A unique feature of the way our brain tries to understand our experiences when we don’t have enough information is a process called “gap filling”, in other words we make up missing information in an effort to make sense of the experience. We also do it when we judge that the information gap is important.
An example of this is eye-witness testimony which is often unreliable. Imagine you are a witness to an assault and when interviewed by police you are asked to describe the perpetrator’s clothing. You know this is important because you are being asked by an authority and it could have a direct impact on being on the outcome, but you don’t actually remember or didn’t notice what the person was wearing. Your brain will very quickly fill the gap in your memory by making it up because you have assessed this information as important. This is not deliberate or even cognitive action but something your subconscious automatically does and you will absolutely believe it to be true.
In a more personal example, perhaps you have a close friend that suddenly starts to withdraw emotionally from you, starts to get rude and then ghosts you. They don’t respond to your questions and so they aren’t able to provide an explanation of what caused them to pull away. In an effort to understand this experience, to make it OK, safe, so we don’t feel wrong in some way, we will start to guess what is going on. We fill in the gaps to our understanding by making decisions around what we think must be the reason, and we typically bias this towards ourselves being in the right. For example, we might decide they are jealous of us, or that they have been influenced by someone else, or were intimidated by our success. We start to change the narrative so that we can understand it and importantly be OK.
We also gap fill in the negative towards ourselves and change the story to defend or justify our own actions. Using the same example, we might think that we hadn’t been in contact often enough, or not supportive to the friend’s needs, but then we add into the narrative the reasons that we couldn’t provide those things, such as the amount of stress we have or that they never returned our calls. We do this to justify or defend our own behaviour to ensure that we are in the right and they are in the wrong. We need to do this so we can understand the situation in such a way as to portray ourselves in a positive light. We don’t want to be the problem, regardless of whether we were or not – accuracy is irrelevant.
Interestingly, we also gap-fill to maintain fight and fight because we know this means survival. In this instance we make up threats (called paper tigers) to inappropriately maintain our defences because we know with absolute certainty that being in fight and flight increases the likelihood that we will survive. It’s not fun or living, but we survive. An example might be that we worry about being accepted, or that we need to prove ourselves. We catastrophise by making up what could happen as the worse possible outcome so we can stay on alert and in survival mode.Are you gap filling in order to understand an experience, to be in the right, to be OK, in order to survive?
