For both meditation and playing music, this means the brain needs to deactivate circuits associated with self-consciousness and with judgment—the finger-wagging schoolteacher in your brain that is saying "that's terrible!" or "you're not good enough." That school marm is useful when you are editing, but anathema to creativity and spontaneity.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
The mental shortcuts we use daily are what academics politely call "cognitive biases." They exist because your ancestors who made fast decisions survived, and those who paused for careful deliberation were eaten.
Those shortcuts saved your species, but they will be the death of your autonomy.
In the world your brain was built for, these rapid-fire judgments worked beautifully. You no longer live in that world. The new predators are a new class I call Malware Engineers. They are the marketers, political strategists, user-experience designers, and the social engineers who study the schematics of your mind with obsessive focus.
To defend yourself, and to become a conscious operator of these shortcuts, you must first learn the schematics of your own vulnerabilities.
The brain is the most complex biological assembly we know of. Its 80 billion neurons—nerve cells—communicate with each other to make trillions of connections, more that the number of particles in the known universe. These connections give rise to the sum of our experiences: all of our thoughts, desires, and beliefs; our emotions, changing moods, memory, even our heart rate and the contents of our dreams. How does this funny-looking, folded-in-on-itself, three-pound tangle of wires and blood vessels do all this, as well as orchestrate the complex interplay between emotion, memory, sound and healing that comes from music? And how does it allow us to remember music that we like, make playlists, and party likes it 1999?
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
Play, which I would define as anything we do simply for the joy of doing rather than as a means to an end—whether it's flying a kite or listening to music or throwing a baseball—might seem like a nonessential activity. Often it is treated that way. But in fact play is essential in many ways. Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, has studied what are called the play histories of some six thousand individuals and has concluded that play has the power to significantly improve everything from personal health to relationships to education to organizations' ability to innovate. "Play," he says, "leads to brain plasticity, adaptability, and creativity." As he succinctly puts it, "Nothing fires up the brain like play."
-Greg McKeown, essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Nature's approach to growing a brain relies on receiving a vast set of experiences such as social interaction, conversation, play, exposure to the world and the rest of the landscape of normal human affairs. This strategy of interaction with the world allows the colossal machinery of the brain to take shape from a relatively small set of instructions.
-David Eagleman, Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain
I've come to know a lot of extremely successful people in my life, and while their temperaments run the gamut—lovable, aloof, enigmatic, even eccentric—they all have one thing in common. They think differently than most people. All of them, to a person, have rearranged their brains to prevail at achieving big goals in turbulent environments where conventional thinking often fails.
-Brad Jacobs, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars
Our brains are special, fascinating miracles of the natural world, but they are also organs of the body. They are flesh and water and electricity, and the fact that they are the seat of our thoughts does not negate their physicality or susceptibility to sickness. Depression is, without any doubt, an illness and should be thought of as such.
If a virus hijacks the machinery of your cells to manufacture more of itself, you wouldn't talk ownership of the decision to produce viruses, would you? If you have a reaction to poison ivy, you wouldn't measure your self-worth by the itching of your skin, would you? Can you imagine considering chickenpox to be an indictment of your life or evidence that you are lesser than other people?
No.
So how is it that our self-worth and the value of our personhood becomes tied to the painful negative thoughts that depression sufferers neither willfully create nor invite into our lives? Depression is not a mirror held up to our identities, nor a yardstick with which to evaluate the quality of our essential selves.
It's the flu. It's a rash.
It's the emotional equivalent of a persistent headache.
As blogger Tim Urban describes it, your brain gets hijacked by an instant gratification monkey, who picks what's easy and fun over the hard work that needs to be done. . . .
Many people associate procrastination with laziness. But psychologists find that procrastination is not a time management problem—it's an emotional management problem. When you procrastinate, you're not avoiding effort. You're avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up. Sooner or later, though, you realize that you're also avoiding getting where you want to go.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
..........................but got different results:
Late in life, Churchill would claim that "I gained a lot by not overworking my brain when I was young." Typically, he tried to make a plus out of a minus, arguing in 1921 that "it is a mistake to read too many good books when quite young. . . . Young people should be careful in reading, as old people in eating their food. They should not eat too much. They should chew it well."
-Thomas E. Ricks: Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom
For most people, decline is just not an unwelcome surprise, it is also a huge mystery. We learn early on that practice makes perfect; there is plenty of research telling us that mastery comes from ten thousand hours of work, or some really high number like that. In other words, life has a formula: the more you do something, the better at it you become.
But then you don't. Progress isn't a straight line upward, . . . So what explains the downward portion? . . .
A better explanation involved structural changes in the brain—specifically, the changing performance of the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain behind your forehead). This is the last part of the brain to develop in childhood and the first to exhibit decline in adulthood. It is primarily responsible for working memory, executive function, and inhibitory mechanisms—that is, the ability to block out information extraneous to the task at hand, so we can focus and imp[orve our core skill. A big, strong prefrontal cortex makes it possible for you to get better and better at your specialty, whether it is making a legal case, doing surgery, or driving a bus.
In middle age, the prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness . . .
-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
In middle age, the prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness, and this has several implications. The first is that rapid analysis and creative innovation will suffer—just what we would expect when looking at the evidence on decline. The second is that some specific, once-easy skills become devilishly hard, like multi-tasking. Older people are much more easily distracted than younger people. If you have—or had—teenage kids, you might have found yourself telling them they can't study effectively while listening to music and texting their friends. Actually, it is you who can't do that. If fact, older adults can enhance their cognitive effectiveness precisely by taking their own advice: turn off the phone and music and go someplace completely quiet to think and work.
-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength
Older brains aren’t as good at remembering details but they’re very good at recalling the gist of things. So as you get up there in years, you can actually be better at “seeing the forest for the trees.” Just like when it’s difficult to find something on your computer because there are too many files, having too many details can make getting to what’s relevant harder. Older brains can also be better at seeing commonalities between situations and discerning what’s key.
-Eric Barker, from this post
........................................with Morgan Housel:
The line between "inspiringly bold" and "foolishly reckless" can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight.
We have brains that prefer easy answers without much appetite for nuance.
. . . financial success is not a hard science. It's a soft skill where how you behave is more important than what you know.
There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don't have and don't need.
A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone's reality.
Napoleon's definition of a military genius was, "The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy."
-all snippets from his book, The Psychology of Money
When was the last time you had to remember someone's phone number? I'm dating myself here, but I'm part of a generation that when you wanted to call your friend down the block, you needed to know their number. Can you still remember some of your best friends' numbers from childhood? What about the number of the person you talk or text with everyday? You no longer have to, because your mobile remembers it for you. This is not to say anyone wants to or should memorize 200 phone numbers, but we've all but lost the ability to remember a new one, or a conversation we just had, or the name of a new potential client, or something important we need to do.
Neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer uses the term digital dementia to describe how overuse of digital technology results in the breakdown of cognitive abilities.
-Jim Kwik, Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life
For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.
-Lewis Thomas, Medusa and The Snail
We, human beings, are a species that's not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we're designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in out self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep "us," our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others.
Self-deception is therefore strategic; a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly. Understandably, few people are eager to confess to this kind of duplicity. But as long as we continue to tiptoe around it, we'll be unable to think clearly about human behavior. We'll be forced to distort or deny any explanation that harks back to our hidden motives. Key facts will remain taboo, and we'll forever be mystified by our own thoughts and actions. It's only by confronting the elephant, then, that we can begin to see what's really going on.
-Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant In The Brain
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