Ep. 114 - What We Can Learn From Search Engines

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When I was a newlywed, my brain kept telling me, ‘This is it Kayla. He’s leaving you.’

And I believed it.

See, we like to think of our brain as if it were Google: A clean, white page with an oversized search bar ready to give us unbiased answers to our unbiased questions. (Okay, Google’s not unbiased, but you know what I’m getting at.) We think we’re asking it a question like, ‘Hey Kayla, how’s my marriage doing today?’, and curiously absorbing whatever results come up.

But alas, our brain is not Google. (Nor does it get decorated special for Groundhog’s Day.) It actually looks a whole lot more like Bing: Before you even notice the little search bar, you’re bombarded with attention-grabbers like ‘Penguin Gives Birth to Triplets’ and ‘Babysitter Charged With Manslaughter.’ (Or in my case, ‘He’s Leaving You.’) Clickbait that sucks you in with so much fear, excitement and drama that you can’t even remember what you came to search for in the first place. All you know is that you’re now knee-deep in Dad-comes-back-from-Afghanistan videos.

Moral of the story is: your Bing-brain is smart. It knows the thoughts that get you spinning in a teacup-ride of negative emotions, and it shoots them at you before you can even type in your question. In this episode, we talk about how to navigate our brain’s search engine to find the results we actually came to search for.