Improve Your Life by Knowing How Your Brain Works
Or, more accurately, how you work your brain.
You can enhance and control your life experience by understanding how your brain works. Your brain does a lot of its work through five mechanisms. 1) Guess and check. 2) Pattern recognition. 3) Interpolation, 4) Extrapolation, 5) Programming. I’ll discuss each briefly for you.
Guess and check. You guess at answers and check to see if it works. My wife and I solve the New York Times’ Wordle using that process. We always start with bayou and ideas. By guessing those two words, we have all the vowels. We then begin guessing words with those vowels.
When I was in sixth grade, our teacher gave us a choice 100 arithmetic problems or two word problems. Many guessed the answer to the word problems and were wrong. The teacher said you could only have one guess. I solved the two problems. I didn’t use some genius equation. I used guess and check.
Pattern recognition. You find what you are looking for. Using Wordle as an example, once we know the position of a letter(s), we use X as placeholders for the letters we don’t know. For example, if we know A is the third letter, we look at XXAXX. THANK and SHACK are two possibilities. It is amazing how that helps.
Interpolation is connecting the dots. You fill in the blanks. Perhaps you’ve seen articles where the vowels of words are left out and you find that your brain adapts, and you can quickly read the articles. Another example is a video. You are seeing a certain number of frames per second and your brain ties them together with no gaps.
In science, we can connect data points on a graph and predict what is between them.
When you watch murder detective shows, you see detectives using timelines to construct what happened. They start with the murder and go back in time looking for connections.
Extrapolation is predicting the future from the past. When a ball is thrown, we use extrapolation to predict how to catch it. For the first couple of decades of my life, I did not have three-dimensional vision. I caught balls by my brain looking at the trajectory.
In business, we predict future performance based on the past. We decide what to do to improve the future based on the past.
Programming. You learn skills by programming your brain. I am learning to play the piano. I can now play easy pieces with both hands. When I began it was impossible. I was told to practice and have rests with plenty of sleep between practice sessions. My brain needs time to program. When I see notes on the scales, my fingers go to the right keys on the piano.
Perhaps all learning can be thought of as programming. We program our brains to perform skills. The skills can be physical like playing the piano. The skills can be mental like applying engineering concepts to solve a problem. We also program the brain to allow ourselves to think about something else. A great example is driving my car home from work. I’ve had the experience of wanting to stop at the store on the way home and getting home before I remembered. My brain was on autopilot – the go home program was active. I wasn’t thinking about driving.
Sometimes we need to deprogram ourselves. We do that by learning that our previous learning was not true, and the programming is not helping us.
Key to all of this is that you enhance your experience by using your will. You must practice. You can be better!!