The benefits of flexible thinking
The benefits of flexible thinking
Made in partnership with The Open University, with OU consultant Dr Volker Patent DR VOLKER PATENT, Chartered Psychologist, The Open University: To become psychologically flexible is more than just addressing personality. It's actually addressing the way we really relate to ourselves. DR LISA FELDMAN BARRETT, Neuroscientist & Psychologist, Northeastern University: Flexibility is the ability to adjust your thoughts, actions and feelings to the circumstances you find yourself in. Situations change, and so it's important to be able to adjust and behave in the most functional way to achieve your goals. CAPTION: THE BENEFITS OF FLEXIBLE THINKING DR LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: When you're born, your brain is not finished. Infant brains are born under construction. They're waiting for a set of wiring instructions from the world. If you expose your children to a lot of varying experiences then you're basically wiring your child's brain to function in a flexible way and to learn new things when necessary. If your child's experiences are very restricted then your child will have less flexibility to adjust their actions to the situations that they're in. DR VOLKER PATENT: There's a really well-known demonstration of flexibility called the Stroop test. A sequence of words, such as red, green, yellow, blue but written in different colours. When you present people with a whole list of these you find that it takes people longer to name the colour of the ink when the word is written in a colour that is different to the actual word. The idea behind that is in order to be able to name the colour requires people to switch between different pieces of information in their mind. In simple terms, what happens is that when they scan the word colour the automatic processes of reading the word interfere with the person's ability to state the colour out loud. The more difficult people find this generally the less cognitively flexible they are. DR LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: When your brain can't predict something, or when you have to take in new information that you didn't predict, that's what we call learning. So your brain can update, it can learn, or your brain can ignore the sense data and just go with its own prediction. Flexibility means tailoring a response to the specific situation, either by predicting well or by learning when there is prediction error. DR VOLKER PATENT: A lot of what psychological flexibility is about is the way in which people use resources that they have available in dealing with stress. One of the things about psychological inflexibility is that people are not using their resources in a way that's helpful to them. Quite often they're using a very narrow range of their resources to be able to adapt. And the idea in psychological flexibility is really to move people from a state of what psychologists call languishing, of being stuck in a less than satisfactory situation, to move them out of that zone into a zone of achieving more of their potential. What stops people from changing their lives from a state of low satisfaction to one of higher satisfaction is quite often to do with inflexibility in the way they approach the problem that they're facing. DR LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: So there's a really deep lesson here. You can take more control over your environment. You are not just a passive recipient of whatever the world gives you. Spending time cultivating experiences and foraging for new information is an investment in maintaining a flexible brain. These are all opportunities to expose yourself to prediction error so that your brain can solve problems more flexibly in the future. So exposing yourself to stuff you don't know, and maybe even ideas you don't like, might make you feel crappy in the moment but actually it is a really good investment.