Judah Pollack: Work Those Mental Muscles

Your brain is a physical structure. Your brain is rewiring itself every second of every day. For you to have a new idea, you have to literally build new neural connections between your neurons, physical structures. When you have a breakthrough idea, there is a physical corollary in your brain. You can literally look at and see the new neural loop that has been created to create this breakthrough. Now, the exercises I'm going to share with you right now are not necessarily going to create breakthroughs for you, but what they are going to do is build up your muscle. It's kind of like doing cardio and strength training if you're an athlete. So here's the first one, and this one we tend to do with teams a lot. Before getting to a larger question with them, it sort of pops their brains open. So I want you all to close your eyes. And if you're listening to this on a podcast and driving right now, please don't close your eyes and don't look at your phone. But for the rest of you, please close your eyes. And I want you to imagine this thought experiment. What would our world look like if gravity stopped working at 10pm and then started working again at 7am? How has our culture evolved if that is the situation? Are there nets over everyone's homes? Are the people who own the nets the richest people on the planet? Do people put their beds on the ceilings and then put mats on the floor in case they fall and oversleep? How do teenagers decide to rebel and get in trouble? Do they grab a bottle of alcohol and cut a hole in the net and just float off somewhere? Depending on who you ask, you get different answers. Designers, start designing whole houses to be careful for this. Artists start depicting all the beautiful art that could be created in zero G. Okay, you can open your eyes. One of the things to look for is, how was that experience for you? Was it exhilarating? Was it exhausting? Was it frightening? Was it a lot of fun? How comfortable are you in engaging in these wide open things? And when you came upon an idea you'd never come upon before and you had to build the structure in your brain to actually visualize it, that's plasticity. Here's another one you can play with at home. Turn on a foreign movie with no subtitles for 20 minutes and try and figure out what's going on, notice what you pay attention to. You might start paying attention to the tone of voice or the way the camera is angled, or what people are doing with their faces or their bodies. You start taking in completely different information which is forcing you to build completely different connections. Again, it might seem like very far afield from having a breakthrough, but it's building the muscle towards those breakthroughs that's the important part.