Your Brain is Not Your Friend
An unconventional new year round-up that will make you a better person
It’s 2023 and I’m rousing myself from a restful, rainy, and luxuriously prolonged winter holiday with an important message for the year ahead:
Your brain is not your friend. Don’t trust her.
I know you want to believe you two are tight (like this 🤞), but your brain has been doing some underhanded shit that I think you need to know about.
She knows what she did. (Photo by BUDDHI Kumar SHRESTHA)
Your brain is biased
Our brains are confronted with a huge amount of information at every waking moment, and relegate the vast majority of our decisions to our unconscious. We simply don’t have the processing power to make every decision — where to step, when to blink, whether we might be in danger — consciously. This method works well and keeps our brains from exploding.
However, our brain takes a lot of shortcuts in its efforts to be efficient and not explode. Shortcuts like favouring or ignoring things that are familiar and more heavily scrutinized things that stand out.
These kinds of shortcuts often lead to discrimination, hasty judgement, and poor decision making. Cognitive biases that show up at work are plentiful and may include:
Anchoring bias — when you ‘anchor’ your decision around the first piece of information you receive, evaluating all new information in relation to that anchor.
Recency bias — when you overvalue the information you just heard because it’s fresh and exciting, and fail to objectively compare it to older inputs.
Confirmation bias — when we seek out information to confirm what we already believe because, you know, being wrong is uncomfortable.
Hasty generalization fallacy — when we broadly apply information gathered from a small sample size to a larger group, ignoring the context.
Our brains also try to sabotage us by projecting our lived experiences on everyone else. You know, like when you make a totally hilarious in-joke from your favourite Bonanza recap podcast during the company all hands and no one laughs, at all. Or when you assume all of your friends know that there are two Emu Ladies on Tiktok and one of them is very canceled.
Internal Narratives
Internal narratives are another wily way our brains try to fuck everything up.
It’s common for us to tell ourselves stories to create a narrative that is simple for us to grasp. Life is full of mystery and chaos, and we’re desperate to feel some semblance of control. In our heads, we’re all the main characters, and we sometimes forget that others are the main characters in their heads, too.
Consider this story: Once, a colleague and I had scheduled a meeting with someone from another company. On the day of the meeting, the other person no-showed, without so much as an email. My colleague was furious — she felt scorned, and immediately filled in the narrative that this person didn’t respect us. She drafted a passive aggressive missive, but I cautioned her to delay sending it until she cooled off.
The next morning, we received an email from the other person begging for forgiveness, and letting us know that his wife had gone into early labour. They had rushed to the hospital where their baby was, thankfully, delivered safe and sound. He even included a photo of the brand new babe.
With this new information, of course, his actions made total sense. We would never expect him to email us while speeding down the highway or forgo witnessing the birth of his first child for our meeting. We forgot for a moment that we weren’t the stars of this show.
Years later, I remember everything about this exchange vividly, except for whatever that important-at-the-time-but-subsequently-inconsequential meeting was supposed to be about.
Ask yourself: Is it possible that this person’s behaviour has absolutely nothing to do with me?
The answer, more often than you think, will be yes.
So, we’re all biased. The good news is, you can interrupt your biases and get your well intending but deeply flawed brain under control.
Your memory is trash
While our brains are really good at grouping information into neat little boxes, it means we overlook a lot of context in everyday situations. Maintaining a high level view of our worlds means that our perception and reality are two different things.
Known as “change blindness,” people are unlikely to recognize changes in their perspective of a scene. And, it’s not just minute details like a minor continuity error in your favourite movie (for the purpose of this blog I’ve assumed your favourite movie is Twilight: New Moon, famous for it’s moving tattoo).
In a fascinating experiment executed on Cornell University’s campus, researchers substituted one individual for another during an interrupted conversation to gauge the level of a person’s observance of the scene in front of them.
Do you think that most folks recognized a complete change in the person they’re speaking to?
Only 7 of 15 pedestrians identified the change of the person asking them for directions.
Less than 50% of the participants realised the person they were speaking to had seemingly shapeshifted into an entirely different human. In another iteration of the experiment, the two researchers dressed in construction gear, repeating the same ruse, and only 33% of participants recognized the swap.
If we can’t even process information correctly as it happens, consider how faulty and susceptible our memories are.
Memory interference is why eyewitness accounts are often inadmissible in court, as there are many ways for a memory to be compromised.
It could be due to misinformation or recency bias, but most often it’s because our memories are filtered through everything we’ve ever experienced and our mind fills in any gaps that may exist, disrupting the memory’s accuracy.
