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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Books to Change Your Mind,
Your Brain, and Your Self

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Here are brief summaries of a dozen books I consider foundational for understanding brain, mind, and behavior. Most of them were published between 2010 and 2012. There are plenty of books that have been published since then—and a couple I’m eagerly awaiting that will be out later this year—but these remain the most salient.

If you were to read all of them, you would see that some cross-reference each other in one way or another. That repetition is extremely useful! You would also get schooled in the extent to which we are wrong, which is also extremely useful.

Each summary includes a quote from the book, my take on what the book has to offer, and a link to a related blog post on my website. The books are listed roughly in order of importance.

Incognito | David Eagleman | 2011

Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it.

It’s silent and dark inside the brain. So what happens in there to give us the rich visual and auditory perception of the external world we seem to have? How often do we mistake illusions for reality? Is the brain even focused on attempting to accurately represent reality or is it actively making things up? To what extent can you trust your sense of time? Is time real? How confident are you in your answers to any of those questions?

This was the threshold book for me: the book that didn’t just show me why and how the way we think about things is wrong, but also opened up so many possibilities. It left me with a big question: what is the best use of consciousness and conscious attention?

Blog post: Z Is for Zombie Systems

Thinking, Fast and Slow | Daniel Kahneman | 2011

A mind that follows WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions.

Here’s everything you wanted to know about System 1 (the unconscious) and System 2 (consciousness). I sometimes refer to these two parts of the brain as Smart Hamster (S2, the slow thinker) and Strong Hamster (S1, the fast thinker). Kahneman details the benefits and shortcomings of both types of thinking.

He also explains the basis of intuition and when it is—or is not—likely to be reliable, as well as some of the many cognitive biases System 1 uses in order to arrive at its quick judgments and conclusions. Overall assessment: mind-boggling.

Blog post: Intuition: Knowing Without Knowing How We Know

Self Comes to Mind | Antonio Damasio | 2010

The narrative of mind and consciousness that I am presenting here does not conform to the requirements of fiction. It is actually counterintuitive. It upsets traditional human storytelling. It repeatedly denies long-held assumptions and not a few expectations. But none of this makes the account any less likely.

Many of the books on my list contain what’s known as troublesome knowledge; Damasio admits upfront that his is one of them. He takes us on a trip from single-celled nonconscious organisms to us: many-celled conscious organisms with a sense of self and multiple selves.

I put off reading this for a long time, but it was worth the effort to get through the science to get to the issue of what it’s like to live with consciousness. As Damasio says, our conscious deliberation is circumscribed by numerous unconscious processes, some of which we can affect and some of which we can’t.

One surprising conclusion is that the unconscious is capable of making much higher-level decisions than we give it credit for—that is, if we have trained it well.

Blog post: Are You a Fictional Character?

The Ego Trick | Julian Baggini | 2011

The self is a construction of the mind, one flexible enough to withstand constant renovation, partial demolition and reconstruction, but one that can be brought down if the foundations are undermined.

Baggini, a philosopher, tackles a big question: If each of us has an enduring essence that makes us the same person throughout our lives (or even after), where and what is it? He attempts to answer the question via philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality.

He says that the self is an illusion but that he does not mean it isn’t real, just that it isn’t what we think it is. That is the so-called “ego trick.” If there is no “true self,” we can, to a certain extent, create ourselves. His emphasis on action and agency make this a must-read, I think, for anyone interested in transformational change.

Blog post: Time to Let Go of the Myth of the True Self

What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite | David DiSalvo | 2011

I believe that the new wave of cognitive research actually undercuts a great deal of self-help advice, and will continue to do so in the years ahead by showing just how vacuous, groundless, and fraudulent much of that advice really is. We do not need more self-help—we need more science help.

The brain is “happy” when it is avoiding loss, lessening risk, and averting harm. While these protective tendencies can be quite useful, they can also get in the way of creativity, innovation, and living a satisfying and meaningful life.

