Modes of Cognition

[INTRO]

Robert Gilman: [00:00:00] I like to think of these different modes of cognition as kind of sitting around in a talking stick circle and each one gets a chance to offer its perception. And when you do that, the outcome is more whole and we're able to bring forward the strengths from each one. Without so much of the limitations of them.

Jenny Stefanotti: That's Robert Gilman. He's the founder and president of The Context Institute, and this is the Denizen podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stefano. This episode is part two of a three part series with Robert, where we explore three capabilities he believes are essential for living in harmony with life on earth.

Being savvy about our psychodynamics. That was our last episode. Understanding and integrating various modes of cognition. That's today's conversation and finding win-win solutions. That'll be part three. Robert is a pioneer in the sustainability space and has been thinking deeply about systemic change for many [00:01:00] decades.

He's an elder in our midst who has a lot to teach us. Here we're exploring various modes of cognition. We talk about object perception and categorical thinking, and why the monopoly they have on how we perceive the world is problematic. We discuss the limitations of language, the value of visual thinking, kinesthetic thinking, and intuition.

Robert explains what he means when he says systems consciousness, touching on what we have to learn from indigenous wisdom. As always, you can find show notes and the transcript for this episode on our website becoming denizen.com. There you can also sign up for our newsletter. I bring our latest content to your inbox alongside information about virtual dentist and events, including community conversations with our podcast guests.

So if you'd like to meet Robert, I encourage you to sign up. Again, that's becoming denizen.com. It's a real honor to bring this three part series with Robert to you. I hope you enjoy this one. 

[INTERVIEW]

Jenny Stefanotti: All right. Robert Gilman, part two.

Robert Gilman: Yes, thank, delighted to be doing it in this way with [00:02:00] you.

Jenny Stefanotti: So in a lot of my conversations, I start with the seemingly obvious just to make sure that we're all on the same page.

And actually, this question is relevant to what we're gonna talk about today because we're talking about language and communication. What do you mean by cognition? This episode's about cognition and modes of cognition, but what did you mean when you say cognition?

Robert Gilman: Yeah. So what I mean by cognition is that it's the combination of perception and thinking.

It's both of those and the way we integrate those in our consciousness, essentially. In the previous podcast, we were talking about psychodynamics. Psychodynamics is one of those big intellectual words. Cognition is another one of those big intellectual words. My apologies for all that, but I wanted to be able to get something that really captured what for me is a very important territory and capture it in its breadth.

Jenny Stefanotti: And so when you say thinking, would you consider that analogous to sense making or making sense, right? Like how [00:03:00] we're coming to understand the world? Yeah. And choice making, just to use some familiar language that I'm sure the audience has heard in other conversations.

Robert Gilman: Right. So certainly sense making and choice making and just the whole stream of what moves through our consciousness.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: It doesn't need to be only the self-conscious. Process oriented kind of thing. It's just a word to capture what goes on in our conscious awareness. Hmm.

Jenny Stefanotti: And this is part two in a three part series on your take on essential capabilities. Right? So why is cognition one of the big three for you?

Robert Gilman: Well.

I got to these really out of what you could call historical and cultural analysis. Mm-hmm. Of looking at where we are at this point and the influence that the Age of Enlightenment has had on our culture, which has [00:04:00] brought us a lot of really great things. But at the same time, it has its blind spots. And one of the really defining characteristics of the Age of Enlightenment was to say, we wanna get rid of all of the madness.

That's going on, so let's just be rational. It doesn't quite work that way. That's not actually the way that humans function, but we've maintained that myth. For some time. And then that becomes a blind spot for us, a cultural blind spot that limits our capabilities in many ways. So it's not that, well, go ahead.

What were you gonna say?

Jenny Stefanotti: Oh, I was just going to underscore what you were saying, and this is, this is just a very important threat of our conversation. Mm-hmm. And why we did that Age of Enlightenment conversation very early on. It's an important thread in the overarching debt and inquiry and why we did that.

