Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

🧠 Free Recall ❓ Quiz 🔍 Cues 🔮 Simulation 🥷 ShadowBox 📐 Encode Cards

Why did a brain like yours evolve? The obvious answer is to think. It’s common to assume that brains evolved in some kind of upward progression—say, from lower animals to higher animals, with the most sophisticated, thinking brain of all, the human brain, at the top. After all, thinking is the human superpower, right? Well, the obvious answer turns out to be wrong. In fact, the idea that our brains evolved for thinking has been the source of many profound misconceptions about human nature. Once you give up that cherished belief, you will have taken the first step toward understanding how your brain actually works and what its most important job is—and, ultimately, what kind of creature you really are.

The feeling brain developed before the thinking brain

Energy efficiency was a key to survival.

This is going in as a tenant

You can think about energy efficiency like a budget. A financial budget tracks money as it’s earned and spent. A budget for your body similarly tracks resources like water, salt, and glucose as you gain and lose them. Each action that spends resources, such as swimming or running, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits. This is a simplified explanation, but it captures the key idea that running a body requires biological resources. Every action you take (or don’t take) is an economic choice—your brain is guessing when to spend resources and when to save them.

The best way to keep to a financial budget, as you may know from personal experience, is to avoid surprises—to anticipate your financial needs before they arise and make sure you have the resources to meet them. The same is true of a body budget.

When it came to body budgeting, prediction beat reaction. A creature that prepared its movement before the predator struck was more likely to be around tomorrow than a creature that awaited a predator’s pounce. Creatures that predicted correctly most of the time, or made nonfatal mistakes and learned from them, did well. Those that frequently predicted poorly, missed threats, or false-alarmed about threats that never materialized didn’t do so well. They explored their environment less, foraged less, and were less likely to reproduce.

This is why brains are prediction machines

This is a good graphic of the cycle of human needs

The scientific name for body budgeting is allostasis. It means automatically predicting and preparing to meet the body’s needs before they arise.

How can animals predict their bodies’ future needs? The best source of information comes from their past—the actions they’ve taken at other times in similar circumstances. If a past action brought benefits, such as a successful escape or a tasty meal, they’re likely to repeat that action. All sorts of animals, including humans, somehow conjure up past experiences to prepare their bodies for action. Prediction is such a useful capability that even single-celled creatures plan their actions predictively. Scientists are still puzzling out how they do it.

Past actions are the source of predictions of the future and for humans that means a lot because we attach a lot of meaning to events so if those events are affecting our predictions of the future, it's hard to unpact that. That's why we have 10000 forms of therapy

what is your brain’s most important job. It’s not rationality. Not emotion. Not imagination, or creativity, or empathy. Your brain’s most important job is to control your body—to manage allostasis—by predicting energy needs before they arise so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive. Your brain continually invests your energy in the hopes of earning a good return, such as food, shelter, affection, or physical protection, so you can perform nature’s most vital task: passing your genes to the next generation.

I love this and this adds more context to our understanding of the brain. The allocator of energy

But all of these mental capacities are consequences of a central mission to keep you alive and well by managing your body budget. Everything your brain creates, from memories to hallucinations, from ecstasy to shame, is part of this mission. Sometimes your brain budgets for the short term, like when you drink coffee to stay up late and finish a project, knowing that you are borrowing energy that you’ll pay for tomorrow. Other times, your brain budgets for the long term, like when you spend years to learn a difficult skill, such as math or carpentry, that requires a sustained investment but ultimately helps you survive and prosper.

You and I do not experience our every thought, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe, every hug we give or receive, every kindness we extend, and every insult we bear as a deposit or withdrawal in our metabolic budgets, but under the hood, that is what’s happening. This idea is key to understanding how your brain works and, in turn, how to stay healthy and live a longer and more meaningful life.

This is another fascinating part here because when we consider the self or "I" as our full self, of course we don't keep accounting for every action of our lives, but when we consider the full scope of the brain as a separate entity and THAT is what is keeping track of all these things then it explains why the discrepancy of who we think we are and what we really are. This is why therapy works. It's unveiling the accounting done by the BRAIN and not the "self"

You Have One Brain (Not Three)

Your Brain is a Network

Little Brains Wire Themselves to Their World

Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do

Your brain actively constructs your experiences. Every morning, you wake up and experience a world around you full of sensations. You might feel the bedsheets against your skin. Maybe you hear sounds that woke you, like an alarm buzzing or birds chirping or your spouse snoring. Perhaps you smell coffee brewing. These sensations seem to sail right into your head as if your eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and skin were transparent windows on the world. But you don’t sense with your sensory organs. You sense with your brain.

