Breaking the Brain's Chains

How our History Shapes our Sense of Possibility

When I was 12 years old, I wanted to be President.

To be fair, I also wanted to be an astronaut, a firefighter, and at some point in the 90s, after developing a girl crush on Cindy Crawford, a supermodel.

I recently found an old journal entry that reminded me what it felt like to have such an expansive sense of possibility. In a page full of declarative sentences written in pencil, I made a series of promises to my future self. “I will help the children. I will be loved. I will have power. I will be happy. I will succeed. I will accell.[1] I will not let anything or anyone get in my way. I will not let myself get in my way. I will not quit.” Reading the words of affirmation from Chantel of the Past, fortifying herself against imagined future obstacles, makes me love her more now than ever.

Fast forward 37 years, and you’ll find the older, more experienced (if slightly less plucky) version of Chantel, soaking in the bathtub at 5:00 a.m. She can’t quite muster the courage to face the day. You see, America just completed a very well-powered experiment in which over 140 million participants had the opportunity to vote for the same candidate—Donald Trump—over three different elections spaced 8 years apart. The results of this experiment showed that Trump won the first election, lost the second, and then, in what has been called a “historic comeback,” won the third. And while there are many different ways to explain this u-shaped pattern of success, the 12-year-old in me can’t help but wonder whether its outcomes have more to do with the gender of Trump’s opponents than with any changing public opinion of his competence as a leader. And the grown-ass-woman scientist in me has to admit that this variable does correlate perfectly with the experimental outcomes.

Is it even possible for a woman to be elected President of the United States Chantel of the Past and I wonder together? And when we do, we turn to our brain, the powerful organ that has recorded our collective history, for answers.

Though I love my brain to death, there are a few things about the ways it defines possibility that frankly scare the crap out of me. The first is that most of the work it does is subconscious. Using a set of statistics, stored in chains of billions of neurons that have recorded my lifetime of experiences in the strength of their connections, my brain creates my reality.

Take the sentence “They are cooking apples.” as an example. Most fluent English speakers comprehend it with ease, never even noticing that it is ambiguous. Is the word cooking a verb describing an activity done to apples or is it an adjective describing a type of apple (e.g., a “cooking apple” as opposed to an “eating apple”)? Because our previous experiences have built a brain that understands cooking is more likely to be a verb than an adjective, most people don’t even consider the alternative version of the sentence. In other words, our personal histories become part of a neural hardware that translates probability, or likelihood, into possibility at the earliest, sense-making stages.

This makes me wonder, what experiences around women and leadership are stored in the depths of my brain, shaping my understanding of what’s possible? Thanks to my colleague Tony Greenwald’s Implicit Association Test, I know the answer too well. Despite being raised by a mom who was a girl boss before her time, I was shocked to learn how much harder it was for me to sort a list of words into categories when “female” and “leader” required the same response hand, than it was to do so when “male” and “leader” or “female” and “supporter” were paired in the task. This result showed that despite my explicit beliefs and values, the connections in my brain between leadership and gender were much more biased toward men than they were in my husband’s brain.[2]

WTF brain?!

Chantel of the Past promised herself that she wouldn’t become part of the problem, yet I  know for certain that I carry sexist associations in my hardware. But as a neuroscientist who studies learning for a living, I need to remind myself that at these subconscious-sense-making levels, my brain’s job is to reflect the world I am most likely to be living in, not the world I want to live in. Given that a study published the year before I was born showed that parents describe newborn girls as “small and pretty” and boys as “strong” despite there being no differences in size or vitality between the two, I suspect that I’ve been receiving this programming my whole life.

But I am also convinced that the digital information age is exacerbating this in ways that are making my brain diverge from Chantel of the Past’s more rapidly than I want it to. And this brings me to the second part of my discomfort with the whole “brains defining possibility” space. As a Gen X’er who spent much of my childhood riding bikes with both the boys and girls in my neighborhood, I remember a time when many of our statistics were collected from the real world, in partially shared environments. But today, more of the inputs my brain receives have been digitally curated for me by intelligent devices that understand something about my gender, my race, my political affiliation, and that I love funny animal videos. They use this information to draw my attention to the screen, then give me adds for funny t-shirts and cute sandals, all the while shaping my brain’s sense of what’s possible. And if I’m going to be compassionate for the part of my hardware that has recorded the sexist ideals from the culture I grew up in, wouldn’t it be hypocritical for me not to have the same compassion for the estimated 52% of White women who voted for Donald Trump? Based on everything I know about how human brains learn to make sense of the world and our place in it, mustn’t I at least acknowledge that their brains, shaped by increasingly different digitally curated inputs, are making decisions based on a completely different sense of what is possible?

