That is, our motivation to believe that an image represents … may lead us to direct our gaze or attention toward specific image features, thus prioritizing different visual input, creating different perceptual experiences, and forming different beliefs.

– The Value of Beliefs

There are good reasons to be fragmented rather than unified, independent of the limitations on our available processing power.

– Seeing and Believing: Perception, Belief Formation and the Divided Mind

Spotting in lifting refers to standing behind someone as she counteracts an opposing force. A number of factors could interfere with whether a person would attempt to lift a certain weight. These include the numerical value assigned to the weight, its physical size, if anyone else is watching and if she cares if anyone else is watching.

In theory, the spotter is there to ensure correct form. The spotter functions as a fail-safe. In practice what a spotter offers is something more; the strength to complete one last repetition. The weight feels lighter with someone else around.

The weight is not in fact lighter since the spotter does nothing more than wrap or place her hands gently around the lifter’s wrists, elbows or the bar on which the weights are attached. Though the heavy weight is entirely borne by the lifter, it is the spotter who is doing the actual heavy lifting. The mental burden of self-doubt is usually heavier than can be neatly reflected by the numerical value assigned to the physical weight.

Beliefs refer to what is held to be true about the world. What a student believes will determine outcomes in his life. “After all, any parent or teacher knows well that the beliefs that young people get into their heads become the rules that govern their actions, for good or, regretfully, sometimes for ill” (Pajares & Schunk, 2002).

So, we tell children to believe in themselves. This in itself is uncontroversial. We all know or have come to accept through repetition, that without belief, achievement would be curtailed and that with belief many things are possible.

This is known as “adaptive benefit of motivated beliefs” – “all else being equal, an individual who believes they will win contested resources is more likely to do so, as their belief will increase their motivation to fight for those resources” (Martin & Sharot, 2020).

Belief directs motivation and motivation directs force. As evidence of this principle, someone showed how an unexceptional name card could be used to break a chopstick into halves. Since it is not possible for the same person to hold the chopstick and bring the name card swiftly down to its middle at the same time, there could have been any number of reasons why it appeared as though a name card could split wood apart. One reason could be that this was an impeccably timed and neatly performed trick to effect an illusion. Or maybe, it was indeed mind over matter.

Yet, words like illusion and delusion exist. In Raising Children with High Self-Esteem (But Not Narcissism), Brummelman and Sedikides (2020) distinguish between narcissism and self-belief. While one is “a sense of one’s worth as a person” the other is “an inflated sense of one’s importance and deservingness”.

They explain that, narcissistic children, “have unrealistically positive views of themselves (illusion), strive for superiority (superiority), and oscillate between hubris and shame” and that children with high self-esteem, “have positive but realistic views of themselves (realism), strive for self-improvement (growth) and feel intrinsically worthy, even in the face of setbacks (robustness)”.

Children are raised; they do not raise themselves. If children are overestimated, overclaimed and overpraised for some qualities (Brummelman et al., 2015, as cited in Brummelman & Sedikides, 2020), valued only when they “stand out from others” and when they “meet” some external “standards”, they might become narcissistic.

When such a child, no matter how worthy in the child’s own right, grows up, such a child would make choices which in reality are attempts to seek validation – my worth is determined by who I am associated with and what I am surrounded by. I am only worthy when accepted by such and such person of such and such standing. I am only something when such and such a person of such and such standing says I am that something.

Such and such person is human too and more likely than not more human than he lets on. Or maybe he is a shark which smells blood.

In contrast, when given “realistic feedback”, praised for “hard work and efficient strategies” and accepted “for who they are, even when” they “fail”, children do not become narcissistic (Brummelman & Sedikides, 2020).

This too does not seem to quite comport with evidence.

What is realistic? In the F1, though drivers lift the trophies and pop the champagne, it is in fact the team which makes this possible. If a person does not have a well-resourced team, it will not be realistic for him to dream of lifting the trophy ever, no matter how talented. His innate worth will remain very and entirely innate forevermore. If the organiser of the race is looking to break records, naturally, offering outsized rewards to race winners would facilitate such aim.

