Section I: The First Person

When we’re lost in the woods, we first need

to come to our senses. To pay attention to the
information we’re receiving from our environment.
The creak of trees, the hoot of an owl. The cold on
our skin.

It’s no different in the digital forest. Once we’re

paying attention, we can start to orient ourselves
and discern. What’s fact, and what’s fiction? Is
the study linked to in that tweet reliable, or is it
someone’s propaganda? What do I really think
and feel when I try to make sense of ecological
collapse or an ongoing election in my country?

Good sensemaking requires discernment, humility,

clarity of thought and emotional regulation. But
these aren’t things we do, and they aren’t things
we can buy. They’re ways of seeing and ways of
being that we develop over time.

In this workbook, you’ll find models, ideas and

practices focused on the first person perspective.
Ultimately, how you use them will be up to you
and entirely unique.

The Mystery of Me
The first person perspective is the most
fundamental layer of sensemaking. While we can
talk of existential risks and headline trends till the
cows come home, the ‘Me’ is the only domain to
which we have immediate and constant access
for all our lives. And in groups - second and third
person settings - we always bring the baggage
and benefits of our individual perspectives. As Jon
Kabatt-Zinn puts it ‘Wherever you go, there you
are.’

While we think we know ourselves fairly well, the

findings of empirical science, wisdom traditions
- and the basic facts of our experience - tell us
there’s a lot going on within each of us that we
don’t notice, let alone understand.

In every moment there are gigabytes of sensory

input, but according to research by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi and others, our conscious
processing capacity is only around 120 bits a
second. We miss a lot.

