and never look for proof. This is what makes it a balance, or “balancing act”, literally an act of balance.

And I find this function is the kind of problem that our body and our brain— which together make a mind— are extremely adept at solving for. We literally are walking disambiguation engines. The senses flow information into the brain while the body also transmits its current status, and together, those signals are blended together to determine best outcomes and courses of action.

The real magic comes from the third source, our lived experience, which can help guide what we are seeing and feeling, shaping what we see, hear, and feel while also being shaped by those same signals.

I have come to understand that certainty is a feeling, not a fact, and we crave it so desperately because it is highly correlated with the moments when all three of our core mental processing systems align— the feeling that accompanies our “moment of recognition,” we label certainty. And it feels good!

It feels so good, in fact, we can often use that feeling as our objective instead of the outcome. We chase certainty, revising our memories and beliefs trying to make reality fit the model that makes us feel “most certain.” We have names for these cognitive artifacts; we call them biases, and the big two are:

• Confirmation Bias (I see what I believe)
• Desirability Bias (I only look for what I believe)

The third amigo that often accompanies these two, especially in our modern knowledge economy, is my personal favorite, the “I’m not Biased Bias.” The “smarter” you are, the more likely you are to fall prey to this cognitive artifact. It basically makes it harder for you to believe that you could make a mistake.

In psychological experiments, the people with the highest IQ’s performed the worst in cognitive tests where they were presented with disconfirming evidence which contractures a cherished core belief. In other words, they were more stubborn, and more resistant to change, and less likely to accept proof that their belief needed revision, than people who had a lower IQ.

Uncertainty, like being off balance, is uncomfortable, largely because it requires effort. However, there are gifts that come from dynamic equilibrium or active balance.

Visualize the athlete who stands on their balls of their feet. With their knees bent, feet shoulder-width apart, head up, hands out just above the waist in that classic “athletic” or “gunfighter stance." They are extremely stable. Imagine a basketball player on defense, or a gunfighter, or a softball player on the infield the moment before the ball is hit. Ponytails and ribbons aside, that girl is ready for what is about to happen next.

This is a moment of optimal “balance,” opposing forces in tension to keep a dynamic system in a state of preparation to make a move.

And to me, that feels like a dance, specifically the tango. Sometimes I move, sometimes, live moves.

And here is where I see the pattern repeat.

Oliver Burkeman in his book 4,000 Weeks, and Meditations for Mortals talks about slowing down, focusing on fewer projects, and recognizing the moments when you will lose control over your day and to welcome those with open arms.

Reading Thich Nhat Hanh, or Pema Chödrön. They talk about being extremely present to life, and receiving whatever happens. You move, but you also pay attention. You give, and you receive life.

Reading Jesus Calling by Sarah Young, she is inspired to write, “Spend time with me before you begin your day, worrying about nothing.”

Michael A. Singer’s Surrender experiment. You listen to where life wants to lead you, then you have to go.

And my own father’s lovely, “Dumb Luck Theory”. You set an intention, get in motion, then pay attention.

All of these touch on a similar theme, the balance between living out into the world through intention and action, but also receiving from the world what arises and some level of trust and faith that it will work out.

For me, they all embody three principles, or they combine to create one animating “spirit”, the spirit of adventure and generativity. They embody humility (I am paying attention, listening, watching, and I’m not in control), faith (but I believe that good can come from this), and courage (I will act in accordance with my faith).

My faith directs my actions, my courage empowers my efforts, and my humility informs my faith and beliefs. This cycle creates a kind of dynamic balance, an athletic position of heart, mind, and soul, if you will.

Who am I writing this to? Myself, I suppose. I am looking for patterns and clarifying my own thoughts and beliefs. I am constantly seeking and revising the answer to my question, how to best live in this life.

Cultivate Curiosity, Don’t Communicate Conclusions

As I have been studying what I will call The Constructed Emotion Theory, or CET, I realize that I need to change the way I communicate in presentations and workshops.

While I have known for a long time that you can’t send people information like computers do, I can’t take the already finished spreadsheet and send it to them for them to use. We don’t work like that. I need to take a different approach.

Basically, I want to leverage the way our brains already work. We are not stimulus-response machines, we are prediction engines. We are constantly trying to anticipate what will happen so we can be prepared for it.

