Much of our meaning making takes place outside of our awareness: if you don't know that you are making the inference, how can you stop yourself unless you stay in a continuous state of alert?
We have an ingrained biological need to reduce dimensionality. Information wants to be reduced. Information is also costly to store. The more orderly, less random, patterned and narratized a series of words or symbols, the easier it is to store that series in one's mind. A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Finally, information is costly to manipulate and retrieve.
Post hoc rationalization
What we "see" is what lies within the information set, and we easily make distortions in the act of processing it. Even from an anatomical perspective, it is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.
In an experiment, psychologists asked women to select from among twelve pairs of nylon stockings the ones they preferred. The researchers then asked the women their reasons for their choices. Texture, "feel," and color featured among the selected reasons. All the pairs of stockings were, in fact, identical. The women supplied backfit, post hoc explanations. Does this suggest that we are better at explaining than at understanding?
It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations. And this theorizing disease is rarely under our control: it is largely anatomical, part of our biology, so fighting it requires fighting one's own self. So, the ancient skeptics' precepts to withhold judgment go against our nature.
There are reasons for us to be suspicious of "right brain/left brain" distinctions and subsequent pop-science generalizations about personality. Indeed, the idea that the left brain controls language may not be so accurate: the left brain seems more precisely to be where pattern recognition resides, and it may control language only insofar as language has a pattern-recognition attribute. Another difference between the hemispheres is that the right brain deals with novelty. It tends to see series of facts (the particular, or the trees) while the left one perceives the patterns, the gestalt (the general, or the forest).
To see an illustration of our biological dependence on a story, consider the following experiment. First, read this:
A BIRD IN THE
THE HAND IS WORTH
TWO IN THE BUSH
Do you see anything unusual? Try again.*
The Sydney-based brain scientist Alan Snyder made the following discovery. If you inhibit the left hemisphere of a right-handed person (more technically, by directing low-frequency magnetic pulses into the left frontotemporal lobes), you lower his rate of error in reading the above caption. Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However, if you zap people's left hemispheres, they become more realistic--they can draw better and with more verismilitude. Their minds become better at seeing the objects themselves, cleared of theories, narratives, and prejudice.
When we become aware of something it is a "call to action" to do something about it. Conceptual awareness helps us intellectually understand the distinctions between managing and leading. But such an approach teaches ideas, not skills. As adult learners, we need exercises, experiences and coaches to turn concepts into leadership abilities.
*The word the is written twice.
Source: "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Tales (Random House)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable