The big questions in life

Imagine that you open your eyes to consciousness one morning. It is cold yet mellow, bright but only slightly, you can almost smell the moisture of the clouds spreading underneath towards the lower ground. You instantly know it is going to rain. The neighbor’s window is still carrying the same cover it always did, the church bell still rings at the hour, you still hear the clocking noise of someone walking in the street in front, You still hear the cars buzzing past. Your brain has somehow learnt to filter these noises without you even realizing that they were even there. You open your eyes and you suddenly realize that your body takes much more effort to be pulled out of bed then it did a couple of decades ago. The head feels much heavier and the thoughts clouded without any certain clarity. Yes you are almost 60. 

Most of the people live the best years of their life viz. 20- 50 by working and paying bills while inundated with thoughts about good financial practices, with bits of real happiness and joy that can only be remembered as disjointed snapshots aka visionary hallucinations of previous vacations or some emotionally long lasting close family events. The brain is very good at creating proxies for memory, which mostly works by the method of association. Think of it like a tag, for every item in your warehouse (emotional event) there will a tag. For eg: vacation, childhood, family etc. Whenever the impulse from one of the input sources (senses) comes in, this part of the warehouse light up (activation in the brain regions).This is exactly what happens in the brain when you remember a vivid moment, for example the first taste of a sweet fruit or the day you first immersed yourself underwater. The brain does not remember the whole event vividly and cannot play the exact event as it happened, because if it were to do so, one would lose track of what is real, the memory recollection or the current conscious state and almost feel like having a hallucination which we all know is the trademark of some mental disorders (except for some hosts in Westworld). The brain rather keeps a proxy for the event which is mostly the beginning, the middle, or the end whichever one is the most “emotional”.

Coming back to the original point, most of us are told when we are children: study hard, get good grades, respect elders, follow traditions, find a good job and “settle”. But what no one ever tells you is what after all that? What is the point of doing this? What comes after that? What is the reason to do that? Why should you care about that? Did someone even ask: what do YOU want to do? What are you interested in? what things to do you care about? I can already imagine that many of you who read the questions above, start to (probably unconsciously) just skip over them like a wave and not ride it in. However, If not then you are in the same boat as me.

I recently learnt that the one of the most important upgrade to humans (evolutionarily speaking) was the ability of abstraction. This lead us to imagine plan future, have questions about ourselves (indulgence with the self), create the idea of a greater being (God) and base theologies or create ideas that do not exists in the real world (intangible). This could even be the reason that we outlived Neanderthals. This ability was important because it made humans who believed in similar ideas, coagulate and hence collaborate to create/understand new stuff. This is why we today have things like agriculture, energy sources, art, medicine and architectural landmarks. It is the basic foundation of our human society. It is this ability of abstraction which is in no other higher primate that helped us become the dominant species we are today. So why does our fellow humans which themselves also possess the same ability tell us or rather “advices” us to not do the same?

My argument being that one can surely live with the “advice” given, but at some juncture in one’s life there will come a point when one will be forced to ask the BIG questions in and henceforth the meaning of life. It will be completely unavoidable and one would be stuck in a state of mind where suddenly everything in their life would seem to be not what they would have wished for! This feeling sometimes in also called mid-life crises, but could happen at any other stage of life. So my question here is, when it is indeed eventual that one will arrive to it at some point in one’s life, why not ask such questions sooner rather than later? There are many benefits of doing so: 1. When one is comparatively younger (around the age of <25) and carries fewer responsibilities, one is still in a tinkering phase, meaning that there would e enough time and little effort to switch the idea of life and idea about what they actually want. One can play around with such ideas without major negative consequences. 2. Since we cannot roll back time, one would avoid being in a situation much later in life (around age 40) of realizing that he/she is living the life that people thought he/she should live and not what the inner voice inside him/her longed for.

So if it were up to me, I would encourage kids as young as 16 to ask themselves these BIG questions in life (ref para 3) and use them a guide to create a life following such questions. It should be noted that the answers to these questions are not always straightforward to find and are mostly not even available at that time. But this would be a start and start somewhere one must! It is the first spark to the fire that will slowly provide ever increasing fuel to the electricity of life.

Some ideas that I can give towards trying to answer such questions is to talk about them with your like-minded friends, Seek meditation from a teacher, try to go within oneself rather than looking to someone else to provide answers to these questions. Read (a lot) get to know about not just yourself but the world around you, and ask yourself what is the thing that keeps you up at night? can you see yourself being a part of that world? Do not care about what others will think of you. It is your body, mind and soul. You and only you are the one master of it.  