Lecturing, teaching in a traditional sense, does not seem to work well with adults, at least the way I have been doing it. So I want to try a different approach. And I am going to experiment with that today. Instead of getting up and giving a twenty-minute explanation about what a Forum Health Check is (if you want to know, leave me a message, I can tell you) , I will start very simply with, “I am here to help you discover how to create a better forum experience.” And then launch into an exercise of discovery with the group called, Alone/Together or Paired Sharing. I will ask them to look in and share their best (and worst) forum experiences. First alone, then in pairs, then they will select the “best” or most representative of each and go around the room. I will assign roles, Seasoned Viewpoints and Fresh Perspectives. I want them as a group to discover how they all see this “thing” they call a forum.

Instead of lecturing, I want to lead them on a journey of discovery and curiosity. I know that we are lazy reasoners. That when you argue with yourself, you always win. However, we are amazing in small groups getting to the truth of things. Our true powers of rational thought are focused outward, toward what is coming into us. And even this system is built upon our predictive abilities. When we dream up our reasoning, we are free to think what we want, largely unconstrained. However, when information comes to us, it must be matched against what we expected, and that matching produces discrepancies, conflicts, and before we treat someone else’s ideas as “prediction error” that must be corrected, we push back. We argue. We ask for clarification, or we present our prediction as an “alternative” that must be considered. And thus begins a process of negotiated mutual understanding. Our information, plus new information, and discussion or debate to get the “right” information. Also, don’t forget, this process must factor in what is acceptable to the group, the cultural milieu, or situation. Words are not simply sounds which hang in the air, but streams of energetic mental representations which can animate another person. (I found this interesting: when ordinary, everyday, spoken words are removed from their context and played back in isolation, adults can identify the word less than 40% of the time.) Communication is an act of mutual transmission; it is musical, contextual, and highly dependent upon many factors.

And what are words anyway? But the transmission of one mental construct, or representation, from one mind to another? Firing networks of neurons stimulate the complex muscles necessary to pulsate air in particular patterns. The three-dimensional sound waves then collide with the inner ear of another person (and this collecting of sound waves is so important we have two large flaps of skin on the sides of our head to collect and direct these oscillations to the necessary sensors). These sound wave sensors then generate electrical stimulations which are converted by the brain from temporal signals (sound happens in a rapid sequence) into something spatial, a representation which can be held and manipulated, worked with and combined, compared, and considered as representations in the other person’s head.

What started as patterns of electrical activity ended as patterns of electrical activity.

Thoughts do not only fill a mind like water filling a bucket, they are the fuel for future predictions the brain will use to interpret the world.

As such, because literally everything is compared against expectation (another word for prediction), crafting communication to be receivable is far more challenging than I realized. Well, communication I want to be received well.

If I do not give people the opportunity to compare, contrast, and contemplate their “prediction errors,” if they cannot “contribute” to the conversation, they will in all likelihood tune out, shut down, or resist much of what I say.

But What If…

What if I am speaking to an audience and I can’t give them an exercise or activity? What if it is too many people? I can tell a story. I can lead them on the journey of how I discovered what I learned. I can share my questions, and my exploration. I can engage our predictive prediction by making a mystery of it. As Malcolm Gladwell said in his master course. A surprise is when the unexpected happens, but a mystery is like a puzzle missing a piece. We know that we are missing a key piece of information, we even know what we are missing. The who done it, the core mystery is “who?” In other genres it could be a how? The caper genre relies heavily on our understanding that best laid plans go awry, the question is “How?” We know what to look for, what missing piece will make this puzzle complete? There is a gap in our information.

We also want surprise. The brain is constantly in search of novelty, but there needs to be a balance of what we expect interrupted with the unexpected.

But this means sharing my own journey, in as entertaining a way as possible, without jumping directly to my conclusions. I need to focus on the question of essence. In the case of the Forum Check, that question could be as simple as, “What is a great forum experience to you?” But for my work on video games, the question could be, “Why are young kids acting like they are addicted to video games?” The true depth of this question is better understood when you ask the question, “What is addiction?” The mystery of the iPads and kids becomes more profound when you realize that these kids have none of the preconditions for classical addictive response. In theory, it should be nearly impossible for them to become “addicted” in the classical sense of the word. And yet… That is probably the place to start: what is addiction anyway? If engineering school taught me anything, it was this: you have your best chance of solving a problem when you understand it. Or as they would say at Intel, “A problem well defined is a problem half solved.” Despite George Lucas’s assertion that slapstick physical comedy can solve hard problems (Anakin Skywalker ends the war with the Trade Federation by flailing around in the cockpit of his purloined space fighter - Oh gee, let me smash a bunch of buttons, oh wow, look what happened!) In what most of us would call real life, we have to understand a problem before we can solve it.

There is a similar saying: “If you find out why the fence is there before you go tearing it down, you will meet a lot fewer angry dogs.” Uninformed problem-solving can create new, unanticipated problems.

