Blog on mind and brain research and advice

Grateful for My Brain: a 2014 Year-End Review

January 5, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 5 Comments

Doing a year-end review has always been one of those things that seem like a good idea but which I never quite get around to. This past year was unique in a number of ways, and so I decided—almost on the spur of the moment—that it would be prudent and productive to spend some time evaluating what happened.

I’m a huge fan of list-making, so instead of using any of the many different tools, processes, and resources available, I conducted my review in the form of making several lists. This turned out to be so helpful that I’ve already put it on my calendar to do again at the end of 2015.

Here are my list headings:

What I accomplished

This was by far the longest of my lists. Because I have a tendency to dismiss what I have done in order to berate myself for what has yet to be done, making this list helped me stop and smell the roses a bit. It gave me greater perspective on the multiple endeavors I’ve been engaged in. It also showed me the areas where my attention was focused—and the areas where it wasn’t.

What I didn’t anticipate

There’s no question that this was the most useful of my lists. The more than two dozen things I hadn’t anticipated—roughly half positive and half negative—not only had a significant effect on my life in general and what I was able to accomplish, they also provide concrete evidence that I can’t predict the future no matter how much my brain wants me to believe I can. We can—and should—plan ahead, but it’s important to remember that getting from here to there is rarely a straight line. Randomness and luck often play a larger role in both process and outcome than we’d like to acknowledge.

What worked

It was good to recognize what I’m doing right so I can keep doing more of that.

What didn’t/doesn’t work

It was also good to recognize mistakes I’ve made, opportunities I’ve missed, or areas that need major or minor tweaking.

What I’m grateful for

In addition to many other things—and people—I’m grateful for my amazing brain (yours is equally amazing, of course) and all the fantastic tricks it can do. Read to the end to see what my brain did with the material from my year-end review.

What I learned

One thing I learned is that I have a lot more to learn! But it was illuminating to see how much more I know now than I knew at the beginning of last year. It gives me hope and also some confidence in the face of the always uncertain future. Here’s actual evidence that I figured out how to do quite a few new things, so it’s likely I’ll be able to figure out how to do more things I don’t yet know how to do.

What I’m not satisfied with or what needs more attention

This list helped me focus on where to put my attention now. It was the last 2014 list, which made it relatively easy to complete and included a couple of surprises. I’m pretty sure it would have been more difficult to hone in on these things if I had started with this category, and I might not have seen things as clearly.

I created just two lists for 2015:

What I want to have happen this year

15 things that are sort of a hodgepodge of goals, intentions, and hopes. This list and the list of what I’m not satisfied with are the foundation of my short-range (3-6 months) planning process.

4 habits I want to keep; 4 habits I want to improve or change; 4 habits I want to start

Again, it was useful to identify what I’m doing that’s working before listing what I want to change (what isn’t working so well). I limited each category to 4 to keep it manageable. A limit of 3 might be even better.

I worked on these lists in bursts of time over several days, so the content was on my mind—and in my brain—throughout that period. As the brain tends to do, mine started looking for solutions for some of the bigger problems I’d identified. And not just during the day! One very long night, I was unable to fall asleep because I couldn’t stop trying to figure everything out logically (as illogical as I knew it was to be doing that in the middle of the night—or maybe ever).

Then, in one of those sudden moments of clarity I’ve come to know and love, the solution to one of the problems just showed up (thank you, System 1!), and as soon as it did, I realized that particular solution also took care of two other problems. I hadn’t even seen the three things as being connected. At that point, I immediately fell asleep, only to be awakened by the alarm clock an hour and a half later.

In the clear light of another day, and after a decent night’s sleep, the solution that appeared in the wee hours that morning seems both obvious and elegant. But had I not laid the groundwork for it by focusing my attention on all these areas of my life, I doubt I’d even have been able to identify the problems. And even if I had identified them, I’d probably be trying to find individual solutions for each of them—using the slow, logical part of my brain.

