Author: Derek Beres / Source: Big Think
- Willingness to roll with the punches is an essential component of good mental health.
- An inability to foresee a range of consequences adversely affects emotional responses.
- A good contingency plan makes all the differences, argues neuroscience professor Kelly Lambert.
When planning for the future, what degree of certainty do you have in the plans you’ve mentally constructed? If these plans do not manifest as envisioned, what is your strategy for dealing with an unforeseen reality? Do you rebel against the circumstances or adjust along the way? Are you willing to scrap everything as new opportunities (or roadblocks) present themselves? How strong are your contingency plans?
Contingency: A future event or circumstance that is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty.
The very noun University of Richmond professor of behavioral neuroscience, Kelly Lambert, uses as the foundation of her latest book. In Well Grounded: The Neurobiology of Rational Decisions, she investigates the neurological distance between healthy contingency calculations and poor decision-making, whether due to mental illness, drug addiction, poverty, privilege, or reduced attentional capacities.
We all rely on personal history to make decisions, whether or not that works out well for us. Well Grounded is a lesson plan for better decision-making.
Lambert travels through the last century of psychology and neuroscience, diving deep into behaviorism, in putting forward her case.
Dualism is an often-cited error in many neuroscience books; Lambert sets the stage by reminding us that our environment is an essential component of our mindset. While our mind is not separate from our bodies, our surroundings are an integral aspect in decision-making. Modern cities and suburbs are not conducive to creating positive contingency calculations.Our view of prosperity in contemporary Western societies with creature comforts such as lush surroundings and various personal services to avoid physical effort may suffocate our neural functions.
I’m currently reading a history of Luddism in preparation for my next book, Anatomy of Distraction, which investigates the physiological and anatomical consequences of distraction technologies. Since the Industrial Revolution we’ve programmed devices with a disturbing amount of agency (better put, stealing away our agency) by offloading memory, critical thinking,…
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