The Brain Plugs Everything Into Categorizes

Part 2 on perception

Apr 22, 2023

We love putting labels on everything. If we can label it we think we have a handle on it. But do we really?

The full content is in the podcast. This is the highlights.

Image Category Error by Brett Jordan on Flickr. “Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination” - Bertrand Russell

I’m a communicator. Misperceptions cause endless communications problems. We often talk past each other rather than communicate because we force things and people into categories.

Why is it that we quickly identify things as belonging to a certain category and maybe cause ourselves a misperception? Those misperceptions can mislead us into a wrong medical diagnosis, identify someone as something they aren’t and never help them. They can also label someone politically who might actually help us?

Stevan Harnad on Categories

For around twenty years I’ve been interested in Stevan Harnad's work. Sometimes I forget his name and it takes me days to find it - along with research. I’m terrible at remembering names and recognizing faces. Every day is a new day for me.

Harnad does cognitive research. I probably would be a unique test subject. My wife is always amazed at all of the useless information I know yet I am silent during trivia games. Anyway, Harnad investigates how the brain works on a basic level. One of the most basic features of the brain is creating categories and plugging things we encounter into these categories.

There are actually groups who specialize in categorizing things. I can’t think of anything more monotonous than sitting around plugging things into categories. Well my wife finds my voice and topics boring and sometimes asks me to talk just to put her to sleep. So maybe there are things more boring than categorizing things.

Anyway, I won’t try to draw hard and fast conclusions from Harnad’s research since I’ve never worked directly in the field, but it does suggest some interesting things about what I do. I work with the psychology of attitude change, personal growth, and communications. I have been involved in AI and medical science, so Harnad’s research is related and has some interesting implications.

Harnad, a pioneer in his field, found that the brain’s neural network develops nodes, which can represent categories, and these nodes can be connected to other nodes. Various parts of the brain are involved in making these categories.

Interestingly men and women have slight differences in perceiving facial expressions. For example, men recognize anger more easily while women recognize happiness more easily. I’m sure this is a big surprise to some – okay I’m being sarcastic.

Language

Harnad’s work is well suited to language. There will be more about language later. However, for this example we recognize the pronunciation of alphabet letters, but have trouble discriminating any sound that falls between the letters p and b.

This perception problem applies directly to learning languages. There are many sounds that native speakers of languages make that we don’t catch simply because our brains are not tuned into them. This makes it difficult to mimic another language which is essential to speaking it well.

Word pairs such as wet and vet, beat and bit, thin and tin, or long and wrong. In the article, The subtle sounds that English speakers have trouble catching, in the publication, The Week, this is explored in depth. Americans often use a puff of air after the consonant p at the beginning of a word. Other languages identify this as a different alphabetic letter.

This type of language specialization has developed in babies by around six months of age. The publication Alta, in the article 4 Difficult Sounds for English Speakers says, “By this age, Japanese infants cannot distinguish between English ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds, while babies in Spanish-speaking countries can’t hear the difference between our ‘b’ and ‘v’ sounds.”

Harnad’s work also applies to color perception. Color is divided into seven light frequencies: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, cyan and indigo. Those are specific light frequencies. All other colors we see are combinations of these colors. They don’t exist as specific light frequencies.

Ancient people did not make a sharp distinction between green and blue. The color blue isn’t even mentioned in the Bible. Some cultures had no words for some primary colors. But they had words that suggested a lighter or darker hue that referred to primary colors. It wasn’t that they couldn’t see these colors, they just didn’t make a big deal of them. People name things important to them.

An example of a color combination that isn’t a primary color is magenta. Magenta is a physiological and psychological perception. We perceive magenta as a mixture of red and violet/blue light, with the absence of green.

There are some color combinations that the brain doesn't recognize. According to the Scientific American article, "Impossible" Colors: See Hues That Can't Exist, red and green are called opponent colors because people normally can’t see redness and greenness simultaneously in a single color. The same is true for yellow and blue.

My wife has names, which are often categories, for colors and fabrics that I have no idea what they mean and can’t identify them. This points to a difficulty we all have. When we talk to each other we don’t know if one person has the same things in their categories as another person.

When my wife says magenta, I think hot pink. It might be pinkish-purplish-red, reddish-purplish-pink or mauvish-crimson. Mauve is a light purple between violet and pink. I can’t even pronounce mauve.

Another example, when someone says to me liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, I have only a slight idea what they mean by those terms. For one thing there has been a slide from left to right over several decades so the definitions aren’t consistent.

The end result of this classification problem is we misclassify people’s beliefs. We talk past each other because we don’t know what is in each other’s categories. If it doesn’t match what is in our interests then it must be in the other category or unintelligible.

This leaves us open to misunderstanding, deception by people who know how groups generally categorize information and manipulate them with partial information, and self-deception.

For communicators it means to avoid using labels as much as possible because they are misleading … unless the purpose is to mislead, which isn’t something I support.

Category helpers

We use themes to facilitate learning. Harnad found that themes serve as cues for different categories by designating what to look for when placing objects into their categories. Square pegs don’t go into round holes, or so we’re told.

More significant is emotion's role.

Affect – feeling emotion

Harnad found that the strength of a label can be determined by three factors: analysis of affective (or emotional) strength, permeability (the ability to break through) of boundaries, and a judgment (measurement of rigidity) of discreteness.

Suppose you have a category of frightening things. Maybe this is a real category and maybe not – I don’t know if Harnad studied this specifically. Thematically and through labeling, you put clowns into the fright category.

I was never frightened by clowns. I have a picture of Emmett Kelly sitting in a circus ring in the raid, looking sad because a sign says, “No show today.”

Apparently some people are frightened by clowns. Clowns' exaggerated features and makeup that conceal facial emotional cues suggest they're some version of humans that we can't put into normal categories, so they're frightening.

Some attribute fear of clowns to movies in which clowns play an evil and psychopathic role, such as the Joker character in Batman movies. This is debatable because no research over the last 100 years shows that movies influence behavior but instead reflect us or simply escapism.

We love to get scared by movies otherwise there wouldn’t be a horror genre. It’s a safer thrill than jumping off a building or cliff to hang glide.

On the other hand, the movie Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock has a motel shower stabbing scene in it that has influenced many generations of people to not take showers in hotel rooms. I speculate that it may have a lot to do with preconditioning from previous scary things and emotions raised during the movie. End result: we have a growing fear clowns.

Trauma is like concrete in memory

The endless wars the US and other Western countries have been involved in have produced many trauma victims. War experiences that entail inhumanity and are very traumatic to recall, result in flashbacks and vivid nightmares.

Trauma emotional experience causes these memories to be very vivid in our memories, so they are difficult to ignore or deal with. Psychiatrists have learned to lessen the impact of these experiences by giving beta blockers shortly after the experience or while recalling them.

My apologies to Harnad if I have mischaracterized his work in any way.

What does this mean to me?

The brain is fascinating both in its abilities and limitations. For those of us who have solid backgrounds in various fields, and who are communicators, leaders, thought leaders, etc., there are abilities and limitations that we need to be aware of to communicate effectively.

Communications have major problems because our categories have different things in them. We use labels to represent those things and they are often corrupted. So people don’t understand us when they think we’re talking about a category they have. What we say just goes right passed them, or is misinterpreted.

What we have to do is be very specific and avoid the shortcuts of labels and categories so that people do understand us.

In the next article and podcast I’ll look at a higher level by talking about language, words, symbols, and attitude formation.