The brain is also happy when it can connect the dots, whatever those dots may be: experiences, symbols, words, images, sounds. It does not like randomness, but it does like patterns. It doesn’t like questions; it likes answers.

As Disalvo says, we have a big brain capable of greatness with hardwiring for survival. And as I’ve said, learn how to use your brain instead of letting it use you.

Blog post: Are You Living the Good Life?

Stumbling on Happiness | Daniel Gilbert | 2006

Because it is so much easier for me to remember the past than to generate new possibilities, I will tend to compare the present with the past even when I ought to be comparing it with the possible.

We are really bad at affective forecasting (predicting how we will feel in the future or about a future event).

For a variety of reasons, making decisions about what to pursue in life based on what we think will make us happy in the future is largely a recipe for unhappiness. Where and how do we go wrong? Gilbert might say, Let me count the ways. In addition to exposing our wrongheadedness about happiness, he relates a considerable amount of research about a myriad of things we take for granted—and about which we are also wrong.

Note: You can skip the last chapter.

Blog post: Miswanting: The Problem with Affective Forecasting

The Storytelling Animal | Jonathan Gottschall | 2012

We are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds—figments of our own imaginations. … And like a novel in process, our life stories are always changing and evolving, being edited, rewritten, and embellished by an unreliable narrator.

Stories permeate both our waking and sleeping lives. We are so addicted to stories that, even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night telling stories. Why do we find stories so compelling that we easily suspend disbelief? Why are we so compelled to turn everything into a story? And why should we question our—and others’—stories far more than we do?

Gottschall provides many fascinating stories about stories, including the stories of our lives, which are based on that most unreliable source of material: our memories.

Blog post: Consciousness Is a Narrative Process

The Hidden Brain | Shankar Vedantam | 2010

Nearly all our social, political, and economic institutions are based on an assumption of how human beings behave that is at best incomplete and at worst fundamentally wrong. The mistakes are so fundamental to the way we think about the world that we have enshrined them in international treaties and in constitutions.

What are the broader-scale effects of our assumptions, cognitive biases, and other errors in thinking? How do they affect our interactions with others and the ways in which we set up and run our social institutions, such as the criminal justice system?

Vedantam, who is the host of The Hidden Brain podcast on NPR, describes how our erroneous beliefs about the way we operate contribute to so many of the problems in the world. By becoming aware of them, we can begin to mitigate some of their negative effects.

Blog post: Success: Is It Random or Predictable?

On Being Certain | Richard Burton | 2008

To be effective powerful rewards, some of these sensations such as the feeling of knowing and the feeling of conviction must feel like conscious and deliberate conclusions. As a result, the brain has developed a constellation of mental sensations that feel like thoughts but aren’t.

As far as the brain is concerned feeling right is identical to being right. And we are persuaded by feelings more than we’re persuaded by facts. We don’t like being or feeling wrong—or being or feeling uncertain. This matters because the more certain we feel, the less likely we are to question our beliefs, judgments, or conclusions.

Among many other things, Burton talks about how feeling certain might, in some cases, serve an evolutionary purpose, what rewards have to do with certainty, and how seeing—or experiencing—should not equate with believing.

Blog post: I Could Be Wrong

Mind over Mind | Chris Berdik | 2012

Exploring the vast influence of expectations brings up humbling, even frightening possibilities. We might discover just how little contact we truly have with bedrock reality, and how much of our time, effort, and emotion we devote to watching and worrying over shadows. On the other hand, the power of expectations makes our reality coherent, meaningful, and open to the possibility of change, if we put our minds to it.

We can’t not have expectations, although we have often been advised to try. One reason is that our brain is in the business of predicting what’s going to happen next, and we have no control over that. We just go along for the ride.

Berdik explains what expectations have to do with—among other things—the placebo effect, addictions of all kinds, and athletic performance. Not surprisingly, the brain’s reward system plays a significant role in our responses to what are, first and foremost, our brain’s expectations.

Blog post: X Is for eXpectations

The Power of Habit | Charles Duhigg | 2012

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often.

