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

September 8, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

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

Anticipation or Apprehension?

June 5, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In his bestselling book Behave, Stanford University’s Robert Sapolsy says that anticipation requires learning. (That appears to be more the case for some personality types than others, but casual observation suggests that quite a few people have some degree of difficulty with anticipation.)

I think the learning needs to begin with making a distinction between anticipation and expectation, two states that are oriented toward a future event and tend to be used interchangeably, thus muddying the waters considerably.

Expectation is the sense that something is about to happen. We can expect positive, negative, or neutral things to occur. The unconscious part of our brain, System 1, is continuously predicting the immediate future so it can determine what actions we should take next, and those predictions sometimes give rise to conscious, System 2, expectations. Of course sometimes the predictions bypass consciousness and go directly to motor neurons that control movement.

For our purposes, it makes sense to view expectation as essentially a functional process.

Anticipation, on the other hand, is a feeling of excitement and pleasure about something we expect will occur, especially in the near future.

The opposite of anticipation would be apprehension, also a feeling, but one of fear, anxiety, unease—even dread—about something we expect will occur in the future.

Anticipation is associated with excitement; apprehension is associated with anxiety. While excitement has positive connotations and anxiety has negative connotations, these two states are not as different from each other as they might appear. In fact, the difference is primarily a matter of interpretation.

Name that Emotion!

Both excitement and anxiety are what are called high-arousal states with similar neurological and physiological symptoms, such as increased heart-rate, restlessness, rapid breathing, difficulty concentrating, and nervousness or tension. Certainly context (the circumstances surrounding a particular high-arousal state) contributes to our interpretation of it. But some of us are more inclined in general to interpret this set of sensations as anxiety and some of us are more inclined to interpret it as excitement.

So the first thing to focus on in learning how to anticipate is your experience of this emotional state and your interpretation of it.

Central to both experience and interpretation is the concept of emotional granularity, which means putting feelings into words with a high degree of complexity. But as psychology professor Lisa Feldman-Barrett, who coined the term, says:

Emotional granularity isn’t just about having a rich vocabulary; it’s about experiencing the world, and yourself, more precisely.

The more precisely we can identify and recognize our emotions, the faster and more accurate our brain will be in assessing circumstances to determine the most appropriate response. The payoff for the brain (System 1) is efficiency. The payoffs for us (System 2) are numerous, including more nuanced interpretations of our feeling states, greater ability to identify our desired outcomes, enhanced experience, and improved critical thinking and decision-making.

Your Mental (Conceptual) Model

How does the brain figure out what any collection of bodily sensations means? Most likely it does the same thing with internal sensations that it does with external sensations: it makes something up, i.e. it constructs. The brain is continually constructing our experience in—and of—the world based on our mental model, which determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and what it all means.

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion. —Lisa Feldman Barrett

Although we operate under an assumption that emotions have some sort of independent existence and are “triggered” by events and experiences, this does not appear to be the case. The brain, which always goes for the path of least resistance, is merely making the easiest and fastest interpretation it can make so it can determine what action to take. We are not passive experiencers of our emotions even though we may believe ourselves to be. In actuality, the more often we interpret a set of bodily sensations as a particular emotion, the likelier we are to keep interpreting it that way.

Get Granular

I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. In addition to her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman-Barrett has a great article and TED talk on how to increase emotional granularity, which I highly recommend.

But as a quick example of the concept, here’s an excerpt from a 2018 article in lucidwaking that involves moving from the non-granular general feeling bad to the first distinction of angry/mad (as opposed to sad or anxious, for example), and then fine-tuning that feeling to a permutation of angry/mad, such as:

resistant … belligerent … offended … agitated … indignant … resentful … irritated … furious … cranky … annoyed … perturbed … enraged … hostile … huffy … wrathful

You can also check out this feeling vocabulary chart to train yourself to detect more nuanced emotions.

The bottom line is that you aren’t entirely at the effect of your brain’s habitual interpretations of your emotional state. Sometimes apprehension is an apt emotional interpretation of a situation or set of circumstances. But if apprehension is always your interpretation of that set of sensations, you are letting your brain off easy, which may feel comforting but limits your options and your possibilities. (Bad brain!)

