Connecting with other humans is what makes our lives rich and meaningful. Especially when so much can pull us apart. Neuroscientist and author of The Happiness Hack, Ellen Petry Leanse, explains what happens to your brain when we spend a lot of time with folks who reflect our own beliefs back to us. Basically, you stop thinking about those beliefs at all. Your brain likes to stay efficient, take shortcuts, and save cognitive power. So, as you become entrenched in your own beliefs, your brain moves them to a part that’s good at automatic, reactive thinking, and away from the part that reasons things out, because who has the time? As a result, you react to competing beliefs the way you’d react to anything that seems totally unnatural or wrong: with disgust and repulsion.
We think it’s reality, yet it’s only the conditioned perception we have been taught is truth.
Here’s the mission, should you choose to accept it: Surprise yourself.
Take one step closer to someone who disagrees with you — whether that means spending time with a friend or relative you’ve been drifting apart from, reading an opinion from an earnest voice on the other side, or sparking a conversation you’ve both been eager and hesitant to have. When you want to explore why they’re wrong, explore instead what you’re missing. When you want to determine what makes each view understandable. When you want to discover why someone believes something that confounds you, discover how they came to believe it. When you want to know what their problem is, try to know what their concerns are. When you want to demand why they don’t care about what you care about, learn what they care about more. When you want to trap them into saying what you want to hear, free them so they say what they honestly mean.
And when you want to stop listening so you can react or respond or judge, which will be often! Mind that gap between what you want and what you most certainly don’t and ask one more curious question. More often than you probably think, you might just find yourself saying “I never thought of it that way.”