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Grateful for My Brain: a 2014 Year-End Review

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year end

Doing a year-end review has always been one of those things that seem like a good idea but which I never quite get around to. This past year was unique in a number of ways, and so I decided—almost on the spur of the moment—that it would be prudent and productive to spend some time evaluating what happened.

I’m a huge fan of list-making, so instead of using any of the many different tools, processes, and resources available, I conducted my review in the form of making several lists. This turned out to be so helpful that I’ve already put it on my calendar to do again at the end of 2015.

Here are my list headings:

What I accomplished

This was by far the longest of my lists. Because I have a tendency to dismiss what I have done in order to berate myself for what has yet to be done, making this list helped me stop and smell the roses a bit. It gave me greater perspective on the multiple endeavors I’ve been engaged in. It also showed me the areas where my attention was focused—and the areas where it wasn’t.

What I didn’t anticipate

There’s no question that this was the most useful of my lists. The more than two dozen things I hadn’t anticipated—roughly half positive and half negative—not only had a significant effect on my life in general and what I was able to accomplish, they also provide concrete evidence that I can’t predict the future no matter how much my brain wants me to believe I can. We can—and should—plan ahead, but it’s important to remember that getting from here to there is rarely a straight line. Randomness and luck often play a larger role in both process and outcome than we’d like to acknowledge.

What worked

It was good to recognize what I’m doing right so I can keep doing more of that.

What didn’t/doesn’t work

It was also good to recognize mistakes I’ve made, opportunities I’ve missed, or areas that need major or minor tweaking.

What I’m grateful for

In addition to many other things—and people—I’m grateful for my amazing brain (yours is equally amazing, of course) and all the fantastic tricks it can do. Read to the end to see what my brain did with the material from my year-end review.

What I learned

One thing I learned is that I have a lot more to learn! But it was illuminating to see how much more I know now than I knew at the beginning of last year. It gives me hope and also some confidence in the face of the always uncertain future. Here’s actual evidence that I figured out how to do quite a few new things, so it’s likely I’ll be able to figure out how to do more things I don’t yet know how to do.

What I’m not satisfied with or what needs more attention

This list helped me focus on where to put my attention now. It was the last 2014 list, which made it relatively easy to complete and included a couple of surprises. I’m pretty sure it would have been more difficult to hone in on these things if I had started with this category, and I might not have seen things as clearly.

I created just two lists for 2015:

What I want to have happen this year

15 things that are sort of a hodgepodge of goals, intentions, and hopes. This list and the list of what I’m not satisfied with are the foundation of my short-range (3-6 months) planning process.

4 habits I want to keep; 4 habits I want to improve or change; 4 habits I want to start

Again, it was useful to identify what I’m doing that’s working before listing what I want to change (what isn’t working so well). I limited each category to 4 to keep it manageable. A limit of 3 might be even better.

I worked on these lists in bursts of time over several days, so the content was on my mind—and in my brain—throughout that period. As the brain tends to do, mine started looking for solutions for some of the bigger problems I’d identified. And not just during the day! One very long night, I was unable to fall asleep because I couldn’t stop trying to figure everything out logically (as illogical as I knew it was to be doing that in the middle of the night—or maybe ever).

Then, in one of those sudden moments of clarity I’ve come to know and love, the solution to one of the problems just showed up (thank you, System 1!), and as soon as it did, I realized that particular solution also took care of two other problems. I hadn’t even seen the three things as being connected. At that point, I immediately fell asleep, only to be awakened by the alarm clock an hour and a half later.

In the clear light of another day, and after a decent night’s sleep, the solution that appeared in the wee hours that morning seems both obvious and elegant. But had I not laid the groundwork for it by focusing my attention on all these areas of my life, I doubt I’d even have been able to identify the problems. And even if I had identified them, I’d probably be trying to find individual solutions for each of them—using the slow, logical part of my brain.

The moral of the story (which I should have tattooed somewhere on my body, sans parenthetical expressions and asides): Use System 2—the conscious part of your brain—to lay the groundwork, and then give System 1 an opportunity to do its thing (which includes seeing patterns, making connections, and putting the pieces together) to come up with a creative solution System 2 can only stand back, figuratively speaking, and admire.

Be Good to Your Brain

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brain workoutWant to stay mentally sharp? There are all kinds of things you can do: listen to music, read a book, gaze at a building, help someone out, get involved in a hobby.

These activities not only make you feel good, they also happen to be very good for your brain in a variety of different ways.

Click on the links to read the full articles.

Listening to music benefits the brain in 8 surprising ways.

Playing a musical instrument benefits your brain even more by giving it an excellent “full-body” workout.

Looking at buildings designed for contemplation may produce the same health benefits provided by meditation—and with less effort.

Dancing, getting some hobbies, and reading (among other things) all help to keep your brain young.