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However, our unconscious mind is processing
far more than what we’re aware of. The mind
seems to have a ‘mind of its own’. Its thoughts,
concepts and suggestions arise and emerge
from unconscious processes we can glimpse only
indirectly in our conscious minds.
So sensemaking isn’t just something we do
consciously - it’s happening in every moment. Our
nervous systems and cognition have evolved to
enact over thousands of years to keep us alive by
effectively helping us to respond to what’s in our
environment. But that’s much more a process of
leaving things out than it is looking at everything.
John Vervaeke’s Model of Cognition
Ask yourself: how and
why are you reading this
text right now? What
words, concepts and
ideas have jumped out
to you? Why is it that the
text - and not the siren
blares, wind, passing cars,
chair squeaks, ambient
chatter, and other data
that characterise your
experience - has been at the centre of your
attention? How has that happened? And what
is it that really differentiates the text from those
surrounding contents of experience? What is the
criterion that our cognition uses to prioritise?
It’s worth stepping back and examining the first
person perspective at its most basic roots - and
something we’ve found useful in this regard is
John Vervaeke’s model of relevance realisation.
In Vervaeke’s model, the criterion that our
cognition is always using is relevance: how
important certain data may be for fulfilling
our goals (conscious or unconscious) at any
one moment. The relevance of sensory data is
therefore a ‘bridging concept’, which ties together
perception and action. It’s in the act of relevance
realisation that we converge on meaning, which
is a complex concept that describes our sense of
connectedness to ourselves, others, and the world.
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Cognition sits in a complex system between
individual and environment. A field of possibly
salient data is monitored and extracted. How we
select for that salience and relevance is a function
of our heuristics and cognitive concepts, which we
would ideally ‘frame and reframe’ to converge on
what is most meaningful for our goals. This makes
relevance realisation a recursive process - one that
is part and parcel of sensemaking.
Doing so well is increasingly difficult, though,
thanks to what Vervaeke calls the ‘combinatorial
explosion’: how the internet has furnished an
explosion of possibly-salient information, which
builds on itself in exponential ways and dilutes
our ability to hone in on what’s most relevant. As
Vervaeke has explained in Sensemaking 101.
Relevance realisation is an ongoing,
evolving coupling. And you can feel
that evolution in your head - your
attention right now. Part of your
attention wants to drift away and add
variation like in Darwinian evolution.
Another part of your attention is trying
to crunch it back down, and follow
what’s going on. Your attention is doing
this because it’s trying to constantly
evolve. What is obvious, what you should
pay attention to, what you should be
doing: that’s relevant to realisation.
That’s precisely the ability that is being
especially taxed right now.
“But very often what we find salient
and relevant, we miss frame it in
some important way. We distort
it when you have an insight, when
you get an aha moment. That’s that
evolving process, self-correcting.
That’s the process. Realising, ’Wait,
what I was foregrounding, what I was
backgrounding, what I was prioritising,
was actually the wrong thing.
The ‘framing and reframing’ essential for effective
relevance realisation is compared by Vervaeke to
switching and trying out different pairs of glasses.
We look out at the world, gather data, act, and
periodically switch out our glasses using certain
attentional techniques (more on this later), before
diving back in the process to go through another
round of relevance realisation.
 Heuristics and Systems of Thinking
Terms like ‘wisdom’ and ‘foolishness’ have lost
their popular currency in recent years, but they’re
very significant for Vervaeke’s model. ‘Wisdom’ is
that capacity to frame and reframe - to master the
machinery of cognition itself to produce meaning.
‘Foolishness’ is its opposite, where the ‘framing
and reframing’ results in a process of ‘reciprocal
narrowing’: where our mental concepts take us
further and further from our goals and the nature
of reality.
An essential term in understanding this is
heuristics, which are the most basic structures
our cognition uses to frame, break down, and
simplify data for sensemaking. These heuristics
are ‘rules-of-thumb’ used to speed up our
thinking, in particular during our development
on the Savannah thousands of years ago.
According to Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman,
the evolutionary process has made our cognition
follow two broad processing modes:
• System-1 thinking: Our rapid source of
‘gut feelings’, intuitions, wordless and
‘black box’ thinking: the domain of ‘Aha!’
moments
• System-2 thinking: Slower, more
deliberate verbal processes of calculation
and deduction
Heuristics belong especially to System-1 thinking,
while System-2 thinking uses more conscious and
manipulable ‘mental models’.
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Mental models are recurring concepts that help us
explain, predict, or approach different and non-
overlapping subjects. Examples range from more
familiar concepts, such as opportunity cost and
inertia, to more obscure ones, such as Goodhart’s
law and regulatory capture.
Once you become more familiar with mental
models, you can use them quickly to create a
mental picture of a situation. Part of being a good
sensemaker is deploying the mental model ripe for
a particular setting, and ‘framing and reframing’
based on how closely the model matched up to
the data at hand.
Cognitive scientists and psychologists - in
particular Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky -
have isolated a number of our heuristics through
behavioural experiments. These are useful to know
about for your 1st person sensemaking.
• The availability heuristic means that we
prioritise information that is ‘easier-to-retrieve’
at that moment. If we can summon more
examples and information right now for a
particular question, then this suggests it’s a
better data source and ground-for-action.
− For example, if we’re asked for reasons
why not to hire someone, and reasons
come flooding out - and they don’t
with the case for hiring them - then this
suggests there are simply more and
better reasons not to give them the job.
− We’re always bound by time
requirements - so it’s useful to weight
towards what is more readily meaningful.
• Another is the representativeness heuristic,
when we estimate the likelihood of an event
by comparing it to a prototype we’ve already
stored in our minds.
− We don’t have time to scan every
example of a phenomenon, so it makes
sense that we’d have to do this. The
ability to ‘abstract’ is a core human
cognitive capacity that other animals
don’t possess.
• The affect heuristic is also significant: when we
make decisions based on how they seem to
make us feel emotionally. If something makes
us feel bad or distressed, it seems plausible
that the decision isn’t worth taking.

