Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

(This post, revised and extended, forms one small part of an ebook on change, which you’ll get if you sign up for my free course on how to make a change plan.)

You may have heard that we only use 10% of our brains. (You may even have seen the saying incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein.) Of course, it isn’t true; we use all of our brain at one time or another, though usually much less than 10% of it at any one time. And this is one reason that it’s sometimes hard to change our behavior.

No part of the brain remains unused for long. From the point of view of the brain’s neurons, it’s like working in a busy kitchen; the moment you finish one task, someone nearby will grab you to work on another. Nobody is allowed to stand around idle.

Chefs In Action by argearge

Scientists who investigate neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to change) have pointed out the paradox that, because of this neural ability to swap tasks and the imperative to keep doing the task you have as long as the demand for it exists, change is actually quite difficult sometimes.

It’s like having a bookshelf that is crammed with books; in order to put a new book on the shelf, you first have to take one of the existing ones off.

books by robina

Or, in terms of real estate, think about wanting to build a new building in the inner city. To do so, you first have to knock an existing building down.

Destruction Zone by mzacha

What this means is that if you have a habit, for example, that habit is taking up a certain amount of space on the mental bookshelf, a certain amount of real estate in Downtown Brain, and in order to create a new habit you have to do something to shift the old one.

Something like what?

Well, as Norman Doidge notes in his remarkable book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (around p. 60 for those who have it; if you don’t, I recommend it), there are a few strategies that work to shift habits to make room for new behaviors.

The first is to pay attention. Another excellent book on brain plasticity for intelligent laypeople is Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, which discusses the power of attention extensively. It describes, for example, a fascinating experiment with monkeys.

Mico – Sagui by Auroquero

You take your monkeys, and you set them up with headphones through which you play sounds, and little devices which gently stroke one hand of each monkey. Every monkey gets the same sounds and the same hand stimuli.

Now, you reward half the monkeys when they make responses that coincide with changes in the sounds, but not when they respond to changes in the hand stimuli, and the other half of the monkeys you reward the other way round. Pretty soon, half the monkeys are paying attention to the sounds and ignoring the hand stimuli, and the other half are paying attention to the hand stimuli and ignoring the sounds, even though both groups are getting both sets of stimuli.

After some time, you map the monkeys’ brains. You mapped their brains before you started the experiment, so you know how large the section of brain was that’s concerned with distinguishing changes in sound, and how large the section was that notices stimulation to the hand. What you’ll find is that the monkeys that paid attention to the sounds are now using more of their brains for sound, and the monkeys that paid attention to the touch are now using more of their brains for touch. Attention reshapes the brain.

Brain in hand by juliaf

And how do you affect attention? People, just like monkeys, pay attention to things that are important to them in some way – either as a threat or as a reward. And something that is associated with a reward gets the same attention that you would pay to the reward itself. So, step one, pay attention; step two, reward attention, and to make it even more effective, step three, reward change. You won’t succeed in changing your habit if you’re not paying attention to it.

So, each time you catch yourself in your habit, ask yourself these three questions:

• “What am I doing?” This focuses your attention on the behavior.
• “Why am I doing this?” If you understand what you’re getting from the behavior, you can start thinking of strategies to replace it with behavior you would prefer.
• “How can I deal with it better?” This starts to replace the old behavior with the new, desired behavior, and, importantly, it associates the new behavior with the circumstances in which you had the old behavior.

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