Expectation

Recently, I hurried through a large park thinking how fear might impact how we perceive "our world and ourselves within it". Suddenly a memory of an article in a newspaper popped into my mind. It was about a person bitten by a venomous snake in a park just like this. Instead of shrugging it off as I usually do, I pushed my thought to revolve around it. I "worked myself into" a peculiar state of fear and the pleasant park turned itself into an ominous place. My eyes were searching the ground for signs of a snake. My steps were hesitant and pace slow despite the hurry. I was perfectly aware that all those changes were caused by my deliberate pushing of my thoughts to revolve around that article, but it still took me a while to get out of it. (Of course - there was no snake whatsoever - but the whole way I perceived my surroundings had dramatically changed.)

At any point in time in our life we expect myriads of things to happen only to let them pass unnoticed as they fulfil our expectations. And rightly so, since only unfulfilled expectations should be a cause for a concern. A concern that "our description of the world and ourselves within it", that gives rise to those expectations, needs an adjustment.

There is a fundamental difference between the concept of expectations and the concept of subconscious processing of raw stimuli. An expectation may correspond to a whole cluster and series of vaguely expected stimuli eliminating a need for subconscious processing and binding.

Our expectations, like "our description(s) of the world and ourselves within it", could be rooted in cells of our body and crowned by our own cosmogonies and cosmologies (culture). We could for example say that a molecule in our cell "expects" a light to trigger an electro-chemical reaction or that we expect the eraser to be precisely on that spot under our desk. And they are more or less rigid depending on how deep towards the roots they are.

These simulations within us based on "our description of the world and ourselves within it" are generating expectations that are fulfilled most of the time in a familiar environment (i.e., an environment that corresponds well to "our description of the world and ourselves within it"). It could be said that the more familiar the environment is, the more precise the expectations are. Those rare occasions of unfulfilled expectations are mostly experienced and dismissed as noise. On the other hand, in unfamiliar surroundings we feel lost while probing with various vague expectations and adjusting "our description of the world and ourselves within it".

I would suggest that our eyes for example are not simple "senders" of hints and edges in space and time (sketchy images) to our central nervous system. It seems that sketchy images are rather a kind of words of a language used by our brain to communicate with our eyes or any other "part" of our body. This would mean that what and how we see, hear, feel... is a result of a "conversation" of our body "parts" at any point in time.

It would be interesting to measure intensity of a "conversation" when we learn new actions (like in a sport for example) and compare them with "conversations" when we execute already learned actions.

Findings 1 and 2 strongly indicate the differences in "conversations" needed.

I would also suggest that this "conversation" does not need to go to every last detail of what and how something needs to be seen, heard or acted. It does not need to go into every last detail of how we will move our leg when walking for example. Our leg already learned how to move (working out all the details) on its own and only a light "conversation" is then needed for us to walk. This kind of optimised "conversation" allows us to focus on other things and simply walk while thinking about other, completely unrelated things.