Life is a social experiment. We are born awake, having never slept, and one day we will fall asleep never to wake again. Every day in between is our opportunity to live, love, learn and leave our mark. Every day is a dress rehearsal for a lifetime.

A life lived in discover mode — with curiosity leading us forward — creates the conditions for learning. But we are also protective by nature. Long before we were hunters, we were hunted. That evolutionary wiring makes us prone to the defensive mode, where we recoil from ideas that challenge our beliefs. Instead of curiosity, we default to certainty.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s biology. We carry roughly 100,000 years of programming designed to keep us safe. But while we may not control our initial reaction, we do control our response. An immediate reaction isn’t always a decision — it’s often just biology. When we react without awareness, we allow someone else to choose our response for us.

We are born into a language, parents we don’t know, belief systems we didn’t choose, and a place that carries all of those things. If you are born in Nepal, you might speak Tibetan and be a Buddhist. It’s not our fault. We don’t need to defend our beliefs. We own them. We need to be curious about what is driving other beliefs. And let that information inform the calculus of our next decision.

I want to thank the Adirondack Daily Enterprise for the opportunity to share a few recent letters to the editor. I should also confess something: those letters were part of an ongoing experiment.

I try to live in discovery mode. Like everyone, I still slip into defend mode — but I’ve learned to recognize its symptoms. Defend mode is marked by justification and rationalization, aimed not at understanding but at protecting existing beliefs. It blocks curiosity and triggers the same biochemistry associated with fight-or-flight responses.

In my letters, I posed a specific question to see whether anyone in our community would be curious enough to engage with it. I extended the experiment by reaching out directly to local leaders, explaining what I was exploring and why. The responses — or lack of them — were instructive.

One person replied. One other engaged only on peripheral issues. What I did not experience was curiosity about the question itself or an invitation into discussion.

This experiment isn’t new for me. It’s informed years of work helping organizations understand the conditions that shape decisions. We never make decisions based on information we don’t have. As cognitive scientist Gary Klein describes in “Seeing What Others Don’t,” insight emerges from “swirl” — the mixing of diverse perspectives that refines our mental models. The more perspectives in the swirl, the fewer blind spots we carry.

Yet many organizations — public and private — unintentionally form impermeable membranes. Information flows downward easily but struggles to move upward. Teachers experience this. Nurses experience this. Frontline workers of every kind experience this. When those closest to reality can’t be heard, learning stalls. If you’ve ever learned to stop offering insight because it changed how the room felt afterward, you already know what I’m talking about.

When people in positions of authority stop listening, they eventually become surrounded by people who have nothing to say. Worse, our protective instincts push us toward agreement instead of accuracy. Consensus feels safe — but agreement doesn’t mean we’re right. Often, the most valuable voice in the room is the one that disagrees. Not because they are correct, but because they expand the swirl.

If we can’t imagine something, we can’t predict it. Ideas that never surface can never influence decisions.

What my experiment revealed is simple and uncomfortable: questions are often met not with curiosity, but with judgment. Just asking a question can trigger defensive mode. And defend mode, driven by fear and insecurity, collapses our capacity to learn.

As Bren Brown writes, “Resist the urge to reach for certainty where it does not exist.” Defending certainty with a teaspoon of information from an ocean of knowledge leads us to conclude there are no whales — simply because none fit in the spoon.

My conclusion is this: choose discover mode. Choose curiosity. These are not soft skills; they are forward-moving skills.

And forward is the only direction. When a small group of people decides to embrace curiosity, the result is a higher intelligence that emerges in the space between them.

Will our new village board be curious in Discover Mode, or will Defend Mode prevail? Is higher collective potential being encouraged or suppressed?

Our democracy was formed from synchronized hope. We, the People, get to decide who governs us. And from my experiment, I believe we need a serious mindset-reset in our small village and our country.

Be curious.

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Billy Martin is a resident of Saranac Lake