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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty

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road ahead

Although we frequently use the terms interchangeably, certainty is not a synonym for clarity.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. –Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

There’s a big difference between being unclear—not knowing which step to take—and being uncertain—not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be. It’s important to distinguish between the two and to be able to recognize whether it’s a lack of clarity or the fear of uncertainty that’s getting in the way.

There’s another big problem with trying to be certain, which is that we can’t be. There’s no way to predict the future—and randomness plays a much bigger role in our lives than we want to believe—so we can’t be certain about the outcome of anything we do. We end up tying ourselves in knots and wasting precious mental resources chasing an illusion.

So if we wait until we can be certain of the outcome of our actions, we’ll never act because the outcome can never be certain. There are no guarantees in life.

The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. —Robert Burns

Unlike certainty, clarity is not an emotional state. It’s a state of mind: unclouded, unobstructed, unambiguous. Unlike certainty, clarity isn’t arrived at via a tortuous route. Unfortunately, the unconscious part of our brain (System 1) is biased against uncertainty, and so we are biased against it, as well. This is another example of our brain using us instead of the other way around.

What you can do:
  • Practice tolerating uncertainty and not being attached to the outcome.
  • Learn to distinguish between being unclear (not knowing which step to take) and being uncertain (not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be).

Additional reading: 12 Signs that You Lack Clarity

12 Signs that You Lack Clarity

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distortionMental clarity means freedom from ambiguity or clearness of perception.

When you have mental clarity, the matter at hand or the situation you’re dealing with is in focus. The path ahead is illuminated. You aren’t weighing pros and cons. Your mind is calm. You know what to do next.

A clear view, a clear sky, a clear mind, and a clear conscience all have the same thing in common: a lack of obstruction (respectively, a building or fence, clouds, an unresolved issue, guilt).

When you have clarity, you know it. But how can you tell when you don’t have it? You probably lack clarity if you:

  1. Come to a major fork in the road and are unsure about what to do or which path to take
  2. Struggle with minor decision-making
  3. Feel confused, overwhelmed, stressed, anxious, or tired
  4. Are in a fog or feel “brain dead”
  5. Rehash the same situations or problems over and over again
  6. Feel stuck
  7. Are chronically disorganized
  8. Feel ineffective or unproductive
  9. Always have too much to do
  10. Are easily distracted
  11. Operate by consensus
  12. Constantly question yourself

There can be other causes for these symptoms, of course, and hopefully you don’t have all of them at the same time. But there’s no question that a lack of clarity can make your life much more difficult and challenging than it needs to be.

The bad news and the good news is that we confuse and obstruct our own minds. We create our own lack of clarity. In general, we do it by letting our brain use us instead of the other way around. If you can identify how you habitually get in your own way, you’ll have a much better chance of stepping aside.

I’ll talk about some of the most common obstructions to clarity in upcoming posts.

In the meantime, here are some questions to ask yourself to help you get in touch with your experience of clarity—and the lack thereof.

What is something you HAVE clarity about?

How does being clear affect your thoughts, feelings, and actions?

What is something you DON’T HAVE clarity about?

How does being unclear affect your thoughts, feelings, and actions?

Please feel free to share your thoughts, feelings, or experiences concerning clarity.

How Can You Live Passionately?

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passion

We don’t go looking for a solution until we have a problem to solve.

This is one of those things in life that seems pretty straightforward—and sometimes it is. But surprisingly often it isn’t. It’s more likely to be straightforward when the problem or issue at hand is small or simple and less likely to be straightforward when the problem is big or complex.

Complex problems can be difficult to see clearly. The unconscious part of our brain has a couple of habits that prevent us from seeing and defining complex issues of any kind. For one thing, it’s quick to jump to conclusions and to treat those conclusions as facts. For another, it craves certainty and being right, so it’s more comfortable with things that are easy to understand and that it already knows something about.

The result is that from time to time we go off on wild goose chases seeking a solution to the wrong problem because we asked the wrong question. No matter how good the solution, it won’t solve that particular problem.

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the idea—or problem, if you will—of living with passion. If I believe passion means a passion, such as a calling—what and who I am meant to be—then the question I might ask is “What is my passion?” or “How can I find my passion?” That’s not an uncommon way to define the problem. Those are not uncommon questions to ask. And numerous roadmaps and processes are available to assist me—purportedly—in finding and following my passion.

But that’s not the only way to define the problem. In fact, it’s fairly narrow in scope and definition. If I believe living with passion requires finding my passion that makes me an arrow in search of a target, hoping I can hit the bull’s eye. What if I fail in my quest? Am I doomed to the booby prize: a passionless life?

If instead I ask, “How can I live a passionate life?” of “How can I live passionately?” that leads me down an entirely different path and to a much more interesting question: “What gets in the way of living passionately?” Now this is a worthy question to ask.

What gets in the way of living passionately?

