The Brain

It’s a wonder how an organ, our brain, can drive so much of our behaviour, thoughts and emotions. It gives us consciousness, an awareness of our being, a sense of self, and is the conductor of every other organ in our body.

I became more fascinated with the unconscious self within us. Carl Jung wrote:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

We think of ourselves as rational beings, capable of making sound decisions based on facts, but many of our decisions are inherently made unconsciously, with our rationale being our justification. These come across in different forms of biases and heuristics, such as confirmation bias - when we have an impression of someone as being kind, we tend to look for instances which confirm that. Likewise with someone who we deem untrustworthy, based on the first few minutes of meeting. Our minds make up judgments quite quickly, despite us trying to be objective.

Reading the book ‘The Brain: The Story of You’ by neuroscientist David Eagleman, he states that most of our actions are unconscious - such as when we drink a cup of coffee while talking to a friend. We are no longer conscious of the motor skills required in us picking up the cup, sensing if it’s the right temperature, and sipping it in our mouths, while we simultaneously make conversation in a coherent manner. Basically, we are running on autopilot with habits and behaviours that we’ve practiced over and over again - in walking, driving, or swimming. He makes the case that we become conscious when the unexpected happens, when we need to work out what to do next. Although the brain tries to tick along as long as possible on autopilot, it’s not always possible in a world that throws curveballs.

I learned a good understanding of how our brain works with its limited attention span and the effects of information overload in our world today, in another neuroscientist’s book, ‘The Organized Mind’ by David Levitin. In our brains where we have a finite amount of cognitive power, context switching between tasks carries a huge cognitive cost. We want to reduce cognitive load as much as possible, to conserve energy for other tasks that require our attention. Our brains are also very sensitive to any change or new stimuli. When we want to focus, we need to reduce any introduction of novelty. Constancy and consistency of the environment can help us relax and focus. He gives the example of a globe-trotting artist who maintained a familiar work surrounding, by creating the same walls within his travels in jets or buses, where he is comfortable and can get in the zone for his creative work.

Every status update we read on Facebook / Instagram, every tweet or text message we get from a friend is competing for resources in our brains with important things like whether to put our savings in stocks or bonds, where we left our keys, or how to reconcile with a close friend we just had an argument with. All this piling up of information taxes our abilities to process information, remember it and make good decisions. The hippocampus has a limited amount of processing power. We don't want to wear it out with new stimuli, which does not serve a purpose. A lot of these 'addictive' behaviours on social media exploit the way our brains work - by giving us a hit every time with stimuli.

We must be hyper aware of what we're feeding our mind, what we're giving our attention to. Given we have a limited amount of attention span on any given day, we must pay careful attention to what we feed our minds, especially in the moments before we go to bed, and when we wake up.

Last but not least, the benefits of napping, and of getting enough sleep, cannot be overstated. Our mind does so much processing in our sleep - in connecting the dots, where our neural connections become strengthened. It's putting the pieces together, during this processing, that gives us valuable insights. We need to alternate between moments of productive concentrated work, and moments of dreaming, to let the information be digested. Sleeping on a problem has its roots in neuroscience.