Enlightenment conversation because there's this awareness of how the Age of Enlightenment or the enlightenment was also the age of reason. Mm-hmm. Yes. And it brought us [00:05:00] into reductionism in terms of how we think and how we come to understand the world, our beliefs about how we understand the world. So it's so much emphasis on intellect and reason and a disembodiment.

And I think what's so important, again, yesterday we talked about the parallels and, and how you've been thinking about it with the Context Institute and how Denizen is thinking about it as well. Of just the need to really appreciate Danella Meadow's take on this, just bring our whole humanity to the task mm-hmm.

Of influencing systems and understanding their complexity and the limitations we have to understand them, but also very critically. Integrating these other ways of knowing. Mm-hmm. That are not just intellect and reason. Mm-hmm. And so this conversation is going to really outline the scope of the different ways that we come to know and understand the world and how to think about integrating them.

Mm-hmm. So what are the dominant modes of cognition and the challenges that that presents? Because one of the things that you had mentioned in your blog post that you just [00:06:00] pointed to just now. One of the most significant limitations you've found in modern culture is the narrow modes of perceiving and thinking, the narrow modes of cognition,

Robert Gilman: right?

So let me just name what I consider the top ones that are the dominant modes, and that is what I would describe as object perception and then categorical thinking. And this is very tied to language because language is essentially labels on categories. And then we assemble them, and language is an incredibly powerful, brilliant invention of human culture.

I wanna make it clear that I'm not dissing. That on its own, the problem is the monopoly that that has had on our consciousness. So it blocks us off from making use of other things, but it's understandable that that's really, I. I don't, how do I say this? [00:07:00] I wanna go back to the very early experience that every one of us had as an infant in the first few months after we were born of gaining the ability to perceive objects.

And this sounds, now we do it all the time and we don't even think about it, but it was a big step to be able to separate. Out of the, sort of the blur of visual sense impressions to recognize that, oh, here's something that has some coherence to it and seems to move all together and it has some consistent properties to it, and being able to form a representation of that in the brain.

So that you recognized it the next time you saw it. This is where essentially all of our perception really starts, and [00:08:00] especially with developing object permanence and that ability to recognize over time that something that you saw in the past is occurring again. And our concepts are basically generalizations from that object perception.

I. But in doing that, in being able to perceive something as an object that had continuity over time, it meant that we had to throw context away. I. Because we had to separate it out from its context and say the context and the relational elements for it at that moment aren't important. What's only important are the things that are individualized to that particular object, and it enables us to do all kinds of things, but it also winds up being in its own way, a great limitation.

So object perception, absolutely crucial. But also limiting. [00:09:00] And then categorical thinking involves just as objects are seen as having a certain single set of properties that persist over time. A category is a box of qualities, a box of characteristics and things either fit in the box or they don't fit in the box.

So categories are not particularly set up for any kind of gradation. You can use language to add a little bit of gradation into it, but it's very box-like. And in language we string together these box-like concepts in the words that we use and hope to get a, something that's a little more refined. But fundamentally, language is a low resolution medium.

It doesn't allow us much nuance. We have to string together a awful lot of words to get much nuance compared to what you can get. For instance, in visuals, visuals can be a much higher resolution means of [00:10:00] communication, that visuals allow us to instantly communicate things in relationship to all kinds of other things because our spatial cognition allows a perception of relationships and context.

I, I wanna throw in here a little piece that. A lot of non-Western cultures do a lot better with retaining context. Their infants go through the same process, but then the cultures help their children to understand context, particularly through kinship.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm,

Robert Gilman: and through the web, the system, the web of kinship becomes a primary metaphor.

I. For understanding interacting systems. And so in indigenous cultures where they look at the plants and the animals and other natural things around them and describe them as all my relations

Jenny Stefanotti: mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: Is taking the kinship metaphor [00:11:00] and being able to, it outward turns out that in Europe, the church.

Starting, apparently around 500, began a series of policies to break up the old kinship based social patterns.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm.

Robert Gilman: They prevented cousin marriages and they did a whole bunch of things that had the, probably the unintended effect that it sowed the seeds for individualism.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: Which is a close relative to the reductionism that you were describing earlier.