Now my final question to you is: why do you wake up every morning? What is your purpose? After all if we are not asking these questions, do we consider ourselves to be truly human?

Psuedo Control

What are you feeling right now? Are you having gazillion thoughts in your mind? Most of them leading to a worry? Don't worry you're only one of the 7.4999999 billion people experiencing the same right now. The problem with us humans is that we are unsatiated and unappreciative species inundated with thoughts. Somehow the animal’s instincts in us are always on! We are always looking for more! More food, more money, more sex, more people around us, more cars etc. But why don't we get satisfied? Why? One of the most important factors driving humans of course is boredom (which I happen to recently seen confirmed in a video by vsauce). But apart from boredom what else could we be looking at? What could cause this insatiable behavior?

Oh and yes did I tell you that because of this habit of not getting satisfied, we are eating more and more (much more than we should) and hence the obesity epidemic? It seems as if humans are just terrible at controlling the self. What an irony life is, humans necessitate the desire to control everything yet the thing they have the least control over is themselves! 

Insecurities deeply embedded in our system drive us to see everything with a sense of (albeit acute) insecurity. I Wonder if in some ideal utopian world, if an individual was not insecure, would they want control of anything at all? And If they would not then would it be a better world to live in rather than one where everything is relentlessly controlled? Even at the level of the mind, one wants to control it because of the insecurities that a spirited mind if let free, it would most certainly wander towards basic animalistic desires of life. Isn’t this what the monks practicing Buddhism do? Trying to control and relinquish the desires of the mind.

The relationship between control and insecurities i feel is highly complex, it could either be a linear or an inverse exponential relationship. As the insecurities rise, the need for control increases linearly. But as the level of control gets more and more, the insecurities increase to such a level that they start to saturate (plateau). Can you feel the tremendous weight of such a situation? Now imagine living at such a level of insecurities and trying to vehement control. The bubble has to burst at one point due to the pressure! 

Looking at it from an evolutionary point of view, sense of control brings good chances of survival, for example someone having more control of the environment statistically speaking survives longer (from someone who has no control over the environment, like a terminally ill patient). Hence the subconscious self, gives us a boost of biochemical further strengthening the idea of control and its survival effects (see the feedback loop here?).

So what in the end it all comes down to is not necessarily having control but rather a sense of it (that’s what i call Pseudo control). Whenever someone is in a situation of uncertainty, they are always advised to believe everything will be fine with time. This is nothing but supporting the idea of providing a sense of control when none actual control exists (the future will always still be unpredictable). One does not need to have absolute control but rather only a sense of it. 

One can observe it in many walks of life. For instance whenever you visit a doctor, all you are doing is seeking a sense of control from someone who you think has it more than you do in that particular scenario. Whenever we look for advice/help we are always transferring the weight of providing us the sense of control via them. 

Rules for example are built for this reason. When everyone around in a social structure follows rules, it gives everyone (specially the state) a sense of control on our surroundings. That everything is smooth, and hence higher this sense the higher is the quality of life (example in Scandinavian countries this would be the highest). 

Since humans are risk averse species (according to the Nobel Prize winning genius Daniel Kahneman), then this sense of control has to reduce the risk for humans. The more control they have, the less risky the world is for them! This further strengthens our belief system as it increases the chances of survival (speaking in evolutionary terms). 

The idea of believing in god and the whole concept of it also revolves around the sense of control if once delves in a bit deeper. Imagine that people who pray or believe that God will make everything alright (by that i mean turn the tables in their own favor) are the people who via faith (passed on via brainwashing) believe that there is a higher power with CONTROL over everything that by praying to that power, one could guide the system in their favor. 

When people are provided choice, they feel they are exercising control over the environment. But have you ever wondered why a good salesman (whether it be an individual, a capitalistic group of people, or even governments) might give you a limited set of choices to make you believe you have control (only a sense of it of course!). For example, the salesman might ask you whether you want the 'left' one or the ' right' one when he has already assumed that you will be buying one of them for sure. The same happens in elections worldwide.

Finally, if an intelligent alien were to drop to earth right at this moment, it would be fairly easy for it to take over humanity: All it has to do is to provide humans a sense of security that everything is under their control (Albeit pseudo). And just when the humans are convinced, then reverse the cycle and use them for its own purpose! Boom easy kaneasy..

