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What does it mean to be "open-minded"? Are some people genuinely more inclusive in their thinking, more expansive in how they process information? Experiments in personality psychology show that open-minded people do indeed process information in different ways and may literally
see the world differently from the average person.
The personality trait that best reflects the lay concept of open-mindedness is called "openness to experience," or simply "openness." Open people tend to be
intellectually curious, creative and imaginative. They are interested in art and are voracious consumers of
music, books and other fruits of culture. They also tend to be
politically liberal.
According to personality theorists, openness reflects a greater "
breadth, depth, and permeability of consciousness" and propensity to "
cognitively explore" both abstract information (ideas and arguments) and sensory information (sights and sounds). In other words, open people engage with the various percepts, patterns and perspectives that clamor for space in our mind-information is like catnip for their brain.
These abstract notions may well seem like academic hand waving, but they are anchored in concrete data from many research studies. For example, consider the superior performance by open people on tests of creativity called
divergent thinking tasks. These require individuals to generate multiple, diverse solutions to a simple problem, such as: "How many uses can you think of for a brick?" Less open people typically generate fewer and more obvious answers to this question-building walls, building houses, building other stuff. But for highly open people, the possibilities flood in. A brick can be used as a weapon, a paperweight, a replacement leg for a broken sofa. Or it can be smashed up and mixed with water to make paint. Open people see more possibilities in even the most mundane of objects.
We see something similar in studies of
latent inhibition, a process also known as learned irrelevance. Learning what to ignore is critical for effective psychological functioning-it would be simply overwhelming to process the full stream of information available to our senses as we make our way through the world. So we cull through this information for relevant details, screening out everything else. The problem is, the screened-out information might be useful later, but by then we are slow to realize its significance, to
unlearn its irrelevance. This process can be modeled in the laboratory by preexposing participants to seemingly unimportant stimuli that later form the basis of a learning task. For the average person, this preexposure stifles subsequent learning-the critical stimulus has been rendered "irrelevant" and fails to penetrate awareness. Not so, however, for those high in openness, who are less susceptible to latent inhibition. This again demonstrates a more inclusive mode of thinking-a "leaky" cognitive system, if you will-that lets in information that others filter out.
These studies show that open people are less susceptible to the psychological "blind spots" that help us pare back the complexity of the world. And research shows that this characterization is more than a metaphor:
open people literally see things differently in terms of basic visual perception.
Consider
inattentional blindness-the screening out of visual information beyond our attentional focus. You have experienced this if you have ever been so preoccupied with one thing that you failed to see something else right in front of your eyes. (Smartphone-jabbing pedestrians dawdling along the bike path, this means you.) In a classic study often dubbed the "
Invisible Gorilla" test, researchers showed participants a film clip of several people passing a basketball back and forth and asked them to count the number of passes between players in white and to ignore the players in black. During the film, someone in a gorilla costume wandered in among the players. In full view, this hairy interloper looked into the camera, beat its chest and drifted off again. Amazingly, most participants in this study reported that they did not see anything unusual or surprising during the clip. Highly open people, on the other hand, are less susceptible to inattentional blindness: they tend to see the things that others block out.
My colleagues and I at the University of Melbourne in Australia have explored these ideas further. In one recent study, we examined links between openness and a perpetual phenomenon called
binocular rivalry. This occurs when one image is presented to our left eye while a different image is presented to the right eye. Because the brain cannot extract a coherent picture from these incompatible percepts, the two images seem to flip back and forth in our mind's eye, each image rivaling the other for dominance. But sometimes both images do break through into conscious perception as a scrambled mash-up. In our study, we found that open people perceived this "mixed percept" for longer periods. It is as though the gates of perception are agape, allowing more visual information to flow into consciousness for open people.
We have also examined how these findings extend to a very different kind of experience called
mixed emotions-the simultaneous experience of contrasting feeling states (bittersweetness, nervous excitement, and so on). Might open people also be susceptible to such experiences, to have seemingly incompatible
feelings break through into conscious experience, analogous to the two percepts in binocular rivalry? Indeed, we found that such individuals do report experiencing mixed emotions more frequently in their lives. This may be another example of the "permeability of consciousness," in this case giving rise to complex emotional experiences.
What is happening in the brains of open people to produce these distinctive experiences? Here our knowledge is far murkier and less certain, the
neuroscience of personality being a fraught and fledgling field. Some evidence implicates
dopamine, a neurochemical that-among many other functions-signals the incentive value of information. This process might explain why open people seem to have more sensitive radars for detecting and processing all kinds of concepts, percepts and qualia. Another clue is an association between openness and activity in the "
default network," a neural system that simulates various experiences such as mind wandering, mental time travel and imagining others' point of view. More research is needed to determine whether these neural processes underpin the flexible and inclusive cognition that characterizes open people.
