Gerald Hüther - Individualisierte Gemeinschaften - Teil 3 #4

the cause of this data highway, because I have experienced it all these years and I have behaved the way people still behave, although it simply no longer fits from a strategy point of view? Yes, that's what this data highway in the brain is. These are solutions that people find. And if you grow into this world as a child and are always led and you are once told then the solution you have is that you say, okay, that doesn't help that much and it doesn't help you if I don't think about it myself, then I'd rather see what others want. And then they don't need to guide you anymore, you're already running right behind them. But that's also a blessing, because then you know what you have to buy, then you know what you have to know, then you know what you have to do from morning to evening. And that's how people actually feel very comfortable, because it's all clear, so to speak. They live in a finished structure, they have nothing to say, but they are always told what it is and that is embedded in the brain as a solution, so it has to be. And if you suddenly release them into freedom, where they should take responsibility for themselves, where they should decide for themselves what and what they work for, then it doesn't work. I talked to schools, there are schools, the so-called free schools, which abolish all these censorship and all that. And then I was a bit surprised, they told me, until a student, so if a student arrives at this school, he had already been to another one before, where he failed, and then he arrives at this free school where learning is suddenly voluntary, then they say, until he is free of the data highway that he created in the other school. That takes almost as long as he has been in the other school. If he is in another school for three years or five years, it can take five years until he is finally alive again. But I mean, we probably both experienced this consumer behavior in high school. It's no different there. Yes, in high school it's just like that. Basically, you have to say, the university is breeding this regularly, because it demands from the schools to carry out these selection procedures according to these criteria. Where the numberus clausus is then determined, so to speak, who is allowed to study medicine now. And I asked medical students again and again when I was still at the university, why they want to become doctors. And then there were quite a few of them who said, I had 1.0. Yes, yes. Hopefully I will be spared by the doctors. You can only hope that you don't get stabbed like that. In your book, Ways out of Fear, about the art of assuming the unpredictability of life, you write about how, on the one hand, fear is an unfavorable state. This incoherent state. And on the other hand, without fear, no change takes place. So no learning takes place. Can you explain that a little more precisely? Because I don't think you should draw the conclusion that you always need fear to learn. Or is that the case? No, no. But it is the case that the brain is constantly striving for a state in which everything up there fits together reasonably well. And that has nothing to do with us. Every nerve cell would do that on its own. Because every nerve cell has to make sure that it is not overloaded. That not too much gets in. And that's why the nerve cells connect in a way that in the end a structure is created, which is characterized by the fact that it consumes as little energy as possible. That's the interesting thing about it. And they don't do that on their own. All living systems do that. Basically, every company, every family, has to organize itself in such a way that as little energy as possible is consumed. If you consume as much energy as you can, then you heat up. As long as you still have so much energy, you can afford a terrible relationship culture. You can see that in some families. Nothing works. Not everyone understands each other, but they have a sailing yacht and think about whether they should buy a southern island. That doesn't help either. So they need an insane amount of energy and then there are other families where it just works out wonderfully with each other. They need almost nothing. They have implemented this principle reasonably. At the moment, we experience worldwide that the amount of energy we use is no longer available in this way and therefore we have to save energy. And that forces us to rebuild our relationships and the structures that we have created. So that it doesn't consume as much energy anymore. So far we don't know exactly how this works. And of course the brain does that as well. And every time there is some kind of unrest, because you have a problem, because something has occurred that you didn't expect, then there is a mess up there, so to speak. The nerve cells all fire wildly at each other, consume a lot of energy. That spreads out when you can't find a solution. And then older areas are affected. Then it affects the whole body. Then you have these feelings of soft knees and shortness of breath. And hair stands up to mountains and sweating. And that is at the latest the state where we then say, oh, now it's getting dangerous. And then we call it fear in German. But that would have to be looked at in more detail, because normally you already notice when it goes down in the brain in the elevator with this mess, that it is getting dangerous now. And then you will do something immediately. So if I realize that this is crap. If I notice it. I have a problem with Mr. Putin, then I would do something immediately and not wait until the war has broken out. And that's why we're all very good at feeling that something is coming that will scare us. But before we get the fear, we already have a solution. And that is even built into the brain when I open the door below and there is a lion sitting in front of the door. Then I don't even need to think about it, but the door automatically closes again. This is my automatic, automated, archaic emergency program. It turns on and boom, the reaction comes. And then there is this other variant and only we humans know it. So the English don't know a term for fear either. They only know what you have with the lion. And that means fear. And the other thing they still know is a kind of ridiculous fear that you don't really have to worry about. That's called anxiety. In German it's called Ängstlichkeit. This fear that we have, they don't have a word for it, they call it German Angst. German Angst, exactly. And German Angst is what happens when I lie in bed in the evening and imagine lions sitting in front of every window. And down by the door as well. And when I'm lying there, I can't close the door. I am, so to speak, a prisoner of my own imagination. And I have the same fear that I would have if I couldn't close the door down there with the lions. I can't find a solution. And these are really difficult situations and we get stuck in them more often than we think. Because it's always the case that it's just the imagination that