So stop trying to control everything and enjoying the freedom. We cannot control everything but we can make ourselves be less affected by the outcome of certain unpredictable completely random events. This i know might not be realistic but it might get you out of the continuous cycle of control and anxiousness. And as John Keynes once famously said: ' in the long run we are all dead anyways' 

Till next time!

Perception of time

One night while driving back home from work I suddenly saw a car that had broken down and lay in the middle of the road without any tail lights on. I was considerably fast and didn’t notice it. Then, suddenly I realized that everything around me seemed to have gone out of focus and my brain only emphasized on the stationary car and the road which became my center of focus. Then, as if magically (almost subconsciously) I maneuvered my car slightly towards left and missed a dreadful collision. In hindsight I can still remember extremely vividly the event taking place in slow motion, As if I were in a movie which had slowed down and the protagonist now had enough time to doge a bullet (somebody like Neo). Now why events like this one in hindsight seem to last longer than it actually did? I did some rough calculations and the time for the sensor signals to reach the brain and back to the motor nerves to react for maneuvering was not more than 300 Milli second! Yet the whole event seemed to have taken forever (relatively speaking). Time seemed to have slowed down for me somehow, or so it seemed to at least in hindsight. I still remember everything in great detail. How is it possible? How can we suddenly from autopilot go into this ninja mode where we perceive things at slow motion? OR DO WE? 

We all have watches around that tell us that time is ticking forward steadily and predictably, whereas our experiences tell us it is anything but. Time or perception of time can be compressed and stretched likes a bubble gum. Time, my friends is indeed warped!

For example, the next time you have a fever, try this experiment: Count till 60 seconds without a watch and when you think its time, shout out loud! At the same time, have someone sitting next to you with a stopwatch measuring exactly 60 seconds, you will be bewildered that your estimate will be consistently shorter ( ~ 45 seconds). The higher your temperature the lower will be the estimate, somehow your mind speeds up your perception of time as your heart rate increases. Like a racing engine, the hotter it is the faster it goes (Well almost every engine except Fiat!).

Like any other scientific finding, this one too raises further question. Namely: do animals that have a faster heartbeat, like mice perceive time faster than us? What about hummingbirds and Honey bees? Do they see the world in slow motion compared to us? Ever wondered why you always miss a hitting a fly with a swatter? Maybe it perceives time faster than you do!

But the million dollar question here is: what are the neural mechanisms of time perception? Interestingly unlike other senses: touch, taste, smell and hear, there is no one single region dedicated to the sense of time, it seems to be meta sensory. Isn’t that incredible? It is nowhere yet everywhere…

Do you know that you have the ability to both; slow down or enhance the speed of time yourself?
Prof. David Eagleman put people in situations where they could slow their time. He placed participants 15 stories above the ground and hung them using a rope, later he released them from there to perceive a feeling of free fall/weightlessness for 3 or more seconds before they landed safely ( in a net). The interesting bit here was that asked the participants to report the time they were in free fall and the participants always overestimated. Seeing things in slow motion and high detail. The duration of the event does not change but the event seems to have taken longer only in RETROSPECT!
Then might it have something to do with the memory of the event? Because your memories are more densely packed you seem to recall them in high detail.

This is the most marvelous and mind blowing link here, the one between Time and Memory! Time to your brain it turns out is nothing but the detail with which you register a memory. During critical situations, the region of the brain called amygdala kicks in and forges the memory in a very high detail (In the hippocampus) and makes them stick together. And since emotional memories are much stronger than normal memories, upon replay of these events the high detail memories might make the event seem to last longer. Hence, the more detailed a memory the longer the event seems to have lasted! So when you take drugs like psilocybin the sense of time is reduced because you are processing much more information than normal conditions. The amount of dopamine in the brain shoots up and you lose the sense of time. Mostly it slows down!

Ever wondered why vacation feels like it whizzed pass very early, but seems to last longer in hindsight? this contradictory feeling is termed as ‘holiday paradox’. That is because we perceive time prospectively and retrospectively. They are usually in sync during our daily lives, of waking up, working, sleeping and weekends. But on vacations the stimulus from sights, experiences etc. brings a sense of novelty and leads to misalign of the two warping the perceived time.

All of that is ok, But I am sure that like me all the people out there feel as if the time is passing very fast as we age. It also seems to be moving slower while we were kids. According to one of the hypothesis that is because as one grows older, one gathers more and more memories and many of them are not in high detail and are hence compressed representations of events. So when you recall these memories, they are somewhat depleted, giving a faster representation of time! (it is faster to go through a thinner book than a thick one). One of the most important things for a brain is energy, brains are always predicting things using approximation and previous knowledge so in the end if you have used more energy that replicates to using more neural activity it seems to be lasting longer. And that is exactly what happens when you’re in a fearful situation. The interesting thing to ask here is there a control center for this? if yes, then where and what type of neurons or activity of neurons corresponds to such a behavior.

The next obvious question on might ask is, are there any diseases which might be linked to an error in the perception of time in the brain? According to this enthralling hypothesis by one scientist, yes there are! Schizophrenia for example is described as the disease of hearing voices in the brain, or having someone in your brain that is not you. Now imagine if that person was actually you but in the past. This is called ‘misattribution of credit’ for example you say I moved my leg but it wasn’t me. This is because of the brain signal being perceived later than it actually occurred. These two things are not in sync which makes you misattribute the signal as not your own doing. It is also noticed that these people have abnormal levels of dopamine. This causes them to Miss Judge the duration of an event when measured via other experiments.

Another related psychological phenomenon is that of being in the zone or in a state of flow. For example the book ‘drive’ the author argues that we seem to lose track of time when we are doing something with a lot of concentration, hours seems to be like minutes which actually makes us slow time down. Different types of music have the same effect. BPM (beats per minute) decide if you will perceive time faster or slower. The perception of time in the brain is distortable and can be manipulated by music.

So how can you slow time down as you grow? Here are my two cents:

Do new things, have new experiences, if you never tried an instrument do it, take a new path to work today, change the settings of your room, it is known that our brain has maps for things we do very often and they get strengthened as we do them regularly. After a while they become a part of our automatic system. That’s when you lose track of time. It’s like driving home automatically without even consciously realizing it. Music is one big factor too. Just like listening to vivaldi (or pink floyd) will slower your perception of time, listening to Nirvana will make it faster.

Since memories are a guide to our perception of time, having new memories in a shorter time will help us in perceiving that the time has gone by much slowly. A weekend for example with multiple new activities but each one having enough detail for example painting a wall, photographing etc. Surprising yourself with new things keeps your brain engaged, and uses more energy, new connection are forged. Attention is the key here. So either that or you travel near the speed of light where you will be moving so fast that you will experiences everything around you still and not moving at all. Moreover, Novelty seem to have a very strong impact on memory. You are more likely to remember things that are distinctive and vivid, and personally involving (Like a vacation! like travelling to space also is known to decrease the perception of time). 

Meditate often! Meditation combined with deep breathing has been shown to be lowering the heart rate which further decreases the amount of activity in the brain and makes you feel lighter. In certain deep modes of meditation one can even completely lose track of time. But the key is to let go. Have a timer or alarm to bring you back but quieten your surroundings and go deep within your mind.

Einstein once famously said: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute — and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."

Time indeed is relative and is immortal; it appeared with the beginning of the universe and will remain till its end. We all are bound by time. It’s the only thing that never stops, is never the same and always moves in a single direction. Time is baffling and that’s what makes it so much fun to study. So the next time you’re feeling the time is passing by too fast, stop, and do something novel. It is famously said in the Vedas: the ones who do not learn to change with time, time changes them.

Stay Curious!
Stay Inspired!

J

Focus and its virtues

Sitting here on my chair and listening to the most peaceful yet immensely emotionally stimulating piano, I cannot help but wonder how incredible is the power of focus in life. When we are young, we are taught to perform every task with focus and complete engrossment. But as we age we realize that this is easier said than done. In today’s world we are bombarded with information from all around us, targeting each and every sense of ours. We have something called an pseudo-information overload. Going back at 50,000 years, we were hunter gatherers living in no more than few people per clan. The means of entertainment were scant and what we had was other humans, some form of art in cave paintings and campfires. The main mode of entertainment was storytelling and cooking, combined with some forms of ritual dances around the fire. In order for our species to survive and be so dominant that it is today was due to this main fact that we were always social creatures and these rituals increased our dependency on being one.

Fast forward to the 21^st century and we see that the species has spread on all lands, water, air and even slowly entering the territory of space. Yet how we are so lonely from deep inside. Numerically we are plentiful yet somehow when it comes to some social interaction we are all limited to the virtual social world (the era of facebook, whatsapp etc). Observing the fact that we are all so lonely, we must be achieving great progress in our professional lives, as recapitulating from school times, we were insistently instructed to have focus in life. And now since we have so less distraction we must be very productive. Except we are not! Ever wondered why?

In the world of constant notifications from friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, and countless other people we might be not connected in real terms but virtually, we are always occupied. And if that was not enough we have The INTERNET (bringer of all evil in cute animals videos and gossip, reality tv shows and entertainment) we are always one click away, one browse away from everything that is currently happening in the world that might or might not affect us directly. We are so hooked up on it that like a heroin addict we need constant shots of the drug releasing dopamine in the brain which further fuels the stress hormones which the life brings that keeps us going on and thus creating a feedback loop.  

This is the current source of my fret and curiosity. Einstein once said: I am not a genius, but I stay with problems longer than normal people. Whenever I am stuck in a problem, whether that is related to programming or requires some logic based careful evaluation, I always remember this phrase from him. That how if we ever wish to truly make a difference, we sometimes need to stop all the vexing notifications and think hard and deep about the task at hand.

Countless studies have proven that people who are excellent at what they do and have made a name for themselves doing that like concert pianists, singers, programmers, athletes, writers, etc  had at some point in their lives to be focused at the task at hand with utmost determination without any kind of distraction. The secret to greatness is not just talent but rather an incessant trial and error combined with a fierce focus. It is that mental asset which rarely gets so much limelight in today’s world when it comes to measuring the variables of excellence.

It is easy to say that when we have so many devices or sources of distraction around us. One powerful tool that helps to achieve such a state is meditation and/or music. Meditation is the way of emptying one’s thoughts to bare minimal and at best none.  However counter intuitive it might sound in the beginning it is indeed the best way to calm down all the anxiousness and our working memory to focus on the important things in life. Music can too provide a way of reducing anxiety and flushing out unnecessary thoughts. Both in some way or the other help the mind relax, reduce the levels of stress hromones in our blood, and helps drive the attention on tasks with higher relevance. For example, if one wanted to learn a new language, dance form, musical instrument or even wanted to do something for a loved one. 

Some form of meditation not only helps to be more attentive but also works as a form of compassion driver (which we can really use a lot in today’s world but another post about it some other time). We all have the desire to stay connected to the world and be aware of our surroundings constantly. But it is necessary to slow down, take a step back and ask ourselves, do I really want to know about this? How does this affect my current state of being, am I looking for small shots of dopamine and losing out on the task that is at hand? Is there something important that I could be doing instead of this? Now I know asking all these questions is easy. Sometimes we even have an answer and still continue to do the same chores. The problem then is of effort and motivation and not understanding, which is another topic of discussion and is beyond the scope of this article. For now I will leave you will this thought and a quote from Blaise Pascal:

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone” 

Digital moralism

Every time i open a link for a news page, i am bombarded with news about the world that is either negative in its nature or is something deeply saddening. Before i know it, the animalistic guilt in me wants to click on it and read it otherwise in my own eyes i will be certified cold hearted, uncaring human with no respect or emotions for humanity and what is upon them. Therefore, my mind implores me to open the link not just to read it but to tell me to be sad over it (Even if my rational mind wants to be a little skeptical about the authenticity of the news), to forcefully react to it in my head and deem it as unacceptable and something that is deeply wrong. It’s as if a big eye is watching over me in my own head judging me for every reaction i make and how i behave. But we forget that eye is nothing but a reflection of our moral mind created by us and extremely influenced by the society around. We all are walking around with that eye above our shoulders. The one who is constantly watching us and through a feedback loop getting stronger, weaker depending on our reactions. Let me give you an example: you are scrolling through your news feed and you see picture of a puppy lying on the road after being hit by a car. Our natural reaction (or the moral reaction) SHOULD be to be sad over it! The image should elicit a feeling of disgust, along with empathy and a desire to help. However, all you can do is to look at the image and share it, get likes on it (or sad emoticons; the new invention by Facebook). But the reality might be that the page that showed it was probably getting paid by the advertising vultures which are praying on emotions of the so called traffic (groups of humans) on its page and using it to stockpile profits. Now if someone asks you who is worse: The person monetizing the picture or the person who just scrolls through without giving an emoticon to it? Who would you judge more? Of course the person who would scroll without giving an emoticon. Because that’s how our mind works, the fast system (irrational one) makes an instant judgement and marks that person as immoral. And the eye sitting on our own shoulders gives a pat on the back and says: see, he is immoral but you are not. So keep going nice human and react to the next image, post, story, etc (like a master training/petting the pet). You will get more morality points from me and you can keep increasing your chest by few cm each time you’re given a pat on the back by THE EYE. 

