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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Matter over Mind

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bear

I was sitting at my desk considering the topic of embodied cognition with the aim of exploring power and power poses. But of course there are many different ways in which what we do with—or how we arrange various parts of—our bodies affects our minds.

For example:

  • If you nod your head while listening to someone, you’re more likely to agree with him or her.
  • If you encounter another person while you’re in the middle of—or right after—a scary situation, you’re likely to consider that person more attractive than you otherwise would.
  • If you’re holding a hot drink in your hand, you’re more likely to consider a stranger warm and friendly (and vice versa if you’re holding a cold drink).

So I took a pencil out of the brilliantly colored oversized Majolica mug that currently holds my writing implements and put it between my teeth. Yes, it did noticeably elevate my mood (because the activity uses the same muscles we use when we smile). And I immediately thought of William James’s bear, which made me think of Joseph LeDoux, and then of his band, The Amygdaloids.

I can see how my mind associated William James’s bear, whether or not accurately, with embodied cognition. But it’s striking how the thought came to me the very second I put the pencil between my teeth. Was it conning my brain into believing I was happier that did the trick?

William James published an article in 1884 titled “What Is an Emotion?” Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, author of several books, including The Emotional Brain, described James’s inquiry:

Do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run? [James] proposed that the obvious answer, that we run because we are afraid, was wrong, and instead argued that we are afraid because we run.

James’s theory—at least in regard to emotion—has not entirely held up over time. But there isn’t much doubt that we can at least alter our emotional state, or our state of mind, via our bodies and the actions we take. Which leads to Amy Cuddy’s research on body language—and power poses.

But first, here’s a video of The Amygdaloids (an all-neuroscientist rock band) performing “Mind over Matter.”

Our Bodies Change Our Minds

Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk (“Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are”) is well worth watching. A social psychologist, she says she became interested in power dynamics, especially nonverbal expressions of power and dominance.

Power has been a recent topic of discussion in a collaborative group I meet with weekly. Prior to one of our sessions, I tried to come up with as many synonyms for the word as I could and made it all the way to 40. Not everyone has a positive view of the concept of power, and power can definitely be abused and misused. But although a few of the synonyms may have negative connotations, most seem desirable—at least to me. In my group, we discussed power as the speed (or velocity) with which one translates intention into action, which I think most of us would like to be better at.

If you could use body language to trick your brain (using matter over mind) into believing you’re powerful—so that you actually felt powerful whenever you wanted or need to be—would you want to do that?

The thing about body language is that whether or not we want to be communicating something in particular to another person or to ourselves, our body language is communicating all the time. So it’s useful to pay attention to our habitual physical postures to notice what it is we are communicating.

Here are five high power poses and five low power poses courtesy of Amy Cuddy:

body-language-power-poses

What’s your relationship with power?

Do you see yourself in any of the pictures? What about other people you know: friends, family members, co-workers, colleagues?

And what about the power synonyms? Which ones do you relate to or feel positive about? Which ones are a turn-off?

My group plans to continue the discussion on power next week, so stay tuned for the next installment, which will include the roles testosterone and cortisol play in regard to power.

Is What You See All There Is?

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rainbow eye

As you move through the world, you probably have the sense that you’re aware of whatever there is to be aware of as it is. This applies not only to the sensory world, but also to events, situations, interpersonal interactions—actually to everything that exists or occurs within your world. But the capacity of conscious attention is much too limited for this to even be possible. The 11,000,000 bits of information being processed by the unconscious part of the brain at any given moment need to be considerably (and swiftly) condensed and summarized into the 40 bits you can process consciously.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman, Incognito

What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI)*

Your brain maintains a model of the world that represents what’s normal in it for you. The result is that you experience a stripped-down, customized version of the actual world. To a great extent, each of us really does inhabit our own world. But it would be incorrect to say that we create our reality; rather, our brain creates our reality for us.

