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Baby animals develop quickly because their brains are wiring up according to a largely preprogrammed routine.
This is possible because the human brain is born remarkably unfinished. Instead of arriving with everything wired up – let’s call it “hardwired” – a human brain allows itself to be shaped by the details of life experience.
The detailed wiring diagram of the human brain is not preprogrammed; instead, genes give very general directions for the blueprints of neural networks, and world experience fine-tunes the rest of the wiring, allowing it to adapt to the local details. The human brain’s ability to shape itself to the world into which it’s born has allowed our species to take over every ecosystem on the planet and begin our move into the solar system.
Just like paths in a forest, you lose the connections that you don’t use.
You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed.
We are sculpted by the world we happen to drop into.
A mature pleasure-seeking system coupled with an immature orbitofrontal cortex means that teens are not only emotionally hypersensitive, but also less able to control their emotions than adults.
who we are as a teenager is not simply the result of a choice or an attitude; it is the product of a period of intense and inevitable neural change.
The scientists discovered visible differences in the cabbies’ brains: in the drivers, the posterior part of the hippocampus had grown physically larger than those in the control group – presumably causing their increased spatial memory. The researchers also found that the longer a cabbie has been doing his job, the bigger the change in that brain region, suggesting that the result was not simply reflecting a pre-existing condition of people who go into the profession, but instead resulted from practice.
Although most of the changes are too small to detect with the naked eye, everything you’ve experienced has altered the physical structure of your brain – from the expression of genes to the positions of molecules to the architecture of neurons.
On the flip side, they found that negative psychological factors like loneliness, anxiety, depression, and proneness to psychological distress were related to more rapid cognitive decline. Positive traits like conscientiousness, purpose in life, and keeping busy were protective. The participants
As your trillions of new connections continually form and re-form, the distinctive pattern means that no one like you has ever existed, or will ever exist again. The experience of your conscious awareness, right now, is unique to you.
The intricate details of our most basic movements are animated by trillions of calculations, all buzzing along at a spatial scale smaller than you can see, and a complexity scale beyond what you can comprehend.
As Read Montague points out, “sharks don’t go on hunger strikes”: the rest of the animal kingdom only chases its basic needs, while only humans regularly override those needs in deference to abstract ideals.
The key to effective learning lies in tracking this prediction error: the difference between the expected outcome of a choice and the outcome that actually occurred.
The power of now explains why people make decisions that feel good in the moment but have lousy consequences in the future:
To make better decisions, it’s important not only to know yourself but all of your selves.
Some psychologists describe this effect as “ego-depletion,” meaning that higher-level cognitive areas involved in executive function and planning (for example, the prefrontal cortex) get fatigued. Willpower is a limited resource; we run low on it, just like a tank of fuel.