I know, I know, lecturing again. This is going to take some time. I suppose what I’m leaning into is uncovering and sharing my own motivations. I have my question: why are these kids addicted? What is addiction anyway? Why do I care about understanding addiction? Because a well-defined problem is a problem half solved. If you don’t understand what is causing the problem, or even the problem that is being caused, it is hard to know what changes need to be made to solve it.

So I can make it personal: do I even know what addiction really is? I mean, I am not a doctor, and I don’t play one on TV. But people, just like me, are being blamed for causing a problem, for harming kids. And that is not cool. I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

What we can say for certainty is these kids are suffering and so are their families. What started out as a (largely innocent) desire by adults to entertain and engage the children they love is this turned into a nightmare for many of them. But why? What is going on?

And most importantly, what can we do about it?

Parents thought they were giving their child a toy, and their kids act like their parents got them hooked on crack cocaine. What the hell is happening here?

Summary

To bring this to a close, I want to rework all my stories, teachings, and shares to leverage the way our brains engage with reality. My conclusions are so far removed from people’s predictions they are very, very hard to digest. So we need to go on a journey together. And I need to build, Tools for the Traveller. How do we navigate this idea space together?

I do love that idea, Tools For the Traveller. If you are going to go on a journey, you should take what you need to get you where you want to go. And as a guide, I need to plan better to make sure I have what my guests need, so I can take them where they want to go.

And this is their journey. They want to have this experience. I cannot, nor should I, try to experience it for them. Maybe this is why Matthew Dicks says, “your vacation story is not a story.” Any time you (well, I’m talking to me) try to share a conclusion, you are telling a vacation story.

How Your Brain Uses Predictions To Construct Your Perceptions and Emotions

There are some astounding discoveries coming out of neuroscience that I project will have far-reaching implications in the world of psychology, but also just every-day human interaction. One of the most interesting is the way our brain produces our experience of reality is actually the opposite of the way we experience reality. Put another way, we feel like “things happen to us” and we “react.” But if that is not how our brains work, what is actually happening?

It turns out, the neurocircuitry of the brain is too slow to successfully execute a stimulus response model. It would not work. Instead, the brain runs a kind of continuous “prediction loop” where it is constantly trying to anticipate what is about to happen and then make continuous, micro adjustments as sensory information becomes available. These “adjustments” are really about responding to prediction error.

Think of it this way. When I was a coach, I taught our players to be “moving on the pitch.” As the pitcher would rear back to throw the ball, we told the players to try and anticipate where the batter might hit it. We wanted them to already be in motion when the batter swung. It is much easier to change direction once you are moving, than to start moving from a dead stop in the direction you need to go. We called this, “getting a jump on it.” The brain does something very similar. It is constantly trying to anticipate what is next, preparing to make the right move, and like a ball player, if the information comes in that tells the brain to do something different, it is more energetically efficient (i.e. easier) to change course, than to start from a dead stop.

What does this mean in practical terms? In practice, this means the brain is continuously constructing our experience of reality from two massive streams of chaotic, confusing, and incomplete data. One set is our senses. Our eyes, ears, skin, smell, and so on. But it also includes the interoceptive network, the giant bundle of signals coming from inside our body. In practical terms, your brain is continuously trying to make sense of what is going on. It spends a lot of its computational bandwidth trying to anticipate what will come next.

Now, this feels completely counterintuitive. The world definitely feels like something happens to us, and we respond. I know that is how it feels to me. However, it turns out there is a gap between what happens to us and what we perceive. This is different from Stephen Covey’s Gap between stimulus and response. This is a gap between sensory data and what I will call, “sense making.” This gap happens at a level outside conscious awareness. I don’t want to call it subconscious because “the subconscious” is a suitcase word. It can hold lots of different meanings, and different people pack different meanings into that word. So let’s use the word preconscious. Your brain is trying to raise the information to the level of conscious awareness as quickly as possible, but it takes time for it to run through all the layers it has to before you can “become aware” of what is happening.

Putting it this way, your brain has information to work on: what just happened. It makes an “educated guess” as to what is most likely to happen next, then it compares its predication against input from the external senses and the interoceptive network. Basically, it compares what is actually happening to what it predicted would happen. The deviations are called “prediction errors,” and the brain uses prediction errors to adjust its next cycle of predictions.

Going back to our baseball analogy, the outfielder starts moving on the pitch, anticipating a line drive in front of him when the batter hits the ball deep to his left. The player anticipated the ball moving in one direction, but the sensory information from his eyes, transmitted through his visual cortex, tells him that the ball is going to be over his head to his right, so he immediately adjusts to the new information. He predicted one thing, but the facts indicated something else (prediction error), so he adjusted.