Mm-hmm. They, they all sort of come together of this, this more fragmented way of looking at things because you don't have the support of something that tunes you in as a natural thing to context. It's all a matter of culture. It's not a matter of what our basic. Human capacity enables us, but, but we live in a culture that isn't very good at being able to perceive relationships and [00:12:00] context.

Jenny Stefanotti: I really appreciate, well, two things. One, the limitations of language because of just, its categorical by definition, but also the ways in which cultural beliefs. Are held within the languages themselves. Yes. Robin Wall Kimer talks about this in Right braiding Sweet Cross, how in indigenous languages there's a beingness.

That nature, right, occupies that. Not objects that are that thing, which just connotes like of a different underlying belief system.

Robert Gilman: Right, and and languages, number of indigenous languages that are not as noun focused as the western European languages are. Probably the whole Indo-European language set. So more focused on process and verbs.

And if you think about it, the nouns are the archetypal object. I mean, there's that match there. And I think the really important point here is that we have the capability [00:13:00] by changing culture to change this pattern. It's not built in, I. It's amenable to our learning, and the people who are alive today are on that growing edge.

Hmm. We are the ones who can now shift to much more of a system awareness and relational awareness, context awareness that makes use of categorical thinking is very efficient. It's low resolution and almost all the big problems that we're facing in the world come out of the fact that we're trying to deal with them with categorical minds and it doesn't work

Jenny Stefanotti: well.

Let's talk about, before we move on to the other modes of cognition in more detail, did you do have that great post on your substack about what's good about categorical thinking? Versus what the limitations are. So let's just underscore that very clearly before we move on. Yeah.

Robert Gilman: So categorical thinking allows [00:14:00] you to gather up experience with a few instances of something and then be able to apply that experience to future instances that you come across.

If you had to figure out how to deal with every grain of rice in terms of how you cooked it, it would be absurd. You wanna be able to say rice category or maybe differentiate Osmo from Jasmine or whatever, but you've got a category for that particular kind of rice and you know how to cook it. And lo and behold, it works to do it again and again and again.

In our practical daily life, we have all kinds of categorical rules for how to deal with. You're driving, you're brushing your teeth, you're cooking, you're whatever it may be. We would be incredibly bogged down if we didn't have the benefit of the simplification that comes from quick object perception and categorical rules.

Uh, it's just one more thing to [00:15:00] say about object perception. It's meant to be very quick because it's all built around survival. You know, evolutionarily it was meant for you to be able to identify is that thing on the trail in front of you, a stick or a snake, and you needed to identify that in a split second.

So it's fast, but crude. The same thing is true with categorical thinking.

Jenny Stefanotti: Great. Okay. Let's talk about, you mentioned visual thinking. Let's talk about it a little more. This also makes me think of Kate Roberts. Donut Economics talks about the value of visuals and how it's. Perceived in a different part of your mind.

That's where the kind of donut concept came from to begin with. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So let's talk about visual thinking, the richness of it and what it looks like to understand and integrate this mode of cognition. I.

Robert Gilman: Yeah, and I do wanna pick up on this business about the different parts of the brain because the language and the categorical thinking and the object perception are in [00:16:00] what's generally called the what pathway.

And that's all designed for very quick action. The where pathway, which is back in occipital lobes connected to the eyes, is able to process a lot more information. And to bring it to consciousness so we are able to see a scene around us and be aware. We don't have to speak it, but we're aware of all kinds of relationships and we can move through that scene in a way in which we're, you know, just, we know where all the different pieces are in that scene.

People come up with all kinds of numbers, but it's like, you know, thousand times more information in an image than what you can have in the description. And if you try to do a description of an image, first of all, it'll come up short and it's like brail. Over that image. And if you can imagine braille over pixel after pixel, [00:17:00] after pixel, after pixel in an image, and it's still not the same experience as you have instantaneously when you see it.

So the visuals are incredibly helpful for understanding relationships and understanding context, and that's why when you're working with systems so often, it's incredibly helpful to at least have some kind of system diagram. To help with all that.

Jenny Stefanotti: All right. That's visual thinking. I'm a very visual, this also reminded me of the learning styles, visual learners and kinesthetic learners and audio learners.