While useful guides, each of these heuristics has
clear flaws.
For example with the availability heuristic, why
would what comes to mind easily at any moment
be necessarily the most useful information to
satisfy our goals? Why would that be a reliable
guide for relevance realisation?
What is easy-to-retrieve, and feels meaningful at
that moment, might not be. The pioneering work
of Sarah Lichtenstein, for example, found that
the information people recall is heavily shaped
by their media exposure, which itself is biased
towards sensationalist and attention-grabbing
headlines.
Lichtenstein found that test subjects were prone
to over-estimating the commonality of violent
crimes - events which, while extremely rare,
prompt disproportionate media coverage, and
therefore a greater information sample for people
to draw upon with their availability heuristic.
And more generally, there is no necessary link
between ease-of-retrieval and the real, most
plausible step - when information and examples
do not come easily, this may, in fact, better
suggest the complexity of the question at hand,
and the need to perform further research.
Inquiry:
Can you think of an example where you fell prey
to the availability trap? Can you remember the
thought process you went through that led you
there?
Another heuristic that can lead us to foolishness
is the representativeness heuristic. Why do
we believe our ability to abstract and form
prototypes is necessarily reliable?
However many people we may have encountered,
our sample size - and the way we gather it - is
unlikely to be enough to ground any generalising
judgement.
If you think people from the opposite town are
‘annoying’, ‘inconsiderate’ - or even awesome -
ask yourself: how many of them have you really
met and spent time with?
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Inquiry:
When did you last ‘represent’ a population in
completely the wrong way? Can you recall a
time when your ‘prototypes’ were way-off?
And because representativeness overlaps
significantly with statistics and probability, it
doesn’t help that human cognition generally
finds numerical reasoning counter-intuitive.
One reasoning approach with which humans
struggle is Bayesian logic, which makes
estimates of how probable an event will
be based on the probabilities of certain
conditional facts.
As an example, Kahneman and Tversky - the
two cognitive psychologists mentioned earlier -
asked graduate students to guess what degree a
composite character called ‘Tom W.’ was taking at
their university.
• Tom was presented above all else as shy
and uncomfortable in social situations - a
stereotype linked, for what it’s worth, with
STEM subjects.
• 95% of the students estimated that Tom would
more likely be taking computer science over
education or humanities - something that
may seem reasonable, if a high proportion of
computer science students are really more shy
and uncomfortable in this way.
• What did the graduate students miss out?
While they accounted for one likelihood - that
Tom would be shy if he were a computer
science student - they overlooked the other
probability: that he’s a computer science
student at all.
− This is the base rate, and it turns out
that there were far more students taking
education and humanities students than
computer science. So, however awkward
our Tom W. was, he’s still far more likely
to be taking history.
• Lastly, consider now the affect heuristic.
Why would the way we feel at that moment
necessarily be the best way to work towards
our goals - or to provide estimates of things
happening or not?
 Like the availability heuristic, our assessment of
real-world events is shaped significantly by our
most recent experiences, and the surrounding
context of our emotional states.
As an example, two children could provide wildly-
inaccurate estimates of the risk of a particular
game, based on how fun (or not fun) it was or has
been in their experiences. The child who had a
great time with the game has their mood boosted,
which makes them more likely to rationalise
playing it through undershooting its risks and
overshooting its benefits in the next iteration - and
vice versa.
The research of Daniel Vjastfall, for example,
