How’s Your Mental Constipation?
“Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.”
― Alison Gopnik
… So what happens in adulthood?
The majority of the world is all clogged up — mentally. Most of us [yikes] are mentally constipated and will spend adult life this way.
Our brains — as a necessary consequence of age— harden around our habits and routines, and our natural laxative is stymied (or outright blocked) by modern culture.
It is not the burden of this article to establish that “mental constipation” is a real thing. It goes by fancier cognitive science terms, like “predictive processing”. But mental constipation is an easy concept to grasp.
Metal Constipation
Consider the above graphic, borrowed from the famous REBUS paper dealing with clinical depression.
The top half of the graphic illustrates the constipated mind: severely limited and constrained by it’s own patterns and beliefs. Stimuli and sensory input — represented by the red ball — barely make a splash. Instead, the brain clings to what it already knows and essentially refuses to open itself up.
The bottom half of the graphic illustrates a brain that is open and expansive — incorporating maximum stimuli from the environment —continuously recalibrating itself with new input.
None of us need to be clinically depressed for hardening to apply.
As we age, our brains increasingly resemble the top half. They become more and more proficient at ignoring things outside of our attention. Note: attention is neither good or bad — it is simply what we haphazardly observed and experienced over years and decades.
The gatekeeper of this “ignoring” function is believed to take place in the “default mode network” of our brain, or temporal parietal junction.
The Consequences are Profound
We don’t know what we don’t know.
Take a minute to soak this in. It’s pithy - but packs a punch.
How do we know what we’re not seeing? Imagine wearing eyeglasses with a smudge on them, and you don’t realize the smudge is there until you swap to clean glasses and see with crystal clarity.
Similarly, our mind is quite literally our reality — sights smells sounds sensations identity belief emotions feelings and life story — all of it being miraculously and continuously projected by the brain’s past experiences — or “priors”.
What if our priors happen to suck? What if they make us feel stuck, anxious, underwhelmed, and bored? How would we know?
This a terrible, and unfortunately common place to be, through no fault of the person having the brain with sucky priors.
Although there is a magic cure to reset priors in a flash, there are, unquestionably, ways to open them up again.
Mental Laxatives: Release Your Priors
The word “priors” is pretty meaningless unless you’re steeped in cognitive science and predictive modeling.
But we all know what laxatives do.
The GREAT news is that laxatives for the mind come in many forms. There is no silver bullet — there are numerous means and methods one might explore.
The ONLY — literally — ONLY key ingredient is interest, curiosity, and persistence. Which is the sole reason of this article — to provoke this.
Sadly, many people might will this far, say “meh”… and move on — so habituated with their constipation that they are happy to continue living with it.
But I hope at least some will wonder what freedom feels like. Quite literally life changing.
Where to begin?
