Paradigm shifts

A paradigm shift is an elusive concept. Look at the box like shape in figure 6.1. Keep staring at it until it the angle you are viewing it from suddenly changes. One moment you are looking down on to this shape and at another moment you are looking up at it. Keep looking, and for no apparent reason the angle of viewing will change again. This random flipping between the two views will happen continuously all the time you are looking at the figure and the change from one view to the other will be very difficult to consciously control.

Any inputs from the body's sensors (i. e., the eyes) cause the brain to go into some form of chaotic activity while the neural mechanisms try to match the inputs with some correspondence in memory. Almost instantaneously, the neural activity stabilises around something that makes sense: in this case a box like shape. In this example, the brain has two equally probable interpretations. Not having any clues as to which is the most accurate perspective, the brain's activity will move randomly from one to another. There is no in between state, the brain flips from one perspective to another.

In his book "Dynamic Patterns - the self-organisation of brain and behaviour", J. A. Scott Kelso describes the mathematics of how these effects arise through islands of stability forming in the chaotic fluctuations of brain cell activity. He explains how this mathematically based activity of brain cells provides an extremely efficient method for the brain to transfer from one complex stem of brain activity to another. One of many examples he provides is the brain activity transitions a horse will have to go through to change its speed of locomotion. It doesn't go through a gradual change from walking to trotting to galloping. It changes in distinct jumps from walking to trotting and then to galloping, corresponding to three quite different patterns of brain cell activity. He shows by means of graphs that these changes from one kind of movement to another occur by temporarily destabilising the system of brain activity to allow it to find a new stability which brings into play a completely different set of muscle controlling neurons.

The brain can be trained to create these islands of stability to allow specific patterns of physical activity to be called upon without having to think about the details of the complexity. This is quite evident in observing how babies learn to co-ordinate movement: learning to focus their eyes and grasp objects, learning to crawl and then to walk. In this way, people are able to co-ordinate their movements unconsciously: instantaneously assigning groups of physical and mental activity whenever there is a need, without being slowed down by conscious decision making.

Probably, the best remembered example of this process in operation is the experience of learning to ride a bicycle. One moment it seems impossible to balance and ride a bicycle and the next finding yourself cycling along and wondering to yourself how you ever thought it could be difficult to learn. Learning to swim and learning to drive a car are similar experiences. Once the appropriate patterns of neural activity are established, they become permanently fixed as stable unconscious patterns of behaviour which the brain's chaotic activity can revert to whenever the need arises.

Jumping between different stable states of neural activity can be triggered by external events. You can think of a jockey's whip as being a trigger that momentarily destabilises the pattern of a horse's brain activity, prompting the activity to settle down into a different steady state that evokes a higher speed of movement. This will not happen for any touch of the whip, it will occur only when the tap of the whip exceeds a certain severity.

Such an efficient method of changing the way in which brain activity instantly reconfigures in response to external stimuli is a product of evolution. We have evolved similar mechanisms that allow our brains to instantaneously reconfigure our activities when a potentially hazardous signal is received from the environment. The sudden appearance of a lion at close quarters, would rapidly transform us from being in a relaxed, contemplative mood into a state of hypertension where all systems are primed to take immediate evasive action.

The important considerations here are first that there is no rational or conscious transition: we automatically transform from one state to another. Secondly, this change will happen only if the trigger exceeds a certain threshold (i.e., the same reaction would not occur is the lion were spotted a mile away).

Something similar happens with our thinking processes. We don't progress from one way of looking at things to another as a gradual process. It is a sudden jump, from one conceptual model to another with no conscious transition between the two. When such transitions occur for the first time, they are often called Eureka moments: sudden realisations, sudden insights - non logical jumps in thought that bring about a different understanding.

This experience is most often encountered with paradoxes, when seemingly contradictory statements suddenly make sense when the paradox is resolved. Much humour is based upon stories giving one impression and then the punch line creating a paradigm shift that gives a whole new interpretation to whatever has been said before.

If new thoughts, new ideas and influences could easily change the steady state of the mental models we use for contemplating and analysing the world around us, we would not have a very stable system of judgement and decision making. To provide stability, it seems that our brains have evolved to be able to ignore or reject most of the intelligence we receive from the outside world: responding only when information causes an overwhelming need for a change in thinking.

This same mechanism that gives us mental stability, also prevents us from readily accepting new ideas: it causes us to reject and fight against any information that challenges our established mental models. Unfortunately, this instinctive trait that has served our species so well in past generations, is proving a handicap in our attempts to come to grips with the new realities of the digital communication age. It makes it hard for us to make the necessary mental adjustments that are needed to cope with the new environment of mass connectivity.

Understanding that there is such a barrier in place, handicapping our efforts to understand new and unfamiliar situations, will help us to overcome them. This we can do by keeping and open mind and be ready to consider ideas that seem to contradict our instinctive judgements or conflict with common sense