suggested that even people in Sweden were more
likely to overstate the risks of everyday dangers in
the months after the South-Asian tsunami, whose
news coverage flooded the homes of millions of
people worldwide.
And as we’ll learn later, socio-emotional drives
and traumatic triggers can readily hijack our
sensemaking if we’re not careful.
Bias and Making Good Decisions
What does all this suggest? A key insight from
cognitive science is that in many ways human
intelligence is a process of bias. Our ability to
select one thing over another as relevant is
fundamental to our humanity, our cognition, and
every single aspect of waking consciousness.
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At Rebel Wisdom we call this the paradox of
sensemaking. The very tools we rely on to make
sense - our heuristics and inbuilt cognitive
categories - are prone systematically to error
and bias: something defined technically as a
disproportionate weight assigned towards an
element of a data set, and without good reason
and proper warrant according to our goals.
In Vervaeke’s terms, the concepts that allow for
wisdom can, in the wrong hands and environment,
program us for foolishness.
The work of the Center for Applied Rationality
(CFAR) has been especially influential in this area.
CFAR is one of the central institutions of the Bay
Area Rationalist Movement, a loose coalition of
in-person and online gathering places (including
LessWrong, Farnham Street and Scott Alexander’s
AstralCodexTen, AKA SlateStarCodex) that seeks
to expose the biases common to our cognition.
See below for a list of significant cognitive biases.
• Fundamental Attribution Error
− When explaining why we did something
wrong, we tend to ascribe it to ‘the
situation’ - uncontrollable variables,
mitigating circumstances, other factors
- and not any failing in terms of our own
character.
− When we explain others’ behaviours,
though, we see their failings in terms
of character traits, that someone did
something wrong because they are a
‘bad person’ more than one facing a ‘bad
situation’.
• Loss Aversion
− Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that
describes why, for individuals, the pain
of losing is psychologically twice as
powerful as the pleasure of gaining.
The loss felt from money, or any other
valuable object, can feel worse than
gaining that same thing
 Inquiry:
• Omission Bias
Can you recall an experience when you were
− The omission bias refers to our subject to one of these biases?
tendency to judge harmful actions as
worse than harmful inactions, even if
they result in similar consequences. In
the famous moral framework of the
‘trolley experiment’, not pulling the
How Does Rationality Really Work?
lever can result in as much (or more)
All of us have experienced these cognitive biases.
death as pulling it, yet we consider
And becoming aware of them - spotting when
the latter generally more morally
they arise in our experience - makes us less likely
objectionable.
to fall for them. One great way of tracking our
biases is the use of a Surprise Journal, or a record
• The Sunk Cost Fallacy
of when you’ve been surprised each day. Surprise
is valuable because it shows the ‘edge’ at which
− The Sunk Cost Fallacy describes our
our heuristics are operating, outside of which
tendency to follow through on an
there is new information and value to be gleaned.
endeavor if we have already invested
time, effort or money into it, whether
But rationality is not simply a matter of pure
or not the current costs outweigh the
‘thinking’, and learning a list of biases. We
benefits; ‘We’ve gone this far, so we
may assume, too, that System-2 - the more
might as well carry on.’
deliberative, logical side of our thinking - is to
be prioritised over the more intuitive System-1,
• Confirmation Bias
but as Julia Galef, a key figure in the rationalist
community explained in this Rebel Wisdom film
− The basic tendency to seek evidence
and reasons to support our existing
beliefs, even when our beliefs may
Each ‘system’ is complex, made up of a
be somehow false or harmful.
variety of parts, and neither is perfect.
Confirmation bias therefore involves a
Our knee-jerk, automatic processes
degree of ‘motivated reasoning’, when