OK, one more post on anticipation and delayed gratification.View the previous two posts here and here.

Double Your Pleasure…
by Waiting for It

June 1, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

The most interesting and frustrating encounters I have with people tend to be based on their reaction to the implications of the brain’s reward system. Regardless of anyone’s individual attitude about it, though, the reward system is a biological fact. So we can either learn how to use it or we can let it use us.

It’s true that some personality types have an easier time with rewards than others. But in addition to that, let’s face it: Homo sapiens is a jaded lot these days. When we can get what we want when we want it—and do so regularly—waiting any amount of time for something can feel painful, like deprivation. We expect, and even require, immediate gratification.

In Behave, the Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky talks about the conundrum we’re in as a result of having access to stimulation of the brain’s reward circuitry, some of which is “at least a thousandfold higher” than anything previous humans experienced. Sure that includes drugs like fentanyl and cocaine, but it also includes processed sugar, which wasn’t readily available until the 18^th Century.

An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top non-natural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task [emphasis mine]. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger.

The Molecule of More

Well, the brain has been referred to as an insatiable wanting machine, and dopamine—the primary agent of the brain’s reward system—isn’t called “the molecule of more” for nothing.

I’ve written and talked a lot about rewards and dopamine already, including the important role of craving in creating desirable habits or pursuing juicy desired outcomes. But it appears there’s a state to be mastered before craving can be put into play. That state is anticipation.

While craving is a powerful desire for something, anticipation is the condition of looking forward to it, especially with eagerness. Without the ability to anticipate, a craving will take you directly and immediately to the object or sensation. You will experience pleasure, but pleasure (aka liking) neurochemicals fade quickly, and then you’re right back to wanting.

For the record, I hate that Carly Simon song, but as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed anticipation: going to the beach, strawberry shortcake with real whipped cream, the next issue of a particular magazine, a picnic in the backyard, beginning—and finishing—a new piece of writing. When scientists talk about the pleasure evoked by anticipation, I totally get it. As Thomas Hardy wrote in The Return of the Native:

Pleasure not known beforehand is half-wasted; to anticipate it is to double it.

So it surprised me to discover that anticipation can have either neutral or even negative connotations for others. But it’s entirely logical that if you don’t enjoy anticipation, you will probably have a hard time delaying gratification. Sapolsky says that once your brain figures out what it gets rewarded for, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation.

The Utility of Anticipation

Temporal discounting suggests that rewards are more attractive when they are imminent as opposed to when they are delayed. But this is not always the case. If you were the recipient of an Easter basket or bag of Halloween candy as a child, did you consume the contents quickly or did you moderate your consumption and delay gratification?

A paper published just last year in Science Advances describes a function called anticipatory utility, which counteracts temporal discounting:

An influential alternative idea in behavioral economics is that people enjoy, or savor, the moments leading up to reward. That is, people experience a positive utility, referred to as the utility of anticipation, which endows with value the time spent waiting for a reward. Anticipatory utility is different from the well-studied expected value of the future reward (i.e., a discounted value of the reward) in standard decision and reinforcement learning theory, where the latter’s utility arises solely from reward and not from its anticipation. Crucially, in the theory of anticipatory utility, the two separate utilities (i.e., anticipation and reward) are added together to construct the total value [emphasis mine]. The added value of anticipatory utility naturally explains why people occasionally prefer to delay reward (e.g., because we can enjoy the anticipation of eating a cake until tomorrow by saving it now), as well as a host of other human behaviors such as information-seeking and addiction.

The paper is a report of cutting-edge research conducted to test how the brain dynamically constructs anticipatory utility. Three different brain regions appear to be involved:

the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which tracks the value of anticipatory utility
the dopaminergic midbrain (DA), which enhances anticipation
the hippocampus, which mediates the functional coupling of the vmPFC and the DA

Researchers suggest that the vmPFC and DA link reward information to the utility of anticipation, while a strong conceptual tie between the hippocampus, memory, and future imagination supports a suggestion from behavioral economics that the utility of anticipation relates to a vivid imagination of future reward [emphasis mine].