In much the same way, your brain also constructs what you feel inside your body. Your aches and jitters and other inner sensations are some combination of what’s going on in your brain and what’s actually happening within your lungs and heart and gut and muscles and so on. Your brain also adds information from your past experiences to guess what those sensations mean. For instance, when people haven’t slept enough and are fatigued or low energy, they may feel hungry (because they’ve been hungry before when their energy was low) and may think that a quick snack will boost their energy. In fact, they’re just tired from lack of sleep. This constructed experience of hunger may be one reason why people gain unwanted weight.

And this is why the feeling project is so important. It's almost like we're trying to unpack the truth in our sensations

Scientists are now fairly certain that your brain actually begins to sense the moment-to-moment changes in the world around you before those light waves, chemicals, and other sense data hit your brain. The same is true for moment-to-moment changes in your body—your brain begins to sense them before the relevant data arrives from your organs, hormones, and various bodily systems. You don’t experience your senses this way, but it’s how your brain navigates the world and controls your body. But don’t take my word for it. Instead, think of the last time you were thirsty and drank a glass of water. Within seconds after draining the last drops, you probably felt less thirsty. This event might seem ordinary, but water actually takes about twenty minutes to reach your bloodstream. Water can’t possibly quench your thirst in a few seconds. So what relieved your thirst? Prediction. As your brain plans and executes the actions that allow you to drink and swallow, it simultaneously anticipates the sensory consequences of gulping water, causing you to feel less thirsty long before the water has any direct effect on your blood.

Wow really interesting. Same thing with alcohol, after the first drink, the inhibitions start to drop and the body predicts what's going to happen. It's probably part of the reason why the placebo effect works as well

All this predicting happens backward from the way we experience it. You and I seem to sense first and act second. You see an enemy and then raise your rifle. But in your brain, sensing actually comes second. Your brain is wired to prepare for action first, like moving your index finger onto a trigger and making body-budgeting changes to support that movement. It’s also wired to route these predictions to your sensory systems,

Habits probably have a role here as well. For example, every time I drive up from Etinosa's place I get tired and I want to take a nap. Is my brain predicting my nap and putting me in the mood to sleep? I think so!

Yes, your brain is wired to initiate your actions before you’re aware of them. That is kind of a big deal. After all, in everyday life, you do many things by choice, right? At least it seems that way. For example, you chose to open this book and read these words. But the brain is a predicting organ. It launches your next set of actions based on your past experience and current situation, and it does so outside of your awareness. In other words, your actions are under the control of your memory and your environment. Does this mean you have no free will? Who’s responsible for your actions?

Think about the last time you acted on autopilot. Maybe you bit your nails. Maybe your brain-to-mouth connection was too well oiled and you muttered something regrettable to a friend. Maybe you looked away from an engaging movie and discovered that you’d downed an entire jumbo bag of red Twizzlers. In these moments, your brain employed its predictive powers to launch your actions, and you had no feeling of agency. Could you have exercised more control and changed your behavior in the moment? Maybe, but it would have been difficult. Were you responsible for these actions? More than you might think.

The predictions that initiate your actions don’t appear out of nowhere. If you hadn’t chomped on your nails as a kid, you probably wouldn’t bite them now. If you’d never learned the regrettable words you tossed at your friend, you couldn’t say them now. If you’d never developed a taste for licorice . . . you get the idea. Your brain predicts and prepares your actions using your past experiences. If you could magically reach back in time and change your past, your brain would predict differently today, and you might act differently and experience the world differently as a result.

Yep, called it and spoke about this in my last note

It’s impossible to change your past, but right now, with some effort, you can change how your brain will predict in the future. You can invest a little time and energy to learn new ideas. You can curate new experiences. You can try new activities. Everything you learn today seeds your brain to predict differently tomorrow.

You want to train your brain to anticipate the future. Anticipation is everything and you do that by changing your habits with effort over time. Train your mind like a dog

a hammering heartbeat is not necessarily anxiety. Research shows that students can learn to experience their physical sensations not as anxiety but as energized determination, and when they do, they perform better on tests. That determination seeds their brains to predict differently in the future so they can get their butterflies flying in formation. If they practice this skill enough, they can pass a test, perhaps pass their courses, and even graduate, which has a huge impact on their future earning potential.

Again, this is why the feeling project is so important. Getting down to the bottom of the feeling and even the physiological features of the labeled emotions can help clarify and even reframe what I believe I'm feeling

My point here is that you might not be able to change your behavior in the heat of the moment, but there’s a good chance you can change your predictions before the heat of the moment. With practice, you can make some automatic behaviors more likely than others and have more control over your future actions and experiences than you might think.

You want to give your brain all the help in the world to predict and prime for the actions you desire. So I posit that adding as much ritual as possible to important habits/behaviors is important

As the owner of a predicting brain, you have more control over your actions and experiences than you might think and more responsibility than you might want. But if you embrace this responsibility, think about the possibilities. What might your life be like? What kind of person might you become?

