When you notice something that’s exciting, it creates energy in your brain and your body. Kids demonstrate this most vividly when excitement jolts through them and they leap in the air, clap and flap, shriek and squeal. Their excitement on the inside becomes excitement on the outside. Adults sometimes shine with excitement too. Think of the contestants on TV game shows, or the “Surprise!” of a birthday party, or the choreographed excitement of sporting events, political rallies, rock concerts, religious jubilees. Dogs show their excitement unapologetically every time their owner shows up.
When you encounter something meaningful, there’s a tiny faint puff of energy deep down in the labyrinth of your mind, imperceptible to others around you, maybe even imperceptible to you yourself, that switches on a minuscule mental light bulb.
What is happening here? What is this special something that ignites in your brain when you encounter something meaningful?
It is a little charge of current that surges through the nerves in your skull. A spark. A neural transmitter catapulting a minuscule payload of chemical activity across your synapses from one neuron to another. This biochemical activity excites the receiving neuron, causing it to come alive and reciprocate its excitement to other neurons, and so on, over and over.
Imagine how this cranial process would appear if you were small enough to see it. There are ripples of activity cascading across grey matter like wind across a wheat field, or a chain of falling dominos, or a zap of blue lightning crackling sideways and jagged through the nighttime clouds.
When you learn something, your brain physically changes in slight but meaningful ways. It changes the structure of the neurons being used, and it increases the number of synapses between the neurons.
Some science suggests you store new stimuli in your short-term memory, a temporary faculty that keeps track of immediate things, and from there your brain may eventually discard it or otherwise move it to your long-term memory where it can be accessed in the future. This movement to long-term memory creates a more pronounced biochemical change in your neural pathways.
Repeating what you learned strengthens the synapses and makes them more efficient at transmitting the information. That’s why it typically takes less time to re-learn something than it took to learn it the first time. Once your neural pathways have been trained, it’s easier to access them. “It’s like riding a bicycle.” This is the basis of learning.
Your brain possesses the property known as plasticity, which basically means it has the ability to change and develop over time. Previously, the prevailing science alleged that as you age, your brain becomes increasingly fixed. “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” But more recently, science has developed to suggest your brain keeps changing throughout your entire life, right until the moment you breath your last breath. Your mind is flexible, not fixed. It can be trained and coached and cultivated, exercised, sharpened or blunted, for better or for worse. When it comes to cognition, your brain has the properties of silly putty.
The mind adapts to new stimuli by forming new neural pathways which, over time, get stronger with more traffic or weaker with less traffic until the weakest ones get eliminated altogether. It’s like a proliferation of vines. In the early days of springtime the vines are all young and fragile, competing for limited water and soil and nutrients. By late summer, some have grown stronger and climbed up the wall while others withered and died off.
In your brain, this type of development speaks to the expression, “You learn something every day.” By analogy, the loss of unused pathways suggests you may also forget something every day.
As you excercise certain brain functions, you become more biochemically proficient at those functions. However, this proficiency can also impede your ability to learn new ways of thinking. You can form mental ruts and rigidity, becoming stuck in your ways of thinking, skeptical of new information. You may become the stereotypical stick in the mud, the bullheaded Luddite, the crusty old curmudgeon, “Get off my lawn, you kids!” If taken too far, repetitive learning can be regressive.
On the flip side, learning new things can be exciting. As your brain reacts to new stimuli by forming new neural paths, that cellular excitement can generate a physically stimulating sensation. Think about how you feel when you learn something fascinating, such as when you read a well crafted story, or watch a captivating movie, or engage in a stirring verbal exchange. That stimulated feeling is the feeling of your neurons coming alive and getting all excited and jittery.
The excitement can really pop when you dive into milestone experiences of your life such as leaving home for the first time or starting a new job or moving to a new city or forging a new relationship. Accelerated learning can trigger visceral, emotional responses.
Sometimes a new idea or concept triggers such an intense “oh wow” moment that the new information is like the light bulb suddenly turned on in your mind. When you get hit by such a powerful concept, you close your eyes and put your hand on your forehead, shutting down your senses for a moment, giving your brain time to process the new information.
And it’s not just your brain that does the processing, it’s your body too. You need a moment to collect yourself to recover from some revalations. You have to pause to get oriented to a new way of seeing the world, which has shifted, which you see a little differently, skewed through the lens of this new idea and its sunburst flare of new meaning. When you see something novel and meaningful, you can never go back to your world as it existed before your eyes were opened. You cannot unsee it.
