Any change begins inside - a hackneyed fact can be taken more than literally: any change begins in the brain. Our Captain, still untold by neuroscientists around the world, is by all accounts the ultimate learning machine. The brain works brilliantly with information and masterly adapts. He is fast, flexible, predictable and cleverly allocates resources. There is only one problem - he cares so much about his own survival that sometimes it goes sideways to his owner.
Briefly
- The brain requires an incredible amount of energy, and therefore it constantly conserves.
- The first thing he saves on is freedom of thought. So we think in classifications and categories, and we love to hang labels.
- By fixing life experience in synaptic and neural connections, the brain gets used to one limited picture of the world.
- SPC (predicative coding structures) and some cognitive distortions (CI) allow it to be maintained - we see what meets our expectations. Because of CI, we see many things distorted.
- The brain is constantly learning (neuroplasticity), and due to this, you can control its limiting features or even use them for good.
Energy saving mode
Our miracle machine was formed to serve three simple biological purposes: reproduction, nutrition and domination. Sociobiological selection entered the arena at the very end of hominid evolution, and at the same time secondary (or artifact) functions such as abstract thinking and the ability to analyze began to appear. From that moment on, the brain began to increase its needs for recharging.
The egocentric organ occupies only 2% of the body weight, but at the same time it eats up 20% of the energy we consume - oxygen supplied with the blood through the vascular network. This is despite the fact that at a certain moment in time, if the piano does not fall on us and the floor does not collapse under us, at the same time only 3-16% of our brain is active. There are approximately 15 billion neurons that play signals between each other, both in the waking state and during sleep.
Such gluttony requires appropriate care, namely constant energy savings. To do this, evolution has forced us to develop a whole mountain of defense mechanisms, ranging from hunger and ending with nervous exhaustion in case of too much activity. Extremely energy-consuming thinking is especially disgusting for the brain, and therefore it blocks it as soon as it can: it releases endorphins when its headquarters are idle, inhibits intellectual thoughts with a headache, and so on. Therefore, by the way, we vitally need one of the mortal sins - laziness. The brain has to recharge and accumulate resources all the time.
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The existence of the Captain, on the whole, looks rather paradoxical - he was born a heavyweight champion, capable of solving heavy tasks, but prefers to lie on the couch, occasionally stretching for a slice of pizza. The ruthless economy attitude not only robs us of titles of champions of genius, but it also drags insidious mentalities with it that cheat us. Here they are of interest to us.
The brain loves labels and templates
Which is easier: explain in what cultural environment that not very polite guy who throws bottles at pigeons grew up, what were his parents, what genetic codes are sewn into his subcortex and what countless accidents formed his unique personality, or say that he is just a gopnik? Of course, the second. With one politically incorrect gesture, they saved a lot of intellectual resources.
The brain loves to do this, regardless of whether you made a conscious decision to hang the label or not. And therefore, in most cases, we think in classifications, categories and put everything on the shelves.
This type of thinking allows us not to burn out from the abundance of information, but also prevents us from looking at the ordinary creatively and receptively. Another reason for this is the gluttony of our imaginations. Imagining a fundamentally new form - something that we have never seen - is much more energy-consuming for him than remembering something already familiar. This is partly why we spend more time thinking about problems (we are familiar with them) than solutions (because they are not obvious).
The brain gets used quickly
Freshness of perception eats up not only categorical thinking, but also what categories we acquire in the course of life.
The assimilation is quite simple. For example, one of the oldest mechanisms, the orienting response, will always distract our attention. That is, if someone suddenly jumps out of the bushes, we will instantly turn towards the unexpected stimulus and create a neural model for this situation. But if they continue to jump out of the bushes further, after a while we will stop reacting, come up with an explanation ("crazy, probably") and calm down. So, through an emotional shake-up and / or repetition, information is recorded.
On a larger scale, this process unfolds at the level of neural and synaptic connections, where models are created through associations. In our distant childhood, they pointed out to us an impolite guy and said: "this is a gopnik, don't get along with him." We linked information about the type and the pigeons mussing in his cross, linked the sound of the word and its meaning. When we met a familiar definition in a different context, we tied new data to old data, forming a whole network of relationships.
Stable synaptic connections that record life experience, over time, shape our picture of the world. Therefore, gopniks see the world through the eyes of gopniks, and obedient boys look at it with the innocent pupils of obedient boys. The brain constantly refers to an already existing picture - it does not need to constantly create new models (which is why we see professional deformations so often).
The picture of the world can break if there is a major cognitive dissonance, but, as a rule, few people have it at once and seriously break. And, you see, this is not the most pleasant way to expand your worldview.
The brain sees everything distorted
Our own perception helps us maintain the stability of the worldview at a basic level. In fact, we need to capture life experiences in order to survive. When a tiger attacks us, we must react quickly, and in order to do this successfully, we must have in our head the prepared knowledge about the tiger and the cause-and-effect relationships of such a meeting. To react quickly, we must perceive quickly.
As the theory of "Predicative Coding Structures" (PFC) states, any sensory signal that comes to us from the outside (from the bottom up) is interpreted by us as a data set, after which the cognitive system offers a working hypothesis about this signal. The brain estimates what is most likely (a tiger or a stuffed animal) and what is most likely to happen next. The chosen hypothesis becomes the basis for the cognitive signal “from the inside” (from top to bottom). So we eliminate the inconsistencies between external and internal data, "superimposing" already existing ideas about the world on a specific situation. The sheep are safe, the tigers are hungry, but in reality it turns out that any contact with the world is mediated by our own ideas about it.
