Brain Archives - Page 21 of 29

The Scientific Power of Thought

May 10, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

I can attest to the power of mental training on increasing physical strength. At the end of January, my personal trainer at the gym suggested I start doing a new exercise. When I went over to the equipment to give it a shot, I struggled to do ONE rep. So I decided to try mental training in addition to the physical training.

Every other day, I sat down in my office chair, closed my eyes, and imagined myself going to the gym and using the equipment. I mentally did three sets of 15 reps for each mental training session. The first time I tried this exercise again at the gym after beginning mental training, I was able to do three sets of five reps. By the fifth session after beginning mental training, I was able to do a full three sets of 15 reps.

The trick to the visualization part of this is that you can’t imagine watching yourself, as if you were looking into a mirror. You have to imagine yourself using the equipment and contracting your muscles just as you would if you were actually doing it.

The next time I start a new exercise, I’ll definitely augment the physical training with mental training.

Inside Week 1 of What Do You Want?

May 8, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

This is a guest post by Jean S., who is sharing her experience of participating the 6-week What Do You Want? course. More posts by Jean will follow, on consecutive Thursdays, as she gives us her perspective on the rest of the sessions.

Nila's Mama (Left) Preforms with a Barbershop ... — Barbershop Quartet (Photo credit: Lea LSF)

I used to think there was something wrong with me because there are things I really, truly want and need to do before I die, and yet I haven’t gone after them, or even half-satisfied the need. In the first meeting of the What Do You Want? course, I learned that it isn’t a flaw in me. It’s System 1, the unconscious, doing its job, what it knows how to do, which is maintaining the status quo. That’s a biggie. As Joycelyn said, “The unconscious keeps you alive, but isn’t interested in enlivening you.”

There are always worksheets which we complete in class, and if not done in class would be harder to do on my own at home. We learn and expand our own thinking as we take turns sharing our thoughts and writing, which we could not do at home, alone. By writing in class, we are sure to get it done, or at least get the process started.

We are never asked to share things that we are not ready to, although sort of by the nature of this work, we end up sharing a lot and finding we have a strong, mutually supportive group.

The main assignment for this week was to fill out one 5″ x 8″ card per day, dedicated to completing the sentence that starts: “What I really want is…” I have gotten past criticizing my every entry. I hear when it starts to sound like a “what I don’t want is…” list. My entries can range from little things that have been bugging me in my environment, such as “What I really want is a new, hand-held shower head,” to somewhat more elusive goals such as “to be clear as much as possible about how to behave so as to be my best self.”

I don’t pay attention to whether it makes sense to put something on this list. I just keep writing. Day after day, many of the same things come up and this tells me they must really be important enough to me to do something about.

Then there are little surprises, like “What I really want is to sing in a Barbershop Quartet.”

The class is provocative, as Joycelyn has many ways to shift our thinking and our understanding about the way we work. This is a great investigation, and I see how exposing it all to light will help us make a difference in our “status quo,” even if we sometimes drag our feet in the process.

Focus: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

May 5, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

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’s a piker 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.

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.

[NOTE: This post is the third in a series. See also When the Going Gets Grueling and Fortitude: Don’t Leave Home Without It.]

The Self-Serving Bias

April 26, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

It’s fascinating to explore the effects of cognitive biases on our behavior. Here’s a short video that explains the self-serving bias.

WHEN You Choose Can Impact WHAT You Choose

April 24, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

People tend to favor maintaining the status quo to such an extent that it’s a recognized cognitive bias, one of many systematic distortions of thinking we’re prone to. The status-quo bias goes hand-in-hand with the loss-aversion bias, which leads us to pay more attention to what we might lose than to what we might gain. The status quo often feels less risky, whether or not it actually is.

It stands to reason, then, that when faced with making a choice between an option that maintains the status quo (the default option) and an alternative option, we’d be more likely to choose the default option. And we are—but only if we make the choice immediately. If we delay making a choice that we could have made immediately, we’re much more likely to choose the alternative option.

There have been a number of studies over the past 25 years, all of which show the same results. Simply delaying making a decision we could have made immediately decreases the likelihood we’ll choose the default option. It doesn’t matter what the options are or which option, if either, is the better choice. Delay itself casts doubt on the default option.

Failure to Choose

This isn’t hard to understand. If we could have made a choice immediately, then why didn’t we? The know-it-all interpreter—or explainer—inside our head has an answer for this, as it does for just about everything: obviously there’s some doubt as to the appeal of the default option. Otherwise, based on the status quo bias, we would have chosen it immediately.

It also turns out that being in a state of doubt about something that is completely unrelated to the choice at hand can have the same impact on our choice. Doubt, in general, influences us to choose the alternative option rather than the default option.

Delay and doubt are factors we should take into consideration when we’re faced with making a choice between a default option and an alternative option. The conventional wisdom is that taking time to make a choice leads to making better choices. That seems reasonable, but it isn’t entirely accurate. Yes, delay has an effect; it’s just not the effect we may have attributed to it.

If we’re aware that delay tends to make the default option seem less appealing, we can factor that in when choosing when to choose. We can mitigate some of the effect of delaying choice just by knowing the effect is there.

Failure to Choose

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