Krafft's Anomaly Notes

Chapter 381 The Five Stages of Cognition

The main chapel is the most important and sacred core of the church building. However, it is rarely visited, and even less so after autumn.

Like other similar structures, the design uses large slabs of stained glass instead of solid walls, resulting in a sharp decline in insulation performance.

If a large number of braziers are not lit now in the area north of Comfort Harbor, the cold will soon drive away even the most devout believers.

Even in the south, the damp and cold weather is not pleasant. Considering that there are not many believers coming to pilgrimage anyway, the few dozen or so people who want to participate in morning prayers can stay in the prayer room, so the agenda of opening the main hall was put on hold.

In addition, Priyère had no glassmakers at all, so the repair work was delayed again and again, and finally it was placed at the bottom of the work list and ignored.

After the monks did a quick clean-up, clearing the ground and tidying up the large number of books, they nailed the main gate back on and locked the small door connecting to the annex.

They have an instinctive fear of this, and during their night patrols they will subconsciously walk quickly past, unwilling to linger, and even intentionally turn a blind eye and avoid talking about it, as if afraid of waking up some unspeakable existence.

Vigilance is such a magical thing; even without any actual evidence, it can awaken the survival instinct and drive people to make irrational but correct decisions.

However, Kraft returned to this place, back to the place where he last felt that thing.

Don't ask how he got in. He's the abbot and has all the keys to the monastery. Except for opening the gates to heaven, which requires consulting with the higher-ups, he can go wherever he wants.

He relived that disturbed night, the places where he had found clues to it, trying to recapture the feelings he had at that time.

The text, which I once saw, was hidden in the cloud pattern on the ceiling of the corridor; once it left, it could never be read a second time.

No matter how you adjust the perspective, imitate the drawing, or even use your mental senses to perform a panoramic scan, they are just ordinary graphics, only drawn a little strangely, with absolutely no extra information.

Like some classic optical illusions, such as stairs that go up and down or triangles with three right angles, they seem perfectly normal at first glance. However, with a hint, they can be completely transformed, revealing something different or even the complete opposite within the same image.

The principle behind optical illusions is that they exploit the brain's processing habits, misleading the brain to interpret two-dimensional images as three-dimensional perspective scenes. However, they also introduce misleading information at key points in the two-dimensional images, like a wrench for changing the tracks of a train, sometimes leading the brain to one interpretation and sometimes to another.

Explaining "it" using the principles of optical illusions may not be accurate, but it does make it easier to understand.

Simply put, from a higher-dimensional perspective, we cannot drastically change the information itself, but we can influence how we perceive it.

It is not simply a piece of knowledge, such as where to find something or how to see something, but rather a kind of "cognition" that descends from a higher level.

Kraft sat cross-legged amidst the books, like a fisherman casting his line at a fishing hole; though the creatures beneath the ice were no longer there, the very act itself aided his thinking.

It is a form of cognition, but what is cognition?
Medical psychology, which barely passed the initial assessment, explains it this way: cognition is not a standalone concept; it is a series of complex changes that encompass the entire process of an individual acquiring, processing, storing, and utilizing information.

First comes perception; everything is predicated on receiving information, whether at the physical or mental level.

Then comes attention and memory, where consciousness focuses on the received information and stores it for the short term. This step is almost an instinct for all intelligent beings; as long as they are alive, they will actively or passively receive and store a large amount of information, but they cannot choose which information they want to receive.

Similar to an assembly line, after storing raw information, consciousness processes it, interprets it using existing experience and concepts, transforms it into a compatible product, and combines it with other information for reasoning.

If the processed information is deemed valuable in reasoning, it may enter medium- to long-term memory, essentially being stored for future use.

Finally, in specific application scenarios, the information will be retrieved, thereby generating external reactions such as language and actions; or internal reactions such as emotional changes and wavering beliefs.

"Cognition" consists of five steps: perception, attention, processing, memory, and response.

The difference between "cognition" and "knowledge" is that cognition is an ability and a process, while knowledge is a given result and structure.

Knowledge is equivalent to long-term memory storage in the fourth stage of the cognitive process; it's the product that a factory prepares for later use. Examining Dominic's "madness" reveals that the entire cognitive process was flawed.

He seemed to perceive additional information in folk handicrafts and written records, and his attention quickly began to focus on this kind of information, constantly reinforcing and filtering it, and he obtained more and more.

The shift is from "I can sense its existence" to "I cannot help but notice it".

In the subsequent information processing, specific information is identified as content that differs from the perspective of others, such as "something exists at a high place" and ubiquitous dynamic vortex graphics.

Logically, the next step should have been for him to form concrete knowledge concepts. But another problem arose: he failed to do so and remained confined to the information he had initially processed, repeating things from a higher level and going through whirlpools.

It seems that the final product composed of information is too large for consciousness to fully contain, and can only cycle through constant assembly and collapse.

Driven by a vast concept, he transformed it into a series of insane behaviors that neither outsiders nor he himself could understand, as he pursued an existence that remains incomprehensible to this day.

Thus, a distorted and incomplete cognitive process was formed.

"Interesting..." Kraft felt his thoughts becoming clearer. This was far more sophisticated than directly pulling someone from the depths; it was subtle and insidious, making it impossible to guard against.

It seems to tend to appear when the target is thinking, reading, or concentrating on something; this state of absorbing and filtering a large amount of information is naturally suitable for infiltration.

The information of the present world is like a pattern on paper to it, which can be slightly deviated during the process of perception and processing.

Further reasoning suggests that the anatomical regions of cognition and emotion are mainly concentrated in the frontal lobe, hippocampus, and amygdala in the anterior part of the brain.

Abnormal cognition and related emotional activities cause it to become overactivated, which projects to the hypothalamus through the emotion-endocrine pathway. The hypothalamus releases various hormone-releasing factors, which stimulate the lower pituitary gland until tumor proliferation occurs.

The proliferating tumor secretes abnormal levels of hormones, promoting mood disorders and cognitive extremes.

A perfect positive cycle on both the mental and physical levels.

For sensitive and thoughtful individuals, cognitive biases are almost impossible to actively detect and resist.

For people who are not very sensitive, they may not even notice the slight deviation.

There are exceptions. If sensitivity to information comes from repeated exposure to more complex information at higher levels, and one already possesses the ability to understand, process, and distinguish it, then the cognitive impact it creates is like armored cavalry trying to sneak past from behind.

For example, Kraft himself realized the problem the moment he was disturbed.

Therefore, besides removing the pituitary tumor, the simplest and most direct method is to expose severely affected patients to deeper information until their brains and consciousness can adapt to and recognize information that does not belong to the present world.

It's somewhat similar to giving children oral bacterial lysate capsules to boost their immunity.

The actual implementation is probably not that simple and requires further consideration.

But what if you don't resist it?

Let's get our reverse thinking in motion.

Treating one or a few patients only solves the immediate problem and does not improve one's actual understanding of it.

If one has a consciousness with sufficient capacity to bear it and actively follows the abnormal cognition, is it possible to truly "know" that enormous concept that cannot be borne by ordinary people in the fourth step of the cognitive process?