And that brings us smack into the arena of personality and personal operating systems. It explains why I find anticipation to be enjoyable and am therefore able to use future rewards effectively to alter my behavior. It’s not a skill I’ve developed. I’m just wired that way!

Coming up next: (1) my personal example of successfully employing and enjoying anticipation; (2) an investigation into learning how to anticipate.

Our Similarities Are
as Important as
Our Differences

June 20, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

We tend to identify and characterize Enneagram types by focusing on what makes each one different from all the others. One of the ways the brain makes sense of the world is by categorizing the things in it, and as Leonard Mlodinow says in Subliminal:

One of the principal ways we categorize is by maximizing the importance of certain differences.

Emphasizing differences is one of the shortcuts the brain uses to help us function and survive in our fast-paced, sometimes dangerous world. And there’s value in exploring those differences, which are actually critical to the survival and advancement of our species from an evolutionary perspective.

Life on earth is chancy. In the pursuit of successful reproduction, every animal must navigate the equivalent of cats trying to eat you, weasels trying to cheat you, and a flood carrying away your winter’s supply of food. Life is risky. And the key to personality is that there’s no single solution that answers every risk.

Two things distinguish the human personality from that of a mouse. One is our profoundly social lifestyle. Most mammals evolved to fend only for themselves, but a few species found that the benefits of cooperation outweigh (if only by an ounce) the self-centered simplicity of a solitary existence. Our social life is etched into the personality of our entire species. Instinctively, we communicate. Biologically, we’re built to share. Without ever meaning to, we care. Not everyone cares equally, but even the nastiest person you know cares more than the nicest weasel or bear.

Our other distinction is the sheer size of our brain. Our tremendous wattage, plus the social instincts, yield nuances of behavior that we don’t see in other creatures. And when the nuances mingle and collide, amplifying or offsetting one another, our personality becomes complex. —Hannah Holmes, Quirk

As we explore each type in the Enneagram classes I teach, we talk about what that type has to offer that the rest of us benefit from. We acknowledge the value of each type’s differences.

Even so, focusing exclusively on our differences can be problematic—especially in light of that other set of shortcuts we use known as cognitive biases. It can be a very short hop from different to bad or wrong or undesirable, whether those we categorize as different share a nationality, religion, age, political affiliation, or personality type.

So I’ve always appreciated the fact that the Enneagram symbol and system doesn’t just differentiate individual types, it also delineates their relationships and interconnections and encloses all of them within a single circle.

Although it’s our differences that tend to get played up; there’s equal—if not greater—value in exploring our similarities.

Find the Common Ground

You can easily identify what you have in common with the other types by locating yourself on the Contact Points chart below. If you’re a type 2, for example, what you have in common with types 3 and 4 is the Feeling center. What you have in common with types 5 and 8 is being part of the same triad. What you have in common with types 1 and 6 is taking the Compliant stance. And what you have in common with types 7 and 9 is having the Positive Outlook coping style.

The patterns of connection within the Enneagram make it clear that we aren’t really as separate from each other as we sometimes imagine we are.

To quote Lennon and McCartney:

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

Z Is for Zombie Systems

April 26, 2017 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

What could zombie systems (also known as alien subroutines) and blindfolded cup-stacking possibly have to do with behavior change? Quite a bit, as it turns out. But first, what exactly are these zombie systems and alien subroutines? According to David Eagleman in Incognito:

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.

Eagleman uses the terms interchangeably. He says the term zombie emphasizes the lack of conscious access, while alien emphasizes the foreignness of the programs.

Some alien subroutines are instinctual, while some are learned; all highly automated algorithms become inaccessible zombie programs when they are burned down into the circuitry.

Cup-Stacking Smack-Down

Cup-stacking, at least as performed by Austin Nabor, is an example of a highly automated algorithm—and thus a zombie system.

