Help Your Brain Learn

Your brain primarily exists to keep you alive, not to think.

Your brain doesn’t exist mainly to engage in cognition – instead, it operates principally to keep your body alive by regulating its functions. It acts like an orchestra conductor, coordinating your body’s activities as efficiently as possible to maintain allostasis – regulation amid various demands and stressors. The brain predicts what the body will do and instantly allocates resources to prepare for those actions, all at an unconscious level.

You may believe you’re sensing the world as it exists and then reacting to it, but instead, your brain is simply making predictions; then, it rapidly creates changes in your body to support the responses it expects. Before...