As the weight of this problem submerges me further into the hot water, I hear the voice of Chantel of the Past promising not to quit. So, I ask myself, what I have I learned as a woman, a leader, a mother, a friend, and a neuroscientist that might help me not get in my own way? How can I break free of the chains in my brain that both literally and metaphorically limit the way I understand what is possible? And how can I help others do the same?

Strangely, my first thoughts go to the self-destruct region of the female octopus’s brain. Thanks to my brilliant friend Z. Yan Wang, I recently learned that most octopus moms die after reproduction, and that this can result from violent acts of self-destruction rather than a peaceful fading into the sunset. While Yan and others are studying the how and why of this dramatic behavior, research has shown that if you remove the part of the octopus’s brain called the optic glands, they don’t self-destruct. Instead, they go on to live longer lives, sometimes even completing multiple breeding cycles! While I find this to be a horribly fascinating example of the way a gal might be liberated from her biological programming, I’m not quite ready to sign up for the brain ablation program yet. But I do have a plan for gaining some agency over my hardwiring.

The first step is to take control of my inputs. Regardless of your gender or political affiliation, you might ask yourself how the amount of curated information you consume is shaping your consideration of different possibilities. And in an age where deep fakes curated by algorithms that—like politicians—know what our brains like, fear, and find safety and belonging in, skepticism about these inputs is more critical than ever. Though I have no idea why someone would create an AI-generated baby peacock that looks adorable and nothing like the scruffy brown thing that nature creates, I know that this fake exists because I’m practicing being as skeptical of the things I see on the internet and like as I am of the things that I don’t want to believe. We can also make conscious decisions to expand our possibility spaces by exposing ourselves to different experiences. After reading Shirley Chisholm’s autobiography “Unbought and Unbossed,” I felt a renewed sense of hope for what a liberated politician could be like.

Next, we need to understand that our brains have two systems for navigating decision-making spaces: the subconscious-sense-making systems we’ve been discussing, and our conscious, value-driven belief systems which allow the frontal lobes to override our more automatic operating systems. While the contents held in the second system won’t necessarily change the way you understand the things in real time, they can be called to action to shape what you do about this understanding. When your instinct or gut feeling push you toward or away from an option, you might ask “What about my previous experiences is shaping that feeling?” before choosing whether or not to follow it.

And this is particularly important when considering my last point—that growth and change are usually uncomfortable. Our brain’s definition of success is built, in large part, on its ability to predict the future. It works tirelessly to prune a set of nearly infinite possibilities down to short lists of things that are most likely to happen based on our personal history, and to push us in the direction of choices that have worked for us before. But if we want to change the world, and our place in it, we’re going to have to break away from the ease of the old operating system and try something new.

Two years ago, my daughter Jasmine and I accidentally happened upon the hometown of Harriet Tubman on a road trip to Ocean City, Maryland. This was particularly weird because at the beginning of the trip, when Jasmine asked me which historical figure I would most like to meet, Harriet Tubman had been my answer. Take that coincidence and stick it in your possibility pipe! As we wandered into the Harriet Tubman museum, we found a film maker debuting his short film about a fictional interaction between Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas.

“I knew you were amazing” my brain said silently, as it met the fictionalized version of what must have been one of the bravest humans to have ever lived. I can only imagine what it must have felt like for her to take that first step toward freedom, carrying with her a lifetime of violence and oppression that somehow, miraculously did not manage to enslave her brain. And when I do imagine it, I know that it breaks a few links of the chains in my brain, expanding my sense of possibility, and brining me closer to the promises I made to myself decades ago.

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[1] Life before spellcheck was hard!

[2] You can take the test yourself  at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html