Jack Boss Coaching

The last post showed the utility of our massive bank of memories to draw on.  Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article demonstrates that this is what makes chess grandmasters, brilliant neurosurgeons and transcendental hockey stars.  Yet the stickiness of memory has it’s problems: it narrows the attention and forecloses on previously unimagined possibilities.

An example: fMRI studies have shown that when we’re asked to imagine a lovely picnic with our family next summer, the same part of our brain lights up that stores the memory of the lovely picnic we had with our family last summer. This is why freedom is difficult: it breaks something; it breaks the bond between last summer’s picnic and next summer’s picnic. We have to go against our brain’s natural impulse to base our assessment of the present on its memories of the past.

What we want to do is imagine another picnic.  Interestingly, the way the study accomplished this was to have the subjects imagine a picnic with Bill Clinton.  This inserted a wedge between imagination and memory, forcing the participant to come up with something new.

Perhaps this is why visualization, “what if’ sort of exercises, and even hypnosis can facilitate novel solutions: it creates a new reality for the mind to draw on, instead of being limited to the same suite of memories its always relied on.