scares us and not the reality at all. And that's what we're working with. If you don't buy this hair washing agent with this hair root build-up agent in it, then you'll soon have a bald spot. Wonderful. That's what scares me and at the same time offers the solution. And if you don't take this wrinkle cream, or if you don't work hard at school, if you don't brush your teeth, and if you don't perform well as an employee, then it's constant frightening. And that's enough for people to be put into a state of excitement and then try to find a solution. And the solution is always there as soon as this incoherent, excited state of confusion in the brain is calmed down again. And the problem is that you find solutions until a certain point that are okay in the situation. For example, drinking schnapps. If I have a terrible debate with the boss again, I can drink a bottle of whiskey and then the brain is satisfied. Because now I don't even know that I had a boss, what happened, I don't know anymore. The alcohol makes such a nice inhibition and at some point I fall asleep and it's good. That means there are also solutions that are stupid. Yes. And there are more of them than we think. So one solution can be that if you are always oppressed, you try to get power over others. If you are constantly told that you are not good enough, that you persuade yourself that you are too stupid for everything. Yes. Then you realize that you can go through the whole spectrum. And I do that sometimes, it is also very interesting for those who listen to us, if you have a person with peculiar behaviors in front of him and with special ideas, it is very helpful if you ask yourself, what kind of solution could that be, which he found there, probably at some point, but with which he still struggles to this day. So people who have such an excessive need for order and have to clean up everything. Yes. That's a solution, that's not a character trait, that's not a personality trait, but a solution found by them. Yes. So, and now you realize that you can't ask me such things, because then I move very far away from the starting point of the question. But the fact is that we constantly want to go where everything fits. Then we also have an idea, paradise, heaven, and the reality of life looks like it doesn't exist. There is only one moment in your life where everything fits together in the brain and that is when you have just died. And as long as we are still alive, there are always disturbances. When I open my eyes, there is already a disturbance up there. You don't have to call it all fear now. But if we couldn't find a solution, we would get scared. And that's why it's good when we realize, aha, something is coming to us, where we don't yet know what it means to us, and we are looking for a solution. And if that was the wrong solution, then we come back to a situation where this solution brings us into a problem, and then we have to find a solution for it again. And if you do that all your life and you realize again and again, you've been wrong again, then something like error-friendliness arises. Yes. There is a huge treasure of knowledge in you and that there are certain solutions that are adequate for certain things, in others they are not. And if you continue, you will develop a skill, let's just call it coherence-reproduction-competence feeling. Because we don't have a name for it in Germany at the moment, because we haven't been able to think about it for that long. Coherence-reproduction-competence feeling would be what someone has, who can say, oh, let's see what's coming to me again now. Welcome, problem, I will also grow on you. Yes. Madness. And these are happy people. These are people who can't get out of the way so quickly. But you can only become one if you have found more than one problem solution in your life. That means, in order to become someone like that, you have to have exposed yourself to the wind of this world. It must have blown from all sides, you must have had different problems over and over again and they have solved them in different ways. And then you have this coherence-reproduction-competence. Yes, yes. Now I have actually measured coherence times in physics, but not in semiconductors, in adjusted conditions. Yes, this term also comes from physics. I have taken it for this reason, you can't call it harmony, it's not resonance either. Because it's a dynamic process, it changes constantly and in this change it has to fit. We don't have a term for that. How does something on the way, while changing itself, fit again and again? Coherence, I thought, is a term that is not yet so proven, except for the semiconductor technicians. Yes, in quantum physics, let's put it that way. Where you can ultimately experience how synergies arise. The term of synergy, Hermann Haken, ultimately also comes from physics. I studied laser physics, so these are all common terms to me. I just don't know if this is a common term for every listener and viewer. But ultimately it's about self-organization and principles of self-order that dissolve themselves. You described it earlier. Yes, but it's all self-organization. It's important that it's a self-organization that has a vector, a direction, where it goes. Namely to energy saving. Yes, well, that's the description of all systems in physics. A stable state is the one that consumes the least energy. You also explain this in your books, interestingly, with entropy. You also studied a lot of physics, of course. In your biology studies and in your whole career. What interests me now, to go into practice again, we have just discussed this topic of fear. This changes people in the most diverse variants. Now I observe children, they are not afraid, they are simply creative in themselves. They build sandcastles, and do other things. I don't think they are afraid. What is the other impulse for intrinsic motivation of learning? Let's put it this way. The children, all of us, also you and me, we came into the world with an unwavering joy of learning. It's in us. And it has nothing to do with genetics, but it has something to do with the principle of organization, how we were born. Everyone of us has incredible learning abilities behind them. If you look at it in an ultrasonic way, how these unborn children make their finger movements and how they learn to put their thumb in their mouth. They are already on their way with a desire for discovery and a desire for design. And of course it is logical that it should go on like this out there. And that's why they continue like this. Until we prevent them and make them the object of our teaching. And I always like to remember the fruit growers who tie their little apple trees with the branches to the wires. And they have a terminus technicus for tying the branches to these wires. And it's called education. In order to have maximum income, the fruit trees are grown. And then I always stop at this point, because I feel bad when I pass it on to our children. And yet I believe that this is exactly the same as we do with education.