Six Insights About Your Brain
I love thinking about my brain. And the brains of other people. Technically, it’s called metacognition. Thinking….about thinking. I find it is the most powerful we have to not get caught up in the hysteria that our brain creates. I think of this as the “above and beyond” hysteria. For example, you broke your leg. It’s awful and painful. But then your brain piles on with everything from “I’m so dumb, why didn’t I see that bike coming my way” to “I’m going to die alone.” Trust me, there’s always a pathway to we are all going to die, and it’s my fault if I let my brain take over.
I like thinking about my brain as if it’s separate from me at times. And, frankly, a lot of other times. I think OFTEN about this cartoon from The Oatmeal because it is so SPOT ON. As a lot of his work is. Sometimes, your brain is an imaginary friend, but it’s really an imaginary frenemy. And it will take you down.
Today, I wanted to talk about some things you may not know about your brain. Understanding more about how it works can help some of its slights feel less inexplicable and some of its tortures less personal.
The brain creates millions of new connections each second. It’s very, very busy. Which probably doesn’t surprise you. The brain loves to make connections. It especially loves to make wide-scale connections that are novel and energizing to the brain.
When we make new connections like this, useful neurotransmitters like adrenaline and dopamine are generated that drive people to want to take action. When we are unable to make a connection- when we can’t think our way out of a problem- we hit an impasse. It’s very uncomfortable. So we can spend a lot of time, not unpleasantly, in a search mode, looking for connections and solutions. Good brain.
Have you ever been talking to a friend or colleague who is stuck, with their head spinning around, and you asked them a good question or pointed out a pattern or connection in what they are saying that they hadn’t noticed? And then say their face light up? That’s because you helped them make a connection and come to an insight. Conversations, especially thoughtful, mindful conversations where we actually listen, are great at helping our brains make connections. Conversations like this can help people resolve impasses that they have not been able to solve by themselves.
Everyone has a unique set of connections for how they think about things. We walk around assuming that other people think like we do. And sure, we are all humans with some similar experiences, and we share some thought patterns. But fundamentally, your pathways are different from everyone else’s. Basic physical and mental functions. like moving a limb, use similar circuits. But thoughts about more subtle issues, like goals and motivation, involve complex individual sets of circuits that belong to you.
How you solve a problem is just how you would solve a problem; other people are likely to use quite different mental pathways to get there. This is why giving advice can be less than helpful. I’m likely to tell you what I would do to solve a problem, but my circuits are different. And this is why powerful questions are….powerful. Then, people arrive at their own insights, particular to their brain circuits.
New ideas or behaviors use what is called “working memory,” which is a very limited resource in the brain. Therefore, the brain prefers to hardwire any behavior, thought, or activity that is repeated — so one literally doesn’t have to pay it any more attention.
This is why you have to be careful about your habits. Once you eat at the Cinnabon at the airport a few times, your brain is like,e “Oh, this is what we do; I don’t have to think about that anymore.” Bad brain. I’ll talk more about habits and habit loops in a later post, but it’s just good to know at this point that your brain likes to make things easy. And it does that by making things automatic, whether you mean to or not.
Getting people out of automatic pilot mode and into more conscious thought takes significant effort because you have to override your brain’s preference for hardwiring as much as it can.
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Our perceptions are driven by deeper, hardwired circuits -old habits — much more than by receiving data fresh from the world.
As a result, people perceive the world according to their current beliefs and attitudes rather than seeing things as they are or as they could be. It’s this hardwiring, and essentially the laziness of our brains, that makes it hard to develop new habits, come up with new ideas, and see things from the point of view of other people.
So, on the one hand, it’s not just you; it really is hard. Because your brain is lazy. To be clear, YOU aren’t lazy. Your BRAIN is lazy.
Be careful what you pay attention to.
Hebb’s Law (1949) put simply: “Cells that fire together wire together.”
This means that trying to get rid of circuits by focusing on them is often ineffective — we end up deepening them instead. You may have heard the saying, “that which you resist persists.” And it feels true. This might be why. It also explains why focusing on solutions creates solutions. On the other hand, focusing on problems simply creates more awareness of problems.
The good news is (see number one) that the brain loves to create new connections and does it all the time.
Every time we travel to a new part of a city, meet a new person, or understand a new idea, we literally create a new map in our brain.
Creating new circuits can be quite easy. The key, if we want to create a long-term (hardwired) circuit, is to pay lots of attention to it.
Attention: in the form of quality and quantity (seconds) of focus- is what changes the brain over time.
Your takeaway from this is to be careful where you give your attention and energy. Habits you want, thoughts you want, solutions you want, that’s where you want to focus. But because your brain is also designed to keep you from being eaten by a lion, it’s going to want to tell you to focus on what might go wrong or what actually IS wrong with a situation.
It’s a battle, but it’s one worth fighting. Eventually, you will find that it gets easier. The habits of thought and practice that you ignore start to fade, and the thoughts and actions that you focus on start to become more automatic.
Originally published at https://tajcarson.substack.com.
