How to use your brain's Delete button?

Imagine your brain is a garden, except instead of growing flowers, fruits, and vegetables, you grow synaptic connections between neurons. These are the connections that neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and others travel across.

“Glial cells” are the gardeners of your brain–they act to speed up signals between certain neurons. But other glial cells are the waste removers, pulling up weeds, killing pests, raking up dead leaves. Your brain’s pruning gardeners are called “microglial cells.” They prune your synaptic connections. The question is, how do they know which ones to prune?

When you learn lots of new things, your brain builds connections, but they’re inefficient, ad hoc connections. Your brain needs to prune a lot of those connections away and build more streamlined, efficient pathways. It does that when we sleep.

Your brain cleans itself out when you sleep–your brain cells shrinking by up to 60% to create space for your glial gardeners to come in take away the waste and prune the synapses.

And in fact, you actually have some control over what your brain decides to delete while you sleep. It’s the synaptic connections you?don’t?use that get marked for recycling. The ones you?do?use are the ones that get watered and oxygenated. So be mindful of what you’re thinking about.

If you’re in a fight with someone at work and devote your time to thinking about how to get even with them, and not about that big project, you’re going to wind up a synaptic superstar at revenge plots but a poor innovator. When faced with a puzzling problem, if you go to sleep at night while thinking of how to solve it, sometimes you wake up with a novel solution o

To take advantage of your brain’s natural gardening system, simply think about the things that are important to you. Think of creative solutions to existing problems or challenges and possibly past instances where similar problems were resolved. Avoid negative thoughts before you sleep and look back on the positives from your day. Your gardeners will strengthen those connections and prune the ones that you care about less. It’s how you help the garden of your brain flower by keeping recycling useful things and deleting the junk.

The original article by Judah Pollack and Olivia Fox Cabane can be found here.