Speaking of reading, ditching the e-reader once in a while and reading an actual book can increase your comprehension, make you more empathetic, and even improve your sleep.

No matter how old you are, learning a new language improves gray matter density and white matter integrity.

Finally, giving really is better than receiving—for you and for your brain.

Be good to your brain and your brain will continue being good to you!

Intuition: Knowing without Knowing How We Know

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associative thinkingIntuition goes by many names: hunch, gut feeling, instinct, inkling, inner voice. Malcolm Gladwell refers to it as “rapid cognition.” Cognitive psychologist John Bargh calls it “automatic processing.”

No matter how we label it, what intuition is is the ability to “know” something without knowing how we know it.

One thing intuition is not is magical or mysterious or superior in some way to rational, logical thinking. It’s just different. The world is not divided into people who are intuitive and people who are not. We all rely on intuition every day.

Intuition is the result of the associative thinking that takes place in the unconscious (System 1). The unconscious sees patterns and connects dots our conscious brain (System 2) isn’t even aware of. It operates quickly and it’s always on. That’s because, by the way, it’s what keeps us alive. And keeping us alive is what our brain is designed to do. System 1 makes rapid-fire assessments and communicates them to System 2. When we become consciously aware of one of those assessments, we call it intuition. We could also call it jumping to conclusions.

Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is important to an understanding of intuitive thinking. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions. —Daniel Kahneman

System 1 reacts exactly the same way (jumps to conclusions) whether we have a clue or not. So sometimes its assessments are accurate and sometimes they’re not. Intuition is good for making short-term predictions when it’s based on training, experience, and practice. But even when the training, experience, and practice are in place, intuition is not good for making long-term predictions or forecasts. There are just too many unknown variables for it to account for.

There are a number of potential problems related to relying on intuition. One is that System 1 processing is highly context-dependent. That means that whatever is going on at the time—the weather, our state of mind, the time of day, the last thing we ate—can influence our thoughts. So an intuitive assessment reached under one set of temporary circumstances could be entirely different from the one reached under a different set of circumstances.

Another problem is that good intuition in one area of our lives where we have expertise doesn’t carry over to other areas where we don’t have comparable expertise.

A third and bigger problem with intuition is the strong feeling of confidence it often engenders, whether or not that confidence is warranted, because that sense of confidence is all too easy to confuse with clarity.

What You Can Do:

Don’t automatically assume your intuitive guesses are accurate across the board. Just because you feel confident about something doesn’t mean you’re right. If you are skilled or knowledgeable in an area, your intuition is more likely to be accurate—at least when it comes to short-term predictions. But if  you have no particular skill or knowledge, your intuition isn’t any better than a wild guess.

As Kahneman says, “Do not simply trust intuitive judgment—your own or that of others—but do not dismiss it, either.”

Additional Reading: How Important Is Your Need to Be Right? and Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty?

How Important Is Your Need to Be Right?

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being rightA heavy investment in being right can lead to all kinds of problems, large and small, personally and interpersonally, even nationally and globally. The underlying source of our drive to be right is survival. Being right enhances our chances of staying alive. In the distant past, if we were wrong too often or about something really important—such as which food was poisonous or which animal was dangerous—we could have ended up dead.

Being and proving we’re right are knee-jerk reactions to perceived threats. Most of us no longer face the same daily threats to life our long-ago ancestors faced. But our brain doesn’t quite get that because it hasn’t changed all that much. It still operates the same way. To our unconscious (System 1), a threat is a threat is a threat—and that includes threats to our beliefs, our opinions, and our good feelings about ourselves and the people we care about. Furthermore, we not only want to see ourselves as being right, we want others to see us that way, too.

Our need to be right gets in the way of clarity in a couple of different ways.

First, refusing to acknowledge we could be wrong about something automatically clouds our judgment. It restricts what we are able to see and understand because we screen out anything that conflicts with the scenario in which we are right.

Second, an investment in being right creates a singular agenda. Rather than focusing on doing the right, or appropriate, thing in the situation, we’re more concerned about being right—or being seen as right—about what we’re doing.

When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. We get addicted to being right. …Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. —Judith E. Glaser, Organizational Anthropologist

No one enjoys admitting they’re wrong, even to themselves. But we’re all wrong much more often than we’re right. And nobody’s perfect.

What you can do:
  • Recognize that you’re not alone: everyone has the same hardwired need to be right and to be seen as right.
  • If you’re feeling stuck about something, ask yourself if wanting to be right is getting in the way of your judgment or your ability to think clearly.
  • Remind yourself that you’re not still trying to survive on the savannah. Being wrong may be unpleasant or uncomfortable, but it’s highly unlikely to be fatal.

Additional reading: Anger, Adrenaline, and Arrogance: Addiction to Certainty and Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty?

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

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joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677