Dave Matthews once sang—wait! Wrong reference. Sorry to all you DMB fans, but I’m looking for something more profound (zing).
So let’s try this again.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian Neurologist/Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who in Man’s Search for Meaning said:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
You will see this quote frequently in coaching circles because it encapsulates the essence of mindset work (that is, coaching) so perfectly. That is why I have chosen Frankl’s quote as the topic of my inaugural blog posts. Three, to be precise.
Part 1 (this post) will focus on the brain’s role in stimuli and responses. Part 2 will explore “the space” and how to create it. Finally, Part 3 will examine how to exploit that space to achieve our greatest results.
Without further ado…Part 1!
The Unconscious Brain
As you know, a stimulus is a change in the environment and response is an organism’s reaction. I don’t want to talk about touching a hot stove and reflexively pulling your hand back or a bird flying away after a loud sound, but those are useful examples.
No, I want to talk about the stimuli in our lives about which we are not consciously aware. These span from the mundane circumstances that drive mindless, inconsequential action all the way to the significant circumstances that have shaped our lives in the form of long-held beliefs and our resultant outcomes without us realizing it.
mmMMMmm Brainz!
It probably won’t surprise you, then, that I will be mostly talking about the human brain—the thing that makes us human by granting us amazing faculties that we still cannot fully define or describe.
I will reference the brain as if it consists of two separate parts: Pinky and the Brain! Oops, I mean the primitive brain and the neocortex. The reactive primitive brain is evolutionarily considered the combo of the reptilian and limbic brains. The neocortex developed more recently and bestows the capabilities of abstract thought and executive functioning. The primitive brain and neocortex operate interdependently and exert influence over one another.
As You Were
I like to look at our brain as the processor of stimuli and gatekeeper of our responses. Often driving this ship is our primitive brain, and it is very good at this. Like, honed and fine-tuned over hundreds of millions of years good.
So much so, that 95% (I made that up) of the time we have no idea it’s even occurring. In the background, the brain is detecting stimuli and determining responses (again, there are few exceptions like reflex arcs).
Think of how babies develop: we stimulate them to challenge their developing brains to start recognizing patterns and laying down neural connections (up to one million per second in the first few years)!
This is not unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator scanning and assessing threats in Terminator 2:
As I Was Saying—Squirrel!
How many times have you scratched an itchy nose (not now because, well, COVID, and you’re probably wearing a mask anyway) without even realizing it? Throw a ball up and catch it effortlessly while carrying on a conversation? Follow both the lines on the road and changing lights at intersections with nary a thought?
Clearly our brain runs on autopilot (a.k.a. our subconscious) for the vast majority of inputs it receives. Can you imagine if this was not the case? If we had to deliberate and weigh in on every response we generated to every stimulus?
It’d be awful—we wouldn’t be able to use our brain-power for anything else. We would still be like our animal brethren freezing at every sound to assess threat vs not threat or squirrel vs non-squirrel. (Hopefully, we’d at least have tails that would unconsciously and eagerly wag!)
You Shall Not Pass!
Thank goodness our brains filter out this noise for us. How else would I be able to try to determine the number of timelines in a season of Westworld? Just kidding, I can’t do that noise or no noise.
However good this automation is, it does sometimes work against us. The neural connections that become ingrained are the ones that generate the fastest response, generate the response that brings relief and resolution, or both. These ones get used over and over again.
As this occurs, the brain prunes other, less used connections to force us into these more “successful” pathways. This is akin to internet providers throttling service speed to sites they don’t like while maintaining blazing speeds to those they do (the whole battle with net neutrality).
The Need for Speed
For the brain, this is a matter of efficiency—how to help us survive and succeed while expending the least amount of energy. Despite the brain’s attempt to conserve energy, brain activity still accounts for about 20% of our basal metabolic expenditure.
In an energy scarce environment, you can see how this would be advantageous. For example, in my former life as a caveman (I may or may not still look like one…), my instantaneous fight or flight response served me well if confronted by a Smilodon in order to best keep me safe.
Primitive Brain, Meet Modern Society
However, it proves less useful in a stable, energy abundant environment like modern society. That is because these ingrained pathways and their resultant response can channel our fear, for example, in maladaptive ways (think intimacy or rejection). It can also trap us in our status quo.
So when confronted not by a threat like a Smilodon (did I mention they’re extinct?) but by something that takes us out of our comfort zone like an opportunity, we generate thoughts like “I can’t do…” or “I never have the time to…” or “I’m not good at….”
There’s a benefit to not putting ourselves out there: we don’t put ourselves at risk for facing rejection or hurt (the emotional kind, not the Smilodon 11-inch canine-inflicted kind).
The Next Time On...
Up until this point, I have described the stimulus-response cycle through the lens of the primitive brain, and I hope you can now appreciate how we generally handle stimuli. However, the real magic happens when we interrupt the stimulus-response cycle with our neocortex.
The 2nd post in this series will explore this interruption, or “the space” Viktor Frankl referenced. Stay tuned!