Here, however, is the catch. The exact same mechanism is used to determine how we feel. The reason that feelings seem to “trigger” us is that we only become consciously aware of them very late in the processing game. Basically, feelings, far from being this built-in, predetermined biological response to stimulus, are the result of how our brain tries to interpret the interoceptive signals coming to it from inside our body. In practice, the model of " we think than we feel" is very likely wrong. It feels this way because we become aware of the story much faster than the emotion, but the process is the same. What this means, and it is really mind-bending, is that our brain constructs our experiences from the dynamic interaction of predicting what will happen and adjusting to what really happens. Both perception and emotion are processed at the same time, but typically, we become aware of our thoughts before we become aware of the feelings giving rise to our belief that our thinking or what happens to us causes our feelings.

We experience our emotions as something that happens to us, but the science says our feelings are the brain’s way of making sense from the interoceptive signals from inside the body.

Okay, I know this is deep, but let’s go back to the ball player. He moves in anticipation of what he believes is mostly likely to happen next, then while he is in motion, his senses give him new information which is different from what he expected, but he adjusts. But how does he feel? Well, in order to execute, his body has to respond to his predictions. Muscles need to move, which means breathing has to provide enough oxygen, the heart has to pump that oxyinated blood, and other things as well need to prepare the body to perform. It was his anticipation of what would happen, and his intention to execute that kicked all of this off, but the channels of communication between the body and the brain are not one way, they are bidirectional, so the body can report back to the brain, “hey this is how we are executing.” This is what it feels like, and the brain then tries to interpret those sensory inputs within the context of its predictions. It is asking what does this mean? Those “feelings” or “emotions” get integrated into, or put another way, they color our perceptions. Our thoughts and intentions are imbued with the signal information from inside the body, which we experience as emotion.

The surprising result of the ball going over the head signals a large prediction error, so the brain kicks more energy so the player can turn faster, and run harder to close the gap and catch the ball. All of that physical action inside the body generates signals back to the brain - the interoceptive networks in the brain interpret these signals as emotion. But what emotion?

And that is the surprising key to this whole thing. Remember when I said the brain makes “educated guesses” about what will happen next? What education? The education of experience. Our mental models, our predictive engine, are shaped by our life experience. Not only cognitively, but emotionally. In essence, we learn what those signals in our body mean, and we assign concept words to those feelings. Those concept words are emotion words.

In short, we all, everyone one of us, are constructing our experience of reality, continuously, dynamically, all the time. And how we interpret the signals that make it to us is a combination of what has happened to us before, as well as what options we believe are afforded to us in the present moment. (These are called affordances.)

So what you might ask?

What good is knowing this? Well, once you begin to understand the way the brain, experience, and emotion really work, you can begin to use that information to work with your brain, (and others) to get better outcomes. This is a new model for understanding the human condition, and one reason I believe it is so powerful is that it has consistently demonstrated not only an explanatory capacity (it explains observed phenomena), it is the first time that I am aware of we have a predictive model for human behavior.

In a rather obscure experiment conducted by Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist at New York University, he demonstrated that our “priors” (prior experience) absolutely affect our perceptions below the level of conscious awareness.¹ He was trying to understand the phenomenon behind the controversial internet meme “The Dress.” (Google it.) His experiment was groundbreaking because he used the model of constructed perception (as opposed to stimulus-response) to construct an experiment to test whether or not people’s past experience shaped how they literally saw “reality.” The answer: that is exactly what happens. Our brain uses what we think can happen, informed by what has happened to us in the past, to construct predictions that we use to perceive the world. Another term for perception in this context could be “disambiguation.” The world is noisy and chaotic, yet our brain finds ways to make sense of it, in real time, and move forward with tremendous confidence. Daniel Kahneman wrote about this in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. We have to sift through an extraordinary number of sensory data points and make sense of it all. Our brain does this not by merely reacting, but by anticipating (projecting) and adjusting (predictive error correction). The really astounding discovery is that we process emotions the same way.

Your brain doesn’t generate emotions, it constructs them, at the exact same time, in pretty much the same way, that is, makes sense of what is happening in the world around us, it tries to make sense of the world inside us. Only we become aware of one before the other. Most of the work of constructing emotions happens preconsciously, which gives rise to the sensation that emotions “just hit us.” We rarely, if ever, see them as they form. However, there are times we can sense the ambiguity. There are times when the emotions are not clear. And that realization opens the door to a new way to think about emotion regulation, and how perhaps we might be able to manage ourselves, and our relationships with others a little more effectively.