I suspect the answer is the same for everyone. What gets in the way is us, specifically the things we tell ourselves, our considerations, our expectations, the preconditions we demand of life, or fear of feeling fear (occasionally known as excitement), and on and on. We’re afraid of stepping up, taking a risk, facing uncertainty, getting hurt or burned, failing, caring too much, or exceeding our reach. The unconscious part of our brain is wired for survival. Passion is definitely not part of its plan.

What gets in the way of living passionately is not our circumstances. It’s our own non-stop mental blah, blah, blah that keeps passion at arm’s length. If we want to live passionately, we can start doing it any time. There’s nothing to search for or to find, either within or without. There’s nothing stopping us from living passionately this very moment but ourselves.

What’s getting in the way of living passionately for you?

A Case for Lucid Waking

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lucid dreaming

You have to hand it to humans. As a species, we are seriously and committedly wrong-headed about so very many things. And we have a high level of confidence about our beliefs and convictions regardless of how much or how little that confidence is warranted.

For example, we think we’re aware (we understand what’s going on) while we’re awake, so it isn’t that much of a leap for some of us to want to be aware of our dreams while we’re dreaming. A Google search for “lucid dreaming” brought up about 673,000 hits, whereas a similar search for “lucid waking” brought up about 10,200. I’m surprised there were that many.

Reportedly, the person who coined the term lucid dreaming—Frederik van Eeden—considered lucid to be synonymous with mental clarity. And therein lies one of the problems. Mental clarity is sorely lacking in the waking lives of most people. This is a fact, not an indictment. We spend most of our days operating on autopilot, at the effect of biases, triggers and cues, and mental processes we have no conscious knowledge of. Most of what’s going on around us is happening outside our awareness. However, we don’t let that diminish our sense of certainty.

We’re very good at coming up with plausible sounding explanations for behavior and events. But just because we can come up with explanations doesn’t mean they’re accurate. Our stories and explanations are developed after the fact to create a cause-and-effect stream that feels like real life. We don’t do it intentionally—at least not usually. It happens automatically, with no effort on our part. It’s how we make sense of the world. Our stories and explanations provide us with a false sense of complacency, comfort, and security. They give us the illusion of mental clarity but not much of the real thing.

And it’s from this vantage point that we set out to develop mental clarity—or the illusion of mental clarity—about our dreams.

My thought is that we might want to redirect our efforts toward lucid waking. If, as a species, we developed greater mental clarity about how we operate while we’re awake, we might be able to take a stab at solving some of the serious problems we face. That seems like a more practical and worthwhile focus for our attention.

How Free Is Your Will?

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Chocolate-Cake

Here are links to a few articles and videos by some of my favorite scientists, researchers, and writers who focus on the brain—specifically on the part of the brain we’re not aware of but which so strongly affects every aspect of our lives.

Of course, much of what is being discovered about how the brain actually works is revolutionary in and of itself. But the access we have to it is no less revolutionary. An internet connection is all it takes to read, watch, or listen to the latest developments. By now, I take that access for granted. But that doesn’t stop me from appreciating it.

Click on the titles to get to the articles.

The Possibilian

David Eagleman, author of Incognito

The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. 

 When I came across Incognito on a bookstore shelf, I picked it up because I had read (and torn out) this article from The New Yorker. There’s a local connection, too. Eagleman attended Albuquerque Academy, which is only a few minutes away from where I live. So far, he’s the only scientist I’m aware of who uses the terms alien subroutines and zombie systems to describe our unconscious processes.

How Your Mind Works

Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

Any video with Daniel Kahneman in it is worth watching. Thinking, Fast and Slow can be a bit of a slog to get through in places (at least if you’re mathematically challenged like I am). But Kahneman’s spoken explanations are disarmingly clear and straightforward.

How Free Is Your Will?

Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux

Philosophers have debated for years whether we deliberately make each of the many decisions we make every day, or if our brain does it for us, on autopilot. Neuroscientists have shown, for example, that neurons in the brain initiate our response to various stimuli milliseconds before we’re even aware that we’re taking such an action.

This link includes the video conversation between Gazzaniga and LeDoux along with the song “How Free Is Your Will?” performed by Le Doux’s band The Amygdaloids. The concept of a rock band composed of neuroscientists is mildly mind-bending. But they’re not bad.

Gut Feeling: How Intestinal Bacteria Could Manipulate Your Brain

David DiSalvo, author of What Makes Your Brain Happy, and Why You Should Do the Opposite

We’ve all heard about the bacterial universe within our bodies, but what’s less well known is just how vast this universe is in comparison to the rest of us: bacteria outnumber all of the cells in our body 100 to 1. And just like us, certain bacteria have a taste for certain nutrients, and they’ve developed ways of influencing their hosts to deliver more of their preferred vittles to the dinner table.

Yes, DiSalvo says, your brain may have made you eat that huge piece of chocolate cake. But apparently “the nervous system superhighway that runs from the digestive system all the way to the base of the brain” is a two-way street. What you eat can influence your brain in constructive–or non-constructive–ways.

The Invisible Gorilla (featuring Daniel Simons)

If you haven’t seen this one yet, just watch it.

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