Trust Your Brain and Your Brain Will Trust You

The Little Engine thought he could, and he made it up the mountain. By force of sheer will, he overcame the challenges before him, and succeeded where before he had failed. 

TLE’s now retired, sitting on a sofa, watching TV. Next to him is a bowl of potato chips. He knows he shouldn’t eat them. A few are okay, but not the whole bowl. But there goes his hand, dipping and lifting the crispy treat to his mouth. “I can stop,” he says to himself. “I think I can!” And then he shoves the fistful in, and sighs as he flips channels on the TV.

We’ve all got bad habits. And we’ve all got routines and motions we go through, without even thinking about it. How do we break out of these ruts, and become the people we know we want to be? The key is confidence. It really is all about believing in and trusting yourself.

Those new-agers were right, but science can back-up some of the claims, by pointing to key areas in the brain. Consider self-control, which is occurs in the frontal part of your brain. This is an area with high energy demands, and you can literally run out of fuel necessary to control yourself (scientists call this “ego depletion”). Now consider the deeper, emotional part of your brain, the ones that want what they want NOW. You’re fighting temptation all day to the point you’re literally tired of fighting, and since the reward for staying motivated is less insistent than the reward for giving in now, you give in.

You run out of that very will that kept TLE chugging up the mountain.

Trusting yourself can replace that emotional want with a different emotion all together. This is reminiscent of the way the brain chooses to give control to the heuristics that you use for routines, and a more conscious executive decision making process. Your brain will choose the method that has the most confidence—it’s easier to drive a car to work, letting your brain handle the lefts and rights while you mental prepare the big speech for your boss. On the other hand, you wouldn’t expect to automatically drive through a city you’ve never been in before, or you’ll end up hopelessly lost.

So, if you’re confident in your decision, then making that decision will be its own reward. Instead of your frontal brain fighting against the pull of your emotions, you harness those emotions to actually push yourself up that hill.

The Little Engine that could should picture himself as a happier engine, sitting in a place where there are no chips. By choosing to concentrate on a positive outcome to his decisions, he can trust himself to execute those proper decisions. Then he can pick up the bowl, take it into the kitchen, and go back to this TV, with the bowl now out of sight.

References:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/addicted-brains/201311/the-key-quitting-self-trust-part-1
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/11/12/should-habits-or-goals-direct-your-life-it-depends-2/
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2013/april-13/why-wait-the-science-behind-procrastination.html

Delegating the Brain’s Delegation

You’re busy. You’ve got things to do. You don’t have time for a lot of disorganization. So when you walk into the reception area of the hotel where you’re presenting a paper on neuroplasticity, you expect to see signs, pointing you to the various areas you need to go. Places like the executive center, so you can download a few slides and print them. And the coffee shop, so you grab a quick cup to fuel your talk. And of course, the restroom.

But what if the sign was garbled? What would you do? You’d ask someone-- but what if there’s no one behind the reception desk? You’d ask someone else. Another hotel patron, maybe, who, while not officially designated to give directions, might be able to point out the places you need.

A new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience suggest that the brain may be able to do the same kind of thing.

Your brain has different areas for recognizing faces and landscapes, and another part of your brain assigns attention to which ever area is required for a given task at hand. If you want to remember a face, for example, this latter area tells the landscape area to relax while telling the face area to pay attention.

Scientists showed test subjects pictures of faces overlaid on top of pictures of landscape. They had them concentrate on only one aspect of the picture to memorize it, all while the scientists used magnets to temporarily knock-out the “delegator” portion of the brain. With the delegator knocked out, subjects were still able to remember faces or landscapes as required.

They looked at brain scans while they did this, and found that a different part of the brain was acting as a temporary delegator. Note that this was not a learned response, something that had developed over time. We already know about the brain’s remarkable ability to rewire itself and compensate for damaged parts. Instead, this was an immediate taking-over of delegation activity.

That’s one take away. And it’s intriguing. The Neuroskeptic at Discover is a little more, well, skeptical. He points out that the study didn’t show for sure this reassignment, only that another part of the brain spoke up when the magnets didn’t keep delegation from happening. It might have been the case that the scientists were wrong about how much actually delegation the delegator does.

(In our hotel analogy above, that might be like the hotel patron drifting over to the sign you’re looking at, watching you read it.)

Nevertheless, it’s enough to warrant further studies which will give us even more data in a quest to understand out decision making processes.

You know, free will.