~~I freaking love this takeaway~~

Your Brain Secretly Works With Other Brains

Part of being a social species, it turns out, is that we regulate one another’s body budgets—the ways in which our brains manage the bodily resources we use every day.

For your whole life, outside of your awareness, you make deposits of a sort into other people’s body budgets, as well as withdrawals, and others do the same for you. This ongoing undercover operation has pros and cons with profound implications for how we live our lives.

We also adjust each other’s body budgets by our actions. If you raise your voice, or even your eyebrow, you can affect what goes on inside other people’s bodies, such as their heart rate or the chemicals carried in their bloodstream.

This may be one reason why people sometimes fail to empathize with those who look different or believe different things than they do and why it can feel uncomfortable to try. It’s metabolically costly for a brain to deal with things that are hard to predict. No wonder people create so-called echo chambers, surrounding themselves with news and views that reinforce what they already believe—it reduces the metabolic cost and unpleasantness of learning something new. Unfortunately, it also reduces the odds of learning something that might change a person’s mind.

I think the takeaway here is that belief change and dealing with people are another draw on energy that needs to be managed - April 02, 2023 @ 2:06 PM

Humans are unique in the animal kingdom, however, because we also regulate each other with words. A kind word may calm you, as when a friend gives you a compliment at the end of a hard day. A hateful word from a bully may cause your brain to predict threat and flood your bloodstream with hormones, squandering precious resources from your body budget.

This is an interesting takeaway because it means we can rebalance our budgets with our words and that's what prayer does. But also... Visualization!! April 02, 2023 @ 2:09 PM

Why do the words you encounter have such wide-ranging effects inside you? Because many brain regions that process language also control the insides of your body, including major organs and systems that support your body budget. These brain regions, which are contained in what scientists call the “language network,” guide your heart rate up and down. They adjust the glucose entering your bloodstream to fuel your cells. They change the flow of chemicals that support your immune system. The power of words is not a metaphor. It’s in your brain wiring.

Powerful -  April 02, 2023 @ 2:12 PM

Your brain needs other people to stay alive and healthy

Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind

if you are from a Western culture, like I am, your mind has features called thoughts and emotions, and the two feel fundamentally different from each other. But people who grow up in Balinese culture, as well as in the Ilongot culture in the Philippines, do not experience what we Westerners call cognition and emotion as different kinds of events. They experience what we would call a blend of thinking and feeling, but to them it’s a single thing. If you find this kind of mental feature hard to imagine, that’s okay. You don’t have a Balinese kind of mind.

Western minds often try to guess what other people are thinking or feeling. This mental inference is such a basic and valuable skill in our culture that when we encounter people who are not so good at it, we may see them as abnormal instead of merely different. But in some other cultures, attempts to peer into another person’s mind are considered unnecessary.

a particular human brain in a particular human body, raised and wired in a particular culture, will produce a particular kind of mind. There is not one human nature but many. A mind is something that emerges from a transaction between your brain and your body while they are surrounded by other brains-in-bodies that are immersed in a physical world and constructing a social world.

Fascinating and this is why the social sciences and scientific method don't mesh. A lot of studies were done at a certain time with a certain subset of the population (grad students) and they probable developed a "certain mind" but if you try it with another subset, the slight variation of the mind might cause the experiment to fail to replicate

It’s important for humans to have many kinds of minds, because variation is critical for the survival of a species. One of Charles Darwin’s greatest insights was that variation is a prerequisite for natural selection to work. Think about it: If there’s a huge change in the environment, like a catastrophic drop in the food supply or a big increase in temperature, a species without much variation might be completely wiped out. A species with great variation will more likely have some survivors after any catastrophe—the members who are well suited for the new environment.

What if Bitcoiner-mind is that variation and the financial collapse is what they'll survive

minds depend in part on micro-wiring that is tuned and pruned by culture.

An especially useful feature of the mind, and one of the closest things we have to a universal mental feature, is mood—the general sense of feeling that comes from your body. Scientists call it affect.* Feelings of affect range from pleasant to unpleasant, from idle to activated. Affect is not emotion; your brain produces affect all the time, whether you’re emotional or not and whether you notice it or not.

Very important few blobs above and coming up

Affect is the source of all your joys and sorrows. It makes some things profound or sacred to you and other things trivial or vile. If you’re a religious person, affect helps you feel connected to God. If you’re a spiritual person but not necessarily religious, affect becomes the transcendent feeling of being part of something larger than yourself. If you’re a skeptic, affect is what drives your certainty that others are wrong.