Much, if not most, of what you do, think, and feel consists of automatically generated responses to internal or external stimuli. And it isn’t possible to consciously mediate all of your responses. It wouldn’t even be a good idea to try.

In addition to helping you navigate the world, your mental model gives rise to your sense of the way things should be. It generates expectations (that are either confirmed or denied), assumptions, biases, etc. that determine what you pay attention to, what you perceive (even what you are able to perceive), how you interpret and respond to what you perceive, and the meaning you make of it all. Your mental model is the result of your genes and your experiences, of both intention and accident. Your brain has been constructing your particular model of the world since your birth, and it is continually updating and modifying it—most of the time entirely outside your awareness.

But while the contents of your particular mental model determine what you think, feel, do, and say, you can’t search them—or follow a bread-crumb trail backward through them—to find out precisely which aspects (and when and how they came to be) give rise to any specific facet of who you are and how you react now.

The significance of your mental model in your life can’t be overstated. Although you aren’t consciously aware of it, your mental model circumscribes not only every aspect of your present experience but also what is possible for you to do and be. It determines what you see and how you see the world, both literally and figuratively, as well as how you see yourself.

But…Your Brain Can Get It Wrong

System 1, the unconscious part of your brain, uses associative thinking to develop and maintain your model of the world. However, there are some problems with associative thinking. For example:

  • It sacrifices accuracy for speed.
  • It doesn’t discriminate very well.
  • It takes cognitive shortcuts (aka cognitive biases).

Your mental model can—and sometimes does—lead to erroneous conclusions and inappropriate responses. It’s the job of consciousness (System 2) to check the impulses and suggestions it receives from System 1, but consciousness is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Most of the time, it’s content to go along with System 1, which means it’s susceptible to cognitive biases. By definition, cognitive biases are distortions or errors in thinking. They actually decrease your understanding while giving you a feel-good sense of cognitive ease.

Confirmation bias is the easy acceptance of information that validates what you already believe. It causes you to selectively notice and pay attention to what confirms your beliefs and to ignore what doesn’t. It underlies the discomfort you feel around people who disagree with you and the ease you feel around people who share your beliefs.

Information that confirms what you already believe to be true makes you feel right and certain, so you’re likely to accept it uncritically. On the other hand, you’re more likely to reject information that is inconsistent with what you already believe or at least you hold inconsistent information up to greater scrutiny. You have different standards for evaluating information depending on the level of cognitive ease it generates.

Evidence has precious little impact on any of us if it conflicts with what we believe simply because the cognitive strain of processing it is too great. To a very real extent, we don’t even “see” conflicting evidence. While total commitment to our particular worldview (mental model) makes us feel more confident, it narrows—rather than expands—our possibilities. That means it limits our powers of discernment, our ability to increase our understanding of the world around us, and our creative potential. It closes the world off for us instead of opening it up.

The often-quoted statement is true: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. If we want to live fuller lives, if we want to be more effective or useful or loving in the world, we first need to recognize that our greatest constraints are imposed by our own mental models.

It’s important to remember that what you see is not all there is.

*Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Distractibility, Procrastination, and Focus: Look, a Bird!

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look a bird

Everyone procrastinates at one time or another. Two big contributing factors to procrastination are straightforward: low self-confidence and the aversiveness of tasks. If we doubt our ability to complete a chore and find it as exciting as watching concrete set, we are more likely to put it off. It is no wonder that calculating our taxes, which is both difficult and boring, is famous for making procrastinators out of almost all of us. However, not everyone is a habitual procrastinator.

Procrastination is a characteristic often associated with perfectionism, as if perfectionism is a direct and quantifiable cause of procrastination. But it turns out that perfectionists actually tend to procrastinate less than other people do, which makes sense when you think about it.