are prone to making the wrong
we’re drawn to beliefs beyond their
connections—if a new acquaintance
merits.
resembles an old enemy, you may find
yourself feeling anxious or cold without
• Framing Effect
really knowing why. Our deliberate,
explicit processes can fail by leaving out
− When the same set of information
information—if you can’t put a fleeting
is ‘framed’ in a different way, we act
feeling of unease into words, you may be
differently. For example, a product
tempted to disregard it, and exclude it
listing itself as ‘20% fat’, while identical
from your calculations..But turning off or
to a product ‘80% fat free’, will be
ignoring large parts of your brain is rarely
selected less because of its less
helpful, and applied rationality is about
favourable framing.
using every tool in your possession.
− This is taken advantage of by
marketers, advertisers, brand
Indeed, one of the great cognitive mistakes of our
specialists, politicians and actors
culture has been to downgrade systematically the
across society. While rooted in a
value of intuition. Intuition may conjure images of
number of biases - often including loss
psychics, mediums and the New Age, but it’s really
aversion and the affect and availability
a capacity stewed in our unconscious, long-term
heuristics - understanding how to
data processing.
‘frame’ information in favourable ways
can be an effective way to encourage
It’s with intuition that we have our ‘Aha!’ moments,
change.
in which a problem is suddenly solved and
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answers glimpsed. Intuition occurs using what But if you start a job tomorrow as a physicist at
CFAR calls ‘tacit knowledge’, which is knowledge CERN with zero training in physics, you probably
that’s hard to put into words and arises intuitively. shouldn’t ‘follow your heart’ because you feel like
Tacit knowledge is the source of our hypotheses, pushing that big red button.
and the glue that ties together our conscious
linguistic concepts: the bread-and-butter of Intuition is subject to bias and direction just like
System-1 thinking. thinking altogether. But it’s also a capacity that
can be trained and harnessed over time. As a
Intuition is the reason why we may feel a strong domain for skilfulness, intuition is something we
calling to speak to, or avoid, someone without feel rather than something we think. And this is
exactly knowing why. It’s because our unconscious important - because true rationality isn’t just about
has drawn connections too complex for our our thoughts.
current immediate conscious mind to grasp.
We may have seen this person before and not Mind and Body
remembered, or perhaps they trigger certain
evolutionary pathways for threat detection. The ‘red pill’ on
rationality is realising
Other times, we may feel an intuitive draw to a that ‘mind’ and ‘body’
certain topic that seems irrelevant. As Julia Galef are not really separate.
pointed out: Cognitive science, and
research into enactivism
and embodied cognition
When we feel driven toward or curious in particular, are
about something, it’s often because finding increasingly
our System 1 has a model of the world how interconnected
that makes that course of action look the two are. You
fruitful—it’s triggering a positive rating can detect this as a
on our progress meter for some goal or matter of experience,
another. using introspective
techniques like
“...If we ignore a particular curiosity mindfulness meditation:
because we don’t see the point of it, or if including interoception
we think our efforts are better directed (awareness of the body)
elsewhere and use System-2 to override and proprioception
the impulse, we’re essentially pitting (awareness of thoughts,
willpower against motivation… consider or meta-cognition).
the possibility that your System 1 might
be on to something, even if you can’t The better your introspective capacity, the
articulate exactly what. Consider going more you’ll notice how certain thoughts and
along for the ride–more often than not, it experiences, and especially feelings and intuitions,
will be fruitful in one way or another. have a strong physiological dimension. Taking
rationality as a whole mind-body system, you see
that they aren’t separated.

