Rewiring the brain

It’s been almost a week since my June experiment ended and I’m starting to notice some interesting and unexpected long-lasting effects. I’m saying unexpected because this was not some crazy long experiment—28 days doesn’t seem like a lot to me—and yet it was apparently long enough to cause some rewiring in my brain.

In June I didn’t read news of any type. And even though we’re now in July, my brain has no interest in staying up to date with, well, basically anything. Not world news, not local news, not even tech news. I’m not actively avoiding them like I was doing in June—if someone sends me an article I read it—but I’m not actively seeking them. Which is interesting. Especially for tech news that is more on the entertainment side of things compared to world news.

Let’s digress a moment briefly to discuss the privilege of not reading news. I understand the sentiment behind the whole idea that having the choice of ignoring the news is a privilege. Part of me even agrees with it. At the same time though I also know that I have one and only one life to live and there’s no good reason to make myself needlessly miserable. The only outcome is that I become crankier and angrier with the world and I’m a worse version of myself for the people around me. So yes, it is a privilege, and I’m taking full advantage of it because the alternative is actually worse.

My brain has also stopped searching for audio content. I’m not missing podcasts one bit, precisely zero times I felt the need to reinstall my podcast player app. The other day while scrolling through the thousands of entries that had accumulated in my RSS reader during my digital fasting I stumbled upon a link to Matt Mullenweg’s interview on Decoder. This is obviously content that’s very close to my interests and so I said to myself “Let’s give this one a listen”.

As per my self-imposed rule, I stopped what I was doing and decided to do some stretching for my back while I was listening. I think I lasted around 10 minutes before getting incredibly bored. Hearing them talking did nothing for my brain and so I hit stop and got back to work.

And it’s not just podcasts. I’m typing this and there’s no music in the background. To give you some context, my Spotify Wrapped of 2024 reported 94108 minutes of music and 49832 minutes of podcasts (and I was also using Casts as well to listen to a bunch more). Now I’m working with no music in the background, I’m driving with no music, I’m not even listening to music while I’m downstairs cooking. This is so incredibly interesting to me.

It’s interesting because I’m now wondering what other things in my brain I can rewrite this easily. Because this was not hard to do. And maybe it’s because my brain was already primed by my weird lifestyle or maybe it’s because I’m also now meditating 35 to 50 minutes a day. And it’s possible that this is just a temporary effect. Still, I find this development fascinating especially because I’m conducting my July experiment—not going to tell you how that is going—and I’m wondering what else I can experiment with. If you have ideas let me know.