Use Your Brain’s Predictive Powers to Shape Your Future
Think about the last time you completely zoned out. Maybe you were cooking, cleaning, exercising, or driving. Your body was performing physical movements, but your mind was elsewhere — lost in a haze of thoughts, wonders, and alternate realities.
You finish your task, and suddenly realize that you don’t know what just happened. You don’t remember almost any details about your drive, for instance. Your mind was focused elsewhere the entire time, yet your body was performing many complex mechanical functions.
How does this happen? The answer is: our brains are evolved to predict. Every movement we make and every thought we think is based on prediction models that our brain has been constructing during our entire lifespan.
In her book 7 And A Half Lessons About The Brain, Northeastern University neuroscientist and professor Lisa Feldman Barrett explains “The brain is a predicting organ. It launches your next set of actions based on your past experience and current situation, and it does so outside of your awareness.”
We’re able to drive cars, take walks, cook, clean, and do many other things while our mind is focused entirely on something else because the brain is constantly making automatic predictions.
If there’s a sharp winding road on your drive that you’ve navigated a thousand times, you probably now handle its curves fairly easily. Your brain has recorded the information about the route many times and has learned to predict when and where to steer. You don’t consciously have to think about it. Your mind is free to roam elsewhere.
Feldman Barrett notes, “your brain asks itself in every moment…the last time I encountered a similar situation, when my body was in a similar state, what did I do next?”
In all situations, our brain predicts what will happen, and we behave according to what we expect to happen next. Sometimes what we expect to happen doesn’t happen at all — but our brain must make a prediction and go with it. This is why we sometimes instantly react without any conscious thought.
Like our physical environment, our brain also predicts our emotional environment. If we have to meet with a difficult person, we get a sinking feeling in our stomach. If we’ve been through several painful relationships, we may avoid getting too close to anyone. Traumatic experiences in our childhood may lead us to form pessimistic predictions about what the future holds.
In these cases, we are expecting something in the future will go wrong.
For all the good our predicting brain does, it can cause problems when our forecasts are deeply influenced by our negative experiences.
When we keep missing out on the jobs we want, continually have trouble in our relationships, or keep making mistakes, our brain may expect the same thing to happen in the future. The subsequent avoidant behaviors that result from these expectations can cause us to miss out on meeting our potential.
So, how can we use the brain’s predictive abilities to our advantage instead of letting them hold us back? In her book Think Forward to Thrive, psychologist Jennice Vilhauer describes ways to harness our brain’s predictive powers to focus on what can go right instead of what can go wrong.
Says Vilhauer, “the neurons in your brain work on an activation/inhibition model…when you activate a positive thought, it inhibits the activation of a negative thought, and vice versa.” When you activate positive thinking, your brain has no choice but to inhibit negative thinking. When you focus on what you want, you focus less on what you don’t want.
The goal is not to always think positive and always avoid negative thoughts. The goal is to become aware of negative thinking patterns, and then redirect them.
Thinking about what we don’t want is natural and healthy. Analyzing what we don’t like about a job or relationship can help us realize that we need to make a change. But we run into problems if the negative thinking perpetuates and gets out of control — we may start to feel hopeless about our situation, become despondent, and lose motivation to make a change.
Instead of focusing energy on what we don’t like or don’t want about a situation, we can redirect our thoughts to what we do want. Vilhauer says, “The more attention you allocate towards getting to point B, where you want to go, the more active the problem-solving part of the brain becomes as it works to come up with a way to get there.”
In addition to thinking more about what we want, we must also learn to expect that we will get what we want. Vilhauer points out that, “we take action based on what we expect, not what we want.” Why do we sometimes choose not to pursue what we want? Because we’ve made a prediction — we don’t really believe we can have it.
And if we don’t really believe we can have something, our brain is not going to spend energy on trying to get it.
To redirect our thoughts, we must change our thinking habits. The brain must be rewired. It takes incredible effort, focus, and concentration. But it can be done.
Techniques like journaling, meditation, and cognitive behavioral therapy, all focused around what we want, can help etch new ideas into our brains and build the new habit of redirecting our thoughts.
Vilhauer mentions many potential roadblocks to achieving this new habit: believing all the effort is not worth it, thinking we’ll never be able to change, not knowing how to begin, and maybe most importantly, “not recognizing that lack of action is consistent with a stored belief about yourself.” Her advice is to focus on the benefits instead of the cost.
She explains, “when your brain is on autopilot, it uses the information that is most readily available to compute the cost-benefit equation. The available information is based on recent activity, determined by what you have been giving your attention to.”
Clearly, what we give our attention to is very important. As we work to form new habits, giving our attention to what we want and expecting we will get it becomes reflexive over time. It’s just like the winding road I described earlier — after many repetitions, our brain adapts and locks in our frequent behaviors.
As I explained in another article, repetition is the key to learning new skills like changing our thoughts and behaviors. Taking it one day at a time, and expecting that we will learn, change, and grow can lead to incredible transformation. As Feldman Barrett puts it:
“It’s impossible to change your past, but right now, with some effort, you can change how your brain will predict in the future. You can invest a little time and energy to learn new ideas. You can curate new experiences. You can try new activities. Everything you learn today seeds your brain to predict differently tomorrow.”