The moral of the story (which I should have tattooed somewhere on my body, sans parenthetical expressions and asides): Use System 2—the conscious part of your brain—to lay the groundwork, and then give System 1 an opportunity to do its thing (which includes seeing patterns, making connections, and putting the pieces together) to come up with a creative solution System 2 can only stand back, figuratively speaking, and admire.

Is There a Real You?

December 16, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

The answer may seem obvious; of course there’s a real you. But journalist and philosopher Julian Baggini, who studies the complexities of personal identity, offers a counterintuitive answer to the question. Baggini is the editor-in-chief of the Philosophers’ Magazine.

There are lots of different processes in the brain, all of which operate, in a way, quite independently. But it’s because of the way that they relate that we get this sense of self. I call it the ego trick. It’s not that we don’t exist, it’s just that the trick is to make us feel that inside of us is something more unified than is really there.

If you think of yourself as being, in a way, not a thing as such, but a kind of a process, something that is changing, then I think that’s quite liberating. Because we actually have the capacity to channel the direction of our development for ourselves to a certain degree. Now we’ve got to be careful here, right? If you watch the X-Factor too much, you might buy into this idea that we can all be whatever we want to be. That’s not true. There are limits to what we can achieve. There are limits to what we can make of ourselves. But nevertheless, we do have this capacity to, in a sense, shape ourselves. The true self, as it were then, is not something that is just there for you to discover, you don’t sort of look into your soul and find your true self, What you are partly doing, at least, is actually creating your true self.

To the extent you have a true self, it’s something that you in part discover, but in part create. And that, I think, is a liberating and exciting prospect.

Watch and listen to Baggini’s TED talk.

Pursuing Happiness? Don’t Get Stuck on the Hedonic Treadmill

December 12, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

When you’re on the hedonic treadmill, you need to keep moving in order to maintain your existing state of happiness. That means acquiring more and more of the things or experiences that initially brought you pleasure. The problem is that attempting to maintain a steady-state of happiness is unnatural. Pursuing happiness may not be the way to attain it.

Here is some food for thought on the subject of happiness and its alternatives.

The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life, and when by means of great wealth homo sapiens can gratify all his whims without effort, the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness. The man who acquires easily things for which he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness. If he is of a philosophic disposition, he concludes that human life is essentially wretched, since the man who has all he wants is still unhappy. He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. —Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do.
–Paul Graham, Programmer, Writer, Investor

Happy chemicals did not evolve to be on all the time. They evolved to promote your survival. …Happy chemicals flow when you see a way to meet your needs. …Unhappy chemicals feel bad because that works. It gets your attention fast. —Loretta Graziano Breuning, Ph.D. Meet Your Happy Chemicals

Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it. In fact, the opposite is generally the case. —Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

We know now that external circumstances don’t predicate happiness. As we know, there are many poor people who are very happy and wealthy people who are extremely depressed, suicidal. What I’m talking about is the daily experience of a meaningful life. I find that when people feel like they have meaning in their lives, they define themselves as happy. They want to get up in the morning. It’s not just a fleeting experience because they had a glamorous holiday or won the lottery or something, but they actually have meaning. Meaning brings fulfillment. So the first imperative is self-awareness. —Max Strom, author of There Is No App for Happiness

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us. —Ashley Montagu, Anthropologist

Imagine that you are part of a grand experiment in which you are provided with everything you need. At regular intervals, you are given gifts of money, food, love, sex, fame—whatever you want. The only catch is that you can do nothing that increases or decreases the likelihood of obtaining these rewards. In fact, in order to receive the rewards, you have to spend eight hours a day in a room doing nothing—no career to occupy your time, no one to talk to, no books to read, no paintings to paint, no music to compose—in short, nothing to engage you. Even though you can get any reward you want, this would be a hellish life. —Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. —Carl Jung, Psychiatrist/Psychotherapist

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind. —Marcel Proust

We are living in an era in which the Happiness Industry invades and permeates society and every unpleasant aspect of life is frowned upon, and dismissed as an unnecessary social ill. Rather than learning to cope with or contemplate certain aspects of life – fear, sadness, loneliness and boredom – we avoid them, gradually removing our ability to tolerate even the most mundane of the difficult aspects of life. —Siobhan Lyons, Philosophy Now

Sunshine dulls the mind to risk and thoughtfulness. —Adam Alter, Drunk Tank Pink

The Anticipation Machine Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

December 8, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Philosopher Daniel Dennett describes the human brain as an “anticipation machine.” He says that making future is the most important thing it does.