And I'm, I'm a very visual person, so I certainly relate to that one. Let's talk about kinesthetic thinking

Robert Gilman: in just a moment. 'cause one of the things I want to throw in about the visual piece mm-hmm. Is that in whatever it was when the Gutenberg. Press first got going 14. Something ushered in this time of.

Print and words. [00:18:00] You don't have to go that far back in. Certainly when I was growing up, books were overwhelmingly just page after page after page words. Occasionally in illustration, but very, very little illustration that's so different from where we are now, where so much of our interaction is on screens that are very easily visual, so that we now have an opportunity.

We're leaping into it. This is why smartphones have to have cameras because it's, people want to be able to, uh, deal in that visual side. Okay? But kinesthetic thinking, what is that? Well pay attention the next time you're driving to all of the eye, hand, foot coordination. You go through the incredible quick dance that you do.

As you make adjustments, you see what's [00:19:00] happening around you move, you adjust to that. And if you wanna see really genius level kinesthetic thinking, watch a basketball star moving through that incredibly shifting environment. We don't think it's thinking because there aren't any words there. And yet it is very much so, and moving the body helps to anchor all kinds of understandings.

So it's not just a matter of that kind of action, but it's also a a way to really deepen learning for many people,

Jenny Stefanotti: I think that's also related to somatic awareness.

Robert Gilman: Yeah, and it's, again, our culture does not support us to really pay attention to what's happening in our bodies.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: If anything, the guidance is, that's bothersome, suppress it.

You need to show up and perform, [00:20:00] and if you're paying attention to your body, you may be distracted, so just tune it out.

Jenny Stefanotti: A hundred percent. I mean, it's amazing how our culture values over extension and burnout, right. And disembodiment. Right. Particularly in the workplace.

Robert Gilman: Yep. The workplace, which is really a complex adaptive system, but we agree to the myth that it's a mechanistic system and everybody who comes part of.

The deal with employment is that when you take on employment, the employer says, we'll pay you as long as you agree to role play into the machine part that we tell you you are, and part of the machine part is that you're not supposed to have a body. I mean, okay, you, you need to show up with a body, but you're not supposed to pay attention to your body.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm. So the somatic awareness is, I mean, this is again, this thread of our inquiry is to become more embodied right in the way that we. Understand and relate in the world. And a key part of [00:21:00] that is somatic awareness around what your body is telling you. I think in multiple forms, right? One of them is just physical needs.

This is something that we went through in the Hoffman process, connecting to your body every day and asking, what do you need today? I need more sleep. I need water. I need to slow down. I'm stressed out. I need to do less. I need to say no, I. Right. But then there's also the sort of information that comes from our emotional state.

Yeah. That encompassed in somatic awareness as well.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. And this is all connected to things we talked about in the previous podcast in terms of being tuned into what's happening in your nervous system. And it's an important part of all that, and it's one of the things that I've found is that. If I allow myself to direct my attention into my body, I often do this with kind of breathing my energy into [00:22:00] my body.

Then it's like it illuminates places that are sore and that need attention, and then if I'm, don't turn away from them, but actually turn towards them. It helps them. They get the support that they need better. That way. Our bodies just are working for us 24 7, 365 for as many years as we've been alive, and they don't get the appreciation.

That I think they deserve.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, I, I think this is also a really good point around the somatic awareness in terms of physical needs, which is so many of us are operating chronic states of stress. Right. Which keep us out of our optimal zone.

Robert Gilman: Exactly.

Jenny Stefanotti: So somatic awareness, connecting to one's body, the cultural value in self care, right.

Leads to. Better decision making, more curiosity, more compassion, all of those things. Right. But I think also [00:23:00] really critically around the somatic awareness piece is that being more tuned into our emotional state, one helps with the healing, the trauma mm-hmm. That we spoke to in the last episode. And also just very rich in having competence around, well what are these emotions telling me?

What is sadness telling me? What is anger telling me? What is guilt telling me? And how this leads to awareness of things in our lives to change.

