Brain Archives - Page 29 of 45

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!

Overthinking: Don’t Get Stuck in Analysis Paralysis

December 1, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

It’s one thing to look before you leap. It only makes sense to consider the potential outcome or consequences of an action you’re about to take. But it’s another thing altogether to believe you can fully determine—or even guarantee—the outcome based on the amount of thinking you do about it.

Overthinking often consists of making multiple lists of pros and cons, running through if/then scenarios, trying to gather as much information as possible, or attempting to approach the issue from every conceivable angle. The process of trying to make a decision becomes overwhelming. Worse, it drains conscious (System 2) attention throughout the period of time you’re trying to make a particular decision. So the more thinking you do about it, the less effective your thinking becomes. You can find yourself going around and around in mental circles, either unable to make the decision or just taking a stab at something—anything—because you can’t stand thinking about it any longer.

Overthinking also begets second-guessing, in which you get to run through several rounds of “if only/then” scenarios.

Overthinking is driven by your brain’s craving for certainty. But thinking harder or longer about something won’t necessarily get you closer to an answer. Here’s why:

In spite of your best efforts, your information will always be incomplete. There are things you don’t know, can’t know, or won’t know at the time you’re trying to decide, and any of those things could be important enough to affect the outcome. Unfortunately, we don’t know what we don’t know, and so we don’t take it into consideration.

Even if you were to have access to all of the information, because you’re human you’re subject to numerous cognitive biases, which means you won’t be able to view it entirely objectively. For example, you will overweigh some information and underweigh, or even ignore, other information. System 2 thinking may be what you’re aware of, but System 1 still has plenty of input, and System 1 makes mistakes.

You can’t account for randomness. The very idea of randomness makes your brain a little crazy, so it refuses to accept it. Your brain is under the impression it can find a cause-and-effect link for anything and everything. The consequences of randomness, according to physicist Leonard Mlodinow, are counterintuitive. (Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!)

You can’t predict the future. Even more to the point, you can’t predict how you’re going to feel in the future. Daniel Gilbert, in Stumbling on Happiness, says we tend to think the future will be a lot like today…only different. But the future is fundamentally different from today, and the way you feel right now when you think about the consequences of taking some action is not necessarily the way you will feel when you are living with the consequences of that action.

Taking any action can have unexpected results and undesired consequences. Although you can anticipate that such things might occur, you can’t plan for them because you won’t know what they are until after they happen.

Too much logical, linear thinking is as bad as too little. After framing the problem or situation and considering possible solutions, turn it over to your unconscious (System 1) for a while and see what it comes up with. Let your mind wander instead of keeping it on a tight leash. The sudden insight, moment of clarity, or change in perspective you get may surprise you. But this is the way the creative process works, and it’s a great way to use both parts of your brain to your advantage.

Additional reading: Intuition: Knowing without Knowing How We Know.

Depression’s Interesting Effect on Decision-Making

November 19, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

How does depression affect decision-making? In a word: negatively. That’s not a big surprise. But why do depressed people have a harder time making decisions? According to the results of a recent study reported in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, one reason is that people who are depressed have more difficulty accessing their intuition. In my last post, Intuition: Knowing without Knowing How We Know, I said that intuition as the result of the associative thinking of System 1 (our unconscious), which constantly sees patterns and connects dots our conscious brain (System 2) is unaware of.

Intuitive—or associative—thinking is good for making short-term predictions and for everyday decision-making. And it’s everyday decision-making that depressed people report having difficulty with. Instead of accessing or relying on their intuition, they use the rational, logical, and linear thinking of System 2, which is considerably slower.

Over-relying on System 2 thinking often results in “analysis paralysis,” which I’ll be covering in my next post. System 2 attention is limited and easily depleted, so if we have to rely on it for every little decision we make, we will quickly run out of steam. We won’t be able to make any decision, large or small.

Another thing the study revealed is that depressed people are more likely to ruminate. Maybe it’s this tendency to ruminate that disrupts a person’s access to intuition.

In a post on rumination last month, I wrote:

Rumination feels like problem-solving, but it actually prevents us from solving problems because it keeps us focused on negative events and emotions. We continue to dwell on our problems instead of attempting to resolve them. Rumination disrupts our self-regulation. Because we want to feel better, we try to distract ourselves or turn to immediate gratification. Rumination also increases stress levels and has a negative effect on our general health.

Rumination is a low level of thinking in which one thought leads to another but never to a solution or a conclusion. Rumination occupies mental space and System 2 (conscious) attention, which is already in short supply.

So depression may at least partially be a matter of using, or getting stuck in, the wrong kind of thinking. Intuition—otherwise known as jumping to conclusions—isn’t infallible by any means, but in terms of ordinary, everyday decisions, it is generally reliable. And when it’s wrong in those situations, the stakes tend not to be high enough to lead to major negative consequences.

