Memory Reconsolidation is one candidate for a scientific of theory of "How to Actually Change Your Mind." In this post, I'll give a few fake frameworks about how memory reconsolidation works, in order to provide intuition pumps for the rest of the sequence.

Schemas as Belief Clusters

For the purposes of this sequence, we'll describe a schema as a particular cluster of felt Aliefs that point towards a goal or set of goals.

I often find it useful to think of beliefs as arranged in a hierarchy of goals, as theorized in Perceptual Control Theory, Connection Theory, and Predictive Processing Theory.

Schemas, or Parts, then represent clusters of these beliefs trying to achieve some specific need.

In this framework, schema's don't represent any sort of natural boundary, and we can expand them and contract them at will based on what we're working on. Schemas themselves can overlap without natural boundaries, and can even contain their own internal conflicts.

3 Steps to Reconsolidate Schemas

In Unlocking the Emotional Brain, the authors state three steps needed for memory re-consolidation:

1. Activate the Old Schema

2. Challenge the Old Schema

3. Learn a Replacement Schema

All of the techniques covered in this sequence implicitly or explicitly cover the three steps. However, step #3 is also augmented later on in the Debugging Process through the "Integration" step.

The Tradeoff Between Activation and Challenge

There's an inherent tradeoff between activating the old schema and challenging it. The stronger and more perceptible the challenge is, the more likely it is to be strong enough to trigger the reconsolidation. However, this strength comes with two downsides:

1. Challenging yourself in a very strong way doesn't feel good. It feels internally violent.

2. The stronger the challenge, the more likely you are to deactivate the schema you're challenging, creating resistance and making reconsolidation impossible.

For this reason, we start with the techniques that provide the weakest challenges, and gradually work our way up to stronger and stronger challenge, waiting till we feel a shift towards a more nuanced and accurate schema.

4 Schema Access Points

In Kaj's Post on Unlocking the Emotional Brain, he points to a paper by Lane et al that give 3 ways to access a schema:

Because I think the names for these 3 methods to acces...

alexislearning

alexislearning

alexislearning

alexislearning