Blog on mind and brain research and advice

2 Prerequisites for Change

June 24, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

change The Farther to Go! program is all about change-making. Change is what we want and what we struggle with because many of the things we’ve tried simply don’t work.

On the way to creating and developing Farther to Go!, I focused first on information about how the brain and mind actually function, which involved debunking quite a bit of conventional wisdom. Then I attempted to incorporate effective tools that had a proven track record and were based on what is now understood and widely accepted about the brain and the mind.

It didn’t take long before I recognized that something significant was missing. I could offer reams of information—and, believe me, I have reams of information to offer—and all the tools in the world, but by themselves information and tools don’t automatically result in change.

Direction!

I discovered that people don’t know what they want. Not only that, they often don’t even know how to ask or answer the question. It’s hard to commit to, and follow through on, a path of action if you don’t know why you’re taking it.

Since the unconscious part of our brain (System 1) is focused on maintaining the status quo, you might say it’s allergic to change. So our path of least resistance is to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. Information and tools can tell us exactly what to do in order to get something different, but first we need to know what it is we really want.

That requires some prolonged dialogue, so to speak, between System 2 (the conscious part of the brain) and System 1 (the unconscious) to identify the things that matter most to us at this particular point in our lives. These are what I call Big Picture Wants. They provide the direction; the information and tools provide the navigation.

Not too long ago, I realized that I was missing another very significant piece of the change process.

Urgency!

System 1 (the unconscious) is powerful and compelling. Think of it as an extremely high-speed processor that keeps you humming along in your well-worn rut. You may know where you want to go, and you may have the information and the tools to help you get there, but still you may find yourself treading water or even falling back into your rut.

We need a force that is as compelling and powerful as System 1 if we want to counteract it. That force is a sense of urgency. Urgency propels us forward in spite of obstacles, delays, diversions, distractions, and the influences of System 1. When we have a sense of urgency, quitting or standing still just isn’t an option. Instead of being wasted on activities like second-guessing or weighing pros and cons, all of our energy goes into taking the next step, and the next, and the next after that.

Urgency doesn’t eliminate uncertainty or difficulty, but it diminishes the power those things have over us. When we have both a clear direction and a strong sense of urgency, we simply do what needs to be done—using the best information and the best tools available.

Direction + Urgency

Direction without urgency is a waste of time because it usually leads to giving up in one form or another. Giving up, especially repeatedly, reinforces the belief that we can’t or don’t want to change. And the status quo remains not only undisturbed, but even more entrenched.

Urgency without direction is a waste of energy because it usually results in running off in multiple directions without a plan or goal in mind. Because it, too, is ineffective it also reinforces the belief that trying to change is futile—and possibly also exhausting.

It’s important to bear in mind that urgency—which means crucial, pressing, great, compelling, and top-priority—is not the same thing as anxiety. Many people have varying degrees of anxiety about changes they want to make but have no sense of urgency about making them.

As long as you think you have a choice about whether or not to do something, you’re either unclear or uncommitted—or both. When you have urgency, you don’t exhaust time and energy trying to decide what to do next. You have direction; you know what to do. You can’t necessarily predict the outcome, but the path immediately ahead is clear.

Count your Yesses

May 28, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

As Rick Hanson famously says, “Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.” That’s because your brain’s primary concern is your survival, so it’s primed to pay more attention to the negative. Positive things may indeed help you survive. But negative things can kill you. As far as your brain is concerned, it’s definitely better to be safe than sorry. It’s better to expect and prepare for a possible threat (there might be a tiger behind that bush) than to be surprised (and wounded or eaten) by that tiger.

It’s easy to forget that we’re operating with essentially the same brain our ancestors on the savanna had. But if you want to overcome your brain’s negativity bias, it’s important to remember that System 1, the unconscious part of your brain that runs you most of the time, doesn’t always deal effectively with the stimulation, stressors, and sheer volume of information you have to contend with in your daily life.

