My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.
—William James
It’s finally winter break; you and four friends pile into the car to take a road trip for a long-awaited weekend of skiing and snowboarding (and general shenanigans). It will be well past midnight before you arrive, but your crew will be set to hit the slopes first thing in the morning.
You and your friends decided to take turns driving, and you drew the late shift and now find yourself maneuvering an unfamiliar two-lane road, winding precipitously to the top of the mountain. A recent heavy snow is promising for tomorrow’s adventures but less ideal for a dark night at the wheel. The only light comes from your car’s headlights, which occasionally illuminate snow-capped signs warning you to watch out for falling rocks, and every so often reflect off a guardrail that seems far too small to keep you from plunging over the precipice into the valley below. The stereo is on full blast and your friends are chatting loudly, but you just peer forward, taking deep breaths and occasionally using your sleeve to wipe moisture from the window.
Thankfully (and with no small measure of relief), you make it safely to your cabin. The next morning at breakfast, something strange happens. While your friends are all cracking up over the conversation from late last night, you draw a complete blank. How is it possible that you were in the car with them the whole time but the only things you recall are snow and nerves?
It’s because, as William James put it, your experience is what you agree to attend to—and you were attending to different things (like not dying). While your friends focused on the conversation, your mind was locked in dead ahead, hands tightly gripping the steering wheel and eyes peering intensely at whatever was illuminated by your headlights. You were directing your attention, and in turn your attention shaped your experience. Whether it’s on a nerve-racking midnight drive or a normal day on campus, where you focus your attention is key to how you navigate your life.
Fortunately, not all of life is a nonstop, white-knuckled, heart-pounding drive through blizzards (at least we hope not). Most days we just walk down the street with plenty of sensory information competing for our attention—people, traffic, ads, smells, and music being just a few.
But while your senses tend to be casual observers of the world, certain encounters can be so overwhelming that they appear to be seared into your brain. Like the time you glanced directly at the sun, and that big ball of fire burned itself right into your retinas. For a few moments, whether you kept your eyes open or closed, your vision was tinged by an afterimage of the sun. A similar phenomenon happens with our attention, and it’s called the Tetris effect.
In Tetris, the most popular video game of all time (and one of the most addictive), different-shaped blocks fall from the top of your screen, and your goal is to fit them into horizontal lines. Every time you complete a line, it disappears. More shapes fall, you make more lines, and your life is slowly overtaken by colorful little pixels. It’s a simple concept, but 425 million downloads can’t be wrong.
In a study that sounds pretty pleasant to participate in (it beats getting low-grade electric shocks or being told horrible news just so the experimenters can watch your reaction), college students were paid to play the game for several hours each day over the course of a week. It turned out that the longer they played, the more deeply the game lodged itself in the participants’ minds. Users imagined blocks as they went to sleep and started visualizing things in everyday life that could be connected into a single, Tetris-like horizontal line. One participant reported snapping out of a near-trance to find herself rearranging cereal boxes in grocery stores, and visualizing the rotation of certain buildings to fit between others as she gazed at the city skyline. In other words, intense and lengthy sessions of Tetris not only shaped the study participants’ attention while they were playing the game, but also spilled over into their everyday interactions with the world around them.
You may be exposed to a huge variety of stimuli every day, and most will fade quickly. Yet similar to the afterimage of the sun or Tetris, the places where you focus your attention intently—the terrible grade you just received or the great date you are walking home from (the next morning)—will also stick in your mind. When we give our attention to a particular experience, our focus will shape the way we see, think, feel, and experience life.
The morning after you arrive on the mountain, you’re riding up the ski lift (feeling very lucky to be alive) when you notice something interesting: even though the slopes are hundreds of feet wide, most skiers seem to follow just a few narrow tracks. Why don’t they spread out and enjoy the open space? Then you recall your own experience sledding as a kid: you always barreled down the well-traveled tracks because they were way faster than trying to plow through the untouched snow. Turns out that your brain works the same way. As neuroscientist Norman Doidge illustrates in his marvelous book The Brain That Changes Itself, the more we revisit a path (think multiple hours of Tetris), the more likely our brain is to repeat the pattern. We have control over the design of our brain’s highway system. Changing our thoughts and behaviors leads to physical, concrete differences in our brains and influences those thoughts and behaviors to come (like setting up a path down the ski slope). Thirty years ago, that idea would have gotten you laughed out of a room (well, not any room, but definitely a room full of neuroscientists). Today, it’s a fact.
The cells that transmit information in the brain are called neurons. When a neuron “fires,” it transmits an electric impulse along its length to the next one, and so on, until the message gets where it’s going. Like the snowy track that gets increasingly packed (and correspondingly faster) with every ski, snowboard, or sled that hits it, neurons that fire together, wire together. Every time we focus our attention on the same things, think in the same patterns, or take the same actions, those same neurons fire, and once fired, they trigger thousands of other neurons. The more they fire, the more neurons they become wired to, and before we know it, we’re repeating the actions without even thinking about them. This type of automatic cruise control is what makes you always put on your left shoe before your right, or always fasten your seat belt before turning on the engine when you get into the driver’s seat.
Thanks to the phenomenon called neuroplasticity, our brains’ superhighway can be expanded and rerouted at any point in our life. Don’t get us wrong—it’s not a simple process. Change isn’t always easy, but it is always possible. (We’ll coach you through the process in chapter 4, “Mindsets: Maximizing Your Mental Makeup.”)
The great E. L. Doctorow once compared writing a novel to driving at night, observing: “You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” College is much the same—you choose where to train your headlights, which path to illuminate, as you steadily make your way to the happy ending you want.
In this section we want to set your inner GPS for the most epic four-year road trip of your life. We will share the best techniques for honing your attention and building your resilience. You’ll discover willpower’s best-kept secret and how to hack it. Most important of all, we’ll alert you to the potential rockslides, potholes, and hairpin turns as your journey progresses, and show you how to reclaim your sanity when you feel like you are about to lose it—or feel like you already have.