Imagine being behind the wheel of a brand-new self-driving vehicle sometime in the future. It is not fully autonomous, but the car does 90 percent of the driving. At the same time, you are the driver, the supervisor overseeing it all, who can take the wheel the remaining 10 percent of the time when needed. 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 response 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. Our self-driving system 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 occur.
In the human vehicle, the driver has executive circuitry, allowing them to process what the self-driving system is doing and step in if necessary. Throughout our early life, the supervisor is actively involved with driving, helping to wire the automatic system that will 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 while we do our best to hang on. Because the driver helped to wire our self-driving responses, they take on more of a passive role in adulthood, rarely interjecting, just sleeping at the wheel as the vehicle drives unattended.
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 greater 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.
Every chapter is designed to be only five minutes long and available in written or audio formats, making it easier to digest. The first few chapters are heavy as they build a foundation for the rest of the book. Hang on; it only gets better as you read, and eventually, you will not want to stop reading. 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.