One of humanity’s more charming delusions is the belief that we are in charge of ourselves.
We may picture the conscious mind as a tasteful little president, seated behind a polished desk, weighing whether to have the second martini, send the email, forgive the brother-in-law, or to finally begin Proust.
Neuroscience, with its usual lack of manners, proposes a less flattering arrangement.
The president is mostly ceremonial. The real government operates downstairs, in a windowless neural basement, where electrical impulses, hormones, memories, fears, habits, and ancient survival programs are already drafting policy. By the time “you” decide, the brain has largely decided. You are not so much the author of the decision as its press secretary.
One’s brain tells one what to do. Then, with breathtaking confidence, it tells one what to do next.
This raises the awkward question: how did one acquire such a bossy brain?
The answer, it turns out, is a haphazard collaboration between Charles Darwin, your parents, and whatever happened to work out relatively well for you in the third grade.
Your brain is not a bespoke instrument of pure logic; it is a meticulously cobbled-together prediction engine, engineered for survival rather than originality. Like a fundamentally lazy bureaucrat, it operates strictly on precedent. It favours the heavy neural pathways laid down by years of cultural conditioning and repeated behaviour simply because electricity travels them with the least resistance.
While you cannot simply ask your brain to instantly adopt a new disposition, you can subject it to the gruelling, metabolically expensive labor of trained and directed thinking.
You can refuse its first, perfunctory offering. You can demand a Better View of the Situation (BVS). By deliberately forcing the brain into unfamiliar cognitive territory. Routinely, rigorously, and without pity. You eventually rewire the basement. You lay down new superhighways. Neuroscientists call this real feature of the brain neuroplasticity.
The brain is not designed for originality at all. It is designed for efficiency. It likes familiar pathways because they are cheap to run. In polite company, we call this personality. In neuroscience, it looks more like metabolic laziness with a good tailor.
MAIN POINT: The brain can be trained. Not persuaded with slogans. No. But trained. Daily. Deliberately. Repeatedly. One can be trained to interrupt the first automatic memo and ask for a much better one. cvs2bvs.
One cannot defy one’s brain.
But one can teach it to give better instructions.
Like, Do a GBB!