And What the Brain Is Actually Doing
As computers were introduced, intelligence came to be associated with storage capacity, processing speed, and computational efficiency. The more advanced the machine, the more data it could hold, retrieve, and apply toward solving problems.
That model explains computers well. It has also shaped how many of us believe learning, growth, and success are accomplished:
We aim for a goal.
We drive toward it.
We assess the outcome.
We analyze what happened.
We adjust the plan and move forward.
When things go well, this approach reinforces itself. When things go poorly, we often double down. Work harder. Refine the same strategy. Explain the failure more thoroughly so it can be avoided next time.
This is how conscious reasoning operates, and it can be effective. It assumes, however, that learning and sense-making happen primarily after the fact, through deliberate analysis and effort.
Neuroscience suggests that in the background the brain is doing something more continuous, more influential than that.
What the Yale Studies Reveal
Two studies published by Yale University in 2024 offer a more detailed picture of how the brain actually processes experience.
The first examined activity in the hippocampus
when an organism encounters something new. Rather than remaining focused on the present moment, hippocampal activity rapidly alternated between representations of current experience and older, familiar mental maps. This moment-to-moment switching, referred to as flickering, allows the brain to rapidly compare what is happening now with what it has encountered before.
The second study examined what happens during sleep. Instead of replaying experiences one by one, the hippocampus compresses and links multiple moments from the day into short sequences, integrating them into broader memory structures that influence future expectations and decisions. Experiences which carry emotional weight or are repeatedly rehearsed are more likely to be consolidated and returned to later.
Taken together, these findings challenge the idea that learning happens through conscious evaluation after an outcome. Meaning is being shaped continuously through ongoing comparison during waking life and integration during sleep.
By the time something feels like a decision point, a story has already largely taken shape.
Why Smart Effort Can Still Keep You Stuck
The part of the process where agency is most available is not in controlling outcomes, but in how experience is interpreted and integrated; however, there’s a built-in barrier.
Because the brain is constantly comparing present experience with past mental maps, the narratives formed after an event carry real weight. Each time a familiar interpretation is reinforced, it becomes easier to return to the next time something similar occurs. Over time, these interpretations begin to function less like explanations and more like templates.
The difficulty arises when new experiences are used primarily to confirm existing stories rather than to revise them. Instead of allowing present information to update past interpretations, the brain emphasizes what feels familiar or emotionally charged. This selectivity is efficient, but it narrows what gets integrated.
The Yale sleep study helps explain why. During integration, experiences that carry emotional intensity or have been repeatedly rehearsed are more likely to be compressed into longer-term memory structures. Elements that align with an existing narrative are strengthened, while genuinely new or contradictory information is more likely to fade.
This bias affects both sides of the traditional learning model.
On the goal-setting side, people often continue pursuing the same objectives using familiar strategies, even when repeated experience suggests those strategies are no longer effective. Effort increases, but learning stalls.
On the evaluation side, post-event analysis yields the same conclusions again and again. The narrative hardens. What began as an interpretation becomes a blueprint for future behavior.
In this way, confirmation bias does not simply distort perception. It constrains revision. Without revision, growth becomes increasingly difficult, even when effort and intention remain high.
And yet, this same process also points toward where influence may still exist.
Where Agency May Actually Live
The Yale findings point toward another potential avenue for agency.
During the day, the brain continuously compares past experience with present input. At night, it continues that work, integrating what it has flagged as relevant. This cycle repeats, shaping how future situations are perceived and how choices feel before they are consciously made.
Agency, then, does not live only in setting goals or constructing explanations. It also lives in the content the brain is given to work with during this ongoing process of comparison and integration.
You cannot fully control outcomes.
You cannot change what already occurred.
But you do influence what gets revisited, reinforced, and woven into the story that guides future behavior.
A Story That Can Change in the Telling
This brings us back to an older model of learning.
Picture early ancestors gathered around a fire, passing down oral history. What mattered was not every detail of what happened, but what was remembered, how it was ordered, and what meaning was carried forward. Stories were not static records. They evolved through repetition, emphasis, and interpretation.
The brain still works much the same way.
If experience is organized as narrative rather than stored as data, then learning is not only about effort or explanation. It is also about how experience is attended to, revisited, and integrated over time.
What happens if, even briefly, the brain is given different material to organize around?
A recognition of what was genuinely new.
A noticing of where an old story may have been applied too quickly.
A moment that allows experience to register before it is folded into familiar patterns.
This is not about forcing meaning or manufacturing optimism. It is about staying in relationship with how meaning is formed.
Understanding how the brain constructs narrative does not eliminate uncertainty. It changes how uncertainty is inhabited. The story is not fixed. It continues to be shaped.
Future articles in this series will explore why the order of experience matters so much in memory, and how simple structures and rituals can influence what gets carried forward.
For now, it is enough to return to the image of, not a machine retrieving data at speed, but people gathered around a fire, deciding together what will be remembered, what will be passed on, and what meaning will guide the next generation.
The brain is still doing that work, with or without our conscious participation.
