The 3 Mental Programs: How Your Mind Works

Your mind is quite complicated.

Unfortunately, it didn’t come with a user manual, but below is a framework for understanding how the mind works and how to train it.

How Your Mind Works in 3 Programs

Three mental “software” programs determine how your mind works. Let’s call them Programs A, B, and C. They shed light on your current thoughts, behaviors, and feelings, and also explain how you can reprogram them.

Program A - The Evolved Mind

Program A comes pre-downloaded at birth. It’s your evolved psychology.

For example, Program A is why you naturally fear snakes, dangerous animals in your ancestors' time, and the dark, since predators could lurk undetected.

Although the world looks vastly different than it did millions of years ago, your brain’s primal psychology still thinks you’re living on the African savannah.

Program A evolved over the course of 600 million years.

As your primitive ancestors struggled to survive and reproduce, natural selection and epigenetics created changes slowly over time.

But in the last ~10,000 years (and especially the last century), our environment has shifted so rapidly that the brain’s software didn’t have time to catch up.

So, for example, you don’t naturally fear texting while driving, now more likely to kill you than a snake. Program A is maladapted to fit the modern world.

Other Program A foundational neural wiring includes:

An innate craving for salty, fatty, sugary foods (McDonald’s)
An innate capacity for pro-social collaboration (democracy!)
An innate fear of out-group members (sports rivalry, racial discrimination)
An innate predisposition to imitate high-authority figures (celebrity obsession)
An innate desire to care for offspring (motherly love)
An innate need for social approval (social media)
An innate fear of social rejection (public speaking)

And many, many more…

All of the behaviors in parentheses stem from our brain’s evolution over millions of years in small hunter-gatherer groups. Some of them are beneficial for your happiness (Yay, motherly love!), and others are harmful (Boo, racial discrimination!).

These tendencies comes pre-downloaded in your brain at birth. But Program A only partially explains each of those areas in parenthesis. That’s why you have Program B.

Program B - The Conditioned Mind

Program B provides your more specific, learned psychology. This program is the neuroplastic rewiring that takes place as you interact with the world.

Program B is why you avoid putting your hand on the hot stove, and it’s why gambling addicts keep slotting coins in the machine. It tells you to seek “likes” on social media (although Program A laid the general need for social approval) and also codes your tennis swing.

In this way, the brain adapts to and learns from the world through approach and avoidance. We tend to avoid things that harmed us in the past (like the hot stove) and approach things that yielded rewards (like approval on social media).

So while Program A is the result of all of your ancestors' experience through evolution, Program B is the result of your individual lifetime of experience.

If you want to know why you have a hand you can look to our monkey swinging past. And if you want to understand why you have a certain thought or behavior, you need to examine both the lives of your ancestors (Program A) and your own life’s worth of interaction with the world (Program B).

Did Programs A & B just make you start salivating?

To illustrate Programs A and B working in tandem, let’s look at the dangerously delicious potato chip brand Pringles.

Pringles has designed a chip with the ideal amount of crunch, a sound and texture that triggers reward chemicals in your brain.

Why do you naturally like crunchy foods? Because Program A thinks you're receiving nutritious, fresh vegetables and insects. Program A also goes crazy for the salt and glucose in Pringles, two life-sustaining nutrients that were relatively rare in your ancestral past.

Once you've tried a chip, Program B makes it difficult to stop eating them, motivating you to seek out the Pringles brand next time you go to the store. Most marketing today is based on this principle: take something that your brain naturally likes (sugars, sex appeal, etc.) and exaggerate it to create a craving.

Most advertisers get you to buy their products by exaggerating an innate desire of Program A, and they keep you coming back for more by hijacking Program B’s reward system.

This makes Program C essential if you don’t want to be a victim of the attention economy, not to mention groupthink, tribalism, obesity, subconscious prejudice, various addictions, and many other causes of misery.

Program C - Self-Directed Neuroplasticity (a.k.a. Mind Training)

That's where Program C comes into play. When you deliberately train your mind (e.g., by meditating or being mindful), the brain begins to rewire itself.

With training, your brain begins to change its structure and function in all sorts of useful ways, such as increasing the size of your hippocampus, a key area for learning and memory. [1] This process is called Self-Directed Neuroplasticity.

Despite all of the evolutionary baggage (Program A) and harmful conditioning (Program B) I’ve mentioned, Program C is your ability to consciously and deliberately shape your brain. Program C is what separates you from every other animal.

That’s an empowering fact: you can train your mind like a muscle.

Program C is the neural sculpting that you undertake during mind training. It's the conscious, intentional design of your own mind, a restructuring that takes place as you get off of autopilot. This is where growth happens.

"We're at the point in our evolution that we all have to become conscious." - Dennis Merzel

Since your brain is prone to discriminate against other people, prone to get irrationally angry at the TSA official, prone to get hacked by advertisements, prone to worry about superficial appearances on social media, prone to become addicted to smartphones, and prone for a bunch of other maladaptive behaviors... that’s the mental baggage (or “outdated code”) that needs updating.

Luckily, you can get a software upgrade in the form of Program C. Unlike Programs A and B, you get to write Program C, crafting the mind you want.

Matthieu Ricard was dubbed the "happiest man in the world” by neuroscientists because of the changes in his brain that resulted from years of meditation practice. [Image Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Reprogramming Your Mind with Meditation

“If you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.” - Anagarika Munindra

During meditation, you’re becoming more aware of the unsavory parts of yourself that don't serve your best interests.

First, you learn to notice and accept them. Then, Program C slowly begins to change them through careful observation of your mental programs in action (introspective metacognitive awareness, a uniquely human ability).

It's not an easy process rewiring 600 million years of Program A evolution and an entire lifetime of Program B conditioning. But Program C is our species' next big step in evolution, the one where you get to build your future mind and life. This rudimentary framework helps us understand the psychology of meditation.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out the FitMind meditation app, where you’ll find over 50 different meditation techniques (from beginner to advanced) and related neuroscience and psychology lessons. Knowing about Program C is useless unless it’s put into practice.