How do you know?
And how do you know what you know?
This sounds like a riddle (and may seem like a detour from my previous articles), but there’s a question here I think is worth pondering. It’s a question of how we think and perceive, and how much of that thinking and perceiving we’re actually aware of. How much we know of what we know.
I want to suggest that most of what shapes how we think, feel, and “fit in” never reaches our conscious awareness – and that this matters deeply for how we live, especially here in a little place like Aotearoa.
When we think of what we know, we usually think of facts we can recall, equations we can solve, or ideas we can discuss. The stuff we can consciously remember, equate or articulate. And the more of this you can do, the smarter you are, right?
But is that all intelligence is? Is our overall ‘intelligence’ limited to just head-level, rational thinking? Or are we more than that?
Testing a country’s smarts
Back in 2003, New Zealand aired a national IQ test, Test the Nation.1 Simon Dallow and Lana Coc‑Kroft hosted the TV show while Kiwis sat at home doing the quiz. The morning after, we did what Kiwis do: those with high scores talked them down, those with low scores laughed them off. Don’t be a big-head, and don’t get sensitive about it.
Test the Nation was an IQ, head-smart intelligence test. But the very next day, we’re comparing, relating to each other, finding our pecking order. There’s something relational going on here that matters, even if we’re downplaying success, or laughing off failure. Still, even if only implicitly, our Western culture elevates head-smarts above other smarts. “I think, therefore I am”, right?
Emotional Intelligence
When researchers tried to link business or entrepreneurial success to IQ, they couldn’t make the link. Some people with high IQ stalled, while others with lower IQ succeeded. Facts, equations and ideas only seem to go so far. Head-smarts don’t always equal success.
In 1995, American psychologist Daniel Goleman published his best-seller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,2 arguing that skills like self-awareness, empathy and social-smarts – what he called Emotional Intelligence or EQ – predict success better than head-smarts and academic grades.3
Where I grew up, there was almost an allergic reaction to the word emotion. Emotions weren’t to be displayed or trusted, and the exemplars around me modelled either strong, silent-type stoicism, or easy-going, light-hearted phlegmatism. But EQ isn’t just about knowing emotions (happy, sad, fearful, angry), it’s knowing how we connect and relate to those around us. It’s a relational thing, and another way of knowing. It’s learning to read and connect with others – while also reading and understanding what’s happening inside of us. These give us not just data but meaning.
This knowing ourselves, and understanding others on a relational level, matters a lot.
Survival Instincts
Our urge to fit in is also a survival instinct. Our ancestors were at more risk isolated from their pack. There has always been safety in numbers, and a deep desire to fit in and not be alone. We don’t face tigers on the street in our culture, but we very much face the threat of isolation, rejection and the need to conform within our packs. And our survival brain reacts similarly to these threats today as it did with tigers.
This video from Dr Russ Harris explains this within an evolutionary framework.
For those less comfortable with evolution, I’d argue the ancient Hebrew origin narratives in the Bible tell a similar story. Cain perceived threat by comparison to his brother Abel and killed him. Cain was banished from his community. He was terrified by the threat of isolation.
Whether we trace our lineage back to Adam or Grug, we’ve always constantly scanned our environments and interactions for threats. It’s called neuroception.4 We do this non-consciously. We need safety and connection with those around us, and we need to feel safe and connected. It’s not just for warm fuzzies; it’s a hard-wired survival instinct. We feel a deep need to fit in, so we scan for vibes and feedback from those we interact with, and conform to the norms and expectations of our pack, our family, our culture. But for large parts of our lives we’re completely unaware we’re doing this.
Becoming Conscious of our Non-conscious
Estimates vary, but research has suggested the processing speed of our conscious brain – our rational, conscious, equation-solving brain – can be measured as somewhere between 16-30 bits per second. A bit is a simple yes-no answer to a binary yes-no question. 16-30 tiny binary decisions per second; that’s what we can be aware of – conscious of – at any moment.
But our bodily senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) send around 11 million bits of data per second to our survival brain.5
Conscious, decision-making brain = 16-30 bits per second.
Non-conscious, deep instinctive, autonomic survival brain = 11,000,000 bits per second.
Think about that for a second. (The irony of that sentence isn’t lost on me.)
The vast majority of what we sense, we’re never aware of. But we are sensing it. Our brain is processing all that. It’s a catalogue of signals that feeds our neuroception threat-awareness system. We’re barely conscious of any of it, but it’s all going in, building a map and patterns for surviving this world.
