Introduction
A perhaps ill-advised preview of posts to come
Hello and welcome to the implicit! Thanks for being here. I’m endlessly fascinated by the ways we tend to misunderstand ourselves and one another, and I hope to unpack some of this in the essays that will follow.
Within interdisciplinary cognitive science, my favorite topic has always been confabulation: the ways our minds and/or brains fill in the gaps in our perception, memory, and self-understanding. What’s critical to understand about confabulation is that it’s arguably the opposite of lying: we honestly can’t tell the difference between our own accurate perceptions and our confabulations. We are not aware of when, where, or how we are confabulating — a fact as intriguing as it is unnerving. Similarly, what we perceive, think, and remember is often shaped by emotional and social influences in ways we’re usually not aware of. So, what does the understanding of our everyday experience as at least partly confabulatory mean about human nature? How can we understand better the way our minds actually work (as opposed to the ways we tend to think that they do), and what can we do with this information to improve our lives? These are the core questions that I hope to pursue in these essays and beyond.
In addition to more research-focused essays on the cognitive science of confabulation, I’d like to offer some more casual, personal essays that stem from observations I’ve been mulling over for a while: having to do with language and connection, as well as some tools we might use to liberate ourselves from some of the oppressive norms that pervade our society these days.
I’ve never seen this done before — which might well mean that it’s not a good idea — but I wanted to go ahead and share the essay topics that (as of January 2025) I’m currently planning to post here. (By the way, I’m not planning to keep posting forever, nor on any specific schedule; essays will come out when they’re ready and stop once I’m out of things to say. ;) The topics fall roughly into three themes, as follows:
On language and connection:
Asking vs. sharing paradigms: Some people tend to carry on a personal conversation primarily by asking the other person questions about themself, in order to show interest and draw them out, while others tend to converse primarily by sharing stories about themselves, so as not to be intrusive. Few people realize this fact, so there's a lot of miscommunication, with both sides misunderstanding what the other is trying to do in the conversation; this piece hopes to offer some clarity and context.
Request levels: My partner and I find it can be useful to give a numerical "request level" (on a scale from 0 to 3) when communicating a request or invitation to one another, to let them know how important (or not) the request to us. Without this, misunderstandings ensue, and people often over- or underestimate the importance of what's being requested. This tool can bring clarity and relieve pressure for both the asker and receiver.
The persistent tense: We have a cultural norm that dictates that as soon as a person dies, you have to start referring to everything about them — even your feelings for them — in the past tense. This essay proposes how we can reimagine how to talk about our late loved ones (and our feelings for them) based on what we feel persists about people, love, and human connection.
On self-liberation:
Fighting internalized ageism: Ageism is incredibly pervasive and acute in American culture. We internalize it to such an extent that, once we start noticeably aging, most of our daily suffering is self-inflicted. What can we do to critique and resist this, and reframe aging in a more empowering and affirming way? I have some ideas that I'll explore here.
Death as the supreme birthright: Dr. Maya Angelou once said that courage is the most important of the virtues, because it is necessary in order to practice any other virtue consistently. Similarly, I think about how death, our most inevitable birthright, is also our supreme one in that being aware of our own mortality can and should give us the courage and moral clarity to more fully claim all of our other birthrights. (For example, knowing our lives are finite can help us to live with purpose and joy, not to let others mistreat us or waste our time, etc.)
When not to use a thought-questioning framework: Reframing our thoughts about the situations we find ourselves in has been encouraged by many philosophies and religions over the millennia. But in recent years, self-development authors like Byron Katie have popularized a much more radical version of this idea, preaching that "the problem is always your thoughts" about a situation, never the situation itself. This type of radical thought-questioning framework can be liberatory in some settings but, naturally, dangerous and harmful in others. This essay is about how to use thought-questioning frameworks judiciously.
What to watch out for to avoid abusers: Traditional popular discourse around sexual assault teaches us to watch out for strangers hiding in the bushes, but most assailants are people we know. When this happened to me, I didn't know how to read the signs, since the red flags of an abuser are not ones we talk about much. I’ve long wanted to write an essay to help others understand better what patterns and characteristics to look out for.
On cognitive science and confabulation:
How emotion mediates the social: That social pressure, norms, and group behavior impacts individuals is well established. But it strikes me that these social influences are very often mediated through the deployment of emotions, and this is an under-explored topic.
Credence as social alignment: When we encounter a new take, a new idea, or a new proposal, the implicit question arises of whether we’ll grant it credence. When this happens in social, cultural, and political settings, the decision to grant credence is often a question of social alignment, wherein we are choosing which group we identify with.
Confabulating why we feel what we do: When we’re aware of a feeling, desire, or aversion, we often have a narrative that accompanies it, explaining how we came to feel this way. This narrative is not always reliable. When and how are our reasons for feeling as we do opaque to us?
Confabulating what we want, or what makes us happy: As many famous psychologists have observed, we are bad at predicting what will make us happy. We’re not even great at recognizing what has made us happy in the past. How can the lens of confabulation help us to understand this phenomenon?
Confabulation and neuroplastic pain: Pain reprocessing therapy has made strides in treating chronic pain that arises from learned neurological behavior: specifically, a pain-fear cycle. This “neuroplastic” pain is essentially the result of the nervous system guessing that the signals it is receiving from a certain region of the body must be indicators of damage, even when no damage is present — arguably, a form of neurological confabulation. How can this phenomenon and psychological confabulation illuminate one another? How might the reprocessing model suggest ways that a better understanding of other types of confabulation could prove liberatory?
Some basics we tend to get wrong about the brain and neuroscience: A chapter of my dissertation delved into common misconceptions about the brain in popular culture, and I might offer a short essay boiling down some key takeaways, also referencing the important contributions of the professors at Penn’s Center for Neuroscience and Society in dispelling misconceptions about what current neuroscience can and can’t tell us about the human condition.
These are excellent topics and observations!