Where does affect come from? In every moment—like right now, as you read these words—your hormones, organs, and immune system are producing a storm of sense data, and you’re barely aware of it. You notice your heartbeat and breathing only when they’re intense or you focus on them. You almost never notice your body temperature unless it’s too high or too low. Your brain, however, makes meaning from this data storm continuously to predict your body’s next action and meet its metabolic needs before they arise. In the midst of all this activity inside you, something miraculous happens. Your brain summarizes what’s going on with your body in the moment, and you feel that summary as affect.

Affect is like a barometer for how you’re doing. Remember, your brain is constantly running a budget for your body. Affect hints at whether your body budget is in balance or in the red.

Scientists are still puzzling out how your brain’s body-budgeting activities, which are physical, become transformed into affect, which is mental.

What we can conclude on though is that the body-budgeting is firmly connected to mental processes and is the reason why things like procrastination happens

Even though every human culture produces minds that feel pleasure, displeasure, calmness, and agitation,

pleasure, displeasure, calmness, and agitation

Your mind must acclimate to the new culture. Scientists call this activity acculturation, and it’s like an extreme version of plasticity. You’re suddenly swimming in new and ambiguous sense data, and your brain needs to tune and prune itself so it can efficiently guess what to do.

Our Brains Can Create Reality

We all live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our human brains.

Nothing in physics or chemistry determines that you’re leaving the United States and entering Canada, or that an expanse of water has certain fishing rights, or that a specific arc of the Earth’s orbit around the sun is called January. These things are real to us anyway. Socially real.

This is a powerful idea. Much of what we know makes up the social reality and the social reality only exists in our minds. This is exploitable, just not sure how

The boundary between social reality and physical reality is porous, and we can use scientific experiments to reveal this. Studies show that wine tastes better when people believe it’s expensive. Coffee labeled ecofriendly tastes better to people than identical, unlabeled coffee. Your brain’s predictions, steeped in social reality, change the way you perceive what you eat and drink.

This is how you start to exploit it. Figure out how to distort the perceptions made in the minds of others

You and I can create social reality with other people without even trying, because we have human brains that can do the 5 Cs.

This is our tools into interfacing with the social world to our advantage - April 02, 2023 @ 2:34 PM

the Five Cs: 
creativity - the ability to create
communication - the ability to communicate with others
copying - the ability to learn from others
cooperation - The ability to work with others
compression - The ability to abstract

compression makes it possible for your brain to think abstractly, and abstraction, together with the rest of the Five Cs, empowers your large, complex brain to create social reality.

Abstractions and "summaries of summaries of summaries" is a large opportunity to mess with and distort perceptions or a large opportunity to make massive improvements. You think "Hey, what are the abstractions(summaries, assumptions false constraints, false beliefs) being made by me or others that I can dissipate to achieve a goal and the clue here is that it's probably going to exist in the social reality

Abstraction is our ability to perceive meaning in them. Specifically, we have the capacity to see things in terms of their function, not just their physical form. Abstraction lets you view objects that look nothing alike—such as a bottle of wine, a bouquet of flowers, and a gold wristwatch—and understand them all as “gifts that celebrate an achievement.” Your brain compresses away the physical differences of these objects and in the process, you understand that they have a similar function.

A really striking thing about social reality is that we often don’t realize that we make it.

The concept of “race” often includes physical characteristics such as skin tone. But skin tone is on a continuum, and boundaries between one set of shades and another are placed and maintained by people in a society. Some try to justify the boundaries by appealing to genetics, but while it’s true that skin tone might be heavily influenced by genes, so are eye color, ear size, and the curvature of toenails. We, as a culture, choose the features of discrimination and draw dividing lines that magnify the differences between the group we call “us” and the group we call “them.” The lines aren’t random, but they aren’t stipulated by biology either. And after the lines are drawn, people treat skin tone as a symbol for something else. That is social reality.

This is a great lesson in social reality and useful to remember.

Social reality may be one of our greatest achievements but it’s also a weapon we can wield against each other.

Epilogue

A brain that can do so many impressive things but at the same time severely misunderstands itself. 
A brain that constructs such rich mental experiences that we feel like emotion and reason wrestle inside us 
A brain that’s so complex that we describe it by metaphors and mistake them for knowledge  (lizard brain)
A brain that’s so skilled at rewiring itself that we think we’re born with all sorts of things that we actually learn 
A brain that’s so effective at hallucinating that we believe we see the world objectively, and so fast at predicting that we mistake our movements for reactions 
A brain that regulates other brains so invisibly that we presume we’re independent of each other 
A brain that creates so many kinds of minds that we assume there’s a single human nature to explain them all 
A brain that’s so good at believing its own inventions that we mistake social reality for the natural world

Starred

Dunk (exclude from study)

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

Review Questions

Todos

Sensemaker