When you walk through a familiar room, you’ll most likely automatically look at where you’re going, and probably won’t notice peripheral stuff like the ceiling. It was always within your field of vision, but it isn’t particularly interesting because it’s bland and white and you’ve seen it before. Your non-conscious brain filters it out. Unless there is something interesting is there, like a big spider. How you react to the spider will likely come down to how you feel about spiders, or your previous experiences of them. Experiences shape perception.6
Your non-conscious brain alerts your conscious brain to a threat. The ceiling was always within your field of vision, but a potential threat triggers not just the noticing, but a somatic, bodily reaction – heart-rate and adrenalin, fight/flight/freeze – especially if you really don’t like spiders. You may not even remember a bad experience with a spider; perhaps when you were tiny a parent or sibling reacted anxiously to one. You noticed that; your survival brain stored that data. Even if you no longer remember it, it built a signal and a pattern that still throws up a “threat” warning when a spider appears in the corner of your vision.
Even a picture of a spider might illicit that response
Cultural Survival
Growing up in the 80s as a boy in a small rural New Zealand town – with a tradie father and grandfather, with two older brothers, British ancestry in my veins, shaped by conservative Christian belief systems – I learnt and intuited what kind of men made it in this place. My 11-million-bit/sec survival brain was picking up these cues and vibes from before I can remember. The exemplar bloke was a strong-silent type, or an affable easy-going type. Not expressive or offensive. Limited emotion. Understated. No big-heads. I needed to be that to fit into this place, to conform in a non-expressive, tall-poppy cutting culture. My threat system learnt how to adapt and survive within these environments; how to fit into the pack, in a small, distant country at the bottom of the South Pacific, where rocking the boat is discouraged, and one doesn’t put their head up above the parapet.
That knowing is still there in the deep, instinctive, survival level of my brain. It’s a well-worn path, reinforced by memories of my emotional expression being unwelcomed, or seeing others in this culture get chopped down or mocked for being different or ‘too much’ – the creatives and truth-tellers, those who dare to speak up and call out this false conformity, or just try to do something different. Something excellent.
The Essential ‘You’
But beneath all the layers of masking, pretense, and conformity there sits something deeper still; a core wiring – an essence – that makes me uniquely me and you uniquely you. It’s where those unique and innate gifts of ours live, those things only I can bring to my world, and you to yours. They were there when you were knitted together, before you were born. But culture shapes us too, and after years of hard-wired conforming and adapting, it takes courage to show those vulnerable, essential parts of us again, and some well-formed neural networks to rewire.
That journey home to our essential self starts with simply recognising these forces exist and have always been at work in our cultures and environments. They are there, and we can’t escape them. But simply noticing; becoming conscious of all these competing forces, and becoming aware of how we react to them; using our conscious brain to notice what rises deep in our instincts, emotions and body sensations as we remember and observe all these shaping influences. Knowing what our masks look like, and what essential parts of us sit behind the masks. And asking better questions of all these instincts. “Is the spider really a threat? My body is saying ‘fight/flight/freeze’ in response to the threat, but is the threat real? Or can I pause, breathe slowly, and then deal with the spider differently?”
But this isn’t about spiders, but conformity to norms. Do we still have to submit to those narrow norms?
The Journey to Belonging
Beginning to ask myself these questions has started to help explain a lot of ‘whys’ for me. Why I hide emotion or expression or creativity, even though they are naturally a part of me, and were there before I decided to fit in. Why I lived at a hundred miles an hour, disconnected from my emotional and body intelligences, unaware of what really drives me. I still find it hard to listen to my somatic body cues. I find it far easier to ‘harden up, and just play on’; that became a well-worn path.
But I don’t have to keep living that way. I don’t have to keep pretending to be hard, stoic, cheerful or non-offensive. Change starts with awareness – of what impulses rise in me in challenging or threatening moments – environmentally and culturally, and what old rules I’m still unconsciously following; what cultural cues my neuroception is still scanning for. Belonging is a journey of slowly learning to realise all these things happened and still happen, but they don’t define me.
Belonging isn’t just a personal, introspective exercise either. When we learn to be at ease with ourselves we learn to accept others as they are too. Emotional Intelligence grows. That’s crucial for others around that have always felt like they don’t fit in, or don’t have something worth saying. Those whose gender has meant their voices are less heard or respected. Or whose ethnicities have placed them outside of decision making or culture shaping influence. Whose neurodiverse way of thinking and processing has been misunderstood and misconstrued. Or whose disabilities or limitations has left them feeling unseen and unvalued. We need their perspectives too, and they need to know it’s safe to be heard.
So when I ask “How do you know what you know”, I don’t just mean your IQ, or the facts in your head. I mean those millions of quiet signals your body has been collecting since before you can even remember; those connections and intuitive pieces of data that have shaped you and taught you how to survive in a threatening world. The work now is to begin to notice all that, and to ask better questions of it all, like “Who was I before the world got its hands on me? Who am I behind the mask?”
Nørretranders uses this analogy, in his interview on The Jim Rutt Show