ExamineHealth

The Brain's Propensity for Pathways

Your mind is made up of connections.  Millions and millions of connections.  Each cell in your brain connects with thousands of other cells.  Neurons fire electrical impulses from one to another, triggering chemical reactions and coordinating our thoughts.  This mass of connections forms a mesh through which there are hundreds of thousands of pathways through.  An electrical impulse could travel from one side of your brain to the other every minute of your life and never need to follow the same path.

The interesting thing is that they do follow the same paths.  The neurons in your brain tend to utilize the same paths over and over again.  Each time a particular pathway is used, it becomes strengthened.  The next time that function is needed, or that thought recalled, it hops along the same neurons in the same order.  This is the formation of habits.  This is also the basis for learning.  As we continue to utilize a particular thought sequence, it becomes further ingrained into our brain.  We become more proficient as a result of the increased traffic through that pattern.  

Particular patterns become worn and are more likely to be activated.  They also operate at increased efficiency.  Think of them like grooves that are worn in your brain.  The deeper the grooves become, the more likely those actions and pathways are to be used.  These pathways can also represent associations themselves.  A song can remind you of a particular time period in your life.  This is due to the strong association that you have in your brain between the two memories.

Instincts

As an example, living things come with some of these pathways already developed at birth.  These are often referred to as instincts, or more recently fixed-action patterns.  These pathways are genetically or energetically bound from birth.  They can be triggered as a reaction to specific input.  In humans for example:

• - A yawn is triggered automatically whenever we see, hear or even sense a yawn occurring
• - A newborn baby will grasp tightly to anything that is put in it's grip - this might have been imprinted ages ago when babies - needed to grasp onto their parents fur coat for a ride when danger was present
• - Infants put almost everything in their mouth - this might be a way for their immune systems to learn about the world that they are living in for adaptation purposes

In other cases, these instinctual pathways can be developed during a sensitive time in the creature's development.  This is often referred to as imprinting.  For instance, a baby chick often associates the first moving object with it's mother.  Most of the time this is correct and the imprint works as it's supposed to.  However, it can be tricked and the chick can associate another creature as it's mother figure.  In such a case it will follow them around just as if it was their mother.  Timothy Leary has a model called the Eight Circuits of Consciousness that is based on the theory of imprints, and uses it as an explanation for much of human behavior.

Brain Neuroplasticity - Learning

While our built-in patterns are essential for survival, they do not represent the entirety of our knowledge.  As we progress through life, we form new neural pathways via the act of learning.  This happens automatically, regardless of our intention.  Things that we are repeatedly exposed to, we develop enhanced associations for.  Practice makes perfect.  This increase in proficiency comes from forming new neural pathways, or wearing deeper grooves.  The more we practice, the better ingrained the patterns become.

Until recently, there were believed to be limits to how much humans could learn, especially as they aged.  It was believed that the brain was limited in the number of new connections it could make.  Recently, studies have shown that this is not true.  While children are naturally disposed to learning and formation of neural pathways.  Adults also have the capability to learn new things right up until death.  Adults also have the added bonus of having learned focus which assists in the integration of new patterns.  This is referred to as brain neuroplasticity.

In the past, stroke victims which lost the use of an arm due to brain damage were believed to be permanently crippled.  Recently it was discovered that by simply restricting the movement of the other arm, the brain was able to re-route those neural pathways to an undamaged portion of the brain and movement to the arm was restored.  We must simply direct ourselves to learn.  We have the capability to learn at any age, we must only keep directing ourselves to do so.  This is why it is important to continue learning new things, avoid being stagnant.  This will ensure that your brain stays nimble and capable of quickly forming new connections.

And when you're learning something new, give yourself a chance to form those connections.  You can't expect to pick everything up the first time around.  Repetition is often needed to solidify learning.  Writing things down can also help with retention, due to utilizing more of your senses and making the recollection experience richer.  Relating the new material to existing concepts can also help you to draw associations that will lead to better retention.  Teaching the newly learned content to someone else is a great way to let your brain force those pathways open as you re-organize the foreign concepts into ones that make sense to you.

Habits

This behavior works for us as well as against us.  Generally speaking, learning is a good thing.  As we practice something, we get better at it.  But what if what we're learning is harmful?  What if all we're doing is picking up a bad habit?  Repetition is a blind mechanism.  It doesn't judge on the quality or disposition of a particular habit.  That which we repeat, we solidify pathways for, and we habitualize.  

This bears some value to the subject of monitoring the things that we continue to do on a regular basis.  Are you forming good habits?  Are you examining the things that you build into habits, or are you forming habits unconsciously?  Imagine the power that you could apply if you could choose your habits.  They can be powerful allies if the habits are positive.  Conversely they can be dangerous foes if left unmonitored.

I recommend taking inventory of your habits.  This might not be something that you sit down and accomplish in one sitting.  But start building your catalog over time.  For each habit that you identify, evaluate whether or not it's serving your best interests.  If it's not, the easiest way to remove the habit is usually to replace it with another habit.  Identify the trigger that causes the habit to execute and replace it with a different response.

Habit creation is relatively easy, it simply takes repetition.  Generally accepted theory states that 24 days of daily repetition is enough to form a habit.  I usually round that up to 30 days just to be sure.  I recommend actually tracking this.  So on your calendar, give yourself a check, or a note, or a gold star on each day that you successfully execute the behavior that you are trying to habitualize.  If you miss a day, start over.  Your goal is to complete 30 days straight of the desired behavior.  9 times out of 10 this will be enough to solidify the habit.  If it feels shaky, do another 30 days.  Again, this is a habit so you're going to do it anyway.  The question is simply how long do you actively track your progress.  And I would argue that point is until the habit is fully formed and no longer requires your attention to execute.

So you identify the habit of grabbing a pop tart on the way out the door for breakfast.  You have decided that you want to replace that habit with the habit of eating a more nutritious breakfast each morning, like a bowl of oatmeal maybe.  Each day when you wake up, actively make yourself a nutritious breakfast before leaving for work.  Yes, this might mean that you need to wake up a few minutes earlier.  This would be a part of the habitualization process.  After 30 days, you won't even think to consider that pop tart.

Maybe you've adopted a habit of getting home from work each day and sitting on the couch watching television.  Instead, you'd like to adopt a habit of exercising each day when you get home from work.  Again, the best way to defeat the undesirable habit is to replace it with a healthy one.  Track your progress, check off those days, and keep that 30 day goal in mind.  30 days is not so long of a period of time that it seems impossible to do, you can do anything for 30 days!  Once you've completed 30 days straight, the behavior will be so ingrained that you won't even have to think about it anymore.  Those neural pathways will be strong and worn in and your mind will default to them every time.

Your brain is wired to serve you.  It operates in a predictable manner.  All it takes is a basic understanding of the mechanics of your thinking to train them to serve you.  Don't be a victim to the whims of random thinking or poorly developed habits.  Take control of your mind and your life and leverage it's power to work for you.  Your brain is an exceptionally powerful tool, with the above tips you can set the direction of it's autopilot functions and allow it to plug away at your goals.

So far we've only scraped the surface of how the brain operates, how we learn, and how we process the world around us.  We'll be revisiting these topics in the future to continue to optimize our lives and the resources that we have available to us.  Stay tuned to the discussion by subscribing to our RSS feed, or joining in with the comments below.