Overview
Primary Roles: The Screen, Autopilot, The Familiar Zone
Most of our decisions are made unconsciously and are therefore driven by past conditioning.
Our brains are inherently driven to make sense of the world around us using existing beliefs. We feel comfort and safety when we understand what is happening. This causes us to fill in the blanks with things we make up, and to distort perceptions to validate existing beliefs.
Roles
The Screen
The analogy for how we use our memories of past experiences to sift through the information flowing in from our senses to make sense of, and add meaning to, what is happening right now. Nothing means anything until we decide what it means.
Our Emotional reactions are based on the Robot’s interpretation of the moment, or the screen, not on what is actually happening.
The difference between perception and reality can be alarmingly large.
Autopilot
The vast majority of our behavior choices are made by the Robot without conscious thought. The Robot consumes significatly less energy than thinking our way through things and is very efficient.
Autopilot behaviors were programmed into the Robot in the past. As such, they may or may not be beneficial right now. Bad habits had some kind of emotional payoff when they were formed. We might continue to do them, even if they have a negative payoff
The Familiar Zone
This represents what we are accustomed to and what is known. Since the Robot represents the un-conscious functioning of the brain, it can only operate from what it knows.
The Robot is then constrained by, defends, and protects the familiar zone, because fear of the unknown or being wrong are a deep drivers in us.
We’d rather make something up than feel like we don’t know. We also distort what we are perceiving so we don’t feel wrong.
When the Robot doesn’t know how to make sense of what’s happening or can’t distort things to feel right, it goes into an alarm mode and Emotion switches to a Protection drive.