Intuition isn’t always to be trusted, though. As
former poker pro Liv Boeree explained in this
Rebel Wisdom film, top poker players don’t act
on intuition specifically because hard statistics are
more reliable. She suggests that intuition is a great
tool for something you’ve done a lot, but not great
for a task or situation you’re new to. For example,
you’ve met and related to many people in your life,
so your ‘gut feeling’ about someone is probably
something to pay attention to.
This is part of a broader approach of systems,
not parts. Being ‘rational’ about rationality means
taking your cognition as an interconnected whole.
Nora Bateson’s concept of Warm Data is another
useful frame: when we break things into parts of
‘Cold Data’, we overlook core information about
the ways they’re interrelated.

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 This isn’t your fault. The separation of mind and
body is a longstanding phenomenon of history
and the English language - in particular, the work
of Descartes, a steady ‘disembodiment’ through
engagements with technology and informational
tools, and our longstanding tendency to separate
nouns, verbs and subjects.
On the latter point, think of how we say ‘I do’
or ‘I am’: this suggests there is some ‘essence’
to the ‘I’ that is separate from the activities of
‘being’ and ‘doing’. What could this be? Consider,
too, how we act as if our bodies ‘belong’ to us,
with claims of ‘my arm’ or ‘my head’: yet these
aren’t attached to an immaterial ‘mind’ or ‘self’.
Rather, they are us in a continual process. This is
something both Brenda Dervin and Karl Weick,
two highly influential sensemaking theorists,
realised: effective sensemaking across the board
will take a reformulation of language and the way
we conceive of ourselves as subjects.
The Role of Trauma
As well as incomplete,
the ‘Spock’ view
of rationality fails
to account for the
irrational and highly
emotional ways in
which our cognition
operates. Indeed,
the reason why
certain biases may be
operative is because
they fulfill deep-
rooted psychological
and emotional needs,
usually furnished through traumatic experiences.
Trauma is the response of an individual’s body-
mind - and sometimes larger groups of individuals
and collectives - to overwhelming stress. What
makes trauma different from basic stress, is
that traumatic stress exceeds one’s capacity to
stay related to the experience - both in terms
of physiology and the response of the nervous
system, and psychology and the disruptions to a
person’s sense of meaning.
8
This means that the body-mind shuts down
or disassociates from the parts that were
overwhelmed. It’s a protective response from
evolution, albeit one that runs amok if it is not
processed and integrated.
The clear signs of traumatic response are:
• Numbing: To protect our bodies and minds
from the stress, trauma lessens our sensitivity
to experience overall. This can manifest in
feelings of disconnection, dissociation, lack of
emotional response
• Hyperactivity: Aggressive, reactive behaviour,
especially in response to events and people
that provoke conscious or unconscious
triggers of the original trauma
• Avoidance: Isolating from other people and
parts of the outside world, in order to avoid re-
triggering the trauma
Our degree of attachment to certain beliefs - and
the beliefs we hold at all - will be affected by
trauma. We may feel ‘triggered’ by particular facts
of our experience, causing our cognition to deploy
a traumatic response and skew us away from our
goals. With traumatic triggering, we are hijacked
and far more likely to sink into reactive modes of
thinking.
The work of Gabor Maté also suggests that
traumatic scars are a primary factor behind
addictive and compulsive behaviours. Don’t look
so far from yourself in that regard, either: through
the addictive properties of social media and
technology, many of us exhibit behaviours we’d
otherwise project on alcoholics, drug addicts
and gambling-dependants. And while social
media algorithms are actively programmed to
be addictive, they leverage tendencies that were
already laid by our traumatic moulds.
One approach to trauma, which we’ve covered
before on the channel, is Peter Levine’s model
of Somatic Experiencing. This aims to release
the energy stored in the body-mind since a
trauma through careful bodily exercises, centred
around interoception (the internal organs) and
proprioception and kinesthesis (the musculo-
skeletal system).
 Focusing
Let’s return to our decision-making and rationality.
One way to take advantage of mind, body and
emotion is Focusing, a technique developed in the
1950s by Eugene Gendlin.
It deals with two main kinds of responses:
• ‘Felt senses’: The physiological responses
we experience in certain situations, such
as butterflies in the stomach, bodily
tension, jarred vision, and sweaty palms
• ‘Handles’: The System-2 ways in which
we channel and describe these ‘felt
senses’, such as a word, a sentence, an
image, a conclusion, that makes sense in a
deliberate linguistic way
With the Focusing technique, the subject is
asked to play with different handles - switching
assumptions, changing narratives, updating
perspectives - in an iterative, exploratory process,
to see which makes their felt senses feel ‘at home’.
This is when some intuitive discomfort and
uncertainty are resolved, suggesting that both
Systems-1 and -2 are in alignment. We listen to the
unconscious signals transmitted through the body
rather than ignoring them.
Harnessing Our Attention
Techniques like Focusing help us develop our
