Our Despicable Brains: how to harness the power of our unconscious “Minions”
TL;DR: Our conscious mind is like Gru from Despicable Me, and our unconscious thought processes are like Gru’s Minions that, with the right approach and techniques, we can learn how to tap into to come up with ideas.
Why are our brains despicable? Ask a cognitive neuroscientist, behavioral economist, or evolutionary psychologist and let them count the ways. They can all tell us how flawed our brains are, whether it’s due to nature, nurture, genes, memes, biases or social heuristics, and how they’ve failed to keep pace with the pace of social, technological, economic, or political change we’ve created for ourselves. Whether we’re committing Descartes’ Error, being Predictably Irrational, Thinking, Fast and Slow, failing to spot The Invisible Gorilla, or falling prey to The Selfish Gene, it’s fair to say that the human brain, in the sage words of Brian Wilson, “just wasn’t made for these times.”
At the same time, many scientists agree with Michio Kaku’s statement that “Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.” No existing technology comes even remotely close to the incredible learning, adaptive, information processing and communication skills of an infant, never mind the energy efficiency of the human brain.
What if the animated film Despicable Me offers a hint at how we might reconcile this seeming paradox? Could it offer clues to how we might tap into the deep power of the most complicated computer in the universe, that squishy gray blob of roughly 86 billion neurons between our ears, while also navigating the evolutionary bugs in our mental operating systems?
I think Despicable Me offers a great analogy to the relationship between our conscious and unconscious thought processes.
For those of you unfamiliar, Despicable Me is a hilarious animated film featuring the exploits of Gru, voiced by Steve Carell, an aspiring evil super genius hell bent on taking over the world. Fortunately, Gru is not alone on his quest for world domination — he’s got an army of “Minions” at his disposal. The Minions, adorable yellow creatures that speak a made-up language and get into all sorts of ridiculous mischief, number in the hundreds or thousands (it’s not totally clear just how many of them Gru employs) and have sworn allegiance to helping Gru fulfill his evil aspirations. If you haven’t seen any of the Despicable Me movies, including the Minions backstory, I strongly recommend checking them out. They’re LOL funny, genuinely heartwarming, and delightfully clever movies.
Here’s my take: Gru is like our conscious thoughts — our working memory, and the Minions are like our unconscious thought processes — the far more powerful mental engine we all have at our disposal.
Neuroscience tells us that we’re only consciously aware of around 5% of our thoughts, so how can we make better use of the other 95%? How might we be more like Gru and tap into the incredible power of our (unconscious) Minions? I’m no expert, but as any unaccredited mad scientist would do, I’ve been running a lot of experiments on myself over the past couple of years in an attempt to learn how to train my Minions and have some thoughts to share.
The essential guide to care and feeding of your minions
Yes, your Minions are part of your brain, so they are part of you. Yes, I know this might sound more than a little simplistic. Or insane. Or both. Point is, our unconscious mind is kinda like a really smart but totally neurotic roommate that we were paired with at birth. Most of us try to peacefully co-exist with the anxious know-it-all, some of us bend over backwards to their every fleeting whim and weird demands, but I believe that we can actually find a way to become wonder-twin-powers-activate-style BFFs with this roommate (or thousands of roommates as the case may be) of ours. In any event, here are three key tips to a happy, healthy relationship with happy, healthy Minions:
- Minions thrive on questions! Open-ended questions are minions’ favorite, the more diverse the better. Just like the healthiest human diets, the most nutritious questions for Minions are diverse (in color, texture, flavor, etc.) and dense (packed with all sorts of healthy vitamins and minerals). Feed your minions on a steady diet of new experiences, new ideas and information, new people and points of view, and a heaping serving of open-ended questions and they will thrive.
- Minions never sleep, and are actually even more active while you sleep, daydream or meditate. Minions also love flow states.
- You can never overwork your Minions — to keep them healthy, remember that a well-read minion is a well-fed minion.
- Experiment! Try different approaches to working with your Minions. I’m constantly testing and iterating on new and different ways of using combinatory play, question storming, incubation, meditation, and all sorts of creativity techniques to engage my Minions. They sure love variety in their diet and exercise!
- Finally, find ways to express gratitude for the awesomeness of your Minions. I’m not suggesting you build a shrine or anything, but I find it to be helpful to say “thanks, Minions!” when those shower thoughts pop into my head…when I magically come up with seriously nerdy answers at trivia night…and when those rare, but super exciting ideas come into my awareness as if by magic. It’s my way of doing what I can to be as consciously aware, mindful of and grateful for the “most complex object in the known universe” that is the human brain.
Based on my experience so far, I can personally recommend doing whatever you can to try to feed, exercise, work and play with your Minions. I’m ever-hopeful that more of us can find new and better ways to harness the power of our Minions and maybe, just maybe, we might make our brains just a little less despicable.
Resources:
As with anything this complex, there’s no single guidebook to the proper care and feeding of your Minions. I’ve included a few recommendations below to get started and, hopefully, feed your Minions some tasty morsels!
