Rebooting Your Brain

CHAPTER 5Modern Life with Our Ancient Mind

As a species, every day we learn more, discover more, and create more. This process has dramatically accelerated since the dawning of the digital age just five short decades ago. Today, you, me, and the rest of our peers generate a mind‐boggling amount of new information and new data every single day—1.15 trillion megabytes of data each day in fact (which I discovered in a 45‐second Google search on data).

Collectively, we create more data and more information in 24 hours than every one of our ancestors did across millions of years of existence. All of this data accumulates on servers around the world and informs our news feeds, social media, and internet searches. We consume it through our televisions, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and every other connected device we own. You and I are immersed in an endless sea of information.

All of this information feeds the 60,000 odd thoughts that flow through our mind each day and serves to influence how we come to perceive the world, other people, and ourselves. However, what I came to understand through my reboot is these thoughts aren't merely transient realizations, perspectives, judgments, or critiques. They are much more powerful than I previously realized.

In the mid‐1800s, the American essayist, lecturer, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

Watch your thoughts, they become your words.

Watch your words, they become your actions.

Watch your actions, they become your habits.

What your ...