Robert Gilman: Right. And also leads to emotions like joy.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Robert Gilman: It's part of the richness of the human experience to actually feel all of those emotions. And especially if you are in the place where you can feel the emotions and get the message and the learning from the emotions without feeling like you immediately need to act out on the basis of those emotions.

[00:24:00] Sometimes it's appropriate, but often it's using the emotions to learn more about yourself. Yeah. And to open board and to partner better with the wholeness of your being. And again, the culture doesn't particularly give us support for that, but it could, you know, we could have a culture in which that was the norm and understood.

And children learn that. And, and again, we are the generation, we are the time where we get to pioneer that.

Jenny Stefanotti: I was just thinking of a ad on the back of a bus I saw last weekend and it was for a middle school and the headline was, road Rage Starts in Middle School, and it was talking about what is developing in the brain at that time and the importance for emotional competence and regulation.

So I just was, uh, appreciating that comment. I saved the best for last. On your list around the modes of cognition, which is intuition. This is so [00:25:00] important. We have a whole episode on living authentically and what that means and the kinda spiritual component of this question of intuition. This ties to the optimal zone conversation that we Right.

Had a whole episode on, but we touched on in the last conversation that we had that's in this series. So I'd just love to hear from your perspective, how do you think about intuition?

Robert Gilman: Yeah, so first of all, I think that the word intuition is understood in a whole lot of different ways by different people.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm.

Robert Gilman: It's a pretty muddy category in that sense. Everything from people identifying what is essentially an emotional reaction as intuition to real spiritual insight. I like to relate to it in terms of this sense of the combination of signal and noise. Again, getting out of the categorical box. Saying that what I experience as intuition often comes [00:26:00] in ways that it definitely seems to have some signal to it, but at least how I interpret that signal often also has some noise to it.

That is, when I say noise, it has some things that you could say that I've added in to the intuition. Let me back up and say that I guess for me, intuition is information that emerges into consciousness without a clear sense of what was the pathway that got it there.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm.

Robert Gilman: So some of that is just the brilliance of our subconscious.

I mean, I like to say if you've got a problem, sleep on it. And I frequently have the experience of sometime in the early morning waking up and all of a sudden having some fresh insights into some issue that I was working with in the previous day. Lots and lots of people who, who look at how creativity works, we will [00:27:00] talk about the benefit of somebody going for a walk, right?

Taking a break. And then somehow or another, something emerges into the consciousness.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, this also ties to the kinesthetic value Yes. Of supporting thinking.

Robert Gilman: Yes, very much so. So I mean, I think studies done with really creative scientists of so often shown that an important part of what they were able to do had to do with intuitive insights, basically.

Another piece here is that we really don't know how connected we are in consciousness. We're in a culture that assumes that we're these skin encapsulated egos, and whatever's going on in our consciousness is just stuff that's generated in our brains. That's not the point of view of many other cultures who have a sense of an interconnection of consciousness, and [00:28:00] at this point.

I wouldn't claim to know, but I'm open to the possibility that there is more connection that, you know, maybe to some extent I'm generating things in my skull. And to another extent it may be that there parts of my brain that are acting as what you call a sense organ, right? Sensing what's out in a larger consciousness field.

But just as my eyes. Render an imperfect vision of what's out there or an incomplete vision of what's out there. So in the same way, I would expect that my capacity to render what's in the consciousness field is also has some limitations to it. So I think it's important to approach intuition with a certain humility, not glamorize it.

I've seen all kinds of problems where people glamorize it. Put [00:29:00] too much of a spiritual wrap around it, claim it to then be the authority. And there's almost always noise in those signals is my experience, but it's a gift for us. And so how do we bring it forward? And I like to think of these different modes of cognition as kind of sitting around in a talking stick circle.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Robert Gilman: Okay. And each one gets a chance to offer its perception. And when you do that, the outcome is more whole. And we're able to bring forward the strengths from each one without so much of the limitations of them.

Jenny Stefanotti: That's interesting. That really is analogous to, for me, what was the most powerful thing that I learned in doing the Hoffman process was they had this framework of you, which was called the Quad, and it was four parts of you, [00:30:00] your.