From the brain’s perspective, habits are an energy-saving device. Duhigg tells us everything we need to know about them from the science behind them to practical application.

There are three parts to the so-called habit loop: a cue, a routine (the behavior), and a reward. Once a habit gets created, we can’t just eliminate it, but if we identify the cue and the reward, we can change the behavior. Similarly, if we want to create a new habit, we also have to determine what the cue and the reward will be.

Blog post: Is There a Blueprint for Habit Change?

Brain Rules | John Medina | 2014

The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion.* I call this the brain’s performance envelope.

Medina does in fact provide “rules” (which are more like recommendations) in 12 different areas: survival, exercise, sleep, stress, wiring, attention, memory, sensory integration, vision, music, gender, and exploration. He supports his recommendation with lots of data and examples.

In the chapter on wiring, he states that every brain is wired differently, but goes on to talk about what’s so for everyone (the “experience-independent” parts: much of the structure and function) as well as what’s so for individuals (the “experience-dependent” parts that are unique to each person). Our wiring is altered by what we do and what we learn.

*The book would have made my Top 12 list for this quote alone.

Blog post: 31 Ways to Be Good to Your Brain

Only Trouble Is Interesting

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If you write fiction, read fiction, or read books about how to write fiction, you know the one thing a story absolutely, positively must include is trouble and plenty of it. If you don’t have trouble—otherwise known as conflict—you don’t have a story. But why is conflict essential for capturing our attention?

This seems like a worthy question to ask given the fact that conflict isn’t something we actively seek out in our daily lives. As Janet Burroway says in Writing Fiction:

In life, conflict often carries a negative connotation, yet in fiction, be it comic or tragic, dramatic conflict is fundamental because in literature only trouble is interesting.

There’s no denying that trouble interests us. We start looking for it at a very young age—specifically at about one year. Much of children’s play is organized around big trouble, including homicide, kidnapping, and getting lost or trapped. And children’s nursery rhymes are riddled with violence. Many child psychology experts believe children’s play helps them develop social and emotional intelligence. In a sense, children are rehearsing for adult life. (Hopefully their actual adult lives will be a bit sunnier than the danger-filled lives they appear to be rehearsing for.)

That doesn’t exactly explain adults’ continued interest in looking for vicarious trouble, but it does jibe with research indicating that people who read fiction have better social skills than people who read mostly nonfiction.

Looking for Trouble

We humans are, to a great extent, operating with the same brain we had back when we were traversing the savannah—a brain which, as John Medina explains in Brain Rules, “appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment while in nearly constant motion.” Doesn’t that sound like the plot of any number of books, movies, TV shows, and even video games?

It should be noted that many of us aren’t fighting for our survival, don’t spend much time in unstable outdoor environments, and are rarely in nearly constant motion. Of course, we still get into trouble, in spite of or because of our best efforts, but our troubles are of a vastly different nature from the troubles of our distant ancestors. Could it be that we’re so intent on “entertaining” ourselves by stirring up all this harrowing pretend trouble because it simulates the kind—or at least degree—of trouble our brain is used to dealing with?

Everything that Happens Happens to Us

Based on neuroscience advances over the past 20-30 years, we now know that our brain doesn’t distinguish very well between actual experience and vicarious experience. It reacts the same whether we read about or watch something awful happen to a fictional character or actually see that same thing happen to a person in real life. Watching a fictional disaster unfold on the screen or the page elicits the same response in our brain that it would if it were happening to us—even though we know it isn’t actually happening. (First, of course, we have to suspend disbelief, but that isn’t difficult for us to do primarily because we’re prepared to find stories compelling.)

We anticipate how certain types of books or movies will make us feel. That’s why we select particular books to read or movies to watch. We know how we’re likely to react to a story described as a “tearjerker,” for example. Some genres, such as suspense, thriller, action, science fiction, and mystery, make us feel anxious, frightened, uneasy, sometimes even terrified. Yet we keep going back for more.

