Imagine being sometime in the future, and you are behind the wheel of a brand-new self-driving vehicle. It is not fully autonomous, but the car will do 90 percent of the driving. At the same time, you are the driver, acting as the supervisor overseeing it all, only taking the wheel when necessary. The self-driving vehicle and the driver inside work as one to navigate the roadway safely. Under normal conditions, you will sit back with your hands at your side as the car drives independently. As the driver, you only have to jump in when the vehicle cannot handle the conditions or if you want to be the one driving.
When driving, the vehicle takes in information from sensors, automatically adjusting the steering wheel, gas, and brakes based on what it processes. As the driver, you have no say in its initial responses but feel the result of every decision. The vehicle uses an artificial network tuned through experience to be able to drive the car. The network has the goal of navigating the roadway safely and a way to measure success, and from that, it learns to drive on its own.
The human body uses a similar design, with an automatic self-driving system performing 90 percent of the driving and a conscious driver supervising it all. We have a self-driving system that responds using survival, intuitive, and default mode circuits that all fire outside driver awareness. These circuits are provided at birth and embellished through experience, becoming the automatic responses that drive us. These self-driving circuits process information, using our sympathetic acceleration or parasympathetic brake to respond. As the driver, we experience the result of these responses but can only intervene after they happen.
In the human vehicle, the driver has executive circuitry, allowing them to process what it does and step in if necessary. As the supervisor, the driver helps wire the self-driving system to drive us. In adulthood, you sit back and relax as you have successfully wired a network that can drive itself. For most, we unknowingly wire our self-driving vehicle to be a chronic accelerator that drives like a maniac, and we do our best to hang on. Because the driver helped to wire our self-driving responses, they take on a passive role, rarely interjecting, as they sleep at the wheel and let the vehicle do its thing.
The Self-Driving You is about learning how to wake our driver to observe the self-driving system closer and take the wheel from it more often in corrective action. The secret power within all of us is deliberate attention; that is how we wake up the driver and take the wheel from the self-driving system. When we use deliberate attention, we are wiring circuits in real-time that become our self-driving responses with repetition. By strategically using attention, especially through mindfulness, we can take the wheel and rewire our vehicle to drive us better. At any time in our lives, we can take the wheel with attention to wire the circuits we want for success and well-being.
This blog is a driver’s manual for our self-driving vehicle. It uses science to explain the brain and how anyone can use their driver to wire their potential. It brings information from over 500 books on neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and meditation to be your one-stop shop for understanding why you are the way you are and how anyone can make the most of it. The goal is to wake our driver within to challenge our self-driving responses and take the wheel to drive towards the life we want. Buckle your seat belts as we provide a starting point for how anyone can use their driver to apply the brakes and recalibrate their vehicle for success and well-being.