🧠 Brain bandwidth

Book of TREE 2.14

One

‘You own one little human brain. Do you want to expend your finite cognitive energy on…’

You spend several hours every day doing no conscious thinking because you are asleep.

You spend a lot of time thinking obligatory thoughts: what you will have for dinner, errands to run, emails to write, etc.

You spend a third of your day at work. Unless your work is also your vocation, those thoughts are for your employer.

There’s not a lot of time left for thinking the thoughts you want to be thinking. And when you do have time, you spend a lot of it thinking about whatever random crap your brain decides to bring out of storage. ‘I just can’t stop thinking about that thing Angela said to Claire!’ ‘It will be fun to spend the day looping the jingle from an ad I saw in 1994.’ ‘What if I make a complete fool of myself at the presentation?’

Two

It’s important to give your brain time to wander playfully, randomly. This is when you synthesise new ideas.

Three

If your brain isn’t wandering to the places you want it to, one thing you can do is change what you feed it. Your brain is separated from the world by your skull. It can only work with the inputs you give it.

Are the
media your consume and the
topics of your conversations
likely to move you towards the
kinds of ideas you want to have?

If not, change them. Your real power is in the inputs.

Do you listen to Short Cuts? It’s a BBC radio programme and podcast of ‘short documentaries and adventures in sound presented by Josie Long’. The first segment of this episode is a story of a woman singing along to an air raid siren in Ukraine. It’s beautiful, emotional, hopeful – perfect for a Thursday near the end of 2024.

Grow slowly
Jeff