Big Changes break our Perception – blame our Words

As the world changes, we are a little blind to process those changes. We talk about changes to understand them. 2 problems – Hypo-cognition and Hyper-cognition – make it very difficult to understand the changes.

Both in action: During the AI hype, we romanticized the black box as if it had consciousness and emotion (hyper-cognition). Because non-experts often lack the vocabulary to discuss how neural nets work or how the math is mathing, we find it hard to understand it (hypo-cognition).

TLDR

• Hypo-cognition: Out of mind, out of sight. We can’t understand what we can’t imagine or describe.
• Hyper-cognition: I have a hammer, so my problem must be a nail. We apply the wrong approach to understand new things.

Hypo-cognition blocks learning; Hyper-cognition leads to misinterpretation

From a data science perspective, hypo-cognition is like not having a model to fit the data, so the data looks like noise. And, hyper-cognition is like using linear regression when you really should be using decision trees, so it looks like there is a simple relationship between 2 variables.

Hypo-cognition – Out of mind, out of sight

During COVID-19, many of us did not have the medical vocabulary to describe what was happening. We stuck to using familiar words and concepts to describe something entirely new in most of our lives. We assumed many wrong things about how to fight it, how to live our daily lives, what risks we could’ve taken, etc.

Without the words to describe viruses or immunity, we misunderstood the pandemic (hypo-cognition for the general public). Knowing technical details and words would’ve reduced confusion and conspiracy, and made it easier to communicate (not hypo-cognitive).

When we don’t have the right words or mental tools to understand a phenomenon, we are in a state of hypo-cognition. In other words, we fail to understand things because we lack the words and mental tools to fully conceptualize an idea/object/event.

(hypo = under/below, cognition = mental representations & thoughts).

In a stricter sense, being unaware and being unable to be aware is the 2-tiered problem of hypo-cognition.

Awareness programs try to reduce hypo-cognition in their audience’s mind. They educate people with stories, technical words, and frameworks. The clarity we gain through those is the opposite of being hypo-cognitive.

There is experimental research^[1] that shows that the very presence of a word to describe something creates an additional layer of meaning that helps us conceptualize a new idea. In the study, aliens were shown to people across 2 categories – those to approach or those to avoid. Just giving both categories a label (a non-sense word title), subjects learned to identify which alien should be avoid or approached better. The non-sense label – aka words – by themselves helped learning even when they gave no new information about the things subjects were learning.

In hypo-cognition^[2], the linguistic and cognitive tools to identify and interpret an object/concept are missing. Literally, no words to identify an object. As a result, hypo-cognitive people fail to see or remember things they know nothing about. That is, people who don’t have the words to recognize a concept fail to recognize it, and therefore fail to learn about it.

The linguistic and cognitive tools are “cognitive representations” – they include words, images, symbols, shapes, processes, connections, examples, diagrams, etc. These representations range from hazy/non-existent (hypo-cognitive) to expert-level clarity (not hypo-cognitive).

Without knowing the word “giraffe,” you might forget seeing one or dismiss it as a weird dog.

Those words also solidify our learning in the long term. A process called semanticization^[3] transforms our experiential learning (long-term memory) into a verbal summary (semantic memory). The added language component helps us recall & compress our learning.

For example, learning how to make coffee as a barista requires knowledge of the equipment. Remembering this is easier when language encodes the learning. It’s like a subtitle for the memory.

Weaponized hypo-cognition

Hypo-cognition is used as a political weapon to control narratives and force people to forget something. If related words are censored and banned from usage, people can’t talk about it. Eventually, those words – and their linked ideas – disappear from public awareness. The government can then move on as if nothing happened by forcing hypo-cognition on people with the use of censorship & punishment for using certain words.

In 2022, India’s political structure “Lok Sabha” deemed many words unparliamentary^[4] and officially released a booklet containing words that will be expunged from official records. The unparliamentary word list has many words – hypocrisy, rape, Gunda (goon), corruption, illegal, fraud, etc. – that severely alter the official records. This controls the interpretation and narrative. Even though people can use them in debates & meetings, ideas described by those words will either vanish or get diluted in official records, which will then alter sensitive/serious narratives.

Fiction has many examples of this. The book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is about suppressing intellectual discourse and critical thinking by controlling access to knowledge and ideas. In that dystopia, people cannot get intellectual because books have been destroyed. People lose the ability to think critically and become compliant. In 1984 by George Orwell, Big Brother deleted words and ideas from basic communication (newspeak). People couldn’t conceptualize individual freedom because words were removed from usage.

