Why living in a volatile age may make our brains truly innovative

Pandemics. Conflicts. Crashing markets. Collapsing governments. A cursory glance at the headlines over recent years is enough to give the sense that the world is an unstable and uncertain place. But “volatility” isn’t just something hedge fund managers care about. It is deeply important to your brain too.

In my new book, A Trick of the Mind, I argue that the latest science tells us the brain is like a scientist, building its own hypotheses and paradigms to understand the world, other people and itself. However, if your mind is in the business of building paradigms, it also needs to know when those paradigms should shift. It turns out a set of frontal and subcortical brain regions, trading in chemicals like noradrenaline, plays a key role in tracking how unstable the world around us seems.

This “volatility tracking” system is how your brain listens out for turning points in the outside world, using unexpected changes to shake up its hypotheses and expectations. Thanks to these systems in our heads, our minds’ paradigms become more flexible when our everyday reality seems to be shifting. In many ways, this is a perfectly adaptive and rational process. After all, if things are changing, we want our minds to change with them.

But in a transforming world, an open mind can be a dangerous thing. For instance, research during the covid-19 pandemic found that the unexpected virus and unprecedented lockdowns made it possible for perfectly ordinary minds to think the unthinkable. One study in the US found that, as lockdowns kicked in state by state, there was a spike in erratic, volatile thinking. Those who began to experience their surroundings as unstable were more likely to begin endorsing bizarre conspiracies – about the pandemic and much more. These thinkers would start to believe that vaccines contained mind-control microchips, but would also begin believing in political conspiracies like QAnon.

Though these conspiracies might seem ludicrous, from a brain’s-eye-view this behaviour makes perfect sense. Our minds need to be malleable and impressionable in order for our paradigms to shift in response to a world that seems to be changing. We need to entertain thoughts we haven’t entertained before.

I actually think that living in uncertain times isn’t always bad for us and our brains. After all, unpredictable doesn’t mean that something bad is destined to happen. It just means we don’t know what’s going to come next. If we look with a historical lens, we can see that many points of positive progress came around at similar points where our familiar reality was shaken up and the future seemed hard to predict. In the UK, support for women’s suffrage reached a tipping point after the first world war, and transformative changes to the welfare state like the creation of the National Health Service emerged after the second.

Though I can’t travel back in time to scan those historical brains, we can imagine that these new moments of possibility depended on precisely the same processes unfolding in our heads. When the familiar touchstones of our surroundings seem unstable, old ideas become dislodged and new ones can take hold.

Once we think about how our brains work, we see uncertainty and volatility rather differently. Though volatility can make us feel anxious, living in a world full of flux and change means our brains are opened up to new possibilities. While we need to be vigilant against bad actors who might be trying to mould our malleable minds in extreme or conspiracist directions, having our brains tipped towards a turning point makes it possible for us to embrace a better and brighter future too.

Daniel Yon is director of The Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London, and author of A Trick of the Mind