I recently read a book I enjoyed a great deal.  It’s called “The Brain that Changes Itself”, and contains inspiring stories about how our brains are much more amenable to change, renewed vitality and healing than we ever imagined.  There’s a term called “plasticity”, which describes the brain’s capacity to generate more neurons and adapt to change.

One of the most important things for keeping the brain healthy and generating new neurons is novelty.  Put simply, our brains like to encounter something new, to figure out new things, to move through new challenges.  These don’t have to be enormous new mountains to climb.  Novelty can emerge when we take a new route to work or play a game we haven’t played before.  I play with novelty in my own life in a number of ways.  Sometimes, I’ll take a new path in Central Park just to introduce myself to a new perspective, discover new trees, and look for things I haven’t noticed before.  I work with “brain games”, where I choose the ones that are especially hard and let myself struggle with learning what seems, at first, impossible to master, and I study a language.  Most important for me is to keep my curiosity alive and to remember that any situation can have something new in it – something I haven’t noticed or discovered before – that can emerge in any moment.  It’s a matter of paying attention and being curious about what’s escaped my notice that I can now encounter.

For this week’s experiment, I invite you to play with novelty in your life.  As a beginning point, perhaps you can use the experiment to support or deepen a point of view that assumes there are new things to learn each day and that novel experiences abound.  For example, on your way to work or to run an errand, engage your environment with an attitude of looking for something new, something you haven’t noticed before.  Or, write with your non-dominant hand and notice how that is.  For some of us, it’s really hard to do that.  As you practice, allow yourself to notice how this particular activity may become easier over time.  The practice, which challenges your brain, is the gift to yourself.  The goal isn’t necessarily to move into mastery.  Rather, the important thing is the opportunity you offer your brain by engaging novelty.

The point isn’t to overwhelm yourself with something that’s too difficult to do or with a demand that you master a new skill.  Rather, it’s to play with the fact that your brain loves novelty, enjoys a challenge, and benefits from learning something new, regardless of the subject of that learning.  One of the ways to keep yourself from falling into “shoulds” or a sense of overwhelm is to notice those moments when something feels hard and you’re on the verge of giving up.  If you remind yourself that your brain loves a challenge, and that the goal isn’t a particular kind of success, then it can be more fun simply to engage the challenge for a while and see what happens.  This can help you remember that it’s really more about process than outcome.

As with all the experiments, make sure you bring along curiosity as your companion and let self-judgment take a vacation.  Our habits of judgment aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the difference between a process of challenging ourselves for the pure benefit of the challenge versus having to achieve a specific outcome or goal.  We know we can’t completely stop ourselves from judging, but we can pat those judgments on the head and send them on their way without taking them so seriously.

By the way, the Book “Eat, Pray, Love”, by Elizabeth Gilbert is a delightful example of someone who gave a year of her life to explore and experience novelty.  I recommend it a way to become familiar with what it might look like if you were to expand your capacity for engaging novelty in your everyday life.