The brain: the most dubious friend of all
Nature has entrusted our brain with an essential mission that it will never betray: to do everything for our survival!
This is why it has this permanent obsession: to help us foresee and anticipate everything that will happen in order to avoid perilous situations at all costs.
But here’s the problem: how can we anticipate an unpredictable, complex and changing world?
So, in order to act as quickly as possible, this clever little fellow will build known patterns, “routines” that are easy to implement quickly. In other words, he will mentally construct a familiar world in order to better find his way in the outside world.
Our brain hates new things
Our brain thus makes a permanent mental reconstruction of the world around us. This is why there are 9 connections between our eyes and our brain, 1 incoming and 8 outgoing. What we see is 8 times more “reconstructed” by our brain than the raw information received from the outside. We construct, evaluate and judge much more than what we see!
And it is very rare that we do something that does not follow one of these preestablished mental constructions. Let’s take a trivial example: try, out of curiosity, when you get out of the shower, to wipe the different parts of your body in a different order than the one you usually follow. You will be surprised at the difficulty and you will certainly notice, once finished, that you are still wet in some places. The routine is good because it allows you to be more efficient and faster.
Should we trust our brain
The problem is that these predefined patterns that are constantly imposed on us offer us few opportunities to discover new trails. We prefer to stay on known terrain where there is no danger or risk of error.
However, it has been scientifically proven that when we make a mistake, that is, when we end up with something we didn’t expect, it allows us to create new connections in our brain. Our brain reconfigures itself every time we learn something new.
So let’s continue to take new paths with joy, and make the concise effort to always get out of the routine. This helps our brain to develop!
