This is about me. But it’s also about brain science. So, par for the course.

I have been thinking about the idea that the more you think a thought, the more it gets reinforced in your head and the easier it is to think again.

This is not a poetic truth or a pop psych truism, this is solid science. It has been observed in action. This is literally how our brain works. Thoughts, memories, emotional responses, and so forth get reinforced by every repetition.

In old timey pre-1950s psychology they used to call this “canalization”, which suggests that they knew what was going on even if they had some odd ideas about the mechanism. It is a simple idea which seems intuitively obvious once someone tells you about it, but it has a lot of very potent consequences.

For example, traumatic memory, as in PTSD. To use a variant on the canal metaphor, the traumatic event digs an incredibly deep groove into your memory because our brains are programmed to assume that the higher the level of emotional response, good or bad, the more important the event is and therefore the deeper that groove should be.

It’s not to imagine why. In the state of nature, the things with the highest emotional response (like finding a field full of tasty mushrooms or getting chased by a tiger) were indeed the most to remember and remember very well.

But in modern life, one can have all kinds of highly emotional events that honestly have no lesson to teach and that frankly are of no use to our future survival, but end up with the enormous emotional groove anyhow.

Thus, our poor minds try to create a lesson out of the experience anyhow, and create the kind of aversion or attraction that is its best guess as to how to avoid the danger or find the pleasure in the future, and that is how we end up with phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual kinks, and so on.

Then take depression. (Please.) The chemical imbalance that is inherent to depression warps the patient’s thoughts towards the negative, and the repeated negative thoughts dig their own grooves, which over time become quite deep.

Thus, negative thoughts become the easiest to think. Positive thoughts take so much more mental and/or emotional energy than negative that our energy-efficient minds just ignore them or even actively suppress them.

We develop a kind of fear of positive, happy thoughts, and treat them as though they are inherently treacherous, just waiting to lull us into false hope so they can dash them to the ground once more.

This is what it is easiest for the patient’s mind to think. Better to never rise than to ever fall. Better to never try than to ever fail. Better stable suffering than unstable healing.

This is what makes recovery so difficult. The negative thoughts are the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance is the default mode of all minds. Most of the time, we think whatever is easiest to think at the time.

And for some people, people without the metacognitive powers to even imagine that there are other paths, the path of least resistance is the only one they know. They just think whatever is easiest to think, and never even try to forge a new path of least resistance by deliberately forcing oneself to think new thoughts over and over until they can compete with the previous path of least resistance, and the person can jump the gap into a new way of thinking and feeling.

This, then, is a brain based argument for open-mindedness. Keeping an open mind is not always easy. The path of least resistance is always very attractive. How easy it would be to just stop thinking and just go with the flow.

This is, incidentally, why it is so hard to “deprogram” a cult member. They have completely given up on real thought and ceded all their thinking duties to the cult and its leader. Their mind really does not want to have to start to think and worry and be open to confusion or doubt again. They have known the freedom of the slave, the freedom from responsibility for oneself, and this can be extremely addictive, especially for people who grew up in a strongly religious community and long for the type of certainty and reassurance that comes from that kind of faith.

But I am no cult member. I would make a very poor one. My curse/gift is the ever-inquisitive mind that has to understand things before it can accept them. It is a mind incapable of faith, which is often defined as the acceptance of things without understanding them or testing them.

I am, however, a mentally ill person. I suffer from major depression, and I have spent a long long time thinking very negative thoughts about myself and my place in the world. I spent a long time thinking I was useless, worthless, incompetent, and a sickly burden on any unlucky enough to care about me.

and those thoughts are still the deeper groove in my mind. They are the easier thoughts to think, the path of least resistance. I have been bolstering myself with all the positive thoughts I can get my hands on, but the negative things are, for now, still easier to think.

But I have a weapon for burning through the old groove’s walls and forging new paths : a white-hot blade of pure rage, capable of cutting through anything between it and healthy, happy flesh.

It isn’t a reasoned thing. I did not choose this path rationally. It is entirely emotional, a deep cry from the healthy part of me that it is goddamned sick and tired of this depression bullshit and now it is fighting back, no matter what.

This is not an easy path. It is, in fact, the harder path, the shallower groove. But I now know that it is possible to forge new paths that lead out of my rut and into a much groovier groove. I will not stop fighting until happiness is the path of least resistance for a change.

As for the old paths, here’s the thing : Unused paths grow over and disappear.

So fuck you, old paths. You don’t lead anywhere I need to go. I am making my own way now and I don’t care what happens to me as a result because I am never, ever going back.

That’s it from me today, folks. Talk to you later!