As personality psychologists delve deeper into openness to experience, we push back the boundaries of knowledge of this fascinating trait. Is it an advantage to be higher on openness, or are there downsides? Can we change our level of openness and, if so, how? Is openness a uniquely human trait? How did it evolve? As the answers to these questions unfold, we better understand what it means to be open-minded and how it shapes our experience of the world.
About the authorLuke Smillie is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Melbourne in Australia and has published numerous research papers on personality and individual differences. He was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Queensland in Australia, has held positions at the University of London and is now director of the Personality Processes Lab at Melbourne.
The experience of those who think their thinking is knowing, is simply reinforcement of their thinking.
Willingness to accept evidences that do not support the current thinking is open to mind rather than presuming to have one that thinks it knows.
The need to NOT know what fear inhibits opening to, is the 'fear of the unknown'.
What is unknown cannot be feared - but fear can project a past learning so as to generate a negative expectation and defend against it before it 'occurs'.
The belief in the pain and loss of negative learning outcomes operates the dissociation of the mind from true or present engagement in discovery, communication and relationship.
The mind seeks 'answer' within the rules set by its defence.
The mind seeks reinforcement and validation for its defended ruling in - and out - or filtering of communication.
The mind of mutually agreed definition generates narrative identity and control as the collective sacrifice of curiosity and freedom of endeavour to accepted and asserted 'reality'.
The loss of joy in freedom is the loss of life to loveless dictate accorded reality or power - and associated with self-protection. This conflict generates insanity within the mind and as social defences running as 'group-mind'.
The limit to tolerance for lack, pain and isolation is the disintegration of allegiance to a poor or faulty investment - regardless how much has been poured into it.
The willingness to question the reality of one's experience is the release of a mind-set to a curiosity of desire to simply know.
The desire to know is a stirring or prompting movement within being.
The fear of the desire to know, is the fear of loss of self.
Fear is division and conflict in which a self-struggle operates defence.
But knowing and loving being are one - or inseparable.
But the wish to experience without love of true is a 'mind set apart' that denies or rejects wholeness, presence, being - by engagement and identification with self-reflection in image, form and concept.
The purpose accepted, is the aligning of the focus of the mind to its fulfilment.
The current result is true feedback to the active purpose.
Awakened purpose knows the alignment of purpose and desire in the peace and joy of unconflicted gratitude for being, as it recognizes the call for correction from beneath patterns of thought and belief given reality that are out of accord with who you are revealed and accepting to be the willingness of.
Opening with discernment, is not opening to a phishing ruse.
The intuitive recognition and alignment in source nature 'delivers us not unto evil' by giving only as in truth we would receive. And recognizing by our receipt when we are out of true, so as to release it from accepted currency of acting from or teaching to ourself and others.
We can only take this step now.
The 'we' is the recognition that isolation in pain and lack is not founded in true and so the true nature of Mind reintegrates the sense of de-fenced externalised existence from within - through simple willingness extended.
The personality structure in total is our world - but it is a world of conflict and struggle to evade pain and loss.
The re-purposing of the personality structure is the releasing of the guilting denial to a discerning embrace.
Love is the willingness to abide with - and as - the revealing of the true.
Fear disrupts or identifies in the belief in disruption - as a sense of 'disconnected independence' asserting over or masking over rejection/abandonment/betrayal/guilt.
None of this post has 'true' outside the living recognition, acceptance and extension of a like quality. The forms we take are not the basis of a unified expression. Unified purpose embodies a rich diversity of uniquely synchronous appreciation or engagement in living - as freedom of being and not the conflicted confusion of freedom assigned to a supposedly independent 'doing'. Whatever you do - will embody the purpose you are accepting as the true of you now.
So let the focus be opened to notice the mind, the emotional response and the physical sensing - as a simple self-honesty - and not a witch-hunt or a series of hoops through which to 'validate'.
Awakening is not a 'goal' in some other moment - but a simple self-honesty from which to live this day well. And if the 'evils of the day thereof' are greatly challenging to the existing sense of self - bring more willingness for self-honesty so as not to be 'phished' by reaction into identity theft - and forgive yourself immediately when waking to that such reaction has been operating a 'mind unwatched' - or 'forgetting'.
The inability to keep watch is not a blame but a current readiness of abiding. We grow in what we value and this applies no less to giving value to fearful, shameful or negative 'appreciations'.
I sense that a sense within being of 'don't go there because it induces dissonance and distorted vision', developed a conceptual sense of coercive prohibition to the desire to explore through the lens of distortion.
Breaking out of one's own false-flagged prohibition to possess the power to judge and assert accepted and rejected reality brought self inflated gratification followed by loss of power, connection, functionality, communication, and support - all of which assigned to self-guilt - that then projects out onto the distorted perception of others, of world and of 'life gone wrong' - because such self-guilt is literally and actually intolerable. But is it - or anything built upon it - true?