The truth is that people who really care about these issues are not sitting on their laptops scrolling through the daily binge news and reacting like a monkey on everything they see. Those people are out there and getting their hands dirty fighting for the causes on the ground level. Because that’s where the change happens! Sure you could tell yourself that by sharing a post you are making people more aware of it, but the reality it just like you are sitting behind a screen and sharing it and hoping that someone somewhere will take the responsibility of actually doing something about it, the people who see your post are imagining in the same. Hence welcome to the collective delusion!

So then why do we think that just by reacting it and satisfying our morality egos we will be okay to go on in our lives and every time we look in the mirror we will see an angel with wings helping the world (albeit by sharing posts). Have we become so shallow? That we ourselves decide if we are moral or not and gloat over it? 

If someone really wants to make a difference they will do it without having Facebook remind them of the causes that they SHOULD care about! Facebook cannot decide if you should care about a cause of not. Nor can anyone else. We all are born in different circumstances and depending on your environments, upbringing and other unknown factors, we care about different things.

I am not aware of any cause that was helped be solved by Facebook posts (except ministers saving stranded countrymen in a foreign land for their personal political glory, or the self-mutilating public showering challenges (for ALS). Where also we self-glorified ourselves by Proving to THE EYE and EYES of our ‘friends’ that we care!)

Some people are calling Facebook or virtual reality the new empathy machines. I would call it the virtual empathy machine. It’s just entertainment (even if it entertainment for our negative emotions). Just like the mice in cages which will die of giving themselves shocks rather than sit alone doing nothing, we all are machines programmed to avoid boredom. THIS ladies and gentlemen of the jury is the whole foundation principle of the entertainment industry. So as far as it stays entertainment it’s okay! The moment it tries to leap over and tries to be a digital messiah, it’s a problem. Because it’s trying to do what it was not supposed to, with keeping a curtain on the eyes of the people. Or by attracting their attention on something that THEY want you to see rather than what might be of more importance but something they cannot benefit from (just like in a magic show the magician uses a Beautiful distraction, who is a key part of the delusion). For this one reason, the digital world deeply vexes me, but then again until I am actively releasing rats in the server rooms of the digital shark conglomerates, I am not actually doing anything. But who knows, maybe one day....

Why so serious Jack? This post is supposed to be taken in humor and nothing else. 

Normalcy

While sitting here next to the Bodensee, It makes me wonder. I wonder about life… what to achieve, how to be great, how to do things that actually matter on a large scale? How to make a difference in the world? You might call it obsession or unhealthy addiction. But one of the things that I spend of the time thinking about is what are the ways that I can make a significant contribution in the world while my time here? What is my purpose in life and what am I on planet earth for? One can say that I might have a fixation on the idea of making a mark for myself to an extent which can easily be deemed borderline obsession. Whether that is wishing to do things that have never been done, write something that never has been written, create things that don’t yet exist or inspire and motivate the humanity to another level. In order to do that one must escape the circle of normalcy and enter the ocean of epicness. Which I believe lies on a different plane of the mind. One must go to depth of onself and find ideas, make deeper connections. The human mind works the best when given a reference point, and as Douglas Hofstader once famously said: analogy is the core of cognition; Using a reference point one can make novel connections to reach to ideas that have never had existed. Think of it this way, whenever I see things like life expectancy, ageing, food (not necessarily in the same sentence) my mind lights up about the role might food have in ageing. In order to do that one must put themselves in a surroundings where their minds are stimulated. The rest will be completed by curiosity. Oh yes curiosity is one of the most significant and crucial aspects of one’s personality. One might have desire, passion and motivation but without curiosity they are like an engine without fuel. Coming back to the point of novel connections, in situations where your mind is challenged to generate new ideas is the most fruitful way of reaching the point where you can find something truly extraordinary whether that is an idea or awakening. Challenge yourself! Escape the quotidian and be in the unusual and unexplored, seek novelty not normalcy and be in stay orbit. We all have been given a processor in our head. It is all about applying updates to our processors. Once one has found the door to such an orbit, one will automatically be in the steady presence; free from distraction of boredom. Which by fact is also one of the ways to remove boredom from one’s state of mind? As soon as you feel static, change the surroundings, talk to new group of people, some people you have never had thought of having a conversation before. Who knows what might come out of it. I get it, changing environments is tough, It is scary too! To move out of the comfort zone of the known and walk towards the realms of the unknown is like jumping out of a plane and hoping that during the fall you will build a parachute. But if we never take the jump how will we know if we can do it or not? Mavbe life is only this… Taking a fall and then building something on our way down to survive, until the thrill of it makes us get back up there to do it all over again!

