If the mind is home to our perspective, close-minded people keep the front door
shut. They’ll shut the door on new ideas, new experiences, new people,
and even new versions of themselves. But what does it mean when we say someone is close minded? Sure,
close-minded people lack empathy, and they often shun any perspective that combats the one they’ve
locked themselves into. But why exactly do we call someone with these characteristics “close-minded”?
Well, believe it or not, close-minded people have actually closed a lock on a specific part
of the mind, being the subconscious mind… or at least the contents held within it.
The subconscious mind is a storehouse of information we’ve gathered from past
experiences. This information exists in the form of knowledge to make up what we call
our Knowledge Base, or everything we know. We reference this knowledge to form opinions,
shape beliefs, and respond to experiences. It’s no different than an open-notes test.
Imagine that our notes are the information we have stored in our subconscious mind, and the questions
on the test are life experiences. Assuming we didn’t study for an open-note test - because
who does that – our response to any question is limited to the information we have in our notes.
Well, in the same way, our response to any life experience is limited to the information
we have stored in our knowledge base, or subconscious mind. This information is a
compilation of our past experiences and learned knowledge. The image we paint of our beliefs
is limited to its colors, the puzzle we piece together of the world is limited to its pieces,
and the photo we take of ourselves is limited to its lenses. This wouldn’t be an issue if the
storage capacity of our subconscious mind was limitless. But like any databank, it’s not. We
can only know so much, and that’s because our knowledge base has a maximum storage capacity.
Once we reach this capacity, we have a choice to make: Leave the mind open or close it off? The
close-minded person is no more than someone who chooses the ladder. Let’s look at what that means.
There is something called the explore-exploit tradeoff, and it states that for us to explore
new information, we must exploit pieces of old information. It revolves around the idea that our
subconscious mind has a maximum storage capacity and can only hold a certain amount of knowledge.
Once we fill that capacity, it becomes impossible to explore new knowledge without exploiting
existing knowledge. It’s like from the point of our knowledge base being maxed out, we’ve got to
unlearn something in order to learn something new. Like a closet that’s slap-full of clothes, there
will be no more addition without subtraction. And this is where the close-minded person is born.
Close-minded people find comfort in locking into their current set of knowledge after it’s
maxed out. Instead of leaving their mind open to explore new knowledge and exploit existing pieces,
they latch onto it and lock it into place. They identify everything they think to be true
as what they know to be true. And this is the point of no return.
The real problem with being close-minded is – once subjective to your ways of
thinking – you think you know better than everyone else. With that being the case,
you’ll listen to absolutely no one. You’ll drive yourself down a straight
and narrow path to isolation, not looking back until it’s too late.
This gets dangerous when we consider the possibility of closing the lock on a mind
full of bad information. If you went to take the open notes test I mentioned earlier with notes
full of bad information, you would fail the test by referencing them. You would fail before you
even began. And the thing is: you could correctly transfer the answers from your notes to the test,
but they are the wrong answers. So even though you are responding to the
test questions with a method as effective as everyone else’s, you are getting them wrong
because you initially identified and closed the lock on the wrong answers.
Well, we can also lock bad information into our knowledge base that causes us to respond to a
new experience or shape our perspective in a way that feels 100% right in the moment but is totally
out of whack. If we initially learn the wrong thing but close our mind with it locked inside,
we don’t see that information as bad. In fact, we perceive it as good.
And it’s now a part of our knowledge base - from which we draw upon to respond to any experience we
have, from which we draw upon to form opinions, and from which we draw upon to shape beliefs.
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