This is pretty fascinating in light of the fact that the prime directive of the brain is our survival. Why would a brain that is intent on our survival create all these fictional worlds filled with trouble, disaster, loss, horror, and even death—clear threats to survival—for us to experience as if they were actually happening to us?

We All Lived Happily Ever After

Stories are notable for how they help us learn and remember. One reason is that stories include emotion, and we’re more likely to remember something that has a strong emotional impact. The greater the conflict or trouble in a story, the more emotion we feel, and the more emotion we feel, the likelier we are to remember.

But remember what exactly? The ending! All stories have beginnings, middles, and endings, but we don’t remember beginnings and middles nearly as much as we remember endings. If a story has a happy—meaning emotionally satisfying—ending, we experience a burst of feel-good neurochemicals the gives us a rush of pleasure and also ensures that we will remember how things worked out: the dragon was slain, the day was won, the quest was completed, the boy got the girl, the challenges were overcome.

In the end, a problem related to some aspect of survival was solved. Something was learned about the way the world works and how the people in it function. And we survived to get into trouble another day, just like (some of) our distant ancestors.

So one possible answer to the question of what’s so interesting about conflict is that it isn’t the conflict per se that interests us—or interests our brain. It’s the resolution of the conflict. When the hero or heroine of a story faces big trouble and not only survives but even triumphs, we feel as if we did, too. And that feeling is definitely worth the roller-coaster ride it takes to get it.

Randomness Does Not Compute

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Have you noticed that the brain has an answer for almost everything? Not only does it work overtime to predict what’s going to happen next, it works nearly as hard to explain what happened after the fact.

The associative machinery of the brain seeks causes.

When something unexpected occurs, the brain tries to explain it and incorporate that explanation into our mental model. Random acts or events, however, are impossible to anticipate and account for.

A random act or event is one that is governed by or dependent upon chance.

Synonyms are: stray, accidental, arbitrary, indiscriminate, haphazard, unplanned, fortuitous, aimless, desultory, hit or miss, unpremeditated, purposeless, adventitious, chance, unintentional, and unexpected.

We’re continually nudged in this direction and then that one by random events. As a result, although statistical regularities can be found in social data, the future of particular individuals is impossible to predict, and for our particular achievements, our jobs, our friends, our finances, we all owe more to chance than many people realize. … In all except the simplest real-life endeavors unforeseeable or unpredictable forces cannot be avoided, and moreover those random forces and our reactions to them account for much of what constitutes our particular path in life. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk

After the fact, everything seems inevitable. After the fact, the past appears coherent as a result of our storytelling mind imposing order on it. After the fact, we have a sense of having had far more control over the direction of our lives than we actually had. But a story is still a story, and there’s no such thing as a “true story.”

Hindsight bias is the tendency to construct one’s memory after the fact (or interpret the meaning of something in the past) according to currently known facts and one’s current beliefs. In this way, one appears to make the past consistent with the present and more predictive or predictable than it actually was.  —Robert Todd Carroll, The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary

The brain makes post-hoc dot connections.

It’s not surprising that when the brain looks back, it can construct a neat cause-and-effect explanation for an event that was not expected. The hindsight bias helps all of us maintain the illusion of control by seeming to eliminate randomness. But it’s only possible to clearly and accurately separate the signals from the noise—and connect the dots—after an event has occurred and the outcome is known. Even then, our explanations are going to be coming from our brain, which means our experiences, our point of view, our beliefs, and our biases.

Our brain looks for patterns in order to explain unexpected events so it will be better prepared to predict and respond to them the next time they occur. But no matter how good it may be at figuring out and responding to a single unexpected event that has occurred, it will never be able to predict truly random events.

The question is would you want it to?

Can you recognize a random act and accept it as such or are you more comfortable having an explanation for it even if that explanation isn’t true?

The photo at the top of the post is from the movie Stranger Than Fiction. Author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) has been trying to decide how to kill off the main character in her novel. She finally figures it out when she notices an apple fall onto the sidewalk and roll away.