Most of us do not struggle to think about the future because mental simulations of the future arrive in our consciousness regularly and unbidden, occupying every corner of our mental lives. –Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Unfortunately, the process the brain uses—adding the past to the present to equal (predict) the future—is far from a fail-safe method for figuring out either what actually lies ahead or how we will feel should what we anticipate come to pass. Our “anticipation machine” creates what we experience as expectations: estimates or forecasts of future situations based on present or past experiences. Expectations are beliefs we have about what should happen or about the way things should or will be.

But the future is fundamentally different from the present; therefore, it isn’t something we can accurately imagine. Our images of the future are firmly lodged in the now, in what we already know and are familiar with. Our visions of what may be possible in the future are heavily constrained by what has already been—or rather, by the stories we’ve constructed about it. We’re not influenced by the past as much as we’re influenced by our stories about the past.

Who I am is the habit of what I always was and who I’ll be is the result. –Louise Erdrich

Not only is the future not the same as the present, but according to Daniel Gilbert, our future self is not the same as our present self (nor is our present self the same as our past self). Our future self may want nothing to do with the commitments our present self is busy making for it or the plans our present self is setting into motion at this very moment.

The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life is change. –Daniel Gilbert

But wait; there’s more.

We try to repeat those experiences that we remember with pleasure and pride, and we try to avoid repeating those that we remember with embarrassment and regret. The trouble is that we often don’t remember them correctly. –Daniel Gilbert

So the bottom line is that we don’t remember the past—which we’re basing quite a few of our expectations on—correctly, we’re no good at imagining what the future is going to be like, and we can’t accurately imagine how we’re going to react to future events when they do occur.

When we spy the future through our prospectiscopes, the clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year can lead us to make a variety of mistakes. –Daniel Gilbert

But that doesn’t stop us from believing we can predict the future or from feeling certain we know what will make us happy or satisfied once we’re living in it. Our brain, after all, does crave certainty.

We tend to accept the brain’s products uncritically and expect the future to unfold with the details—and with only the details—that the brain has imagined. –Daniel Gilbert

There’s simply no way to guarantee our future happiness. There’s no way to guarantee anything. But quite a bit of research suggests that one of the biggest things that gets in the way of happiness is our firm belief that we know what will make us happy. What would it be like to loosen the reins, to let go of that mistaken notion? What would it be like to allow ourselves to stop trying to guarantee our happiness and allow ourselves to…stumble on it?

Be Good to Your Brain

December 4, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Want to stay mentally sharp? There are all kinds of things you can do: listen to music, read a book, gaze at a building, help someone out, get involved in a hobby.

These activities not only make you feel good, they also happen to be very good for your brain in a variety of different ways.

Click on the links to read the full articles.

Listening to music benefits the brain in 8 surprising ways.

Playing a musical instrument benefits your brain even more by giving it an excellent “full-body” workout.

Looking at buildings designed for contemplation may produce the same health benefits provided by meditation—and with less effort.

Dancing, getting some hobbies, and reading (among other things) all help to keep your brain young.

Speaking of reading, ditching the e-reader once in a while and reading an actual book can increase your comprehension, make you more empathetic, and even improve your sleep.

No matter how old you are, learning a new language improves gray matter density and white matter integrity.

Finally, giving really is better than receiving—for you and for your brain.

Be good to your brain and your brain will continue being good to you!