Perception, Memory, and Empathy

"Being empathetic is seeing the world through the eyes of the other, not seeing your world reflected in their eyes." - Dr. Carl Rogers

Introduction

Empathy is one of the fundamental skills that keeps relationships intact. It lays the groundwork for confirming and denying our assumptions about one another. Whether we're talking about intimate relationships or leaders and subordinates, the relationship can only be successful if each person can understand one another. Given that society and large institutions are made up of multitudes of relationships, I would claim that empathy is a key driver for the flourishing of our civilization. From the personal up to the social, part of what allows a human to feel comfortable enough to function is his belief that he's heard, understood, and that he matters. A relationship without empathy has to resort to other means of communicating and learning about one another, such as coercion or tyranny.

People are different in some ways and similar and others. We are a combination of inorganic, organic, social, and intellectual layers all on a substrate of chaos and order (1). Inorganically and organically, we're all pretty much the same. It's once we enter the social domain that the differences start to become pronounced and revealed, and it's also where our conscious, subjective experiences facilitate a malleability of thoughts, expressions, and interpretations. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. believed (2), people don't like complex, dynamic answers to complicated problems, so some of us have a proclivity to avoid trying to understand human nature given these layers of complexity. However, a prerequisite for civility and well-being is the wrestling with this complexity in pursuit of a unified understanding of one another.

To empathize may be broken down into three steps. First, you must shed your worldview and open yourself up to that of the other person. It is my belief that knowledge of human perception can aid in this step. The next step is to listen to what the other person is saying. Frequently, much of what the other person will be saying will have to do with their memory, so I'd like to see if explication of memory from a psychological perspective can help us here. Finally, we should allow ourselves to experience what happens once we adopt their worldview and convey this feeling to them. What exactly is the through line between perception, memory, and empathy? That's the question I want to pin down in this paper.

Perception

Perception can be thought of as the processing of information for action. We construct our interpretation of the world by combining sensory input with our memory, current context, bodily state, and other factors. Perception can be broken down into conscious and unconscious perception. Conscious perception occurs when you are aware of your attempt to recognize something as it relates to either a category or another instance. Unconscious perception manifests as stimuli too weak to breach the threshold of consciousness nevertheless affect your behavior or physiology. A classic instance of unconscious perception is found in people who have blindsight. It has been shown that people with blindsight will claim to be unable to see any images or objects when asked, but either their behavior, decisions, or physiology will show some evidence of visual perception.

Our unconscious is constantly filtering through data and only providing what it thinks is the most accurate and relevant to our conscious. Tor Norretranders wrote in The User Illusion, “Our sight really consists of a hypothesis, an interpretation of the world. We do not see the data in front of our eyes; we see an interpretation” (3). Dr. Jordan Peterson states, "When we look at the world, we perceive only what is enough for our plans and actions to work and for us to get by. What we inhabit, then, is this 'enough'. That is a radical, functional, unconscious simplification of the world -- and it's almost impossible for us not to mistake it for the world itself" (4). The point here is that there are many levels between what we experience and objective reality. This ambiguity is why two people can be given the same stimulus but come away with different understandings of what just occurred or what they just saw.

In 12 Rules for Life, Dr. Peterson also conveys the important point that our goals organize our perceptions. We don't see objects, but patterns of tools, obstacles, or irrelevance. For example, outside of my condo are a few sets of stairs. Typically, when I come home, I'm excited to see my girlfriend and to wind down the day with her. As I approach those steps, I can feel the positive emotion welling within me. I don't think of them as objective pieces of wood or concrete. They are the "things that I can step on to get to my girlfriend." However, there was a period during the summer when I had a negative encounter with my downstairs neighbor who is mentally impaired. We were around those same sets of stairs as the aggressive interaction ensued. The following few days, my nervous system evoked feelings of stress and anxiety as I walked up the steps. They were now the potential obstacles that not only might prevent me from seeing my girlfriend, if the neighbor decided to come outside for round two, but they might also infringe upon a higher-order goal of safety and peace.

Memory

Memory is a construction that we create which is part information processing and part subjective experience. It was once believed that our memory worked as a type of tape recorder which objectively captured events that could be recalled in a streamlined fashion at some point in the future. Dr. Daniel Schacter illustrates that a more sophisticated and accurate conceptualization of memory is that it's fundamentally a reconstructive process. When we encounter an event, as we learned from the previous section on perception, we only perceive details and patterns that are important to us. We are biased and subjective at the initial experience. Of the details that we perceive, only a select few are encoded in our memories. Of those memories, some will vanish, and others will remain available for recall. Finally, the retrieval process of an encoded memory takes into account your current emotional state, the knowledge you've accumulated since the initial event, and your future goals. To remember is more than merely thinking about an objective event that occurred in the past. Dr. Schacter puts it eloquently, “Our memories are the fragile but powerful products of what we recall from the past, believe about the present, and imagine about the future” (5).

