Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture

by Ryan A. Bush

designingthemind.org/psychitecture to get your Psychitect’s Toolkit.

Mindfulness is a metacognitive strategy which has been defined as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.”

Belief systems are essentially complex chains of cognitive algorithms, and when those algorithms are heavily biased, they make up massively warped worldviews. When people take action according to their distorted worldviews, they can cause great damage and harm in the name of doing good.

People are killed every year because they believe that completely untested medicine will heal them, or that proven medicine is more likely to harm them than help.

As technology becomes exponentially more powerful, the consequences for faulty thinking and dogmatism will rise exponentially along with it. Nuclear weapons, bioengineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence are all quickly advancing. All will become more powerful, less expensive to create, and easier to wield. And all will pose threats to the very existence of humanity.

If your happiness is dependent on false beliefs, it means you have become reliant on coping structures which have been built on a bad foundation, and as soon as storms come in and reality crashes against your shoddy models of it, you’ll be hit with pain and confusion.

I find that a map of your value system needs to be updated about every three years.

You should never have total confidence in the value system you have constructed. This map represents an ever-evolving and improving draft.

The most important relationship in your life is your relationship with yourself, which will degrade if you fail to dedicate quality time to it.

The key to finding out which of your values are truly yours is the process of taking a philosophical wrecking ball to them and seeing what refuses to fall.

And even more impressively, studies have found that simply assigning patients to read Feeling Good, a self-help book by David Burns which distills the concepts of CBT, is just as effective in treating depression as a full course of anti-depressant medication.

Reappraisal, also called reframing, is the act of reinterpreting the meaning of an emotional stimulus, altering the resulting emotional trajectory.

Try to take a note of every undesirable emotion you notice - anything from minor annoyance to severe anxiety. The simple act of keeping a log should cause you to notice many more of these emotions than you normally would. Every time you log an emotion, take a note of the situation which triggered it, and if possible, the chain of thoughts which immediately preceded it.

Try this for a couple of days.

Numerous studies have found that people who consistently experience gratitude are more satisfied with their lives and experience more frequent positive emotions.

The reason to act in accordance with your values, even when no one is watching, is that you are always being watched by the most important person: yourself.

One crucial way to design yourself through your environment is by surrounding yourself with people who have priorities, traits, or practices you would like to cultivate in yourself. Statistically, the more overweight people in your social circles, the more likely you are to become overweight.16 So if you want to become more fit, you’ll be swimming against the current if you haven’t embedded yourself in active environments or built connections with people who prioritize fitness. The character traits of the people around you will rub off on you as well, so people who are honest, narcissistic, altruistic, or manipulative will gradually shape you in the direction of those traits.

Although many aspire to retire and stop working, the truth is that humans are not wired to be without work. They are simply wired to crave creative, challenging, and meaningful work.

Your entire life runs on the software in your head—why wouldn’t you obsess over optimizing it? …And yet, not only do most of us not obsess over our own software—most of us don’t even understand our own software, how it works, or why it works that way. - Tim Urban

If we want to truly improve the world, we need to train people to build systematically better minds - our emphasis on “making people happy” needs to shift to “making happy people.”