Body. So there's your sort of satic awareness piece of it. But then there was also the intellect, which is obviously more of the object perception, categorical thinking part of, and then your emotional child. So this is a kind of different kind of sematic signals and then your spiritual self, which I think would map to the intuition.

And the premise in the work there is that we tend to have one part of us dominating in decision making. Some of us are more driven by our trauma, which is something we talked about yesterday. Some of us are more driven by our intellect, which is a lot of what we're talking about today, and that ideas that you want your quadrant to be in balance, although they do talk about your spiritual self being the leader.

Of that quadrant and having the hands on the wheel. I also think it's interesting, and to your points earlier about tapping into some broader consciousness. We talked in the last episode about [00:31:00] internal family systems or sub personalities in your work, and the ways in which when we inhabit that capital S, self y, self, spiritual self, whatever it is, I think it's interesting that people tend to draw.

From the same underlying foundational, philosophical point of view. Right. Right. Around again, compassion, curiosity, love. Yeah. So that consistency mm-hmm. Is very interesting.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. I mean, I like to talk about it as the optimal zone self, and I think what we're seeing is that there's a lot of commonality in the human experience.

That when you get to a place where you have internal safety, internally generated safety.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: That there are all these qualities, creativity, confidence, compassion, all those lovely C [00:32:00] words out of the IFS tradition and it's in that optimal zone state that I experience that my intuition has less noise.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: And that it feels like it's, how do I say it? It's the place where I most easily remember, remember my connection to the larger whole and to the extent that that larger whole has a spiritual dimension to it. It's also the place where that connection happens most easily. But I like to approach it in a way, I mean, if I said, oh, you should get in your optimal zone because then you'll be spiritually advanced and you'll be able to have a disease.

If I ever seen the downside to that kind of thing, speak to it. There's all kinds of glamor and self-deception and other things that happen when you're [00:33:00] in that space. I much prefer just saying, let's just get ourselves in our optimal zone and see what happens when you're there, and let it be humble, un glamorized.

It comfortably stands on the neuroscience understanding of what's happening in the autonomic nervous system as it should. You know, I mean, there isn't a conflict there, and if it opens up other things for you, cool.

Jenny Stefanotti: So we've delineated the different modes of cognition. Mm-hmm. And I wanna speak to and limitations of our monopoly around categorical thinking and object perception.

The goal here is to have competence in these various modes, understand when one is more valuable than the other, and then utilizing them synergistically. I. Then all of this adds up to, I think, really critically the ability to have contextual awareness and [00:34:00] also what you call systems consciousness. So let's talk about what you mean by systems consciousness.

Robert Gilman: Well, system consciousness gets back to what, in my limited knowledge, I think a number of indigenous cultures had. System thinking can easily be just categorical. Thinking about systems, a kind of mechanistic reductionist. Thinking about systems, system consciousness means that you're actually living it as you go through your day.

Looking at, well, what is this thing that I'm looking at? But what is its context? What are the relationships to it? How does it fit into some kind of broader system? When that just comes to you as a matter of course, then I think that's functioning from a systems consciousness point of view. I know the word [00:35:00] system for many people.

The connotation for it is intellectual.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: And analytic and all of these sorts of things. Maybe people would be more comfortable if we talked about constellation consciousness. I.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that. I mean, we've been moving away from using systems thinking, which was something we've talked about a lot.

Yeah. Systems feeling, but that's also a piece of it. So I appreciate these systems. Consciousness or constellation of cons. We just talked about constellation of currencies, a couple of episodes as well. But yeah, I mean this is kind of again, pointing to. Integrating these different modes of cognition, many of which are embodied.

So moving from the over reliance on the intellect of thinking into an integrated, embodied way of perceiving and understanding the world. Cognition as you call it, perceiving and thinking. And then also I think really critically getting back what was lost in categorical [00:36:00] thinking, which was stripping away context and relationality.

So it's both integrating across these different embodied forms of knowing. Mm-hmm. And getting back context and relationality.