Humans have many memory systems that overlap in some structural and functional respects but are independent in others. Semantic memory is our factual and conceptual knowledge, often dealing with language comprehension. Procedural memory is our habits, behavioral knowledge, and skills. Episodic memory, which may be most germane to our conversation, is our narrative understanding of our events and experiences. Episodic memory helps us organize the broad sequences of our life from multi-year epochs to specific event-related details that span a one-minute duration. Narratively speaking, it's our sense of self. People who lose episodic memory feel lost. They don't know where to go since they don't know where they've been. Episodic memory is also most akin to the subjective experiences of memory, the belief that there is an I who experienced past events.

We don't remember most things, so what we do remember is what we deem to be meaningful. Dr. Schacter talks about elaborate encoding, which requires an individual to attend to the meaning of the thing to be memorized and to associate it with something else. Elaborate encoding increases the accuracy of memory over brute force encoding which is just the intention of remembering. This happens implicitly, unconsciously. We “elaborately encode” when our nervous system tells us that something is important, which can occur without us having the intention of deeply memorizing something. How someone remembers something is just as important as what they remember, and both the how and the what provide insight into their experiential being.

Empathy

Perhaps one of the most beautiful lessons from psychotherapy is that the conditions under which personality transformation can occur are not particular to psychotherapeutic sessions. Dr. Carl Rogers, an American psychotherapist, believed that all genuine relationships were cathartic, and that the healing aspects of therapy were the result of the establishment of a genuine relationship. He laid out three states that a person could embody if they wanted to engage with another in a manner that is cultivating and fulfilling. One state was positive regard which is unconditional acceptance of a person regardless of their flaws or bad decisions. Another was congruence which means to be genuinely authentic with the person, even if it risks hurting their feelings. The third state was empathy which means to understand how the other person is feeling to the best of one's ability (6).

Of those three states, which may be an inaccurate depiction as they are all dynamic, active processes, empathy is what we are lacking the most in our society. While there are many reasons for the paucity, one of them may be that people simply don't know how to empathize with one another. How can we take what we've just learned about perception and memory and use it to improve our empathic skill set? Given that a person's goals arrange their perceptions which are related to their emotions, the communication of their perception gives you insight into their desires, motivations, and emotional states. Most of what a person is communicating to you is also predicated on their memory, and remember that memory is constructed from the individual's interpretation of the event, their current attitude and emotional state, and interactions that occurred in between. This means in part that the information they present can be deconstructed to attend to all of those aspects, rather than trying to understand the "objective event" that's being recalled.

When you're conversing with someone and you want to demonstrate that you understand their situation, use the concepts and language of perception and memory to find your way through the conversation. Summarize what you think the person communicated back to them, not word for word, but only detailing the gist or the most important parts (7). When someone's telling you their goals about the future, use that as an opportunity to inquire about their worldview, specifically as it relates to their aspirations. When someone recounts a story, highlight, in a curious, non-arrogant manner, that the events that they remembered must have been meaningful and important to them. Let them know you truly heard them by remembering that their unconscious, which is every bit as much of their being as their conscious is, guided their perceptions and constructions of memory and conveying to them that you've attended to these implicit processes.

Conclusion

Part of the gift that empathy presents is the insight into parts of ourselves that we don't attend to regularly. Majority of our functioning is done unconsciously, and while we may not be aware of what's going on underneath the hood, these processes still have an impact on our everyday lives. A benefit of having personal relationships with people who want the best for you is that they have an easier time spotting these unconscious glimmers such as our facial expressions, posture, and tone of voice. They more of us than we typically notice, perhaps more than we're capable of noticing, so when they reflect to us what they think they've heard like a mirror, we get to listen fully to what's approximately closer to the gestalt of who we are.

To empathize presupposes that the other person metaphorically and literally sees the world differently from you. The main function of empathy is to dawn the other person's perceptions, allow what the other person is communicating to fill your mind imagistically, and experience what the other person is experiencing. Typically, part of what the person is conveying to you is their memories. Even if their memories don't reflect reality, they still hold some insight into what the person is feeling and thinking. The psychologist Dr. Daniel Schacter wrote, “The contents of a [memory] may say more about what a person believes or fears about the past than about what actually happened." The first step in resolving any problem is understanding it, and one of the keys to ameliorating many of the social conflicts we have today is the radical adoption of empathy towards others.

References

1. Pirsig, R. M. (1991). Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. Bantam.

2. King, M. L. (1963). Strength to Love. Beacon Press.

3. Norretranders, T. (1999). The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. Penguin Books.

4. Peterson, J. B. (2018). 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Random House Canada.

5. Schacter, D. L. (1996). Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and The Past. BasicBooks.

6. Rogers, C. R. (1980). A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin Company.

7. Rogers, C. R. & Farson, R. E. (2021). Active Listening. Mocking Bird Press.