Hypo-cognition literally blinds us to things around us^[5], even when they are there. It slowly deletes things from our perception.

When we lack the words to describe something, we fail to notice it. That's hypo-cognition. It deletes things from our perception. Share on X

So when we have the words – that is when we are not hypo-cognitive – we recall our past learning better, and we also understand new things better.

The opposite of this is an equal problem.

Hyper-cognition – I have a hammer, so my problem is a nail

We have many different ways of understanding things – analogies and metaphors, a collection of words and visuals, or different mental models. We acquire these mental tools by learning a variety of things. However, in hyper-cognition, we misfit what we understand to new things we are trying to understand. Like using the laws of physics to understand how people act in love. Robert Levy, the American Psychiatrist who coined hypo- & hyper- cognition^[6], describes how Tahitians (a large ethnic group from Polynesia) didn’t have words for grief and sorrow. So, they interpreted grief and sorrow as sickness because they had words for sickness. This changed their perception of grief and sorrow. This is an overfitting of the concept of sickness to the concept of grief.

(hyper = above/more, cognition = mental representations & thoughts). Hyper-cognition is a state of over-using a mental tool (word, process, or visual) to incorrectly process a new idea.

Hyper-cognition is more devious than hypo-cognition. Hyper-cognition misfits/over-applies cognitive representations where they don’t fit, while Hypo-cognition makes us blind to ideas.

Unlike real-world tools like hammers and nails, incorrect use of mental tools is harder to spot.

Look at how people compare AI to children or experts. Is comparing AI to human intelligence the right approach considering it is trained on a knowledge base extremely different than how humans acquire knowledge? Logically, shouldn’t it be given its own category of intelligence?

These questions test if the Human-AI comparison is done correctly or not. Let’s stick to the “AI is like the smartest 8-year-old” comparison. Can we also say that a dog is like the dumbest 5-year-old? Can we also measure a human’s ability to swim based on a whale’s? Can we compare our ability to build machines that fly with birds’ flying abilities? (we use a machine, they don’t).

Hyper-cognition is deceptive – it resembles good analysis. But overapplying the idea of a child’s intelligence or a human’s engineering feat to animals leads to dead ends.

Let’s take a marketing principle, “Scarcity creates value.” Being hyper-cognitive would be applying this to a relationship and thinking, “If I interact less and disappear more often, I will be valued more”.

This is a case of “overgeneralization” – misfitting an idea unto another. Hyper-cognition ignores context, and that is the problem.

Then there are micro-level hypercognitive problems that have made our language itself confusing.

Costco had to recall 36,000 Kg of Butter^[7] because the packaging failed to mention “contains milk”. This might sound ultra absurd because – duh, butter is dairy. Just like Pork doesn’t need a label saying “contains pig”.

Unfortunately, we’ve developed a very bad habit of misnaming things for simplicity. We sacrificed conceptual clarity for ease. By already using a concept, and applying it to places it does not belong to, we created simplicity by being hyper-cognitive. Consequently, we also created confusion for anyone who hasn’t yet been exposed to these words or ideas.

Body butter isn’t butter, vegan chicken isn’t chicken, and soya bacon isn’t bacon. Black pudding is neither black nor a pudding.

Sometimes, we name things based on their shape or texture. Other times, by ingredients or their function. Each of these is a simple form of hyper-cognition.

We blur definitions and confuse ourselves as we keep doing this. Language often sacrifices accuracy for accessibility, so knowing when something is hyper-cognitive helps us figure out unknowns better.

At best… hyper-cognition might lead to incorrect analysis. At worst… dilute the value of precision.

When we have just a few mental frameworks to understand something, we end up overfitting them to new ideas, and that leads to wrong analyses. That's why we need to update and upgrade the frameworks we use for thinking. Share on X

The fix?

In short, Hypo-cognition makes it difficult to learn and notice things. Hyper-cognition leads to wrong interpretations.

The words and context, together, are needed to understand things and accurately talk about them. Hypo-cognition & Hyper-cognition govern our perception of the world. And, we either need to learn the cognitive representations or contextually choose the right cognitive representations to keep up with the changes.

To combat both, learn words, processes & how things work, and contexts in new developments. They will help you recognize changes, and then learn enough so you have a diverse toolkit to process new ideas. That means… a learning mindset.

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