System 2 thinking is slow, effortful, and deliberate. It’s great for solving complex problems and for long-range or strategic planning. It isn’t the best choice for the hundreds of quick decisions we normally need to make every day. It’s easy to understand how someone could become mired in the quicksand of System 2 thinking and feel mentally paralyzed.

Some suggestions on curtailing ruminative thinking can be found here. Hopefully, the link between a tendency to ruminate and the loss of access to intuitive thinking will lead to greater insight into depression and more treatment options for those experiencing it.

Intuition: Knowing without Knowing How We Know

November 12, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

Intuition goes by many names: hunch, gut feeling, instinct, inkling, inner voice. Malcolm Gladwell refers to it as “rapid cognition.” Cognitive psychologist John Bargh calls it “automatic processing.”

No matter how we label it, what intuition is is the ability to “know” something without knowing how we know it.

One thing intuition is not is magical or mysterious or superior in some way to rational, logical thinking. It’s just different. The world is not divided into people who are intuitive and people who are not. We all rely on intuition every day.

Intuition is the result of the associative thinking that takes place in the unconscious (System 1). The unconscious sees patterns and connects dots our conscious brain (System 2) isn’t even aware of. It operates quickly and it’s always on. That’s because, by the way, it’s what keeps us alive. And keeping us alive is what our brain is designed to do. System 1 makes rapid-fire assessments and communicates them to System 2. When we become consciously aware of one of those assessments, we call it intuition. We could also call it jumping to conclusions.

Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is important to an understanding of intuitive thinking. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions. —Daniel Kahneman

System 1 reacts exactly the same way (jumps to conclusions) whether we have a clue or not. So sometimes its assessments are accurate and sometimes they’re not. Intuition is good for making short-term predictions when it’s based on training, experience, and practice. But even when the training, experience, and practice are in place, intuition is not good for making long-term predictions or forecasts. There are just too many unknown variables for it to account for.

There are a number of potential problems related to relying on intuition. One is that System 1 processing is highly context-dependent. That means that whatever is going on at the time—the weather, our state of mind, the time of day, the last thing we ate—can influence our thoughts. So an intuitive assessment reached under one set of temporary circumstances could be entirely different from the one reached under a different set of circumstances.

Another problem is that good intuition in one area of our lives where we have expertise doesn’t carry over to other areas where we don’t have comparable expertise.

A third and bigger problem with intuition is the strong feeling of confidence it often engenders, whether or not that confidence is warranted, because that sense of confidence is all too easy to confuse with clarity.

What You Can Do:

Don’t automatically assume your intuitive guesses are accurate across the board. Just because you feel confident about something doesn’t mean you’re right. If you are skilled or knowledgeable in an area, your intuition is more likely to be accurate—at least when it comes to short-term predictions. But if you have no particular skill or knowledge, your intuition isn’t any better than a wild guess.

As Kahneman says, “Do not simply trust intuitive judgment—your own or that of others—but do not dismiss it, either.”

Additional Reading: How Important Is Your Need to Be Right? and Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty?

How Important Is Your Need to Be Right?

November 4, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

A heavy investment in being right can lead to all kinds of problems, large and small, personally and interpersonally, even nationally and globally. The underlying source of our drive to be right is survival. Being right enhances our chances of staying alive. In the distant past, if we were wrong too often or about something really important—such as which food was poisonous or which animal was dangerous—we could have ended up dead.

Being and proving we’re right are knee-jerk reactions to perceived threats. Most of us no longer face the same daily threats to life our long-ago ancestors faced. But our brain doesn’t quite get that because it hasn’t changed all that much. It still operates the same way. To our unconscious (System 1), a threat is a threat is a threat—and that includes threats to our beliefs, our opinions, and our good feelings about ourselves and the people we care about. Furthermore, we not only want to see ourselves as being right, we want others to see us that way, too.

Our need to be right gets in the way of clarity in a couple of different ways.

First, refusing to acknowledge we could be wrong about something automatically clouds our judgment. It restricts what we are able to see and understand because we screen out anything that conflicts with the scenario in which we are right.

Second, an investment in being right creates a singular agenda. Rather than focusing on doing the right, or appropriate, thing in the situation, we’re more concerned about being right—or being seen as right—about what we’re doing.

When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. We get addicted to being right. …Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. —Judith E. Glaser, Organizational Anthropologist

No one enjoys admitting they’re wrong, even to themselves. But we’re all wrong much more often than we’re right. And nobody’s perfect.

What you can do:

Recognize that you’re not alone: everyone has the same hardwired need to be right and to be seen as right.

If you’re feeling stuck about something, ask yourself if wanting to be right is getting in the way of your judgment or your ability to think clearly.

Remind yourself that you’re not still trying to survive on the savannah. Being wrong may be unpleasant or uncomfortable, but it’s highly unlikely to be fatal.

Additional reading: Anger, Adrenaline, and Arrogance: Addiction to Certainty and Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty?

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