Anxiety is another tendency that is frequently associated with procrastination. However:

According to analysis of about a hundred studies involving tens of thousands of participants, anxiety produces a negligible amount of procrastination at best—and even that tiny amount disappears completely after you take into account other personality characteristics, especially impulsiveness. –Piers Steel, Ph.D., author of The Procrastination Equation

This research suggests that the anxiety people feel when a deadline is staring them in the face and they aren’t sure they can meet it is the result of having procrastinated.

According to Piers Steel, it’s impulsiveness that is “the nickel-iron core” of procrastination:

[I]mpulsiveness creates procrastination because it makes small but immediate temptations, like playing Minesweeper or updating your social network status, especially attractive. The reward might be small but the delay is virtually nonexistent. On the flip side, large but distant rewards, like graduating or saving for retirement, aren’t valued much at all. Despite their importance, these long-term goals don’t motivate us until the march of time itself eventually transforms them into short-term consequences. Only in those final hours do we frantically try to catch up on what we really should have addressed long before. The more impulsive you are, the closer to deadlines you need to be before you’ll feel fully motivated.

I understand what he’s saying about impulsiveness, but I wonder if distractibility—which means to turn away from the original focus of attention or interest—might not be a more apt term for this than impulsiveness—which means to act suddenly on impulse without reflection.

Focus

A distraction is something that keeps us from giving 100% of our attention to what we’re doing or attempting to do right now. By diverting our attention, it dims our focus. Being distracted isn’t the same as choosing to take a break. Allowing ourselves to be distracted is rarely a conscious choice.

The path to anywhere is booby-trapped with an unrelenting blitzkrieg of tempting distractions so magnificent and horrible—and insistent—they may even invade our dreams.

These distractions tempt us because they include:

  • things we’re naturally interested in
  • things we’re convinced we need to know (every single thing there is to know) about
  • things we have to be on top of or take care of
  • things we suddenly remember we forgot to do
  • things that are simply so compelling we can’t not be distracted by them
  • things that take our minds off whatever we’re doing that we don’t want to be doing
  • things that seem better (more interesting, easier, or maybe just newer) than whatever we’re doing now

The internet is a major—and obvious—source of distraction, but it is an amateur compared to the source of distraction inside our own heads.

Attention is notoriously difficult to keep focused. One reason is that conscious attention requires, well, consciousness, and conscious (System 2) attention is a limited resource that can’t be easily or quickly renewed. It definitely can’t be renewed on command. If we squander it early in the day, we may not have enough left for another task that requires it later on. And squander it we do, on all kinds of things that are not worth actually thinking about.

When it comes to maintaining focus on a long-term goal—keeping our eyes on a distant prize—we often trip ourselves up at the outset by not accounting for the inevitable flagging of conscious attention. All evidence to the contrary, we’re convinced we will maintain the same level of enthusiasm and focus through the entire extent of a project that we had at the beginning of it. We count on our interest and enthusiasm to carry us through. It can’t and it won’t.

The sane thing to do, then, would be to assume that our interest, enthusiasm, and attention are going to flag and to create a plan that doesn’t rely solely on will power, self-discipline, enthusiasm, interest, or anything else that comes and goes.

Use Your Brain

If you want to use your brain to help maintain your focus, one thing you can do is set up checkpoints along the path to monitor your progress and to reward yourself for your achievements. The hits of dopamine your brain releases when you reward yourself will not only make you feel good, they will also activate emotional and learning circuits to increase the likelihood you will remember what you did and will want to do it again. As you get closer to reaching your goal, your brain will actually increase the amount of dopamine it releases each time you pass another checkpoint.

Achieving a distant goal—which could mean two months, two years, or two decades from now—requires detailed planning in order to get your brain to get with the program. Imagining the outcome—so you know what you’re aiming for—is important. But if you don’t identify all the steps it will take to get to the finish line and claim the prize, your brain will not be on board. Your brain, in fact, will be looking to board any passing train it catches sight of, and it will be taking you right along with it.