Rewards are outsized not quantitatively (numerical values obey diminishing returns of marginal utility) but qualitatively – you are worthy forevermore because your achievement has immortalised you. This will inadvertently feed narcissism.

Teams would be incentivised by possibility of everlasting returns. With teams in the fray, because it is worthiness at stake, records will be broken, along with the dreams of some individuals. The race offers an open invitation but in reality, only teams stand a fighting chance.

It makes sense from a collectivist point of view. It is difficult to break records without teams. Without records being broken, there will be no spectacles. Without spectacles, there will be no fee-paying spectators. Without fees, the organisation would not exist. Without the organisation, no one will have any chance.

But we digress. Also, this too may not be how things actually work. What we do know is without belief little is possible. The question is when does belief morph into illusion or delusion? Should we tell students to aim for the sky or is that not realistic?

Does it matter if it is realistic? What realism aims to avoid is wastage, of resources and emotions. Have you wondered why some athletes take part in the Olympics despite knowing they are not going to win? Nobody remembers anyone but the winner. Is it enough to have merely participated? Are you sure the instinctive answer is not merely a familiar refrain?

If not winning is not the same thing as having lost and if one can handle that disappointment without having the spirit crushed, and transmute that experience to something life-giving, there is no need for dreams to be realistic.

There is another reason why it may not pay to be too realistic, whatever that actually means. The posterior medial prefrontal cortex (pMFC) is responsible for “monitoring and modifying judgements in response to information” (Martin & Sharot, 2020). It was found that it is easier to revise our expectations upwards when positive information is received than downwards when new information is negative because the pMFC “does not track the strength” “of contradictory” evidence.

That there has been an error of judgement does not register well because there is “weakened neural representation of errors in response to negative information”. Martin and Sharot (2020) describe the brain’s proclivity towards positive information as an “asymmetry” and that “these asymmetries in updating beliefs from positive versus negative information are absent in humans with depression” (Sharot & Garrett, 2016, as cited in Martin & Sharot, 2020). In other words, attributing more weight to positive information when receiving a mix, promotes mental health.

Who knows what would happen in the future? In the absence of a crystal ball, the only reality which matters is that things are always in a state of flux. Therefore, how we form beliefs becomes more important than what we believe, since beliefs need regular updating.

There are two main schools of thought in how we update beliefs. The first is Cartesian. Here, a proposition is investigated before a truth or false label is affixed. The other is Spinozian. Everything is first accepted as truth automatically if it does not fly in the face of logic and then rejected only when there is evidence for rejection.

Children would in the ordinary course of things believe what trusted adults say about them to them. To give them a shot in the arm, it is entirely reasonable to eschew so called objectivity when giving feedback; especially because growth is unpredictable.

They may be faced with evidence to the contrary in their dealings with the world. Here, how their belief system operates might make a difference to eventual outcomes.

Some people aim for a “single unified corpus of beliefs that’s active in guiding all of their behaviour all of the time” (Egan, 2008). Put another way, this is a “single, holistically connected web” which is “designed to maximise coherence with both incoming evidence and standing beliefs” and “any part of the total information stored can affect any other part” (Porot & Mandelbaum, 2019).

For example, a child could believe he is no good at a certain task. He is told to be coherent about his beliefs and also that the following statements are true. To be good at a task, you have to be talented and have the right habits. So and so embodies good. Since he is, so and so will be successful at everything he does and therefore, so and so ought to be emulated. Such a child would inevitably carry a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis so and so into every domain even into those in which he has a natural god given advantage. He will believe that if he was honest, he is not a worthy person like so and so. So and so has all the nice things twenty years down the road because so and so is the kind of person who was good at a task twenty years before. Such a child would not even bother competing with so and so regardless the domain.

What we should tell children instead, is that the accurate and right thing to do is to hold to seemingly contradictory beliefs at the same time; that there is no need to be coherent. A child may not be good at a certain task but that in no way takes anything away from his worthiness. He is free to be good or bad at a task whenever he wants to be. How well he performs is not material to who he is. This is a fragmented belief system. If he believes he is worthy, twenty years down the road, he can have as good a life as he wants to.

Also, there is no need to be Edmund Hillary to enjoy magnificent views with a nice cup half full.

The Brain Dojo