How Gorillas and Velcro Relate to Your Brain

A cheeky baby gorilla, photo credit to: Arjan Haverkamp on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/ajhaverkamp/6771227909/in/photostream/

Ever had the experience of thinking about buying a certain brand of car and then you start to notice that model everywhere? If you think about the complexity of the human brain as it has evolved over thousands of years, it has developed shortcuts for sorting through masses of data to alert us to the most important details. Through making a quick judgement, the mind uses speedy split second processing to keep us safe from potential threats. The humans who were good at this tended to survive, the humans who were not so good at this… well, not so much….! To be able to reduce complex data into a super-fast response is a miracle of the brain. Think of every piece of external visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory data entering your senses and then coupled with all the internal data – our thoughts, feelings, body sensations you can easily picture as a huge constellation of stars of data, like stars in the night sky. To take all of that in would be extremely difficult so the brain will choose certain parts (just one constellation) to focus on.

Milky Way over Vavajeveski lake in Finland, photo credit: Laura Lohi Photography

However there is a big downside to having this speed and that is, that our brain is very good at matching what it expects to see and eliminating what does not match our current state of mind. This is demonstrated in a famous Harvard University experiment, The Invisible Gorilla Test. Volunteers were asked to watch a clip in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts pass basket balls. Volunteers were instructed to keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. Part way through, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending several seconds on screen. Would they see the gorilla? Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I would.” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? Half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible. This experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much. http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html Most people’s brains have evolved to have a slight negativity bias – we have learned to be on guard for anything that could negatively affect us and give our attention to that as the priority. This is even more pronounced during the teenage years as any parents of adolescents can readily attest to! We know that during this period of life, even neutral information (such as a blank or neutral facial expression) can be encoded as negative. A common teenage statement to parents or teachers is Why are you looking at me like that? While their bemused parent was thinking about something else entirely. How do we decide what is negative? I like to use the analogy of all the past things that have happened being like a huge google database in our mind. Our data base contains all of our own life experiences and also the collective human learning experiences (for instance – avoid snakes!). Our own life experiences are shaped by all of the interactions we have had so far, all of our memories and everything that we have learned about the world and about people. The strongest, most repeated or most painful memories (or also those that happened at a particularly impacting time in life – like mid adolescence) are those that will be at the top of your mind’s “google search results”. So anything that happens that even remotely reminds the mind of this google database item, will result in a zoning in. Sometimes so much so, that this blinkering effect blacks out everything else. For example, Sam has developed a sensitivity to perceived criticism so his mind will focus on the one time his colleague didn’t agree with his approach and he will blank out the other twenty times when his colleague did agree. We also know that when the brain encodes negative content it wires in more strongly. The negative tends to stick like Velcro in our mind whereas the positive can be like a Teflon saucepan – just sliding straight off. Think of all of our experiences as being encoded in our brain neural networks – things that happen repeatedly (positive or negative) will form pathways in our brain (like a habitual or autopilot response).

Old Barn in Maturing Spring Wheat Field, Tiger Hills, Manitoba, Canada. Photo credit: David Reede

The analogy that I use for this process is to think of your mind like a wheat field – if you run through the same path way over and over again, the wheat flattens, and it becomes a very easy to navigate, well trodden path. The Buddhist faith refers to this as “habit energy” – we tend to react to things in a set way. This is easier for our brain and uses minimal energy and processing. The challenge becomes that sometimes our internal default “wheat field” pathways might keep us “safe” but seriously interfere with feeling fulfilled, happy and peaceful. Many people have had the experience of going through a period of very low mood – sometimes to the extent of becoming depressed. When we are in this state, our life experiences start to mirror the way we feel – strangers can seem more hostile, we notice all the red traffic lights.

There are ways in which we can learn to activate parts of our mind that help us to step back and see more of the full constellation of experiences. This is part of the reason why seeing a Psychologist is helpful – by sharing and processing the information you start to gain a difference viewpoint or perspective (perhaps like flying up about your wheat field in a helicopter to view all the different pathways). The more we are aware of our brain’s in built negativity bias, the more we are able to learn to notice it in a more detached way (that’s just what brains have evolved to do). You can also get gains quite quickly by consciously attending to what is going well, and noting that down on paper (writing rather than using a phone) helps to encode this more strongly in your mind. Some interesting resources to learn more about this include the Rick Hanson Being Well podcast or his excellent book Resilient focusing on neuroplasticity (how the brain can change and evolve) and book The Teenage Brain; A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults by Frances Jensen.

Rick Hansen’s Resilient: https://www.rickhanson.net/books/

Frances Jensen, The Teenage Brain; A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

Article by Shannon Yeardley, Clinical Psychologist and Clinic Director at Brisbane Wellbeing Psychologists. Australian Psychologist of the Year Finalist 2018.