Why living in a volatile age may make our brains truly innovative

Pandemics. Conflicts. Markets crash. Collapse governments. A superficial glance on the titles in recent years is enough to give the feeling that the world is an unstable and uncertain place. But “volatility” is not only something that hedge fund managers care. It is also deeply important for your brain.

In my new book, A tip of the mindI maintain that the last science tells us that the brain is like a scientist, building his own hypotheses and paradigms to understand the world, others and himself. However, if your mind is in the field of paradigms, it must also know when these paradigms should change. It turns out that a set of frontal and subcortical brain regions, exchanging chemicals such as noradrenaline, plays a key role in monitoring the unstable of the world around us seems.

This “volatility” system is the way your brain listens to turns in the outside world, using unexpected changes to shake up your hypotheses and expectations. Thanks to these systems in our heads, the paradigms of our minds become more flexible when our daily reality seems to change. In many ways, it is a perfectly adaptive and rational process. After all, if things change, we want our minds to change with them.

But in a transforming world, an open mind can be a dangerous thing. For example, research during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that the unexpected virus and unprecedented locking allowed the perfectly ordinary mind to think of the unthinkable. In the United States, a study revealed that, while locking kicked in the state, there was a peak in an erratic and volatile thought. Those who started to discover their environment as unstable were more likely to start approving bizarre plots – on the pandemic and much more. These thinkers would begin to believe that vaccines contained micropuces of mental control, but would also begin to believe in political plots like Qanon.

Although these plots may seem ridiculous, from the vision of a brain vision, this behavior is perfectly logical. Our minds must be malleable and impressable so that our paradigms move in response to a world that seems to change. We have to entertain the thoughts that we have not entered before.

In fact, I think that living in uncertain weather is not always bad for us and our brain. After all, unpredictable does not mean that something bad is intended to happen. It just means that we don’t know what will go afterwards. If we look with a historical objective, we can see that many positive progress has come to similar points where our familiar reality has been shaken and the future seemed difficult to predict. In the United Kingdom, support for the suffrage of women reached a tilting point after the First World War, and the transformative changes in the Providence State as the creation of the National Health Service emerged after the second.

Although I cannot travel in time to scan these historical brains, we can imagine that these new moments of possibility depended precisely the same processes that take place in our heads. When the familiar touch stones of our environment seem unstable, old ideas are relocating to and new ones can settle.

Once we think about how our brain works, we see uncertainty and volatility quite differently. Although volatility can feel anxious, living in a world full of flows and a change means that our brains are open to new possibilities. Although we have to be vigilant against bad actors who could try to shape our malleable minds in extreme or conspiracist directions, to silence our brain towards a turning point allows us to embrace a better and more brilliant future.

Daniel Yon is director of the Birkbeck uncertainty laboratory, University of London, and author of A Trick of the Mind