Don’t Hurt Your Brain

How to avoid the many accidental self-harms our modern lifestyle inflicts on our most precious organ

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles here on Medium, the human brain isn’t at all like a computer. With a computer, lines of code can be rewritten and data stores can be deleted and then overwritten. You can erase old data and write new data and the storage device “has no memory” of the past.

The brain, however, is a physical device and it works by creating physical connections between hundreds of millions of individual neurons. Once those connections have been formed they cannot by removed. The more often those connections are utilized, the stronger they become. This is why for the vast majority of people facts have no influence on beliefs. The human brain is not a logic circuit.

Let’s take a practical example. An extremely ignorant and thoughtless person can easily be persuaded that the Earth is a flat disc. The intuition of the human brain is adapted to cope with the relatively simple and static and extremely local conditions in which our ancestors evolved. The human brain is not evolved to cope with either large-scale nor small-scale phenomenon, which is why both general relativity and quantum mechanics produce results we find extremely difficult to encompass intellectually — yet we…