Imagine you were an archer in a medieval castle in the year 1,100.

You would have defended your castle from the topmost battlements where you had a sweeping view of the surrounding countryside.

You would have seen the enemy advance with its archers and siege engines, and you would have been able to choose your target, any target in the field.

When arrows and random projectiles started hurtling your way you would have ducked behind a merlon (an upright portion on the battlement wall) and only stepped out from behind it to launch your own arrows.

And therein lay the problem: in order to launch your arrow you would have had to expose yourself to oncoming arrows.

This, sadly, proved the end of many a castle archer.

Fast forward a hundred years when a new architectural feature hit the castle scene. The feature called a loophole or arrow slit, was all about protecting the archers. It allowed them to launch arrows continuously while remaining safe and hidden.

Loopholes first appeared in ancient Greece in the third century BCE but didn’t find its way to Europe and England until the late 12th century.

Loopholes were long vertical apertures or windows in the outside castle walls, walls that could be up to twelve feet thick. On the outside loopholes were as tall as a man but only as wide as his fist.

On the inside, the slit flared into an opening or embrasure that could be many feet wide. This interior wedge of space gave the archer room to maneuver and launch arrows through the slit.

He could pivot his body to cover a tapering slice of land below, but only a very small area was visible at any given time.

The benefit of the loophole was clear: it kept the archer safe from incoming arrows.

But it had a downside: the view from any single loophole was at best extremely limited.

And therein lay the loophole dilemma: in order to remain safe the archer had to sacrifice flexibility and visibility.

When loopholes overtook merlons what was lost was a broad and unobstructed view of the world outside.

Loopholes and the Bureaucracy of the Brain

We humans have our own version of the loophole dilemma embedded in our brains. The survival of our distant forebears required that they be able to process the huge amount of information entering their brains through their senses at any given time.

To handle this, early hominid brains developed a strategy that was so effective it lives on in us today: a circular system full of mental red tape.

This bureaucracy of the brain consists of organizing patterns made up of all our memories, knowledge, and beliefs, and are organized according to our individual rules of thinking, i.e., our “logic”.

These patterns allowed our forebears to react instantly to stimuli (Can I eat it? Can it eat me?) without having to go through a rigorous, and often fatal, process of analysis of each new situation.

As with loopholes, there was a price to pay for all this security.

Organizing patterns gave us the ability to have a clear organized view of the world out of which we could rapidly make decisions.

Clear and organized perhaps, but rarely accurate or complete. What we sacrificed for this security was our ability to see a larger more diverse view of the world.

We are literally stuck peering through the loophole of our organizing patterns. It is a narrow field of vision, limited to the collective information already stored and organized in our brains.

In a circular process organizing patterns alter new information so that it fits into what we already believe.

The altered new information in turn reinforces the organizing patterns, and round and round it goes. This becomes our whole world, the wedge of ground outside our loophole; it IS our reality, and something really new rarely enters our cognition.

When we think we are changing or gaining new understandings, for the most part, we are like the archer pivoting from side to side in the embrasure but always within the loophole: we see only our point of view, and it feels like our survival depends on it.