A friend of mine has a very vivid memory distortion story: when she was 12, she remembers coming downstairs on Christmas morning with her two cousins and having a wonderful time opening gifts and sitting beside the fireplace in her childhood home. The reality is, while she spent many Christmas mornings with her cousins, they never celebrated it at her childhood home. Her mind overlaid two distinct memories and created this falsified one. Even after recognizing that the memory is distorted, it can be hard to shake the “reality” of it.
Make your brain work better with spaced repetition
Normally, our brains can only retain roughly 10% of what we’ve learned within a month, but it is possible to expand the constraints of our working memory with spaced repetition.
Spaced repetition is a simple yet effective practice to systematically remind ourselves of new information over an extended period of time.
When we first learn information, we are able to retain it effectively for roughly 24 hours. If we are reminded of the information again on day two, that recall period doubles. With each periodic reminder, the longer we are able to correctly recall the information exponentially. After about a month of spaced repetition, we can remember the information for nearly twenty years!
Essentially, the more we are exposed to a piece of information, the more likely we are to remember it correctly. This is why advertisements are repeatedly shown to us, as the consistent repetition makes us remember the product being sold, and why I remember my best friend’s phone number from several decades ago, but not the directions my friend gave me to her new house last week.
You can think of spaced repetition as a way to “hack” your memory. Since we are more likely to recall something that we learned recently, systematic repetition increases the duration in which we can correctly remember the information.
Your brain is a diva
If conditions aren’t ~exactly right~ your brain will refuse to function, like that high maintenance house plant you received as a gift that died on day three.
This high maintenance bitch over here. (Photo by Nicolas Hirajeta)
Our nervous system manages nearly everything happening in our bodies: our breathing, digestive system, movements, mood, thoughts, and emotions.
When we are healthy and balanced, our nervous system is regulated, keeping us within what is known as our window of tolerance.
What is the window of tolerance?
It’s a phrase coined by Dr. Dan Siegel, used to explore and explain our optimal body and brain reactions, especially in challenging situations.
When we are in our window of tolerance, we are:
Present
Engaged
Flexible
Curious
Reasonable
On either side of our window, we enter sub-optimal states of shutting down or being unable to calm down — aka “the danger zones”. These extremes negatively impact our ability to think clearly and respond to stressful stimuli as our best selves.
Through understanding our window of tolerance, we are better equipped to maintain an optimal state, which improves our productivity, problem solving skills, and overall mental health. Of equal importance, if we recognize when we’re outside of our window, we can avoid making rash decisions with long lasting consequences, like telling your boss to “stuff it” or impulse cutting your own hair.
What to do when you fall outside the window
Explore what is negatively affecting your mood.
Are you hungry or thirsty?
Did you get enough sleep?
Is there an external situation impacting you?
Identify possible solutions.
Step away and get fresh air
Take some deep breaths
Drink water
Listen to a pump-up song or soothing music
Stretch and move your body
Challenge your thoughts with curiosity.
What are the objective facts of your situation?
What stories are you telling yourself? Where are you filling in blanks?
Do you have all the information you need?
Emotional Intelligence: the key to being a better person
As with any frenemy, it’s not all bad. Your brain does a lot for you, and is a powerful tool that can be honed with intentionality and practice.
Developing high emotional intelligence can counteract some of the tricks your brain tries to pull on you.
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the process of understanding ourselves, our emotions, and the emotions of those around us.
Core tenets of emotional intelligence:
Self Awareness
Authenticity
Self Regulation
Self Motivation
Empathy
Social Awareness
Communication Skills
Emotional intelligence in action:
Know how to effectively say “I’m sorry” — The ability to sincerely apologize and learn from your mistakes is how you maintain healthy relationships, boundaries, and mutual respect. Read the how-to guide by yours truly here.
Be curious — Curiosity is a skill that everyone needs to practice. Why? Because through practicing curiosity, you are able to view the world from various perspectives, better control your emotional responses, make better decisions, and effectively mediate conflict.
When we’re younger, there is wonder in every encounter, partially because we are aware of how much we don’t know. That’s why little kids love asking questions and following up with a series of “why?” to every explanation.
Curiosity is a quality deeply linked to intelligence because it activates and strengthens your mind.
Embrace silence — Silence is an under-utilized tool that allows others the opportunity to process their thoughts and access their intuition. It’s very useful in mediation and coaching scenarios, especially when paired with curiosity.
Silence may feel uncomfortable, but it actually builds trust, as it signals to the other person that you are there to actively listen.
I’m glad we had this talk. When you accept that your brain is not always working in your best interests, you can begin to leverage its full potential through the important lessons above.
Feeling a little overwhelmed? I build custom workshops for people just like you on topics just like this. Let’s chat.
Don’t forget to share this article with your friends and peers, so they can be better people, too.
