Chapter
3
This Is Your Brain
The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.
Your brain is the most powerful computer in existence. But it’s not at all like the computers we’re familiar with, and in fact it has some really odd peculiarities that can either trip you up or propel you to greatness. So in this chapter, we’re going to take a quick look at how your brain works.
We’ll see where intuition comes from, begin to look at harnessing it better to become more expert, and learn why a lot of things that perhaps you think “don’t matter” turn out to be absolutely critical to your success.
Since we’re pretty familiar with computers, it seems useful to talk about the brain and its cognitive processes as if they were designed as a computer system.
But that’s just a metaphor. The brain is not a mechanical device; it’s not a computer. You aren’t programmable. Unlike a computer, you can’t even perform the same action exactly the same way twice.
That’s not just a hardware problem; it has nothing to do with muscles. It’s a software problem. The brain actually plans out your motion slightly differently each and every time, much to the chagrin of golfers, pitchers, and bowlers.[26]
The brain is a horrifically complicated squishy lump of stuff. It’s so complicated that it has a very hard time analyzing and studying itself. So, please remember that this is just an analogy—but I hope a helpful one.
With that said: Your brain is configured as a dual-CPU, single-master bus design, as shown in Figure 5, This is your brain.
As we’ll see in this chapter and the next, this dual design presents some problems, but it also presents some terrific opportunities that you might not be aware of.
Figure 5. This is your brain