Every time you do something, you are making a choice about how you want to map your brain. A few times might not make much of a difference, but eventually you will start seeing the world differently. During the 1890s, psychologist George M. Stratton found that after about 5 days of wearing reversing glasses, his brain started to see the world upside down.

Every time you make a choice about what you do today, you bring your brain a little closer to remapping itself, or reinforcing the remapping that it is still there. This is a lot of why habits can be so difficult to break.

Confounding many of your efforts is the fact that your brain tries to be as lazy as possible, all the time.

You may experience this as the article above, as changing your walking gait under different conditions, or as many do, as your brain sliding away from a difficult problem and distracting you with something else.

If you want to get better at these things, you have to train yourself to marshal and to guard what I call ‘proactive energy[1]’. My personal theory is that this is why hobbies and doing something you love are so powerful. When I was singing with TNL, we would talk about ‘The Inner Game‘, and tactics for interacting with yourself, to getting out of your own way and letting yourself succeed.

But we never would have gotten there if we hadn’t so desperately wanted so sing well. Because we loved the singing so much, and wanted to succeed so badly, we overcame a number of internal obstacles. We could then use these tactics we learned to help us do so many other, more mundane things.

Somewhat similar to how engineering school is often great training for pushing yourself to your limits, and learning how to deal with sleep deprivation[2].

But back to our original question: “How do you want to remap your brain today?” Every choice you make is a brain remapping choice, where you will get better at the things you do.

The corollary is that if you do things you love to do, you will get better at them, and then want to get better at them, perhaps enough to learn more about yourself and remap your brain even a little bit more consciously.

[1] Christine Miserandino has an excellent essay: ‘The Spoon Theory‘, which talks about the difficulties of living with a chronic illness or disability, and how difficult it can be to have limited resources of this type. She uses ‘spoons’ as a proxy for the amount of mental energy someone has at the beginning of the day. Wikipedia link.