Robert Gilman: Right. And when you can do that, my experience is that you're able to make better decisions because you've got a richer body of. On the one hand, you can see more options, but at the same time, you can see the potential downsides of various different options.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: So you can do a better design thinking and design consciousness speak that way, right? Yeah. You can bring a better design consciousness to the process. By looking at it from these multiple different perspectives and the decisions we make are so, I mean, we're making them hundreds of decisions a day, little decisions that we don't even notice, but that are nevertheless important as [00:37:00] well as sort of what we think of as bigger decisions.

It's all really important to be able to do that, and at this point in time where the old. Patterns are falling apart. We can't rely on just going to an old pattern to help guide us in our decision making. We have to make fresh decisions. I. So we need to get better at that.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, I also just appreciate this notion that, well, one, we have a more rich and nuanced understanding of the problem, the system that we're trying to make sense of by integrating all these modes of cognition.

And as a consequence of that, we open up a much larger. Solution set. This is pointing to the next conversation that we'll have in this three part series, which is about collaborating in win win win solutions instead of zero sum, which I'm excited to get to. There's also a really important point around how [00:38:00] this affects communication.

Can you speak to that?

Robert Gilman: Sure. So words, because they're low resolution. Because every person has somewhat different connotations that they attach to words. Even if the meanings are somewhat, you know, the dictionary level meanings are somewhat shared. I mean, one of the illustrations I like to use is dog. You use the word dog.

Some people that evokes this wonderful, really friendly, delicious kind of energy, somebody else who's been bitten by a dog may have a. Pretty different kind of connotation for that. They're gazillion different examples of that kind of thing. And right now in the US with all the political polarization, there's a pretty heavy case of words, meaning different things.

And an inability to communicate [00:39:00] across that gap for a variety of different reasons. But part of it is just that once language breaks down as a means of communication, it can really get stuck. You see that in intimate relationships too?

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: People are saying what sounds like the same thing, but it's got whole different connotations to it, and this is where being able to bring in visuals, I.

For instance, I mean, one of the ways of, if you get a group of people where you're trying to find out what is it that that group wants to do, if you just sit them around and have them speak, and especially have them start to argue over which one is better, it is not fun and it's not very productive. But if you can begin to map out.

And totally simple visual technique is being writing things up on a whiteboard or a flip chart, but in that [00:40:00] process, affirming for everyone that what you said is still in the game.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that. I really appreciate that. You know, it just, yeah, I mean, it's such a

Robert Gilman: simple technique. Not been in so many situations where it would've been helpful, but it wasn't used.

Jenny Stefanotti: I can't tell you how many times I've done that in my design and strategy work where just get everyone in the room and ask. What are you thinking about this thing? Right? And, and you put it all up and then you, you sent, you actually identify the gaps and then you talk about it, and then you come to a common understanding.

But absent that common understanding, you have all these gaps and assumptions sitting in the room, right? And people don't realize that they're talking past each other,

Robert Gilman: right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So you might not think of putting words up on a flip chart as visual, but it is visual. Mm-hmm. Because each one of those then becomes this component that is instantly perceived visually.

And so held in relationship. There's certainly times when being able to communicate a [00:41:00] relatively simple, uh, diagram of some system helps people to understand what's going on in a much better than if you tried to describe it in words. So these are simple cases. Being able to share videos, being able to share simple still images, communicates.

A lot more nuance to people than simple descriptions.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm. That's true. I appreciate that. I did a, yeah, and

Robert Gilman: it's, it's so easy to do these days.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm. Is there anything that we've missed on cognition?

Robert Gilman: There is something that I'd like to go into some. Okay. At this point. Because I think it relates to cognition, but it also ties into the broader culture.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: And this is, I want to talk about developing a FUD immune system.

Jenny Stefanotti: Oh, that's right. I had this on the list too. Yes. What is fud?

Robert Gilman: So FUD is [00:42:00] fear, uncertainty and doubt. FUD is the stuff that drives us out of our optimal zone and down into our defensive zone. It's all about threat. And it's really good at grabbing your attention.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm. This gets into attention literacy, which was something I, I wanted to touch on.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. Yeah. So we live in a culture where the scarce commodity is attention.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: And so there's this incredible competition for attention. And unfortunately, people have gravitated to. To get attention. It kind of works.