But you might ask why should we do so much effort when we can just glide in life without shaking up too many things around us? But if you wanted that then you probably would not have been reading up until this point. You would have lost interest, if you reached this far it is only because your mind is curious to know, it wants to surpass the mundane and enter the extraordinary. Some people might tell themselves that we get one life, and better do everything one can before the system shuts down forever!

Why do we think we wasted our teenage years doing something that was useles?

Many times it happens that someone asks us what you did in your high school or early college and your mind suddenly goes into the consciously hidden memories deep in your hippocampus and brings out an image, the spark of which itself creates a feeling of not just emotional but physical pain and embarrassment. “Oh I did something completely useless” we yell. When the pain from this sudden burst of electrical shock starts to subside, we try and repackage the memory and hide it again until someone else entices it out again.

I am sure we all have at some point in our lives have used these same words. Should we really be carrying this burden of emotional memory with us always? Is it really our fault that we chose to do something that we now think was not worth it? Did we really waste that time doing what we did? Well the good thing is that it’s not completely true. Let’s start with the brain of young teenager vs the brain of an adult. It is certain now that some parts of a teenage brain are underdeveloped compared to that of an adult (except if you are Ra*ul G*ndhi, in that case its always underdeveloped). Specifically the prefrontal cortex- which is the execution decision making part. The part that is most involved with rational thinking and logical decision making. This part of the brain lights up when one is given a task related to rational thinking or during logic games. Anyhow, for teenagers this part is highly underdeveloped or is still being developed. Until an individual has reached 25 years of age, this part is always under constant development. It is likely that before this age, we are not really capable of rational decision making (I wonder why we are still allowed to vote under this age. Or to marry. Etc.). Hence any major life decision that you made before that age is likely to look like idiotic or stupid now in hindsight. So if you decided to study philosophy or social studies when you were 20, when you think you should have studies music or arts, don’t worry! The decision was not purely rational and you are not to blame yourself for it. It is just that you were highly incapable of making that decision at that moment of your life. Probably you took that decision because you were a rebel and believed in doing something ‘different’, or you believed in conspiracy theories about science and technology or mathematics being the source of all evil, it is also possible that you studied it because you saw a hot girl/boy in that class who you really liked and took the course just to be in their company (like the genius Richard Feynman did). Oh and maybe because you thought it is the easiest and everything else was close to sorcery. It is also possible you took it because all your ‘friends’ were doing the same. This is called collective delusion (some people even get married like that. Oh humanity!). Whatever your reason was, we all have been there and done that. We all have taken naive decisions that we now regret. But like I said before, our brains were wired differently back then. The question here to ask is that knowing everything about these differences in the psychology of young minds why is our education system build up in the way it is? Why is it so rigid? Is a teenager really capable of making such a major decision about the topic of study for whole of his/her life? Why do we put doors in front of teenagers and ask them to choose one while knowing that probably that there is no coming back from it. Do we really want kids to live with a decision they took when probably they were not even aware why they are taking it? 

So here are my two cents on the topic: chill! The time you probably think you wasted on something is the time you spent learning about yourself, what you like, what you don’t like, where you don’t see yourself, what sort of a person inspires you etc. You spent this time probably meeting new people and making lifelong friends. You could also have spent this time learning about the world and how you were wrong about certain things and change your opinion about them. No one is judging you here so stop doing that to yourself also! Would you rather be in jail? Or working for Donald Trump’s presidency campaign? (I don’t know which is worse). Of course you will feel there were so many things you could have done. But remember, the fact that you are saying this is because you are not the same anymore. You probably have changed; have become more responsible and matured. Hopefully your decisions are more rational now. So go on live your life the way you always wanted. Or at least work towards it. Now you have got no excuses or reasons (biological at least) for making the same irrational mistakes. And if someone asks you the same question in future, remember this fact and answer with confidence and not embarrassment! like a prudent man once said, whenever in doubt trust biology!