Train Your Brain to Work Better

Hard: LEVEL 1

Become a teacher or a creator yourself:

Use your skills to teach people to repot house plants, design a class to analyze the artistry of Weird Al music videos, build a kinetic sculpture, create a YouTube channel specializing in uses for found objects, volunteer to help kids learn how to build tiny houses, build a website devoted to innovations in battery technology, offer an Extension class, teach a hip hop course, make short fun physics videos, or whatever you want.

Does it seem like a hard task? Devote a little time to it each day.

Hard: LEVEL 2

Slow or stop your use of meaningless social media

Watching a series of short meaningless video clips, like scrolling through TikTok or FaceBook (FB), actually makes it harder for your brain to focus and concentrate. You are teaching your brain to have a version of deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Do you know that FB no longer makes connecting with friends and family a priority? Now its focus is on feeding you a ton of bad science, people being outraged for no reason, poorly designed T-shirts, and endless scams. FB is just TikTok for older people (yes, it is just as bad).

The TikTok app, with its endless scroll of 15-50 second videos, is designed to be addictive using the principle of random reinforcement. As a person scrolls through the short videos, they get a random reward of dopamine when something funny or unexpected happens. The app trigger a series of dopamine hits, similar to people addicted to gambling or drugs. There is evidence that social media is contributing to dramatic decreases in the attention span of people over time (Lorenz-Spreen et al. 2019).

Boer et al. 2020 found that using social media improperly increases ADHD symptoms. Problems with social media use (SMU) involve addiction like behaviors, such as choosing SMU over other activities or having conflicts with others due to their SMU. Heck just calling social media use SMU makes it sound less appealing.

Being bored is a playground for new ideas. You need to be bored to cultivate creativity and change.

Beck G. (24 year old man): "I wanted to be more productive and make art but I felt my life was being sucked away from the endless scrolling in social media. So I blocked everything. I did six months of no Reddit, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, and no TikTok. I still used Google and YouTube for research but no more endless scrolling.

I'm not going to lie, it sucked at first. I had no idea what to do with myself for those hours I used to waste or what I could do with my time. I was bored.

After about two weeks my creativity came back and I was able to start working on art projects I’ve been putting off for the last year. My stress went down and I slept easier because I wasn’t doom scrolling all evening. My mental health improved since I stopped using those platforms. I did eventually get back on a few sites, like Reddit, that were more interesting and not problems for me.

Nuking the online world gave me hours more a day where I could do whatever I wanted. It freed up my time and made me more productive because I was bored and wanting something to do. I thought I was too busy to do art but I was actually being consumed by the time-blindness caused by endless social media."

Hard: LEVEL 3

Change your preconceived notions

Don't participate in hate and fear (often interlinked - fear leads to hate)

Be better, unjustified hate and fear twist your brain and harm you. Hatred activates the regions of the brain associated with aggression and the motor regions that translate this aggression into action (Zeki and Romaya 2008). This triggers the autonomic nervous system; creating a freeze, fight or flight response due to an increase in cortisol and adrenalin.

These hormones can contribute to weight gain, insomnia, anxiety, depression, and chronic illnesses. A suddenly flood of these hormones can cause an amygdala hijack, where your body reacts without input from your frontal cortex, the thinking part of your brain. You can work to regain control of yourself during these attacks.

Studies have shown that viewing pictures of people we think about as different from us; such as homeless people or people of a different race, skin color or religion activates the amygdala (McCutcheon et al. 2018). The amygdala is the fear center of your brain; when it is activated it dulls activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain area associated with social cognition and empathy. This contributes to feelings of dehumanization, in which people see the viewed group or person as less than human, a stereotype or as a threat. Dehumanization can contribute to an increased risk for violence, paranoia, or anxiety.

Think through the fear

To deactivate your overactive amygdala, try to think of people different from you as individuals. Remember that things like race are social constructs, meaning we made it up to form artificial groups. Kids and people who grow up in diverse environments do not have this automatic amygdala response to people who are different (Telzer et al. 2013). Basically, this fear of different people is learned in adolescence.

It is ok to be angry at people who participate in hate groups: the Paradox of Tolerance

It is OK to be mad at truly hateful people but don't let it derail your thinking. You need all your cognitive skills to fight evil. It is also ok to be intolerant of hate groups or hateful and intolerant religions. We, as a society, should not feel compiled to be tolerant of those who are intolerant themselves. This is called the paradox of tolerance.

Proposed by Karl Popper, a 20th century philosopher of science, the paradox of tolerance suggests that a society that allows intolerant groups or ideas to spread risks being destroyed by them. In short, societies who have unlimited tolerance allow intolerant ideas to infiltrate organizations, destroy freedoms, and silence dissenters. This could ultimately destroy the society.

We need to balance the right to free expression with methods to prevent the spread of lies and misinformation. Read Karl Popper's 1945 book 'The Open Society and Its Enemies' here.