As much time as I spend thinking about what a fish might think, I have to acknowledge that 1) I will never know what a fish thinks, and 2) fish probably don’t think much at all. Fish react. In all my time fishing, I have never witnessed a fish pondering. Yes, sometimes they are slow to bite — there’s nothing slower than a carp opening its mouth to slowly suck in the bread ball floating on the surface of the water, and yes, fish like to nibble and taste when fishing with live bait, but my hunch is that what looks like thinking to me is merely reacting to various stimuli like smell, taste, and movement. Often they don’t take the time at all. If fish are feeding and you see a rise and can plop your lure down in the middle of the commotion fast enough, then chances are good that you’ll get an immediate hit. All of this makes sense if you think about it. FIsh live in a fast, competitive world. They need to eat things that are trying to elude them and, in turn, elude those bigger fish (or fisherman) who are trying to eat them. Hesitate a minute, and your meal goes by, is snatched by another, or you turn into a meal yourself. To survive, fish learn to react: a silver flash means a minnow, a fuzzy something is a nymph, a white underbelly with protruding floating on the surface is a tasty frog. Immediate reactions, not contemplation, means survival. Besides, fish brains are just not that big.
A lot of activism is based upon the belief that humans are rational beings who think and then act. Traditional democratic theory is based on this belief, and it is understandable that those of us who would like our society to become more democratic also operate under this assumption. The problem is this: we don’t think the way we think we think. In fact, most of the time we are not thinking at all, we are just reacting to stimuli based upon patterns we’ve established and beliefs we already hold. This is why no amount of reasonable facts articulated in clever op-eds or laid out on well-designed flyers is going to change people’s minds. If they don’t fit with what we already believe we ignore them, dismiss them, or twist them to make them fit. This is what cognitive scientists call confirmation bias. So what can activists do? The first thing is to figure out the patterns that guide people’s reactions then fit the facts we want people to understand into the stories they already tell themselves. We can also become really good storytellers ourselves, creating new patterns into which new facts can fit. Finally, we can disrupt old patterns though actions that defy easy classification and immediate reaction. Take a protest, for instance. When you see a protest you know what it is. If you like protests and support the cause then you’re all for it. If you don’t, then you immediately reject it. In either case, there’s not much thinking going on since you know the story already. But when a protest looks like a street party as Reclaim the Streets protests in London did, or resembles a children’s dance recital (with gas masks) like a protest staged by environmentalists in Chongqing, then it slows down reaction time and thinking has a chance. People can learn to think before reacting. We have big brains.