A Neuroscientist’s Advice on New Year’s Resolutions |
Some say making New Year’s resolutions is pointless. They are wrong. It’s a way our culture helps us harness one of the human brain’s most remarkable capacities: our ability to think about our own thinking. Resolutions remind us to step back from the hurley-burley and ask: Am I pursuing the right goals, and pursuing them in the right ways?
Any of us can use the latest neuroscience to improve our thinking about thinking. It can help give us the grit to stick with goal—and the wisdom to adapt (or even quit) if changing our mind is the route to success.
Why do we have New Year’s Resolutions? Planning. Whether you play chess or checkers, you know it’s impossible to win only by using habits, reflexes, or emotional responses. In life, planning makes the difference between running straight forward into a barrier, or anticipating that barrier and taking a detour instead. Our clever human brains can look ahead—through a decision tree that branches out into many potential futures—to pick the best option. Such planning is a huge challenge: board games are simpler than much of real life, yet even a relatively simple game like “Go” has over ten170........