Dan Gilbert, a Harvard Psychologist, gave a TED talk on “synthesized happiness.”​

​In this talk, Dan reminds us of a powerful quality of our brain:

“Pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don’t make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It’s a marvelous adaptation.” (TED talk, February, 2004)

The idea of thinking of our mind as an experience simulator resonates so strongly with me, all the way. It’s reminder that our mind is a content-generating machine that is creating all types content on and on. It’s a reminder that our mind is pattern-making machine that is constantly coming up with thinking-patterns, action-patterns, meaning-patterns, relating-patterns and many more. It’s a reminder that our mind also has this incredible capacity to create experiences as if they’re happening right now, right here, based on past ones.

Think about these two scenarios:

• Scenario 1: Let’s say that on a sunny day, you’re walking in the streets of your neighborhood and you see a mom & pop book store. You decide to take a peek at it; so you walk, smile at the person at the front desk, start wandering through the bookshelves and see the classic sections – cooking, gardening, personal growth, business… And then you see a tiny section on traveling. You walk fast towards that aisle – because it reminds you of your upcoming vacation. You grab a book that looks interesting because of all the colors on its cover; turns out, it’s a book about Bolivia. You flip through the pages, read about Salar de Uyuni, the Bolivian flat salts, and see the many shades of blue, pink, red, and white in every picture. You read about the high temperature during the summer, the different types of birds you will see, the hotels made of salt that are around, the types of vans that are driven in that area, the best restaurants in which to have local food.
• Scenario 2: I bump into you, we haven’t seen each other in a while, so we’re catching up about our families, work, projects, and much more; and as the conversation unfolds, I share with you that I’m trying a new recipe for dinner blending dry cat food and chicken!

Any reactions? Did you get an impression of how it may feel to be in the Salar de Uyuni? Did you make a face when thinking about putting together dry cat food and chicken?

There is no right or wrong way to react to these images; each one of us will have a unique experience of them.

However, regardless of the intensity and type of reaction you had when reading about those scenarios, your mind was doing something that it naturally does: simulating an experience based on previous information – how it feels to be under the sun, how different colors look like, old news about South America, the texture of cat dry food, the flavor of chicken, and so on.

Even though you weren’t in the Salar de Uyuni or have never tried dry cat food and chicken, your brain foresee, anticipate, and predict how those experiences would be. Isn’t it fascinating how our brain works?​

Our brain not only is a content-generating, pattern-making machine, but it’s also an experience-creating machine.

​This is exactly what happens when worry kicks in; our brain – like a worry simulator – comes up with a laundry list of gloom-and-doom scenarios. Naturally, we play-it-safe by anticipating, predicting, and imagining all negative possibilities and next thing we know, we organize our behavior accordingly.

For instance, Gemma was applying for a summer internship; she worked very hard on her application essays, asked her mentors to read them, prepared supplemental questions, and researched carefully the agencies she was applying to. Gemma couldn’t stop thinking, “I probably won’t get any position, people won’t read my essays, I won’t get a decent job, and I’ll never be independent; The more that she thought about these possibilities, the more she asked others to review her application.

Gemma’s playing-it-safe move was over-preparing for a potential failure, bad outcomes, and other awful things, that despite all her efforts, it was keeping her stuck in her head.

You may tell yourself that by paying attention to potential negative outcomes you’re protecting yourself from painful surprises, but you might actually miss seeing the entirety of a situation with all its layers, colors, and shapes

So, at the end of this post, I want to invite you to try a couple of things:​

• Remember to see your thoughts as thoughts, not as inevitable truths of what’s happening next.​
• Do your best to stay in the present as it is and as it’s happening, not as your mind is telling you it is.​
• Remember that your mind is an old device and acts more like a content-generating, pattern-making, and experience-creating machine, not as a source of 100% truth.