SPK is supported by such a feature of our thinking as cognitive distortions (CI), the total list of which has more than 100 positions. Among them: catastrophization, forcing us to assume the worst option of all possible (in a dark courtyard I will be robbed and killed), personalization, when we believe that all the actions of others are related to our person (everyone is staring at me), etc. Professional deformation, by the way, is also one of the cognitive distortions.
Of the long list of such bugs, the most annoying thing to us is selective (aka selective) perception (the collective name for a number of CIs). It implies that we pay attention only to information that, like in a mosaic, fits perfectly with the expectations we already have. At the cognitive level, we choose what fits into our picture of the world. The most detrimental CI in this subgroup is confirmation bias. Translated into the language of ordinary mortals: the tendency to seek evidence to support our ideas, and to ignore any evidence in favor of an alternative.
KIs are built into us by default and you will not find someone on this planet who does not have them at all. You can correct them, but the process of reflashing yourself will not remove them at all. And in most cases it won't help at all, according to sociologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, author of an ingenious guide to cognitive distortion. It's all about System-1, which is responsible for reading information and our mistakes at the level of intuition. Like when looking at optical illusions, where the lines are the same, but visually appear to be different (like the Mueller-Lyer illusion). System-1 cannot be changed - it is too fast and automatic.
System-2, which is slower, more meaningful and involved in forecasting and decision-making, can be trained. To accustom her to certain rules, to teach her to read the incoming information correctly and interpret it correctly. For example, knowing that the lines in the picture are equal, we can probably see them equal. But the total training of System-2 requires an incredible skill of self-observation. Only an ascetic with a 20-year practice of cave meditation will be able to constantly consciously control System-2 (he will probably cope with System-1). Ordinary mortals are not immune from simple human bugs - one hot quarrel or an evil hangover during the rush hour of the subway, and all our internal regulators cried.
What to do
As follows from the previous paragraph, you should read Kahneman to arm yourself with information, and meditate in a cave to develop self-control, so that this information can be correctly embedded in your software. Both statements are true, but first you need to make a small act of acceptance - the features of the brain for that and the features of the brain that they will not go anywhere from us. But often they can be played to your advantage.
For example, cognitive distortion with the tempting name "mind reading" (the belief that we know what others think) works negatively if our picture of the world is gloomy (it seems that everyone around us thinks badly about us), self-esteem and a positive outlook on the world - in a positive (everyone around me thinks that I'm cool). More general selective perception works in exactly the same way.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy actively plays on such a switch of the worldview. The scary, anxious and depressing world in front of your eyes can really be brightened by paying attention to the good, catching negative judgments and changing them to positive ones, and repeating the affirmation (= cognitive mantra) in front of the mirror “I'm good, like George Clooney in his best years, and even cooler”can help you feel more confident. The peculiarities of thinking that drag us into the depths of the unpleasant and false, when the disposition changes, work for our movement in the other direction.
Neuroplasticity allows the brain to perform this trick. The skill, the discovery of which revolutionized neuroscience, is the following: under the influence of the environment, our Captain is constantly changing, building more and more synaptic and neural connections. Up to the cultivation of whole productive pieces based on the old ones, that is, neurogenesis. The famous series of experiments with London taxi drivers clearly shows this: the hippocampus was noticeably enlarged among the hard workers from the taxi company, who were studying the map of the labyrinthine capital of Great Britain (this is why “nerve cells do not recover” - a myth).
Neuroplasticity, endless brain training, is a tricky thing. If you treat it carelessly, the brain will seal itself with habits of despondency, unjustified laziness, boredom, inertia and automatism. I must say, it depressing neural connections worse than ethyl alcohol, since our brain creates patterns for monotonous actions - engrams or "memory traces". The more often we use engrams, the less actively the basal ganglia, which are responsible for the production of acetylcholine, work (regulates higher functions and responds to cognitive flexibility).
The more harmful and meaningless actions the Captain envelops, the more vague his forecasts will be, the worse his performance will be. As we remember, the brain is very, very fond of saving - and the first, due to which it will reduce the budget, will be freedom of thought.
That is why one should always act “from the opposite”: the tendency to patterns and labels is overblown by persistent attention to details and particulars; cognitive distortions that are not subject to regulation, to correct with increased attention to them. A lot of pleasant things contribute to an increase in the overall efficiency of the brain: playing musical instruments, aerobic exercise and another 1000 and 1 techniques that you will find in any scientific study on neuroplasticity (the classic and simple version is the book by Wendy Suzuki).
As for the picture of the world, travel, art and any other ways to get a different-sized experience come to the rescue. As shown by numerous studies, the two-way communication "brain-experience" is worked out especially actively when listening to music - it improves cognitive abilities, response, increases the level of a number of useful neurotransmitters, promotes recovery from traumatic brain injury, etc. If MRI is to be believed, Mozart is especially useful, which is called the “Mozart effect” among neuroscientists). Everyday activities also count - a new route to the old house is not only useful, but necessary, because the brain is constantly changing. It is important that at every minute of time it changes in the right direction.
