The irrationality of how we
think has long plagued psychology. When someone asks us how we are, we usually
respond with "fine" or "good." But if someone followed up
about a specific event — "How did you feel about the big meeting with your
boss today?" — Suddenly, we refine our "good" or
"fine" responses on a spectrum from awful to excellent.
In less than a few
sentences, we can contradict ourselves: We’re "good" but feel awful
about how the meeting went. How then could we be "good" overall?
Bias, experience, knowledge, and context all consciously and unconsciously form
a confluence that drives every decision we make and emotion we express. Human
behavior is not easy to anticipate, and probability theory often fails in its
predictions of it.
Enter quantum cognition: A
team of researchers has determined that while our choices and beliefs don’t
often make sense or fit a pattern on a macro level, at a "quantum"
level, they can be predicted with surprising accuracy. In quantum physics,
examining a particle’s state changes the state of the particle — so too, the
"observation effect" influences how we think about the idea we are
considering.
The quantum-cognition theory
opens the fields of psychology and neuroscience to understanding the mind not
as a linear computer, but rather an elegant universe.
In the example of the
meeting, if someone asks, "Did it go well?" we immediately think of
ways it did. However, if he or she asks, "Were you nervous about the
meeting?" we might remember that it was pretty scary to give a
presentation in front of a group. The other borrowed concept in quantum
cognition is that we cannot hold incompatible ideas in our minds at one time.
In other words, decision-making and opinion-forming are a lot like
Schrödinger’s cat.
But the notion that the human
thought and its very existence is richly paradoxical has been around for the centuries.
Moreover, the more scientists and scholars explore the much irrational rationality
of our minds, the closer science circles back to the confounding logic at the
heart of every religion. Buddhism, for instance, is premised on riddles such
as, “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without it.” And, in Christianity,
the paradox that Christ was simultaneously both a flesh-and-blood man and the
Son of God is the central metaphor of the faith.
In the Old Testament, the
embattled Job pleads with God for an explanation as to why he has endured so
much suffering. God then quizzically replies, “Where were you when I laid the
foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4).
The question seems
nonsensical — why would God ask a person in his creation where he was when God
himself created the world? But this paradox is little different from the one in
Einstein’s famous challenge to Heisenberg’s "Uncertainty Principle":
“God does not play dice with the universe.” As Stephen Hawking counters, “Even
God is bound by the uncertainty principle” because if all outcomes were
deterministic then God would not be God. His being the universe’s “inveterate
gambler” is the unpredictable certainty that creates him.
Then we synthesize those
competing options to relate to our relatively "certain" realities. By
examining our minds at a quantum level, we change them, and by changing them,
we change the reality that shapes them.
Changing the metaphors we
use to understand the world — especially the quantum metaphor — can yield
amazing insights. Jonathan Keats, experimental philosopher, explains in a video
about this. You can watch it here.
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