cognitive flexibility. In turn this helps us get better
at ‘framing and reframing’ our concepts in an
effective way. And core to this is learning how to
train our attention - our ability to stay focused on
what is really relevant for our goals.
In this regard, by far the most useful long-term
technique we have encountered is mindfulness
meditation. Evidence suggests that even
short regimens of mindfulness can occasion
powerful changes in our thinking, behaviour, and
neurophysiology.
1
To learn more about Focusing, please see the introduction here:
https://www.focusing.org.uk/an-introduction-to-focusing
A 2014 meta-analysis showed that meditators’
brains tend to be enlarged in a range of regions,
including the insula (involved in emotional self-
awareness), parts of the cingulate cortex and
orbitofrontal cortex (involved in self-regulation),
and parts of the prefrontal cortex (involved in
attention).
In one study, people who’d only been meditating
for just one week (twenty minutes a day) showed
a decreased amygdala response to upsetting
images. One fMRI study showed that in very
experienced practitioners, compassion meditation
actually triggers activity in the brain’s motor
centers, preparing their bodies to physically move
in order to help whomever is suffering, even as
they’re still lying in the brain scanner.
Meditation therefore encourages an attitude of
Presence in our lives. We face up to and process
the reality of each moment in its full breadth
and depth: ensuring a full map for the process of
relevance realisation and effective sensemaking.
This stands in contrast to the auto-pilot in which
many of us spend much of our time - something
that isn’t helped by the attention-scattering effects
of technology and social media, whose ‘infinite
scroll’ and algorithmic hacks encourage us to lean
in more and more to easy, ‘fast food’ information.
We’d like to cover three basic kinds of meditation.
The first is a more general framework developed
by Shauna Shapiro called the IAA (Intention,
Attention, and Attitude) Model.
Intention
Attention Attitiude
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The IAA Model Cognitive Flexibility and the
• First, we set an intention to meditate. We
De-Centering Move
also cultivate a particular attitude - self-
Together with
compassionate, curious and open. We use
Attention and
our ability to focus and concentrate to
Presence,
pay attention to our experience right now.
mindfulness
meditation is
• Each of these elements is ever present,
core to two
and it may help your practice to
other ingredients
consciously move between them. For
of effective
example, as we pay attention we will
sensemaking.
inevitably become distracted by our
thoughts, physical sensations, sounds or
First, cognitive
any other sensory information.
flexibility that
we mentioned
• When we do, we can come back to our
earlier: or our
intention with a healthy attitude. This
ability to adapt
means not beating ourselves up, or
our thinking to change to our environment.
striving to ‘get it right’. It simply means
Second, cognitive flexibility encodes for a related
staying curious (‘how interesting I
capacity called complexity tolerance, which
became distracted’) and coming back to
describes how well we can make sound decisions
our intention (‘I’m sitting to meditate’)
and perform good sensemaking in situations of
and paying Attention.
complexity: when we face blurry boundaries,
lots of incoming sense data, and where many
• Whether you’ve been practising
hypotheses for action may be mutually exclusive
mindfulness for 5 minutes or 50 years,
but simultaneously plausible.
you are practising in this way. What
changes is how skilfully you practice these
Popularised by the trauma professional and
3 elements, and the gap between when
facilitator David Treleaven and explored in this
you’re aware that you’re aware and on
episode of our Wisdom Gym, complexity tolerance
autopilot shifts – and even blurs entirely.
is a more intense matter of the ‘framing and
reframing’ seen in Vervaeke’s relevance realisation
schema. A skill we need to harness for all of the
This leads us to a bespoke technique called above, though, is de-centering, which is a core
the Salience Meditation, which we’ve designed skill trained and described in Mindfulness-Based
specifically for the course based on the work of Cognitive Therapy (or MBCT).
John Vervaeke and others. You can find a guided
audio for it in the same section you found this De-centering is a mind-body move in which we
workbook. ‘step outside’ of and observe the contents of
immediate experience. We cease to identify with,
Warning: Vervaeke emphasises that any single and stop believing ourselves identical to, our
meditative practice, however effective, must be thoughts and narratives, emotions, or somatic
accommodated within an ‘ecology of practices’, to sensations. And with this distance, we can pay
encourage the ‘framing and reframing’ necessary closer attention to how these contents arise,
for good sensemaking. This may include staging including in relation to particular triggering stimuli
different forms of meditation. The ‘open inquiry’ and the shaping of beliefs, which makes us less
method, or perhaps a metta (loving-kindness) liable to ‘hijacking’ by temporary events: a cause
practice, can enlarge one’s frames to the of both ineffective sensemaking and much of our
immediate data of experience - and parallel to this, everyday suffering.
the IAA method and forms of vipassana (body-
scanning and deep insight on the workings of
experience) can enclose on experience.

