You Will Be A Different Person After Reading This
I have a friend who met the love of his life…four different times.
He’s always a little embarrassed to admit that, afraid of what it says about him and how frequently he claims to have discovered “the one.” But that’s because he thinks like a romantic and not like a scientist. I have to keep reminding him that we don’t live one life. We live thousands. So the possibility of him finding his true love in several of them is not all that unusual.
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We often think of our brain as a gelatinous blob; a wrinkled mass of tissue squished within of our skull.
But if we had a magical microscope that allowed us to take a deeper look inside, a different image would appear. We wouldn’t see a lump of static cells waiting to be activated, but instead, billions of tentacle-like neurons bumping up against one another, forming new connections and breaking free from others. Deep within our grey matter is a living community of intertwining organisms — trillions of them — that shift, react and adjust to maximize efficiency. It is a giant tapestry of neural interactions that are forever blossoming, dying, and reconfiguring. Those connections make us who we are, which means as they change, we change. We are constantly transforming into a different person — every hour of every day of every year we are alive.
The human brain is a dynamic system that ceaselessly alters its own circuitry in order to match the demands of an environment and the capabilities of a body. Whenever we learn something, experience something, feel something, or believe something, our brain physically changes. We become someone slightly different than the person we were moments before. Who we were yesterday is not who we are today and not who we will be tomorrow.
Most of the time, those transformations go unnoticed. But looking back we know they occurred. We know we aren’t the same person we once were and are sure that we aren’t the person we will one day become. Our life — every joy, sorrow, thrill, pain, fear, disappointment, embarrassment, enlightenment — remakes the connections of our neural network and turns us into someone new.
We think of our lives as one long continuum from birth to death where we age and progress in a predictable manner. That’s true for our bodies, but not for our brains. The hands you were born with are the same hands you have today. Bigger, rougher, more callused, possibly more scared and wrinkled, but the same in their configuration, how they operate, and what they can do. And they will be the same ones you have when you die.
But the brain and mind you are using right now is nothing like the one you were born with, or the one you took to kindergarten, or high school, or college, or your first job. It’s not even the same one you had last week. It is perpetually changing, and not always gradually or incrementally. Most often, the way we think, the ideas we believe, the styles we like, the places we enjoy, the interests we have, and the things we do transform dramatically over time. We can look back at a previous version of ourselves and see a stranger, someone we no longer recognize. We possess the same or similar body but have a completely different brain to go with it.
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To understand the cognitive and neurological science behind your changing brain and the different lives it produces, imagine making a pot of soup. The pot is your brain, the ingredients are your experiences, and the flavor that results is your life. You may start with a family recipe; one given to you by a parent or grandparent that includes the stock and vegetables that are common and available in the community where you grew up. But then you learn about new spices and new seasonings and your palate changes. You begin to add salt, or oregano, or chili peppers to your recipe and the flavor of your soup is no longer what it once was.
Maybe you move to a new country where the meat and vegetables available are different than the ones you traditionally used. So, you make a substitution, or two, or three, and the flavor changes again. The pot — your brain — is only so big, so while you can add more ingredients, you may have to remove others. Each modification — every addition, subtraction, and substitution — creates a new flavor. It’s no longer the same soup.
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It’s hard for most people to understand that there is no world “out there.” Everything we experience and react to, everything we feel and imagine, everything we perceive and sense takes place inside the 3.5-pound meatloaf that sits at the top of our head. That is where our life — where our lives — exist. When the neural connections change we change with them and become someone new. A new brain. A new soup. A new life.
I will remind my friend that he didn’t the meet the love of his life four different times. He met four different loves in four different lives.