The human brain makes lots of choices. The styles of thinking in which those choices are made fall into two broad categories—Instinctive thinking and Analytic thinking.
Instinctive thinking is very different from learned thinking—alias Analytic thinking. Instinctive thinking comes about as part of genetic evolution, not as part of day-to-day learning. It is part of the brain’s hardwiring.
When a similar situation is encountered by many species members generation after generation, those who handle it more successfully are more likely to have grandchildren. If the brain can hardwire a solution, that will be much faster and more comfortable and more reliable than learning a solution, so those who evolve the right instinct will be winners.
Instinct thinking emerges when some trigger event occurs. That trigger can be reaching an age and/or encountering a situation. In autumn, Instinct tells many species of birds to fly south. Sometime around puberty in humans, Instinct may suggest that it’s time for you to fall in love, and that you have found the right girl or boy. Love at first sight! (Of course the exact ways in which these Instincts are expressed are influenced by culture. An odd example of this cultural influence is scientists in ultralight gliders teaching parentless whooping cranes where to fly.)
What the Judgment layer feels when Instinct is talking to it is a suggestion. It can be gentle or quite forceful, but it feels like a good idea to do something in a situation or feel a certain way about it.
The advantage of following Instincts is that it feels very comfortable to do so, and it’s fast and easy thinking.
A curious incident of Instinctive thinking happened to me when I was a student at MIT in the early seventies.
That was the time of “Black Power” emerging as a cultural concept, and MIT offered its first Black Studies program. Being the curious sort, and looking for an easy grade, I signed up for an American history class taught from the black perspective. History! I love it! I was in the right place!
The class was taught by a black teacher and was mostly black students … nothing surprising there. The surprising thing was that as I attended the second day, I got a strong, growing visceral feeling of, “I’m not supposed to be here!” By the end of class I couldn’t get out the door fast enough!
I had experienced a panic. No one had said or done anything to bring it on. It was inspired totally by my own brain.
Growing up in Ohio, I was raised to be tolerant of all people, including blacks, our “minority of concern”. (All communities have some identifiable minority of concern, which may or may not be racial.) I’d been taught long and hard to treat people equally, and I’d been around blacks, treating them equally—and being treated equally by them—in high school, earlier college, and the Army.
But in that classroom, where for the first time in twenty-four years I was in a racial minority that was implicitly disfavored by the context, I had experienced a sharp, fast, strong unfolding of the “don’t trust strangers” Instinct.
I learned first-hand that our Instincts don’t stop unfolding at puberty. And I was scared!
So what was I going to do about that Black Studies class? Instinctual suggestions can be very powerful, but they are just that, suggestions, and they don’t have to be followed. I decided I wasn’t going to give in to that one.
It took a lot of personal convincing … a whole lot. When I went back for the third day of class I felt uncomfortable but it was bearable, and by the fourth session the panic was just a powerful memory and I was comfortable. The Instinct had made its suggestion, and when I chose to ignore it—I didn’t let it become a Morality—it disappeared quietly.
While an Instinct always feels right as it flowers, it can be followed or ignored. If it is ignored, it will fade with time.
When a situation is unfamiliar so Instinct doesn’t have a good solution available, the brain must use Analytic thinking.
The root of Analytic thinking is learning, which happens when the brain experiments and discovers how to deal with situations Instinct can’t handle.
Analytic thinking started as a kind of insurance policy. In single-celled and primitive multi-celled organisms, Instinctive thinking solved all the day-to-day problems. Analytic thinking paid off when one-of-a-kind situations came up where doing some experimenting improved survivability. At first this wasn’t often, but as organisms got more complex, and their lifestyles got more complex, experimenting paid off more and more, especially for those that moved and thus had developed brains.
So why not do all thinking with learning-style thinking? Why not go to a tabula rasa, calculate on a blank slate where all thinking is Analytic?
We’ve already said that the Judgment layer is difficult, energy-intensive, slow, and clumsy. So Judgment thinking is expensive even when it’s assisted by Instinct, and even more so when it has to go Analytic. However, a continuum of thinking has developed, from mostly Analytic to mostly Instinctive, depending on how nearly familiar the situation seems. Using a hopefully appropriate mix, Judgment decides what to do and calls on the other layers to carry those decisions out. As it determines a successful solution, it then trains Morality and Habit to make the strange situation familiar, understood, and mastered.
In this process, Judgment not only uses input from the senses to become aware of the situation but is extensively assisted by Memories, its records of things that have happened to the organism before. Memory sharpens Analytical thinking and helps determine whether to go along with Instinct’s suggestions that seemingly pop out of nowhere.
The challenging trick for humans living in advanced civilizations is first to master the use of Analytic thinking, and then to decide when it’s appropriate. Civilized humans need to use more Analytic thinking, a whole lot more, because Instinct thinking is well adapted to Neolithic living and often gives wrong answers when dealing with civilized situations. This is why formal education is so important to civilized living. Among other things it teaches how to do Analytic thinking more quickly and easily… more Habitually.
Our brains, like computer systems, have both quick retrieval and slower, archived memories. The brain is pretty good about retrieving material transparently from its various memory systems to consciousness, but sometimes we notice.
For instance, our internal maps of our world are stored in an archive. When we get ready to go somewhere, the brain knows we’ll need our map, so it is transparently pulled out of archive and put in active Memory, where it stays ready until we finish our trip.
But unless you work in an information booth, when someone asks you for directions, even though you immediately know that you know, it takes you a longer or shorter moment to actually put the information together.
The “I know I know this” feeling is in computer terminology called a “pointer” to the information. Your map’s pointer is immediately accessible when the brain is surprised by someone asking directions, but it takes time for it to actually do map stuff.
Other things are also put in archive storage, as one example vividly illustrated for me.
As I walked out of a restaurant after lunch one day, a man came up and said “Hi” and we proceeded to engage in small talk. I knew I knew him, but I could not for the life of me remember anything about him! I was in Provo, so my brain was actively searching my Provo people archives … nothing … Novell (where I once worked) is in Provo … search Novell archives … nothing … . The longer our small talk went on, the more distressed I got inside. “Who is this guy? Why can’t I place him?”
The conversation went on for five minutes with me functioning a bit like Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1970s “Doctor” computer program, which didn’t depend on any actual understanding to formulate human-sounding responses. (You say you had a good time in Florida? Excellent! Was the weather good? You say your mother is feeling well? How wonderful! How is the rest of your family?) It wasn’t until the man was saying goodbye that he mentioned Toastmasters, a social club that I had belonged to … in Salt Lake City!
Ah!!! That was a key clue. Memories finally started flooding into my consciousness!! I was so relieved! I immediately remembered that he was a Toastmasters member … and that he was a very boring person. That’s why I hadn’t remembered him immediately.
The odd part of this story is that for the next three days, I couldn’t stop remembering new things about him. I remembered the speeches he had given … and that he was boring. I remembered where he worked … and that he was boring.
I finally started yelling at my archive, “Yes! Yes! Enough! I’m not going to meet him again, and yes, he’s boring!” Nowadays I don’t think about him at all, but this story is something I remember easily.
The moral is: If you know you know something, just wait; it will come to you.
That’s the Thinking Stack.