The prompt is “My Brain’s Secret Life”. Think of it as a research project on your own mind.

Almost every second of our lives is filled with thoughts. They come and go at lightning speed, messy, unformed, unnoticed, unfinished. They can take many forms: shreds of sentences, words, images, places, faces, feelings, emotions. They can trigger one another, like a never-ending chain of dominoes, they can produce associations or ignite memories. Some stick to the point of obsession and discomfort, some – the vast majority – disappear without a trace. It is your job to capture them. Pay attention to your mind. Catch fleeting thoughts as they are fading, slow them down, and ask yourself “why did I think that?”. Force yourself to finish thoughts that are left unfinished. Break them down to base elements. Analyze them, like scientists analyze the world. This is not the way you normally handle thoughts – but it can be trained. What did I just feel? Why did I experience this? Why did I just think of something seemingly unrelated? Why did I just use this phrase? Where did I learn this? Why do I have this habit? It helps you understand what’s going on under the hood of your brain. It takes practice, but once you are good at it, it’s worth it. There’s another word for it: mindfulness. Mindfulness is essentially awareness of your mind. What I ask you to do is exercise that awareness and treat it with scientific precision.

Some examples of what can be done here. One student from a previous year wrote a fantastic essay using a game she called “Don’t look right”. She would be going about her day and then suddenly force herself to not look right. She would try to remember everything that’s there, and then check to see how much she missed. It always seemed as if she knew the room very well, but inevitably it turned out she was missing almost every detail, except, she observed, the things she had previously interacted with.

Another student wrote an essay about music perception, where she analyzed why she liked particular kinds of music and disliked others. She tried to understand why some songs get stuck in her head, so she did some reading on the reward system of the brain, and related it to her own experience. She correctly guessed that “earworms” are a form of brain’s self-stimulation, which happens more often when you are bored. It also explains what songs, or rather moments of songs, get stuck in your head – the moments that had previously caused you a moment of pleasure. The brain is trying to get some more of that pleasure, which you experience as a song playing in your head.

Other people wrote about bilingualism and how their personality changes in different languages; food cravings and their patterns through several weeks of observation; filler words and how their frequency changes depending on mood and confidence; cognitive distortions experienced when playing poker; the staple New York habit of jaywalking and how it works in other cities, and so on. There are endless possibilities and as always I encourage you to think outside the box. Start thinking about it now – the best essays are based on long-term observations.

One topic that I want to address specifically is the reward system, which will be the focus of our next class. I have mentioned it to many of you in private conversations and in comments to your group projects, because dopamine and reward are by far the most common subject that people pick in both contexts. It is a natural direction to go, because once you try to write about anything you like and why you like it, you inevitably end up on dopamine. But it’s not an easy subject which is very easy to mess up, so be careful. Perhaps the most common essay that I see (and internally call “The Dopamine Essay“) is always structured like this: “Why do I like X? Scientists say that when I eat it, it produces dopamine! It’s like drugs! Turns out, there’s a scientific reason for why I like X. The end.” You will not get an A for an essay like that. Here are some tips on how to handle the reward system if that’s the route you’re going:

1) Don’t confuse dopamine and serotonin (they are very different and do very different things) and please never, ever use the phrase “feel-good chemicals”. It’s superficial and inaccurate.

2) Don’t assume that dopamine is an explanation for why you like something. Saying that you like something because your brain produces dopamine is like saying that people play football because their muscles move: technically correct, but it doesn’t explain anything. You still have to explain what’s the deal with football in the first place (great question btw). With dopamine, once you said that it’s released in response to your favorite movie, the question then becomes: why is it that your brain produces dopamine specifically in response to this movie you happen to like, and not another movie? The explanation of that would still involve your past history, your culture and life experience and perhaps even some genetic influences, but dopamine is just a mechanism, not explanation. It is not why you experience pleasure – it is that pleasure, just in different terms.

3) Please don’t label the dopamine paragraphs in your essay, or for that matter anything with long words, along the lines of “the scientific part” (as opposed to a “non-scientific” part of your essay where you just talk about your emotions). Science is a tool, not a separate domain of reality. I cringe every time I see essays dichotomized that way, and I don’t think you want to make me cringe when reading your essay. Molecules are not just “scientific” pictures in the textbook – no matter how we call them or how we draw them, they are part of nature and life.

We will talk about reward in more detail next class. See you then!

Have fun,

NK

An essay is thoughtful creative writing piece. Students are generally given plenty of freedom in finding their topics of choice. In your writing, I look for clarity, logical reasoning and attention to detail. I don’t count pages or characters, but a rough guideline is 5–10 pages of reasonably formatted text.