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In Kross et al. (2009), a course of meditation
produced a less self-referential, emotional, and
visceral state among patients asked to reflect
on negative autobiographical memories. Papies
(2015) found that decentering is most helpful
when processing events that are the most
emotionally and personally affecting for us. Other
researchers found that decentering reduces the
Linguistic Intergroup Bias, in which you expect ‘in-
group’ members to behave more positively than
out-group members and it shapes your choice
of language. Similarly, der Schans (2019) found
that decentering decreases hostile attribution, or
the likelihood of projecting negative attributes to
other people.
By de-centering from our beliefs in particular,
we allow for greater cognitive flexibility, which in
turn programs for greater trait resilience. In fact,
evidence suggests that conditions like PTSD and
clinical depression can be modelled as states of
extreme cognitive inflexibility, in which we reify
negative, maladaptive thought patterns as actual
features of reality. A 2005 meta-analysis showed
that cognitive flexibility, among other related
factors, accounts for 16–29% of the variance in
mental illness and emotional ill-health.
One study found that mindfulness-mediated
decentering results in experiences of self-
transcendence, and cognitive flexibility is known
as a mediator of flow experiences: psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s term for mental states
in which we feel ‘in the zone’, and our cognitive
machinery is uniquely well-directed for converging
on our goals and finding meaning in each cycle of
sensemaking.
According to Kavanagh and May’s ‘elaborated
intrusion theory’, de-centering also relieves the
‘cognitive elaboration’ that deepens craving and
compulsive habits - something, you’ll recall, that’s
worsened by our traumatic scars, which often-
underwrite such behaviours. When we invest
our normal depth to the ephemeral contents
of experience, they become more encoded in
working memory, which creates the kind of
‘reciprocal narrowing’ described by Vervaeke.
This is visible, for example, through the ‘cocktail
party effect’, in which attention may be re-directed
involuntarily to the mention of one’s own name
in a context of diffuse background noise. This
is generalised to special triggers of all kinds.
Alcoholics have been observed to find alcohol-
related colour-words (‘beer’) more cognitively
challenging on the Stroop Test, which is a way
of testing our attention. Compulsive acts of all
kinds - such as a reactive opposition to ‘out-group’
members, or a visceral response to an exchange
on social media - will be affected by the same
phenomenon.
Here’s where meditation steps in. As well as
facilitating de-centering, research suggests that
meditation helps with compulsive behaviour
by causing us to pay closer attention to the
local stimuli of a trigger. This helps us to see the
trigger as a mere set of sensations, and not the
compulsive hook that demands our response.
Research also suggests that simply telling addicts
not to pay attention to addictive stimuli - and not
‘give in’, in general - is typically ineffective.
It’s with the power of de-centering - and
mindfulness meditation more generally - that we
can engage in four crucial other kinds of ‘framing
and reframing’ vital for complexity tolerance. In
The Age of Breach, Alexander Beiner proposed a
heuristic for sensemaking in uncertain times called
Grounding, Flipping, Blending, Holding as a way to
quickly sort these capacities.
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 Grounding: Reconnecting with foundations in Conclusions
the body. As well as tapping into the intuitive,
System-1 signals of somatic intelligence, This workbook and the practises you’ll find within
connecting with the body brings us necessarily the Sensemaking Companion are designed
to the present. There’s no ‘wrong answer’ here, to help you make sense more effectively. But
either: sensations of all kinds, including warmth,ultimately they’re just guides; it’s up to you to
cold, pleasure, pain, even numbness and the apply them where you see fit, embodying the
‘absence’ of sensation are acceptable loci for same kind of cognitive flexibility in how you
paying attention. approach them that you’re trying to train. If that
isn’t meta enough for you, also consider that
Holding: Complex phenomena are liable to slip while you’re improving your own sensemaking,
out of the grip of our mental models, but with you aren’t doing it in isolation. We’re all trying
enough mindful attention - and a comprehensive to make sense together of things we’d never be
mental model - we can ‘hold’ onto complexity and able to figure out alone, and we’re doing that in
its contradictions. We can allow one and zero to the context of the wider world. If you’re intrigued
occupy the same space simultaneously. by these second and third person modes of
sensemaking, explore the other two sections of
Flipping: We don’t run on a single ‘operating the Companion.
system’. As Nora Bateson points out, rules of
engagement change across different contexts,
and relationships are governed by different
‘social contracts’. To that extent, we’re already
unconsciously ‘flipping’ - or switching between
different mental models - all the time. Conscious
flipping, though, is when we can toggle between
different worldviews fluidly and with skill as a
core foundation of cognitive flexibility.

Blending: When things that were previously

unconnected come together, they blend. By
combining mental models and ways of knowing,
we can create new ways of seeing and being that
emerge as more than the sum of their parts.

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