Peak Mind by Amishi P. Jha

Author:Amishi P. Jha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2021-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Power of a Story

One of the motivating reasons I wanted to work with military service members was exactly that: I wanted to know if we could help them not only to pay attention better, but also to be more discerning and situationally aware. Situational awareness—the mental state of constantly knowing what’s going on around you—is critical for people in a variety of professions, including police and first responders. Could mindfulness training, I wondered, help soldiers (or anyone) come into situations less susceptible to biased thinking so they could see more clearly, be less reactive, and respond appropriately and proportionately?

Our prediction was yes, because of how mindfulness practice guides you to use your attention: in the present moment, without judgment, elaboration, or reactivity. In other words: without making up a story about what you’re experiencing.

Sometimes a story is given to us and we quickly accept it—like the soldiers and the expected insurgent camp. Other times we arrive at the story ourselves, through our own mental simulation. We are incessantly concocting narratives about what might happen in an hour, or tomorrow, or about what others are thinking or feeling, or about their motivations. We visualize options and courses of action. We imagine how events might play out so that we can be more prepared; we troubleshoot various possibilities: If she says x, should I reply y or z? If that road is closed, what detour will I take? If the schools reopen while COVID cases are still high and new variants are emerging, will we send our kids? To visualize the possible answers to such questions, you create a whole world in your mind, with sensory details, characters, plot lines, and sometimes even dialogue. You experience emotions in response to this world you’ve created—it makes you feel sad, or anxious, or satisfied—and those feelings help you make decisions about what you may choose to do next.

We use simulations to arrive at mental models that guide our thinking, decision making, and actions. This is really what I mean when I say “story.” You come up with these mental models, or “stories,” rapidly and constantly—you simulate, arrive at one, then use it and move on; or you receive new information that causes you to update or dump that story and simulate a different one. The key ingredients for your simulations? Memories of episodes you have experienced in your life, fragments of these memories, plus everything else you have learned and remember. Add to the mix your capacity to think, reason, and forecast, and voilà—a freshly simulated new story!

The simulation process is vivid, detail-rich, and captivating, and the mental model requires our attention and working memory to come alive. But it also puts heavy demands on these limited capacity systems. That’s part of the reason stories are so powerful: they can become a kind of “shorthand” for efficiently framing and maintaining a situation, problem, or plan in mind—and this efficiency helps free up cognitive resources to do other things. But (there’s always a but) stories also constrain information processing.

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