Hunting for Foxhogs,
I Find a Foxcat Instead

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In the last chapter of Curious, Ian Leslie lays out “seven ways to stay curious.” Item number three on the list is “forage like a foxhog.” The foraging he refers to is for information. The question under consideration is whether it’s better to have a depth of knowledge (specialize) or a breadth of knowledge (generalize).

Eventually he connects these two approaches to a quote from Greek poet Archilochus:

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Leslie suggests that these animals represent two different ways of thinking, neither of which is really better than the other: the hedgehog knows a lot about a little, while the fox knows a little about a lot.

The thinkers best positioned to thrive today and in the future will be a hybrid of these two animals. In a highly competitive, high-information world, it’s crucial to know one or two big things and to know them in more depth and detail than most of your contemporaries. But to really ignite that knowledge, you need the ability to think about it from a variety of eclectic perspectives and to be able to collaborate fruitfully with people who have different specializations. —Ian Leslie

So by combining the fox and the hedgehog, we get the “foxhog.”

Leslie devotes six pages to this discussion, at the end of which I was not entirely clear about the distinctions he was making beyond specialization vs. generalization. So I did a little research of my own.

Assumptions Were Made (but not by me)

The first thing I discovered was that this concept of the hedgehog and the fox is fairly widely used. That was a little surprising. Also surprising was the fact that although people seem to have definite ideas about what the concept means, it doesn’t appear to mean the same thing to everyone.

I listened to a 38-minute podcast of The Hidden Brain titled The Fox and the Hedgehog, which I found interesting and worth listening to. But it did not advance my understanding at all.

It turns out that Archilochus may have been the source of the quote, but we have no elaboration from him on its meaning. That credit goes to philosopher Isaiah Berlin and his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox published as a book in 1953. It was Berlin who first classified various philosophers, writers, and scientists as either hedgehogs or foxes. But the focus of the essay was Leo Tolstoy, who Berlin conceived of as that hybrid creature, the “foxhog” (although he did not, of course, use that term).

According to Berlin, Tolstoy was really a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog, and this internal dissonance was a source of distress to him. That would make Tolstoy a bad example of a “foxhog,” but Leslie does give us a few positive role models.

After checking out Berlin, I understood that Shankar Vedantam (the Hidden Brain podcast) had based his understanding of the concept of the hedgehog and the fox on Berlin’s essay. But other people had somewhat different ideas, and I was still trying to understand it in terms of types of thinkers—or leaders—or learners. The characteristics associated with foxes and hedgehogs by various proponents didn’t really hang together.

Enter the Foxcat

Eventually, I came across a different perspective based on an Aesop’s fable. It turns out there is a fable titled The Fox and the Hedgehog, but the moral of that story doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what Berlin or Leslie or any of the others are talking about. The fable that does connect is The Fox and the Cat.

This fable sees the fox and cat discussing the various tricks and dodges they know: the fox has many, while the cat says he has just one. The fox appears to have the advantage, until a pack of wild dogs attacks them both. The cat’s one bright idea—climb a tree to get out of harm’s way—rewards him by saving him from the dogs, while the fox—busy chewing over which of his bright ideas to act upon—remains rooted to the spot and is torn apart by the hounds.

Clearly there’s a moral there: act quickly and decisively when you have to, rather than endlessly turning over the various options in your head. —interestingliterature.com

In this story, the fox represents System 2, conscious processing, which allows for more possibilities but is also slow and energy intensive. The cat represents System 1, unconscious processing, which is fast because it acts based on habit and instinct: what worked in the past. (I especially like this because I frequently use my cat as an example of a creature who acts exclusively on System 1 impulses.)

Is There a Moral to This Story?