Nabor has been practicing all the moves involved in cup-stacking regularly for several years. As a result, physical changes have taken place in his brain to hard-wire cup-stacking. He can now perform it automatically without thinking about it, which is why he can do just as well when he’s blindfolded as he can when he can see what he’s doing.

In the video (link above), 10-year-old Nabor faces off against David Eagleman mano-a-mano, as it were, and hands him a resounding defeat. Eagleman said of the contest that he wasn’t even an eighth of the way through his routine when Nabor finished. During the competition, both were fitted with skull caps to monitor electrical activity in their brains. Instead of burning more energy to complete his complex cup-stacking routine speedily and flawlessly, Nabor’s brain used considerably less energy than Eagleman’s brain used to perform the routine much more slowly. In fact, Eagleman described Nabor’s brain as serene.

Eagleman’s brain burned more energy because he had to think about what he was doing and conscious thought burns more energy than zombie systems and alien subroutines burn.

When a professional baseball player connects his bat with a pitch that is traveling too fast for his conscious mind to track, he is leveraging a well-honed alien subroutine.

Your brain rewrites itself based on the things you repeatedly practice, such has hitting a ball with a bat, driving, or swimming. Some of those things could be classified as skills while others might better be classified as habits. Whether they are skills or habits, once they become “etched into the circuitry of the brain,” you lose conscious control over them. Your brain doesn’t particularly care what skills or habits (good or bad) are turned into zombie systems. The purpose of the process, as Eagleman says, is to free up resources, allowing the conscious you to attend to and absorb other tasks.

Because you lose conscious control of zombie systems and they run automatically, it’s quite difficult to change them—to put it mildly.

Learning to Ride the Backwards Bicycle

Engineer Destin Sandlin, creator of the website Smarter Every Day, was challenged to ride a bicycle that had been modified so that when you turn the handlebars to the right, the wheel turns left, and when you turn the handlebars to the left, the wheel turns right. Watch him try—and fail—to ride the bike, and then offer to pay other people if they are able to ride the bike 10 feet.

“Once you have a rigid way of thinking,” Sandlin says, “you cannot change that, even if you want to.” Riding a bicycle, for most of us, is a hard-wired zombie system. Since we don’t have conscious control over the bicycle-riding algorithm, knowing that the bicycle has been altered has no effect on our ability to modify the algorithm—at least not right away.

It took Sandlin eight months of regular practice to learn how to ride the backwards bicycle. However, he noticed that the old pathway was still there and minor distractions, such as a cell phone ringing, could cause his brain to “jump back on the old road it was more familiar with.”

Sandlin’s young son, on the other hand, who had been riding a bicycle for three years, required only two weeks to get the hang of the modified bicycle.

When Sandlin attempted to ride a normal bicycle again after having more or less mastered the backwards bicycle, he couldn’t do it at first. But after about 20 minutes, his brain slipped back into gear, and he was able to remain upright. Think about that when you’re struggling with changing a habit you’ve had for years or maybe even decades. It takes a great deal of repetition and persistence to master a replacement behavior but very little provocation to revert back to the old path.

Consciousness on the Sidelines

Having the knowledge, information, or even will to change your behavior are all System 2 (conscious) processes. They’re certainly useful and even desirable. But a habit is a System 1 (unconscious) zombie system that is not immediately responsive to your conscious intentions or attentions.

In fact, those System 2 processes can sometimes get in the way. Eagleman says:

Not only do we run alien subroutines; we also justify them. We have ways of retrospectively telling stories about our actions as though the actions were always our idea. As an example…I mentioned that thoughts come to us and we take credit for them (“I just had a great idea!), even though our brains have been chewing on a given problem for a long time and eventually served up the final product. We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood.

Essentially we come up with conscious explanations for unconscious systems we have no access to. When we think we understand something, but we don’t, we’re likely to also think we know what to do about it. But we don’t.

If your brain is running an alien subroutine or a zombie system you don’t want it to run, you have to make like Destin Sandlin and practice the new routine over and over and over again. And you have to be prepared to have your brain “correct” you back to your old behavior at the least provocation.

When that happens, it’s far more productive to get back up on the horse—or bicycle—than it is to create a story about it.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.