MWB #15 - How The Brain Works, Wealth Path and Life's Paradoxes
Things we learn that could transform us to a better human.
Hello friends,
I am sharing with you today few things that I’ve learned about the brain so far.
The brain is a very interesting phenomenon.
It contains billions of neurons that can all stand alone. Alone, each neuron is useless but together, in their interconnected manner, they are a force of nature.
Studying the brain has been one of my most fascinating activities.
You see, for a long time, scientist assumed that our brains have a top-down structure. Meaning there's an observable pattern to how the brain works and that that pattern can be altered. But they were wrong.
Surely, the brain is not a chaotic environment where patterns don't exist, they assumed. They see it as the hippocampus being in charge and it shares the chain of command with the neurons. Then the neurons store specific memory and report it when needed.
To recall the memory of your childhood they assumed, you can just go to neuron number 23,345. Of course, they turned out to be wrong. You can't go to any specific number.
And while they were right about the hippocampus and the neurons working hand in hand, the brain doesn't have the chain of command they were looking for.
To recall a specific memory, millions not one neuron is triggered.
That reality made it difficult for specific memories to be erased from our mind. We will never know all the interconnected neurons that trigger a particular memory.
What did I learn from this?
This fact is why our brain is resilient. It's the reason why learning can be fun and adaptive.
It's also the reason why learning can happen over time.
You can pick a neuron cue here and there at a time and pick another here and there at another time.
And you won't have to necessarily look for any specific neuron for the learnings to be connected. They connect by design.
And it also doesn't have to be connected to just one neuron cue, it can connect to as many cues as are related to it or can be related to it.
The development of the human brain over millennials is a miracle. And If you know how your brain works, priming it to do your bidding will become easier. This knowledge seats at the heart of "learning how to learn."
Jerry Lettvin from MIT was instrumental in helping us learn more about this nature of the brain as interconnected neurons instead of a numbered neuron with a chain of command.
And talking about learning how to learn, Barbara Oakley was the brilliant professor that taught me that. Check out her course on Coursera. I took the course in 2018. How I learn has changed ever since.
Tweet of the week
Best of What I Read
Too Much, Too Soon, Too Fast - Virtually all investing mistakes are rooted in people looking at long-term market returns and saying, “That’s nice, but can I have it all faster?” Go down the list of investing blunders and I’m telling you, no less than 90% of them are caused by investors trying to compress this natural, “most convenient,” time horizon.
Some of you all know Naval and if you don’t please check him out. Naval founded AngelList. AngelList has been around long enough now that a lot of people don’t know how it got started — the amazing comeback story of a lost fortune, a lawsuit, a $10 pdf, and the blog that built an empire. This essay is about how AngelList was founded and the many ordeals that needed to be overcomed.
The Paradoxes of Modern Life -
The Paradox of Reading: The books you read will profoundly change you even though you’ll forget the vast majority of what you read.
The Paradox of Decision Making: It’s better to choose, commit, and get started instead of waiting for the best possible option, so the correct decisions are actually suboptimal.
The Paradox of Consensus: Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect was found guilty by every judge, they were deemed innocent. Too much agreement implied a systemic error in the judicial process. Beware: unanimous agreement often leads to bad decisions.
You want more? Read it here.
[This is only for the nerds on my email list] Completing Girard: Johnathan Bi, one of the smartest up-and-coming philosophers. He just published a short book about René Girard. It’s all available for free on his site. Like I said, this is only for the nerds. If you don’t know René Girard, you might not understand why he his a sensation. He is the one behind the idea of mimetic. And here’s a short introduction - Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard.
Until next week.