It’s easier for all of us to pay attention to the negative: the threats, the slights, the hurts, the things that fall apart or don’t go our way. We don’t have to make a point of looking for what isn’t working in order to find it. Our brain does that automatically. Another aspect of our survival-based brain—its associative method of “thinking”—makes it easy to get on a negative track and stay there. One darn thing leads to another, meaning one similar thought reminds you of another similar thought. Before you know it, your mood and your attitude have soured, and your ability to refocus your attention has evaporated.

You can’t stop your brain from noticing the negative, and it wouldn’t even be a good idea to try. But neither do you have to give in to it. The advice to count your blessings comes to mind, but I find blessings to be a loaded word on several levels. I prefer to count my yesses. It’s a great way to turn the tide when I notice I’ve mentally starting traveling along that road to nowhere.

Although I tend to be pretty optimistic and upbeat, the first thing I noticed when I began this practice was how much easier it is to count my nos. Because the nos are brought to our attention by System 1, the unconscious part of our brain that is always on and processes 11,000,000 bits of information at a time, they come to mind immediately and automatically without any effort on our part. Counting yesses, on the other hand, requires intention, which is a function of System 2, the conscious part of the brain that is slow, lazy, and easily depleted.

The process of shifting my attention doesn’t just change the mental track I’m on; it also causes me to be aware of how influential my mental model of the world is at any given moment.

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

That quote has been attributed to several different people, but regardless of who said it, it’s true.

When you’re tired, stressed, or sick—or when life has dealt you some kind of blow—you simply have less System 2 attention available. So it’s easy for the nos to get the upper hand. A couple of weeks ago I went through a bout of food poisoning. During the illness itself and the two days that followed, the nos were abundant. I observed the downward trend in my thoughts, but I also understood what was happening. I was pretty sure my perspective would change once I got better (which it did), so I didn’t let the nos carry me too far downstream.

Someone I know regularly posts what she calls “The Daily Yes” on Facebook. It’s a prompt that works well for me because I don’t have a regular schedule for accessing Facebook, so I don’t always see it at the same time of day. But every time I do see it, I stop to read it. It doesn’t matter what the specific content is. It’s the word yes that’s my cue to pay attention to what’s juicy and zesty and working in my life—to who and what has said yes to me and who and what I’ve said yes to.

It’s easy for one no to outweigh many yesses, so much so that we may not even notice the yesses when they occur. That’s why I’ve found it helpful to make a list, whether it’s on paper or just a mental list. It reminds me that my brain does have a negativity bias—but that I don’t have to agree with it or go along for that particular ride.

Why Right-Brain Left-Brain Is Wrong-Headed

May 6, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Conventional wisdom has it that some people are right-brained, meaning they tend to be creative, intuitive, and emotional, while others are left-brained, meaning they tend to be logical, analytical, and methodical. But once again conventional wisdom has vastly oversimplified and overstated the situation. (There’s a reason why conventional wisdom tends to function this way, but that’s another blog post.)

It’s true that the two hemispheres of the brain function differently. Much of what we know about the differences between the two hemispheres is the result of research conducted in the 1960s on patients with split brains. Normally the two hemispheres are in ongoing communication with each other via the bridge of fibers called the corpus callosum. But the corpus callosum was surgically severed in some epilepsy patients in a last-ditch attempt to relieve their symptoms.

Michael Gazzaniga, Roger Sperry, and two other researchers conducted the testing on these individuals that revealed some of the effects—many of them quite surprising—of cutting off communication between the hemispheres. Later on, Gazzaniga conducted additional research with Joseph LeDoux.

To me, the most interesting thing they discovered is what happens as a result of visual information no longer being passed from one hemisphere to another. Language is primarily a function of the left hemisphere. So although the right hemisphere could recognize an image not shown to the left hemisphere, it couldn’t communicate about it verbally. David Eagleman summarizes these experiments in his book Incognito. Remember that brain wiring is contralateral, which means that the right hemisphere processes information from the left visual field and controls the movements of the left hand—and vice versa for the left hemisphere.

