Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

by Jordan B. Peterson

Enough has been learned in the last half-century of inquiry into intellectual and emotional function to enable the development of a provisional general theory of emotional regulation. Description of the role that reaction to novelty or anomaly plays in human information processing is clearly central to such a theory. A compelling body of evidence suggests that our affective, cognitive and behavioral responses to the unknown or unpredictable are "hardwired"; suggests that these responses constitute inborn structural elements of the processes of consciousness itself. We attend, involuntarily, to those things that occur contrary to our predictions-that occur despite our desires, as expressed in expectation. That involuntary attention comprises a large part of what we refer to when we say "consciousness." Our initial attention constitutes the first step in the process by which we come to adjust our behavior and our interpretive schemas to the world of experience-assuming that we do so; constitutes as weIl the first step we take when we modif)r the world to make it what we desire, instead of what it is currently.