Everything NEW will soon be OLD - Your automatic brain

We can get from point A to point B while checking our emails, talking to others in the subway, drinking coffee or doing any number of tasks simultaneously. Our brains are on automation, running our lives, making decisions and doing what needs to be done with little thought required. 

Our automatic brains are cheap to run and extremely fast and efficient. That’s a very good thing when you consider how much that ability would cost if we had to use the very expensive novelty-oriented parts of our brain. If we couldn’t rely on automation, we’d never be able to accomplish much of anything.

What is the automatic brain made up of? 

It is made up of old memories, some of which are explicit, but most of which are implicit, or outside our awareness. This is called procedural memory. We know it because everything we have learned—riding a bicycle, driving a car, dancing a routine—has become something our body knows.

Imagine you and I are on our first date and we are interested in each other. 

We are both excited by this new person in front of us. Our excitement is apparent and our attention is focused intensely on each other’s face, body, smell, touch, and maybe even taste. 

You and I want to know everything about the other. We are fully present with wonderful neurochemicals coursing through our blood, brain and body, much like cocaine. That is nature’s love potion working on us. Delicious, isn’t it? 

Well I have good and bad news. 

First the bad news. The beautiful, fascinating, mysterious new thing that you are, will soon be automated by my brain.  And your brain will soon automate me too. When that happens, we will become familiar and our novelty-seeking brains will no longer pay each other so much attention. Instead we will draw from our vast reservoir of memories and experiences to do our daily business.

What is potentially bad news about this is that we think we know each other, but we really don’t. So we will make mistakes. We’ll operate from memory, which does not require presence, attention, error correction, and the other fancy things our brain does when faced with newness. For example, my brain will automatically see you as if you were one of my previous partners or my mother or my father and base its reactions on those memories.

Oh! I almost forgot: the good news. 

Due to the automatic brain, our relationship will seem easier, more comfortable and more familiar. Probably the best news is that automation does not have to become a problem. This is because the antidote to automation is presence and attention to detail. 

By that I mean, that you become habituated to attending to the details of your partner’s face, voice, body, movements, words and phrases. When you are together, stay present in your body and don’t wander off into your own thoughts, your cell phone or other potential partners across the room. Keep your eyes on the ball—and that ball is your partner. Pay attention as if you’ve never seen or heard him or her before.

Paying close attention engages your brain’s novelty-loving parts. You’re telling it, “Hey, this person is unpredictable, surprising, beautifully complex, and the one on whom I am placing all my bets.” Much like a sign I once saw in Las Vegas: “You have to be here to win!”