You tend to remember emotionally salient events more than emotionally neutral events. That’s because your emotions impact the encoding and consolidation of memories. Emotions are triggers. They signify to the brain, “Hey, pay attention! This is important!” And this helps to highlight the memory so it will stand out in the future.
The amygdala is the part of your brain where you connect emotions to memories. It sits physically close to the brain region that carries information from your senses, especially the sense of smell, which is one of the reasons why scents are such strong memory triggers. Senses, memories, and emotions all mesh together in the synaptic firing of the amygdala like the multicolored squares of a Rubix Cube.
When you are mentally and emotionally stimulated, the amygdala is active, and it signals the release of stress hormones like adrenaline. Sights, sounds, and smells become sharper, more pronounced. Memories become more vivid. Emotionally salient events capture your attention. They create heightened focus and alertness which help to aid your recall at a later time.
Lab scientists have discovered that when they artificially stimulated their subjects’ amygdalas, they helped their subjects to retain memories. Instead of their brains placing information into their short-term memory, which may be unreliabile for recall later, the amygdala-stimulated subjects seemingly sent the information directly to their more reliable long-term memory.
As author Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Your specific words and actions will become buried in the minds of other people and they will disappear, forgotten; but the same people will retain the memory of how they felt about you.
The most extreme version of the emotion-memory connection is the so-called “flashbulb memory.” These types of recollections are exceptionally vivid and detailed, sometimes associated with traumatic events. The death of a loved one, a car accident, a physical attack, or a crime, these are the shocking events that instantly brand themselves into your psyche, often serving as the source of future dreams, hallucinations, or PTSD. They shape how you see the world, how you interact with it, how much you trust the world around you and how much you mistrust it.
Flashbulb memories aren’t always bad, however. Religious experiences, peak althetics, chemical intoxication, exhilarating sex, childbirth, powerful encounters with the natural environment, and other intensely emotional experiences can be brilliantly emblazoned on your wall of forever-memories.
When you fall in love and you surrender yourself to becoming emotionally open to a trusting bond with your lover, that can be among the most powerful, life-changing feelings in the spectrum of human experience. Just before your surrender, you’re confronted by a choice to either maintain a safe emotional separation or else abandon yourself to feeling the intoxicating rapture of chemical excitement. When you open your heart to another person, you become psychically vulnerable, flooded with destabilizing thoughts and emotions. And, if your beloved reciprocates those feelings, the flashbulb memory can be virtuous and exhuberant. However, if your beloved withdraws, spurns you, or rejects you at this fragile moment, the searing flashbulb experience could be vicious and traumatic.
One of the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs is their ability to allow people to perceive familiar topics in novel ways. If you think about your brain like a snow-covered mountain, and the neural pathways are like paths that skiers have carved into the snow, eventually a limited number of paths may become so well formed that they are like ruts, offering a limited number of ways to get down the mountain. Drugs can be like a fresh blanket of snow that covers the old well-worn paths, allowing for discovery of new paths, providing new experiences and perspectives and ways of thinking.
When you encounter something new that you don’t recognize or understand, your mind scrolls through your bank of experiences looking to find an appropriate context. That’s why you may become momentarily disoriented when you bump into someone familiar outside of the environment where you know them, such as on a random subway or a city street. For instance, you may know someone at work, and you are used to interacting with that person only at work. You think of her as a “work person.” Then when you bump into her at the grocery store, it may take a moment to scroll through your memory to identify her as the person from work. Out of the work context, you may not even remember her name, even though you have no trouble remembering it at work.
Memory plays an important role in how you connect things in your mind. As you encounter new things, your brain works to connect them to things you already know. You have information that you hold in your memory — it could be something in your short-term memory from a moment ago or something that has been in your memory for much longer — and you withdraw it from your memory bank to connect it with new information. It’s about recognizing how things fit into new contexts. This process is like putting a new battery in an old flashlight. Neither of the objects are all that useful individually, but they find their purpose when paired together.
The human fight-or-flight impulses work in the same way. When you see something, you instantly run it through your memory bank to make a snap judgment about whether it’s threatening or not, and you respond accordingly.
Knowing all this, you can train your mind to become more skilled at making connections. Your environment plays an important role in your neural development. Put yourself in environments that exercise your skills for recognizing patterns, spotting trends, categorizing diverse elements, identifying common attributes. Over time, these neural processes will become stronger, quicker, more nimble and more capable. Through mindful practice, you can become the person among your peers who notices the connections that others don’t.