Just as everyone procrastinates from time to time, anyone can become distracted. The trick is to not allow chasing squirrels to become a habit.

How much do you procrastinate? Here’s a link to a procrastination survey you can complete. It might be an interesting distraction.

You’re Not Sabotaging Yourself

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self-sabotage

Following right on the heels of a lack of will power, the number two reason people come up with for not following through on what they set out to do is self-sabotage. This is a catchall phrase that seems to refer to any behavior that is inconsistent with one’s conscious intentions or goals. As such, it’s completely meaningless.

You may routinely do things that you regret doing:

  • Overeat when you’re trying to lose weight
  • Sleep in when you want to go to the gym
  • Fail to study for an exam you want to pass
  • Put less than your best effort into a project that matters

But that doesn’t mean you’re sabotaging yourself.

Here’s the Merriam-Webster definition of sabotage: “the act of destroying or damaging something deliberately so that it does not work correctly.” Dictionary.com defines it as “any underhand interference with production, work, etc….as by enemy agents during wartime or by employees during a trade dispute.” Vocabulary.com says sabotage occurs “when you ruin or disrupt something by messing up a part of it on purpose.”

What these and all other definitions of the word sabotage have in common is the element of deliberateness. Sabotage, by definition, isn’t accidental or an unfortunate side-effect. It is intentional. So in order for us to be sabotaging ourselves, we would have to be engaging in counterproductive behavior on purpose.

This gets dicey right off the bat because we’re told our counterproductive (self-sabotaging) behavior originates in the unconscious. It is “hidden from our everyday thoughts,” according to one self-help author. But if we do something because we’re “unconsciously compelled” to do it, as a psychologist wrote, then it can’t possibly be intentional or deliberate.

Yes, it’s true—and inevitable—that we have competing or conflicting beliefs, goals, and intentions. In Incognito, David Eagleman says:

Brains…are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As Walt Whiteman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle.

When the hostess at a party offers chocolate cake, you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: some parts of your brain have evolved to crave the rich energy source of sugar [System 1], and other parts care about the negative consequences, such as the health of your heart or the bulge of your love handles [System 2]. Part of you wants the cake and part of you tries to muster the fortitude to forgo it.

Brains can be of two minds, and often many more. We don’t know whether to turn toward the cake or away from it, because there are several little sets of hands on the steering wheel of our behavior.

This is relatively straightforward and in no way implies that the part of our brain that craves sugar, System 1, has an intention to undermine System 2’s attempts to manage our health. The brain just doesn’t work that way.

Eagleman proposes that the brain is best understood as a team of rivals and adds:

Remember that competing factions typically have the same goal—success for the country—but they often have different ways of going about it.

How we frame a problem determines where and how we go about looking for its solution. If we view our counterproductive behavior as resulting from self-sabotage, we’re likely to divert our attention to trying to figure out why we’re sabotaging ourselves. But we don’t have direct access to the unconscious, which is where our so-called sabotage originates, so even if we were sabotaging ourselves we could never actually get to the bottom of things.

We harbor mechanical, “alien” subroutines to which we have no access and of which we have no acquaintance. Almost all of our actions—from producing speech to picking up a mug of coffee—are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems.

Looking back into the past to find the trail of breadcrumbs that leads to the behavior of today amounts to a whole lot of wheel-spinning. It can’t succeed, and even if it could, it wouldn’t make any difference in regard to solving the problem at hand: getting our behavior to line up with our conscious intentions.

That’s because it isn’t the unconscious part of the brain that’s the problem; it’s the conscious part. If we don’t know what we want, we don’t have a clear direction. If we aren’t fully committed to what we set out to do (or claim to be setting out to do), we have no urgency. Without both direction and urgency, our best laid plans are dead in the water.

We can retrain System 1 to do more of what we want it to do and less of what we don’t want it to do. But that requires repetition and persistence. Lots of repetition. And lots of persistence. It isn’t easy—and it isn’t as sexy as searching for our inner saboteur—but it’s both straightforward and effective.

