Your brain is running subconscious programs right now that decide what you notice, what you ignore, the choices you make, and how you feel about all of it.
This article walks through some of these programs. Everything you observe in meditation, focusing, noticing and making choices, is you watching these programs at work.
The most complex thing in the universe
The human brain is the most complex entity we have discovered in our exploration of the universe. And not just by a little bit.
Someone counted the number of states a brain could be in. You have somewhere between 80 and 100 billion neurons. Each one connects to up to 10,000 others. Along these connections sit tiny switches called synapses, and there are huge numbers of them. When you multiply it all out, the number of possible states is larger than the number of fundamental particles in the entire universe.
About perception
Information comes in at one end, and action comes out at the other end. In between, it loops around through a variety of steps: input, filter, interpret, learn, and decide.
You take in a tiny snippet of data. Your brain throws away most of it. And yet the world still feels rich and complete.
There's a famous attention test called the invisible gorilla, where people watch a group passing a basketball and are told to count the passes. A person in a gorilla suit walks straight through the middle of the game. Roughly half the viewers never see it. They're so focused on the ball that the gorilla simply doesn't register.
Your brain throws away most of your experience, leaving you with a tiny snippet from which it builds a complex model of the world.
A third of your brain is given over to vision, and a lot of that is matching patterns between what you see and your memories. You look around and see colours, shapes, and patterns everywhere. You may spot a body shape in the shape of some leaves, or a face in a cloud. All of this visual information gets bundled and processed in continuously rolling 300-millisecond chunks, which are constantly aligning with all your other sensory experiences. There isn't time for much. The brain filters hard, keeping what you're looking for and dropping the rest. Unless something is different or threatening, in which case it brings it to your attention.
Fast and slow thinking
Once information is in, the brain tries to make sense of it. It does this mostly through patterns. You compare things, you associate things, and you reach a conclusion.
The book Thinking, Fast and Slow describes two ways this happens. (The author, Daniel Kahneman, won a Nobel Prize for the underlying research.)
- System 1 is intuitive. You glance, you recognise, you judge instantly. No effort.
- System 2 is systematic. You work things out on purpose — comparing, calculating, checking, looking things up.
You're using System 1 almost all the time.
Where meditation fits in
Each step in this process can be observed. That's what meditation trains you to do.
A clarity meditation lets you actually watch the filter at work. You focus on something over time, and you notice the filter on your experience starts to shift. A karma yoga meditation lets you catch your mind in the act of choosing where to place your attention.
Open awareness vs. the Autopilot
Modern life keeps your focus narrow. Next task, next thing, next place, next person. You end up on autopilot.
Open awareness is the opposite. You widen your attention and take in the whole environment at once. Suddenly, the world is richer and more detailed. It's a different way of perceiving, and most people rarely do it. So you practise it on purpose.
So what is an algorithm?
An algorithm is any process you can reduce to something measurable and then predict.
You can't predict a person perfectly — people are complex. But you can predict plenty. Tap someone's knee, and the leg kicks. Tap harder, bigger response. Tap too softly and nothing happens, because there's a threshold you can measure. Walk into a hospital, and you'll see machines tracking heart rate, blood pressure, and brain activity. Every one of those is an algorithm running against your body.
Some algorithms and how our economy applies them to you
Your mind runs on algorithms, too. Here is a small selection of the ones I taught on Wednesday.
The attention algorithm
This is where the real action is. Right now, every business, government, and organisation is competing for one thing: your attention.
That's what marketing is. There's even a mnemonic for it — AIDA:
- Attention: get you to notice
- Interest: give you a reason to look
- Desire: make you want it
- Action: get you to buy
There are two ways to do this. The first is to find people already in the market. This is why search advertising is everywhere. If you keep searching for mindfulness courses, the system shows mindfulness adverts to you, because you've already shown your interest.
The second way is to manufacture your desire. This is where it gets salesy. Think of a luxury watch on a film star's wrist. The camera catches it for a second as he checks the time. Now the watch is linked to someone you identify with, and the message lands: wear this, and you'll be like him.
This runs continuously, and you absorb it without noticing whenever you interact with any media. You are being influenced continuously.
The reasoning algorithm
The human brain isn't built for pure logic. Logic must be learned. It runs a set of heuristics we call 'reasoning'. Reason isn't logical.
The brain handles "if this, then that" quite comfortably. It handles a chain of positives easily: he stood up, walked out, went to the shop, and bought something. But any "not" logic is bolted on afterwards. Negatives act more like brakes than building blocks, which is why double negatives confuse people. "It isn't not raining" means it's raining — but you have to stop and work that out. This is why we usually learn formal logic by rote until it becomes second nature.
The social algorithm
Other people are an algorithm you're constantly reading.
You pick up tone of voice, pace, cadence, posture, and body signals unconsciously. Sometimes the signals clash, which we call mixed messages.
On top of that sits language, a system of symbols. It's surprisingly recent. The Vikings ruled much of north-west Europe and created empires in Ukraine and Sicily with only runes, simple symbols sitting somewhere between scribbled pictures and true writing.
The fluid model of the self
You carry a running model of who you are, and you constantly update it.
A lot of that update is about how you think other people see you. For example, as you age, you may notice you're treated differently. This shifts the mental model of your self, your ego. Much of rumination is this adjustment of how we believe others see us.
The metacognition algorithm
Metacognition is awareness of your awareness.
This can be mindfulness or also what we call witness consciousness: noticing the thoughts, watching the patterns form, observing the feelings that result and knowing that all of this is happening.
Why this matters
The purpose of meditation is to become familiar with the mind. This familiarity brings you in contact with the algorithms of your mind. It is good to learn about them. I will go through more in a series in my meditation classes.
