Human Thoughts
On Brain Plasticity, Entertainment, and Little Joys
I wanted to start with this podcast interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman because it’s just absolutely fascinating from start to finish.
Eagleman’s book, Livewired, is about brain plasticity - how the brain re-wires itself in response to lived experience. Personally, I’ve always found brain plasticity findings pretty uninteresting - we know that people change as a result of life experiences; that we can also see changes in the brain is unsurprising. But Eagleman presents these findings in a completely different light, which I’ll do my best to try and sum up here!
The picture Eagleman presents is of a brain constantly simulating its “best guess” of reality, through a continuous prediction-action feedback loop. (As Anil Seth - another excellent neuroscientist - puts it: our brains present us with “controlled hallucinations of reality.”) We begin with a prediction of what we’re about to experience - say, the warm sensations of drinking a cup of tea. We then act to confirm whether or not our prediction was correct - perhaps the tea was warmer or cooler than expected. What we pay attention to, and what we’re conscious of, is the difference between our predicted and actual experiences. We update our future predictions of tea-drinking accordingly as we create an ever-more sophisticated predictive map of our world.
But here’s the thing: Eagleman explains how this feedback loop of prediction and action doesn’t necessarily provide you with an accurate view of reality. Instead, it can simply provide you with a predictive map of reality that you get mostly right most of the time. This is exactly what happens inside your media filter bubble - you expect to read about some abhorrent view expressed by the “other side” and that’s exactly what you find, confirming your view that everyone on the other side is abhorrent.
Another example is people whose view of reality significantly narrows as their social activity decreases. Eagelman notes how the brain changes and updates its predictive models in response to novel stimuli, and that a major source of novelty for human beings is other people. When we stop meeting new people, we stop seeing the world differently. We become stuck not just in our habits and routines, but also in how we see reality. And when our view of reality remains static, we cease to be motivated to change it - to test whether or not our predictive map is either true or good for us.
So get out of your bubbles! Switch things up a bit! Don’t be a slave to your routine!
We predict our reality with ever-greater precision because we want to control it. I’ve written a lot about control in this newsletter before and how it’s the defining value of the modern age. But I’m not alone in thinking this. Another newsletter that I frequently enjoy is Granola by Gracy Olmstead, who writes in particular about how food and community have been steadily eroded by the ethos of control and security.
In the latest edition of her newsletter, linked above, she writes about entertainment, and in particular the entertainment we expect from the natural world. She talks about her latest trip to Yellowstone national park and how the natural world, for many people, has been reduced to “a show or spectacle for our amusement. We come to Yellowstone (and many other places in this world) as spectators waiting to be entertained, thus turning the sublime into a commodity for our own amusement.”
What do we lose by trying to control the world in this way? Well, we lose the opposite of control, namely connection. When you encounter the natural world without expectation, you must enter into some kind of conversation with it - paying full attention to what it’s all about, what it has to offer, and what it may want from you in return. Typically (though not always), you don’t try to control other people, at least not the people you love and respect. Instead, you enter into connection with them, start a dialogue, an ongoing conversation. You could do the same in other areas of your life, including how you relate to the natural world and other wonders beyond your head.
These sentiments are echoed by the linked Brainpickings’ (aka Maria Popova) review of Hermann Hesse’s essay, “On Little Joys”. Hesse takes aim at another defining feature of modern life: being busy. Again, in our attempts to control our lives - to achieve all our goals, to be the best version of ourselves - we race around trying to do as much as possible, celebrating our busyness as another personal achievement.
But Hesse couldn’t disagree more. He writes that “the high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.”
Hesse sees our insatiable desire for entertainment as a symptom of this unhealthy control mindset. When our motto is “as much as possible, as fast as possible” then we seek out “more and more entertainment and less and less joy… This morbid pursuit of enjoyment [is] spurred on by constant dissatisfaction and yet perpetually satiated.”
How can we escape this viscous consumptive cycle? Hesse suggests that the key is to enjoy things in moderation and to embrace the little joys in life. As Popova writes, learning the “difference between binging on stimulation and savoring enjoyment in small doses… is what sets apart those who live with a sense of fulfillment from those who romp through life perpetually dissatisfied.”
This reminds me of our discussion a while back on distractions vs slow joys. When you’re busy racing through life, trying to get as much out of it as possible, you rob yourself of the opportunity to relax, do nothing, and - dare I say it - be bored. It’s in these moments that you can switch from being in control-mode to being in connection with life, in conversation with it, and enjoy whatever unexpectedly turns up.
That was a longer edition than usual - well done on getting to the end! I hope you managed to take time and savour it within your no-doubt busy schedule :-)