In 1978, researchers Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux flashed a picture of a chicken claw to the left hemisphere of a split-brain patient and a picture of a snowy winter scene to his right hemisphere. The patient was then asked to point at cards that represented what he had just seen. His right hand pointed to a card with a chicken, and his left hand pointed to a card with a snow shovel.

The experimenters asked him why he was pointing to the shovel. Recall that his left hemisphere (the one with the capacity for language), had information only about a chicken, and nothing else. But the left hemisphere, without missing a beat, fabricated a story: “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”

When one part of the brain makes a choice, other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why. If you show the command “Walk” to the right hemisphere (the one without language), the patient will get up and start walking. If you stop him and ask why he’s leaving, his left hemisphere, cooking up an answer, will say something like “I was going to get a drink of water.”

The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzaniga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains.

One important thing to remember is that for people with intact brains, the two hemispheres remain in constant communication with each other. We are whole-brained people who use both parts of our brain all the time, including during the creative process and in the course of logical problem-solving.

Although this, too, is an oversimplification, it’s closer to the mark to say that if we did not have language or discernment, our creative ideas would be useless and possibly incoherent. And if we did not have emotion and imagination, we would have no context for decision making.

Not only is neither hemisphere “better” than the other, you may be surprised at the conclusion Gazzaniga has reached about which hemisphere is more “conscious” and which hemisphere is more literal.

After many years of fascinating research on the split brain, it appears that the inventing and interpreting left hemisphere has a conscious experience very different from that of the truthful, literal right brain. Although both hemispheres can be viewed as conscious, the left brain’s consciousness far surpasses that of the right. Which raises another set of questions that should keep us busy for the next 30 years or so.

I’m looking forward to the results of that additional research!

The Space-Mind Continuum

April 6, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

We all have a limited amount of System 2 (conscious) attention to dispose of each day, and when we’ve exhausted it we can’t quickly or easily replenish it.

Every waking moment, you are making judgments about where to focus your attention. If you didn’t, you would be overwhelmed by the vast amount of sensory information in your surroundings. The ability to direct attention, a skill humans share with species as primitive as fruit flies, helps you process what is important to you at the moment and ignore what is not. —Ingrid Wickelgren, Scientific American

The problem is that if you don’t have enough System 2 attention available to direct your focus, System 1 (the unconscious) will focus on what it thinks is important.

You use your conscious attention for many different things, some of which are necessary and unavoidable. You can exhaust it on important matters and complex tasks, for example. Or when you’re sick or injured or worried about a friend or family member. But you also probably squander conscious attention bit-by-bit on dozens of minor things throughout the day. Even worse, you may be squandering it on the same minor things day after day. Many of these things are literally just occupying space, thereby limiting the conscious attention you have available.

Inner Space and Outer Space

The things that occupy space in your mind (inner space) and in your environment (outer space) have an effect on the way you think, how effective your thinking is, and even what you think about. For example:

It’s difficult to focus your attention, solve a problem, or complete a complex or demanding task when you’re preoccupied with another issue (inner space).
It’s hard to focus or to think clearly when the surrounding decibel level gets above 90 (outer space).
It’s difficult to avoid thinking about how utterly and completely disorganized you are every time you can’t find something—or what a sloth you are you when you can’t invite guests over for dinner because the dining table has become the repository for several months’ worth of mail, numerous unfinished projects, and the general detritus of your daily life (outer space).
It’s next to impossible to be present or attentive when you’re in the process of running through your mental to-do list (inner space).

The more things occupying your inner and outer space at any given time, the less System 2 attention you have available. And the less System 2 attention you have available, the more likely you are to be at the effect of System 1 (unconscious/autopilot) thinking.