That's why people continue to use it. But the overall effect of it is very damaging to the culture as a whole. We're constantly bombarded with. [00:43:00] I mean, look at the headlines on any news site. The headlines are designed to, you know, it's clickbait, it's designed to grab your attention.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: And so often it's grabbing your attention by having something that relates to fear, uncertainty, or doubt.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: So it isn't necessarily that the people putting together those headlines are malicious. They're just pursuing what has turned out to be a relatively good business strategy.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: It's true with activists as well who are passionate about their particular concern and wanna bring attention to it and figure out the way to do that is to emphasize something that stirs up fear, uncertainty and doubt.

There's all of that going on, but we have another layer of that going on in the world at this point as well, in that there are. Groups of people who are actively using fear, uncertainty and doubt [00:44:00] with what I would describe as malicious purposes. And again, we haven't been particularly aware of the degree to which that is going on.

In the last few years, I've been paying a lot of attention to what's been happening in the Russian Ukraine war. In that process getting a much I here the background in the 1980s, I went to the Soviet Union, like I think it was like 12 times as part of the citizen diplomacy movement. So had a lot of friends there that I worked with and had that kind of direct experience.

But it's also clear to me that one of the ways in which the Russian. Government has a superpower over actually centuries of working with this. They become incredibly good at information manipulation, if you will. Those of us in the West have [00:45:00] been pretty naive about it, and so it's been effective. We see it going on right now at a national scale in the us.

It's fine to talk about. And all of this good stuff. I mean, it's really important that we talk about those things, but unless we have some degree of immune system for both the. FUD stuff that people are doing simply for business purposes and the FUD stuff that people are doing for malicious purposes. We get dragged down, we get our perceptions distorted.

One of the really interesting narratives that has been very successfully promoted from first the Soviet Union and now more recently through Putin, has been that the only imperialism in the world is Western imperialism. That's simply not the case. Unless we're able to understand these things, we can't get a balanced understanding of what's really going on in the world.

So it's [00:46:00] another place where our ability to be skillful with our diverse modes of cognition and recognize the places where this ties also into the psychodynamics 'cause it's very much a psychodynamic issue, so that we're able to, again, separate signal out from noise. Much more effectively and come back to our own internally generated sense of safety so that we're not so vulnerable to the fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm. I appreciate that. This makes me think of the work that, uh, center for Humane Technology is doing. Tobias Row Stockville, he wrote a book called The Outrage Machine, talks about the whole history of media and media innovations, and precisely this, right? Driven by the or, Tristan says, uh. Race to the bottom of the Brainstem and Conent project.

One of our partner organizations also does a lot of work and just again, trying to help people have more competence in navigating immediate environment that is really driven towards salacious [00:47:00] sensationalist content since it's inception. So I appreciate that point too. All right. Any final thoughts?

Robert Gilman: I think just.

Relative to what I was just talking about, and this does tie back to what we talked about in the previous one with motivation. Just to say something about what I like to think of as sustainable motivation.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm.

Robert Gilman: So you can get short-term motivation out of fud, but it's kind of like a drug that you have to keep hitting harder and harder to get the result.

But it leads to burnout, it leads to denial, it leads to people just backing away. If you really want to have sustainable motivation, you have to have future pull. You have to have something that you're moving towards, not just things that you're moving away from. You need to be able to have something that increases people's sense of safety rather than decreases it.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that. That's what we try to do on this podcast. I feel like so much of the [00:48:00] conversation is backwards looking in the poly crisis and how broken everything is and not actually forward looking and what do we do about it, so,

Robert Gilman: right. Appreciate that. That's where being able to gain the skills of optimals own resilience, for example, isn't that hard.

If you want to do something for the world. Gain those skills

Jenny Stefanotti: working on it. And by

Robert Gilman: the way, it's good for you too.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah, exactly. I love that synergy. All right, well, thank you so much for this part two. I look forward to getting them out as a series.

Robert Gilman: Super. Thank you, Jenny.

[OUTRO]

Jenny Stefanotti: Thank you so much for listening, and thanks to Scott Hanson, also known as Tyco for our musical signature.

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