Self-sabotage is nothing more than a good cover story.

Hooked on The Brain with David Eagleman

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david eagleman brain3

I’ve just finished watching the third episode of this PBS series and I think I’m more hooked on David Eagleman and the brain than I was on J.R. Ewing and Dallas back in the 1980s. I’ve spent the past three and a half years intensely focused on learning as much as I can about brain, mind, and behavior, so I’m not really surprised that so far I’m familiar with everything that’s been presented in the first three episodes of The Brain. However, that hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm for the series. Quite the opposite. I’ve pre-ordered the DVD and look forward to many future viewings and to sharing the episodes in my classes. I’m thrilled to see this information put together so beautifully and made so widely available. Not everyone is hooked on the brain—at least not yet, anyway. Maybe more people will be after watching.

When I look back on the path to creating Farther to Go! a number of moments stand out. Of course, memory is a bit of a crapshoot when it comes to accuracy, but I do have physical evidence that these things actually happened when I recall them happening.

More than 20 years ago, when I was working as a substance abuse counselor, I came across a book by Richard Restak, The Brain Has a Mind of Its Own. The chapter of the same name described experiments in the 1980s by Benjamin Libet that identified a readiness potential that was observed in the brain prior to the subjects’ awareness of their desire to take a specific action. Quite a few people in a number of different disciplines seemed disconcerted by these findings, concerned about the fate of our so-called free will. I was fascinated. The implication was that things are not as they seem—or as we feel them to be. Restak’s a good writer and the rest of the chapters in his book were no doubt interesting, but all I recall is the information on Libet’s experiments. If you watched Episode #3 of The Brain, you saw some of the current research in this area.

A few years later, I took a biological psychology class that further whetted my interest in how the brain and mind (if they are indeed separate from each other) actually work. That’s where I first encountered the split-brain research of Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry. I don’t know whether the instructor made a point of this particular research or whether I was particularly fascinated by it. But Gazzaniga’s name and research clicked into place for me when I came across them again several years ago. He’s the person who came up with the concept of the Inner Interpreter, which Eagleman alluded to when he mentioned how the conscious part of the brain comes up with a good story about why we’ve just done something.

In 2011, The New Yorker ran an article, titled The Possibillian, about a neuroscientist named David Eagleman, who had spent time living in Albuquerque, which is where I live. He had attended Albuquerque Academy, which is practically within walking distance, and lived in roughly the same part of town. At the time, he was studying “brain time”—essentially how and why our experience of time differs from the actual passage of time. I found the article interesting enough to have torn it out of the magazine and saved it, which isn’t something I do very often. A year or so later, I was browsing the shelves of a local bookstore and saw Eagleman’s name on the spine of a book titled Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Had I not known who he was, I might not have pulled the book off the shelf. And had the book I was actually looking for been available, I doubt I would have purchased Incognito.

The first chapter in Eagleman’s book, titled “There’s Someone In My Head, But It’s Not Me” (a tip of the hat to Pink Floyd), had enough references to things I already knew about, but expanded beyond anything I had previously been aware of, that I read all 19 pages standing next to my dining table without even taking my jacket off. I’ve since learned he studied literature before turning his full attention to neuroscience, which may explain his talent as a writer.

Just glancing through the pages of the book now and noting what I highlighted or earmarked reminds me of how excited I was to read and think about some of these things for the very first time. Concepts that seemed new or difficult to comprehend or somewhat improbable have become part of my mental model of the way the world—and my brain—work.

He closes the book with these words:

What a perplexing masterpiece the brain is, and how lucky we are to be in a generation that has the technology and the will to turn our attention to it. It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.

That’s exactly how I feel. I’m definitely hooked on the brain, with or without David Eagleman, but he’s a most excellent tour guide. Everyone should be watching this series!

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joycelyn@farthertogo.com
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