Our Brains are “Unhackable”
There’s a lot of bull going around about brushing your teeth with the wrong hand.
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In fact, people lash at any chance to hack their brains. Turning to things like brushing with the wrong hand and probably walking backwards, to get “both sides of the brain to speak,” but it’s a fool’s journey.
You won’t increase creativity by brushing with the wrong hand.
Not only is this stuff not supported by evidence — it’s just plain silly. Writers calling for these hacks are the snake oil salesmen in woolly pin-striped suits on 19th-century bandstands. It’s crap.
But, let’s not get too hasty. While the act of brushing with the wrong hand is an ineffective way of inspiring creativity, it just so happens that doing things differently than you usually do actually does boosts creativity. Just not in the way that you think.
Our brains are un-hackable.
That means what we have are just our normal, regular brains. And those are pretty amazing.
Your brain produces about 23 watts of electrical power while awake. Every single human brain makes about the same amount. Given that it’s a human brain, and most likely not something too out of the ordinary, remind yourself that all great artists and creators — the luminaries of history — also had human brains.
If the luminous brain of Albert Einstein could conceive the general theory of relativity, and our fair president’s brain can figure out how to lead the “free world”, one can only imagine what our own brains can do.
The point I’m trying to get at is that our goal shouldn’t be to make our brain do more. They do plenty. We need to redirect our brains to work better. And we don’t need a hack for that.
What we need are true, meaningful experiences with where we want to go, who we wan’t to be. And that’s it.
To Be, You Must Do
I’m a firm believer in making conscious choices for how to spend your time. Because, when you do, you become. And that comes from knowing yourself.
Trailblazing psychologist and researcher Carl Rogers once said of self-actualization, the process of meeting your higher and more complex needs, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
When I was just a slim and scrawny high school kid with a curly black mop top, music was already a major part of my life. Since I was young, my father would play scratchy blues and doo-wop records. He’d extol on the legends of the rusty-voiced greats — Lightning Hopkins, Screamin’ Jay, Muddy Waters — and showed me the silky melodies of Ray Charles.
A pink, tie-dye Aria II guitar found its way into my teenage hands, and I was unsure of where to start. Beginning to navigate the guitar was the first time I ever really challenged my world to inspire me, as it sat limply in my hands. How could I be like the Jeff Becks, Jack Whites, and Joe Pass’s I admired if I wasn’t like them? What did they do?
Self-Immerse to Self-Actualize
I turned to the art itself, music, as inspiration. And I took my time.
I became familiar with scales slowly, and started shaping them into melodies. I learned chords, then let my understanding grow as I realized chords are just patterns of notes in scales. I put the chords together, and started to write songs. I even learned the slow part of the solo in “Panama” by Van Halen. I listened to music endlessly, because having my head in a musical space made me happy.
I also focused on what I loved, a subject I’ll explore in a later blog post.
One day someone told me they liked my playing. I was at a party, and it was one of the first times I felt validated. I pulled my head out of the sand, out of this cloud of inquiry that kept me from doing homework and really anything that wasn’t music related, and realized I was somewhere else. Yes, I’d almost flunked out of school, but I had something precious, something that gave me a sense of purpose.
I wanted to be a musician, so I let music take me. To places I wanted to go, and didn’t. I discovered what I liked, what I couldn’t stand, and tried to understand why. And all the while, there was nothing else getting in my way because it felt so right. Sorry to my English teacher.
In that time, I’ve also done the same with reading. Now, I’m a writer. I’m not legendary in either, but without putting in the time, without stepping into the world you want to live in, I don’t think you can ever get anywhere.
So, if you want to be a writer, read. Then write. If you want to be a chef, taste food. Then cook. If you want to paint, grab a sketchbook. Then draw.
And if I need to spell it out for you…
Don’t trust that anyone has a “secret sauce”.
Following our passions really requires only two things — time and direction. Time is something we are given by proxy of our general existence. Direction is something we find when we’ve had a look around.
It’s us and our circumstances that hold ourselves back. Sometimes, you’ve got two kids and and are a single mom with a dream to be an actor. That dream feels so far away, but hopefully you can find time to scribble a few notes down. Take five minutes to fill a page of prose. Just here and there, nothing big.
Kathryn Joosten was that mom. An actor on West Wing and Desperate Housewives, she was flung into despair after a divorce with her husband. With her two sons, she went out and pursued her dream. She somehow made time, put her energy in the right places (and in the right way for her circumstances, because she still had her family) and manifested her dream. She began this journey at age 52.
Joosten’s story is incredibly inspiring to me. My life will never be exactly like hers, but it’s absolutely fair to say that a single mom with two kids can in fact become an actor in a major television series. A man like Nelson Mandela can go to prison for decades as a militant revolutionary, and can eventually lead his people to breaking the chains of apartheid, even with its failings. A young girl like Anne Frank — terrified of Nazi capture — could still somehow manage to create a narrative which inspires all of us, even amid the worst of conditions, to be kind.
All these people were born regular people, and their achievements were not easy. They may have not even come naturally to them, but they created and did wonderful things amid seemingly insurmountable odds. Like I said, it’s inspiring.
As crazy as it sounds, we all have the capability to design our life as we want. The only question you could possibly have is whether or not you’re willing.
And If You’re Not Willing, That’s Okay.
The only thing a lack of willingness indicates is that whatever you’re trying to do doesn’t grab you. It doesn’t pull you. And there’s no reason to force it.
That means there’s something else out there. And that means you need to “brush differently.” Try different things, and do things in different ways. Your brain will in fact find what it loves to do for you.
Everybody has something — go out and find it. Thanks for reading.
“Hitting “like” on a social media platform is the modern day version of clapping at the end of a performance.”
― J.R. RimAl Gentile is a freelance commercial writer, philosophically-flavored musician, and wannabe rugby player who sells records and can’t stop putting pen to word, even if you ask him to. See more Medium articles [here].
- “Can Brushing Your Teeth Left Handed Boost Your Brain?” — Dan Robitzski, Inverse, July 2017.
- “Kathryn Joosten.” — Wikipedia, accessed November 19, 2019.