The Trouble with System 1 Attention

System 1 attention—also called bottom-up attention—isn’t always bad. In fact, it’s essential to your survival. But as Winifred Gallagher writes in Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life:

Bottom-up attention automatically keeps you in touch with what’s going on in the world, but this great benefit comes with a drawback, particularly for postindustrial folk who live in metropolitan areas and work at desks rather than on the savannah: lots of fruitless, unwelcome distractions. Maybe you want to focus on your book or computer instead of the fly that keeps landing on your arm or that ambulance’s siren, but just like your evolutionary forebears, you’re stuck with attending to those insistent stimuli.

Not only do you have to contend with a host of fruitless, unwelcome distractions in your environment over which you may have little to no control, you are also continually creating additional distractions in your environment and in your head.

The result is that, moment-to-moment, rather than being deliberately focused, your attention is likely to be spent responding to stimuli.

That’s important because what you put your attention on shapes the quality of your life.

We all have a limited amount of conscious attention available. We can’t easily get more, but we can learn how to make better use of what we have. A good first step is to try to identify what claims–and can drain–our conscious attention.

How Many of these Myths Do You Believe?

March 12, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

These six beliefs are so pervasive they seem to be embedded in our culture. Most of them are meant to be motivational, but because they aren’t true, belief in these myths can have unintended consequences that harm rather than help. Ultimately, we need less external motivation and more straightforward education about how the brain and the mind actually work. Then we’ll be able to generate our own motivation—from inside.

Myth #1: We always have a choice.

The reality is that we rarely have a choice. The majority of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are the result of automatic brain processes. We operate on autopilot most of the time because that’s how our brain is wired. Contrary to popular belief, there’s not much we can do about that. But that’s neither an excuse nor a reason to give up. What we can do is reprogram some of our automatic behavior so it reflects what’s important to us and what we really want.

Myth #2: Anything is possible.

Sure there are lots of things we have the ability to change. But the reality is that we all have limits and constraints; we all face obstacles; and randomness plays a much greater role in our lives than we’d like to admit. No matter how many hours I put into practicing the violin, for example, if I have no musical talent (and I don’t), I will not be the next Jascha Heifetz or Joshua Bell. However, the more I practice the violin, the better a violinist I will become because although I may not be good, I can always get better.

Myth #3: To live a satisfying life, we need to identify our life purpose or passion.

The reality is that no matter how hard we search, we won’t find our life purpose because we don’t have one. In fact searching for a particular life purpose seems to lead more people to a state of paralyzing anxiety than it does to a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment. Giving up on the life-purpose myth can open the door to living with passion—which means identifying what we really want and then creating a big, juicy, satisfying life on our own terms.

Myth #4: It takes will power to achieve anything significant.

The reality is that will power is an unreliable resource that is easily exhausted. Will power and self-control are unequal to the task of changing habits or behavior or achieving big goals. We don’t need—and can’t get—more will power. What we do need is perseverance. Perseverance is what keeps us steadily moving toward the desired outcome regardless of setbacks or obstacles, adjusting course as we go. I call perseverance magic because it is.

Myth #5: If we focus our attention on the result we want, we’re more likely to get it.

The research has been in on this one for quite a while. The reality is that focusing on the end result (or outcome) of something we want actually decreases the likelihood we will get it. On the other hand, focusing our attention on the process—the individual steps or actions we need to take—increases the likelihood we’ll be successful.

Myth #6: We should always trust our gut.

The reality is that our gut instinct—otherwise known as intuition—is situation-specific and therefore fallible. Our unconscious (System 1) regularly makes suggestions to the conscious part of our brain (System 2). That’s what intuition is. If we know a lot about something or have a lot of experience in a particular area, we can probably rely on those suggestions. But intuition is not magic. In areas where we have no knowledge, skill, or experience, relying on intuition is a mistake. When intuition isn’t based on anything, it’s no better than a wild guess.

Letting go of these myths is one giant step toward creating a more deeply satisfying and meaningful life.