Listen. Can you hear it? It is the sound of your brain growing, stretching, just by reading these words. Your brain is becoming something more than it was just moments ago.
There are approximately 100 billion neurons in the human brain. That is more than ten times the number of stars in the galaxy. It is not just the neurons that make your brain what it is. It is the circuits between them (synapses) that are the building blocks of your thoughts, memories and perceptions. You have about 100 trillion of these, and the combination between them are nearly limitless.
Every time you learn something new, observe something new, do something new, you are creating a new pathway or circuit between brain cells. The more you do something, the more you think about something, the stronger those circuits become. The less you do something, the weaker they become. Your brain is constantly growing and ungrowing all the time.
This is why driving a car, reading a book, or riding a bicycle becomes easier the more you do it. This is also why what you do, and the tools you use to do it, become a part of who you are, how you think, and how you behave. Your brain tends to use the most strengthened pathways, even when you are doing something new.
This is why a writer’s fingers may twitch when they are thinking, even though there is no keyboard in front of them. This is why your right foot will press down on the floor if a truck suddenly pulls out in front of you, even though you’re in the passenger seat. Watching too much television will shorten your attention span. Browsing too much on the internet will eventually hinder your ability to sit down and actually read (rather than scan) a whole book.
Whatever it is you do for eight hours a day, five days a week, this too will eventually have an effect on how you think, and how you behave. What you do shapes your mind, becoming a part of who you are.
If you put four sales people in a room, or four accountants, and ask them to come up with new, fresh ideas for their business, you could probably predict the results. You’ll get a handful of ideas, and they will agree on most of them. People who engage in the same work and deal with the same types of problems everyday, will tend to have the similar perspectives on their work. When looking for new ideas, they will tend to agree on which ideas are best. Now, if you put the accountants and the sales reps into the same room, you will have a much, much different kind of meeting.
As a writer, I find words themselves sometimes become problematic. Reading words, writing words, thinking in words, even when writing creatively, can become a mental rut. Every six months or so, I become overwhelmed with the need to immerse myself in something new. I will paint for a week straight, or draw, or fix a car, build or refinish a piece of furniture, pick up a guitar, speak French, take flying lessons.
This summer I’m learning wood carving. I’m really awful at it, but I seem to improve with each hour. Its a very tactile, non-verbal experience. While it takes a great deal of thought and planning, the thought process is different than writing a paragraph, and the planning is much different than plotting a novel. When I return to the keyboard, it is with a slightly different mind than if I had just gone for a walk, or watched a movie, or any of those hundreds of other things we use to distract ourselves.
Learning to play music does make you more aware of sounds, but it changes the way you think about words as well. Learning to paint doesn’t just make you more sensitive to colors, it alters your approach to everything else you do. Wood carving, I’m beginning to find, does not just change how I look at a piece of wood, or how I look at the trees. It has slightly altered my perception of the words I’m typing now. It has slightly influenced the way I think.
I don’t believe it matters what you do, as long as it is new, and different from your normal routines. Because, for myself, what I have learned, the act of beginning something new, whatever it might be, also helps me reacquaint myself with a beginner’s perspective. I’ve stepped out of my own head for a while, stepped out of my usual neural pathways, and when I return, it is from a completely different perspective.
In my own head, you could say, it is Frost’s path less traveled. You zen folks out there would call it the beginner’s mind.
So I would urge you this week to get out of your head and try something you have never tried before. Engage with it, immerse yourself in it, experience it. When you return, you’ll be returning to your self from a slightly different angle, a slightly different perspective, than the perspective you have on your life today.
