The brain is a lazy bastard

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Let me tell you a little secret. Reading your favorite newspapers (authors), working in a well-known specialty, using your native language and communicating with friends who understand you well, visiting your favorite restaurant, watching your favorite TV series … - all this, so beloved by all of us, leads to brain degradation.

Your brain is a lazy bastard (like you), and therefore seeks to reduce energy consumption for this or that activity by creating a kind of "macros" - programs that you execute according to templates.

Biologist Richard Simon at the beginning of the 19th century called these programs "engrams" - a physical habit or memory trace left by repeated exposure to a stimulus. Engrams can be thought of as paths that neurons “tread” in your brain, performing the same action. The longer we do it, the less energy our brain spends on it.

Sometimes these paths turn into roads, and then even into autobahns, as, for example, in this Chinese man who collects a deck of cards faster than a robot:

On the one hand, this is an excellent superpower - really, why waste extra energy to carry out the same type of actions? However, the flip side of this ability is a decrease in the plasticity of our brain.

The fact is that the longer we use engrams, the less the basal ganglia in our brain work. Their main function is to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which helps neurons "cut through" new paths among the informational noise of our brain (approximately this is happening now, after reading this sentence).

Think back to your way to work or college. If you travel along the same route for more than six months, then your actions become so automatic that in parallel you can perform other actions - read, listen to music, reply to mail. In your favorite restaurant, you don't have to squeeze acetylcholine out of yourself and think about what to take for lunch, you already know the entire menu by heart. Behind a friend's fake smile, you immediately recognize anxiety, and you will not need to strain to decipher these communication signals.

It would seem, why change all this? And then, that our life is a continuous source of changes beyond our control. We have to adapt to most of them, and in this "chameleon race" the one survives who will change their color faster than others to match the color of the environment and will be able to sneak up on an insect (of which there are fewer and fewer during the crisis).

You can be laid off (as, for example, it was done quite recently with thousands of doctors); the tasks of your department may change and you will be required to master new skills (and if you fail, you will, again, be laid off); you will fall in love with a Chinese woman and want to learn the Dungan language spoken by her relatives, and so on.

Therefore, the plasticity of the brain must be constantly maintained and trained. Imagine that your brain is concrete, which will freeze over time.

The image of "hardened" brains will become clearer to you if you look at the majority of 70-year-olds who are not able to master the timer on the microwave, take hostility to everything new, perform the same type of actions for years (or reproduce patterns of thinking). These "paths" in their heads turned into holes and tunnels in rocks, and it is almost impossible to "dig" a passage into the neighboring cave.

Your task is to constantly stir this "thought mixture", to prevent it from hardening. As soon as we relax and start using engrams, some part of our brain hardens and we don't even notice it.

What to do to stop brain degradation

I have identified ten of the simplest, but quite effective, techniques:

Watch yourself. If you suddenly feel discomfort that something is wrong (for example, your favorite website has changed its design or your favorite yogurt has disappeared in the store), grab this feeling by the tail and start “spinning” it. Why not try all the yogurts, or even start making your own?

Do not re-read books you have already read. Do not re-watch movies you have already watched. Yes, this is a very pleasant psychologically feeling - to plunge into that cozy little world, in the life of already familiar characters, no surprises, you already know the end and you can enjoy the little things that you didn't notice for the first time, swallowing a book in an hour (or watching a season over the weekend). But at the same time, you take away from new books and films the chance to discover something fundamentally new for you, deprive your brain of the formation of alternative neural connections.

Look for new routes. Try to look for new routes for the usual way home and back, find alternative shops, cinemas and other infrastructure points on the map of your life. It can take extra time, but it can also bring some nice bonuses - for example, lower prices in stores or fewer people in the theater.

Look for new music. If you are a music lover, your iPod has tens of thousands of songs, and it seems to you that your taste is very rich and varied, then I hasten to disappoint you - most often we listen to 50-100 familiar tracks, pleasant to us all for the same reasons - we have adapted to them, and our brain does not need to spend additional resources to process and comprehend them.

There are several hundred thousand Internet radio stations in the world, and even if we switch to a new one every day, our life will still not be enough to listen to them all.

Look for new friends and acquaintances. Yes, it is certainly great to have friends with whom it is pleasant to get together every Friday and discuss football or Beyoncé's new dress. Psychologically more comfortable.

But after all, most of us live in megacities, why limit our circle to 4-5 people, moreover, most often not chosen by us, but "imposed" by circumstances - school, institute, work?

The social tools inherent in us greatly influence our way of thinking, and sometimes it happens that we, under the influence of certain friends, change our point of view, a set of interests, and sometimes even our occupation.

Have kids. Children are a permanent source of chaos and uncertainty in your life. They are living "concrete mixers" in your head, destroying all templates and redrawing your established routes in a new way.

I have three sons of different ages, who every day bring something new with their questions, behavior, inquisitiveness of mind and continuous experiments with everything around. You yourself will not notice how your thinking will be liberated and you will start to think differently.

If you can't have children yet, you can start with a dog. First of all, it requires a walk (and fresh air is good for the brain). Secondly, it involves you in involuntary communication with other dog owners. And thirdly, it can also become a source of chaos (mine, for example, when chasing flies, does not pay special attention to the obstacles that arise in its path).

Stop criticizing. "What a terrible design!" in life. Changes that, more often than not, you cannot change. Or you can, but with a lot of effort that is not worth it. Agree, there are in fact more interesting activities than demanding a book of complaints in a restaurant and writing a slander at a boorish waiter?

It will be much more beneficial for your own development to accept these changes and motivate the brain to continue living in the new reality.

Your dialogs should look something like “New menu? Great, because the old dishes are already boring!”,“New road repairs, do you need to look for a detour? Great, so in a month there will be no such potholes here, but while the repairs are underway, I will learn something new about this area!”,“New operating system? Super! Now I have a new entertaining quest - find the control panel!"

Stop labeling people … It is very convenient - instead of understanding a person, thinking about why he did this, succumbing to weakness and simply “stigmatizing” him by attaching him to one or another psychotype. Cheated on her husband? Whore! Drinking with friends? Alcoholic! Watching Rain? Belolentochnik!

Each of us is under the influence of, perhaps, even greater pressure from life circumstances than the same Rodion Raskolnikov, however, many find his reflections, described by Dostoevsky, interesting, and his divorced neighbors with two children - something vulgar and not worthy of attention.

Experiment with scents. Despite the fact that evolution has supplanted our olfactory receptors into the background, smells still have a huge impact on us. And if you have a favorite eau de toilette that you have not changed for years, then it's time to change it. And do it at regular intervals.

Learn foreign languages. And for this it is not necessary to fall in love with a Chinese woman, you can find other motivation associated, for example, with professional interests or hobbies. Foreign words and their associated semantic fields are often different from your native language, and learning them is perhaps the most effective tool for training brain plasticity (especially if you move further from the tourist vocabulary and delve into cultural characteristics).

It should also not be forgotten that our brains are much more complex than many people think. Engrams associated with listening to the same music affect the way we communicate with friends. Unexpected sensations from the smell of food in a new restaurant can awaken in you the desire to overestimate the words and actions of your loved one (to understand and forgive). A walk after work on an unfamiliar street will give you an idea of how to find a suitable solution to a problem that has arisen at work. Therefore, the above life hacks are best combined.

And maybe one fine day, about 30 years later, when your grandson brings you his new gadget, which is a cloud of nano-robots, you won't say “Oh my God, take this buzzing crap away from me!” hand into it with the words "Wow!" and immediately ask "How does it work and where can you buy it?"