Mindframe

Let’s suppose that you’ve got a habit you want to break. You’ve followed the following five habit-breaking rules: 1. Tell a friend you’re going to break a habit to help put pressure on yourself to actually follow through 2. Be persistent; whether making or breaking a habit, it’s generally believed you need about 60 days of reinforced behavior to cement a change 3. Enlist a friend for moral support when you find your will weakening 4. Plan out a meaningful reward to give yourself once the habit is eradicated 5. Keep track of your daily progress towards breaking the habit to reinforce positive habit-breaking behavior Everything’s going smoothly, and then just when you think you've rewired your brain, you’re blindsided by a sneak attack from within. Once you understand that your rational brain is up against an internal conspirator, you might not be surprised to discover the nemesis is your emotional brain, sometimes known as your reptilian brain, which has some habit main...

Listening to music is one of the most compelling human experiences. Music taps deeply into our sense of feeling, often highlighting and perhaps even giving a voice to our emotions. For this reason, it’s no surprise that in Holhe Fels cave in the hills of west Ulm Germany, archeologists discovered an ancient flute that carbon dates to 35,000 years ago. What’s kind of surprising is that it’s made of a vulture bone. What’s very surprising is that it’s tuned to the pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale is the set of notes virtually every song you know is built on. Everything from German Baroque to ragtime to West African music to to jazz to Sami joik singing to polka to third-wave Canadian psychobilly, and even that earworm that was in your head all of yesterday, the one you finally managed to shake a few minutes ago. Fundamentally, music is just a set of vibrations operating at a frequency level (measured in Hz or cycles per second) detectable to human ears, which our brains t...

There is a famous Arabic proverb where a camel loaded beyond capacity collapses after a single straw too many, hence, ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back.’ The idea is a basic one: a small, seemingly inconsequential, event ends up having profound effects. Exactly one hundred Fridays ago, I began posting on this blog. In my writing and research, I have been struck by one reoccurring theme: the simplicity and elegance of the single increment, the power of potentiality unleashed through a minute action. “A journey of a 1000 miles must begin with the first step.” This quote is sometimes attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, but the concept also resonates in Daniel Coyle’s talent code, Anders Ericsson’s 10,000 hours rule, and BJ Fogg's tiny habit. It’s the compounding effect of building on a single decision, and that crucial first step overcomes inertia for creating a new habit. The process is understood: practice builds repetition, which in turn builds habit. Hab...

I don’t need to tell you that sight is important for most people. It is estimated that the brain devotes 50% of its activity to processing our visual sensory experience. As a child, it’s likely you contemplated an idea that went something like this: “I wonder if the color red I’m seeing is the exact same color red my friend sees?” That question, framed in scientific terms, asks, “Is there strict commonality in the way any two brains process the same visual representation?” Interestingly, it’s only very recently that neuroscientists have begun to shed some light on this issue. In fact, light plays a key part in the story. But before we get to the answer, it’s important to understand that some people, and by that I mean some women, have been shown to have visual super powers. The retinas in our eyes process light through conical structures made up of neurons. Most of us have three types of cones. Sounds pretty basic, yet various permutations of those three cone types let us perc...