Neither the fable of The Fox and the Hedgehog nor the fable of The Fox and the Cat are directly relevant to Leslie’s idea about foraging for information. (I don’t think they’re relevant to Isaiah Berlin’s ideas about Tolstoy, either, but that’s another rabbit hole.) In terms of staying curious, I definitely agree with Leslie that breadth is as important as depth. “T-shaped knowledge” combines specialization (the vertical axis) with broad understanding in other areas (the horizontal axis).

The same could be said of System 1 and System 2 thinking: one is as important as the other. It’s important to know when to apply logical, linear, critical thinking and when to allow unconscious associative thinking.

But the moral of the story is that there’s no good reason for us to believe that we know what we’re talking about—or what anyone else is talking about, for that matter. We take the world at face value when we ought to question our assumptions.

Sure, curiosity may have killed the cat. But satisfaction brought it back.

Conspiracy Theories and the
Storytelling Mind
(Conspiracy Part 3)

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The most important thing about conspiracy theories isn’t that they aren’t true. They’re stories; of course they aren’t true. There’s no such thing as a “true story.”

We see, understand, and explain the world and other people—including ourselves—in terms of stories, not facts. Stories and the telling of them come naturally. They are easy to formulate and to remember. Facts, on the other hand, don’t come naturally. That’s why much of what we’ve learned, including most of our deeply held beliefs, has been transmitted to us via the stories we’ve heard, read, or watched—beginning with the fairy tales and nursery rhymes of early childhood.

In fact the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are more important to our sense of self than the actual facts of our lives. What we remember of an experience is a story about it. The details are subject to revision, and we often employ confabulation, in the service of reinforcing a particular emotional state.

Emotion determines what we remember and how we remember. Emotion is what makes an event or an experience compelling. And there’s nothing more compelling than fraught situations, lurking danger, and bad outcomes. That’s because the brain is first and foremost a threat detector—as it should be, since although pleasant things are rewarding, unpleasant things can kill us. We need to know about those things so we can try to avoid them.

Wired for Story

It’s really no surprise that facts don’t persuade people to change their beliefs, especially in regard to conspiracy theories. Facts are not persuasive. Stories, on the other hand, are so persuasive and come to mind so easily that the world seems to present itself to us as a series of stories with beginnings, middles, and endings.

In his highly readable and wide-ranging book The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall devotes several pages to a discussion of how conspiracy theories are one outcome of our mind’s tendency to impose the structure of story in places where there is no story.

He prefaces the discussion with the example of a 1940s experiment involving an animated film of geometric shapes. When the psychologists running the experiment, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, asked viewers to describe what they had seen, almost no one said they saw geometric shapes moving around the screen. Instead they related detailed narratives imputing intentions and desires to circles and triangles.

They saw soap operas: doors slamming, courtship dances, the foiling of a predator. —Gottschall

Gottschall says that he, too, saw a very convincing story involving a hero, a heroine, and a villain. Heider and Simmel’s experiment has been replicated, and other similar experiments have been developed since. All have produced the same result.

Ripping Good Yarns

Conspiracy theories connect real data points and imagined data points into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality. Conspiracy theories exert a powerful hold on the human imagination. …They fascinate us because they are ripping good yarns, showcasing classic problem structure and sharply defined good guys and villains. They offer vivid, lurid plots that translate with telling ease into wildly popular entertainment. —Gottschall

Conspiracy theories serve multiple purposes. Via the structure of story, they provide an explanation for why things are bad in the world; they separate the good guys from the bad guys; they tie random events together to weave a seamless whole.

Conspiracy theories…are always consoling in their simplicity. Bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story. —Gottschall

Our brain is so good at altering our memories to support and affirm particular emotional states that we can become firmly convinced that something that didn’t happen happened (or vice versa). In the same way, conspiracy theories buttress our worldviews, altering our mental model and our actual experience of reality.

Conspiracy theories are an example of allowing the associative processing of the unconscious (System 1), which is gullible and prone to cognitive biases to run unchecked by the skeptical, critical thinking of System 2. It’s an example of letting our brain use us. And because of the way the brain works, once someone starts down that road, it becomes easier and easier to believe the story, and more and more difficult to question it.

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