What if Everything You Knew About Emotion was Wrong?

Over the past week, I have been reading the book, How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. And when I say, “read,” I mean “listen to.” However, the reality is that I do a bit of both. I listen, then pause and go to the Kindle version of the book and highlight or mark key concepts.

While listening to Dr. Barrett’s book, I was struck by the amazing similarity between her work and that of Stephen Grossberg. You probably have never heard of Stephen Grossberg because he works tirelessly in a very obscure niche between psychology, neuroscience, and physics.

Grossberg’s goal was to understand how the observed behavior of neurons (neuroscience) can explain the observed behaviors of humans (the discipline of psychology). Very few psychologists are trained in neuroscience, and very few neuroscientists are trained in psychology. Neither of those groups is trained in physics.

What does physics have to do with the brain? One of Isaac Newton’s great contributions (similar to Einstein’s) was not only a theory of how physical reality is structured but the mathematics to model it. We have amazing equations like Force = Mass * Velocity^2. I used to tell my baseball players that a lighter bat moving faster can hit with more force than a heavy bat moving slowly.

This, it turns out, is counterintuitive. Early baseball players played with very large, heavy bats. They believed a big thing (the big bat) hitting a little thing (the ball) would produce the best results. However, controversial home run king Barry Bonds swung the lightest bat he was allowed to swing. Modern professional players focus on swing speed and exit velocity. Newton’s laws of physics shape how they play. Early players’ intuitions were wrong. And this, sadly, turns out to be a case for many of our “intuitive” senses about reality.

A great model can unlock better understanding of the way the world works. Of course, there are limits. Newton’s classic mechanics gave way to quantum mechanics, which challenges our understanding of a great many things.

Einstein’s great discovery of relativity is known by its equation, e = mc^2 . But you typically do not see equations like that in medicine, neuroscience, or psychology. The most common type of mathematics used in the “people” sciences is Bayesian statistics, a formal set of disciplines designed to help scientists make sense of data gathered from experiments. This means most psychologists and neuroscientists tend to form a hypothesis and test it for validity. Physicists build models which have valid predictive capabilities.

Grossberg is perhaps the only person working in the “soft science” fields I know of building such models. He wanted to understand how a group of neurons, wired together, can produce many of the psychological effects researchers gather from their studies.

In essence, using cross-disciplinary skills, he is trying to connect the dots. How do bundles of neurons collected into a three-pound (1.5-kilogram) ball make a human mind?

Grossberg is not well known to most people; however, he was the first to educate other scientists and engineers on his discoveries about how neural networks work. Because he also focused on creating mathematical models to explain how these networks work, engineers could build software simulations of his networks. Thus, Grossberg seeded a generation of work which has led, more or less in a straight line, to our modern artificial intelligence systems, the “large language models” or LLMs behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others.

But Grossberg was not trying to build artificial intelligence; he was trying to understand human intelligence.

I have been reading his textbook for the last year a little at a time, and it is dense. What’s more, Grossberg suffers from a lot of self-reference. He mostly refers to his own papers, and he is very rarely cited in other people’s papers. This has the unfortunate side effect of making him look like a bit of a crank, or at the very least an oddball.

Sadly, even science seems to be subject to the laws of human prestige. If we can’t know for certain the truth (because every claim is hard to verify), we resort to good old-fashioned popularity contests. If enough people not only build on your work but say they build on your work and give you credit for doing so, then you must be right.

From my point of view, since Grossberg toils away in the gaps between disciplines, effectively belonging to multiple camps, he belongs to no camps. However, recently, the work of Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett on understanding human emotion seems to me at least to lend tremendous credence to Grossberg’s work. While she never directly cites him or mentions him, her work is consistent with Grossberg’s assertions and other recent neuroscience discoveries that the brain does not work the way we believe it does.

Just as the early baseball players managed to play the game despite the mistaken belief that a heavier bat was more effective than a lighter one, many scientists and clinicians have been able to work with people using incorrect understandings of the human brain’s wiring.

The first major myth of the brain, one that is near and dear to any determinist’s heart, is the idea that the brain is a stimulus and response engine. B.F. Skinner built his entire career around this idea, that the brain is stimulated and responds. End of story.

Only… the evidence - for quite a while has been mounting that this is not actually how the brain works. It is not fast enough to be only a stimulus and response engine. So it does something even more incredible.

The human brain is a proactive prediction engine. Now, that won’t mean very much to you at this point in time, but the difference is profoundly important. And it is this understanding that is of particular interest to me, because I think it directly relates to why kids are having so much trouble with video games, especially free games designed to “hook” the user.