Why Saying Yes or No Makes All The Difference

As told in the book The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks by Mariano Sigman a vegetative patient was taught to say yes or no to some questions based on whether they imagined themselves playing tennis or walking through their house. Doctors could then observe the areas of the brain activated (playing tennis and walking activate different regions of the brain) and decide if the patient was conscious or not.

This and similar experiments makes one think of the nature of decision making more so given that most if not all of our choices are yes or no situations. The fact that the brain can understand a yes decision to mean playing tennis almost certainly means whenever we decide on something we can model the consequences of our choices well into the future.

Deciding to party the whole weekend or to waste money and time, for instance, implies that the brain is at least comfortable with the future it has foreseen and at the same time saying no means that the mind wants to stick with the things it is currently attending to.

This fact provides a potent method of changing our behaviour because if the brain already has an elaborate image of the consequences of our decisions, then we can purposefully interrogate our yes and no decisions to make them more aligned with our long time goals.

You want to ask yourself is it worth it? What’s the alternative? What is it that I gain from this?

Doing this has the added advantage of making sure that you will build up a history of good decisions such that when it comes to deciding, your brain will automatically make the right ones.

Here are some of the decisions for which you should strive to have predetermined choices.

· Save rather than spend at least most of the time

· Persist in what you are doing rather than quit

· Choose to live within your means

· Whenever an opportunity presents itself choose to learn and improve

· Be a better person

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Mateo Ngatia

I'm Mateo Ngatia. A full time Content Developer who enjoys sharing two rules to live by on a daily basis. It is mostly a fun thing, that reminds us that living is serious business no matter what you do .

Website: http://2rules2liveby.blogspot/