Are we the sculptor or the clay?

A job's power to change the brain

“I’m leaving at 1900 on the flight to SFO. They’re experiencing ATC delays, so I decided to go tonight instead of tomorrow morning. If it cancels, I can fly to OAK and take the BART. Or maybe I’ll just drive to AUS and visit friends instead.”

• Using the 24-hour clock

• Referring to cities by their three-letter airport code

• Superfluous use of acronyms

• Having multiple backup plans when traveling

• Not getting too attached to plans at all

These are small examples of how a 20+ year airline operations career changed me. Last week I wrote about what I learned working with optimization software. That made me curious about how else my career changed me, and how common it is.

Case study: a job can change the human brain

London taxi drivers undergo 3-4 years of training to learn “The Knowledge”. They memorize the complex road network of London and surrounding suburbs, including specific routes and points of interest. Neuroscience research shows this training physically changes the taxi drivers’ brains. Researcher Eleanor Maguire and colleagues found the longer someone had been a driver, the larger the hippocampus, or memory center, of the brain.

The research was further supported by following a group of drivers through The Knowledge training. When the study began, all subjects had similarly sized hippocampi. Those who passed the training four years later performed far better on memory tests and showed larger hippocampi on MRI scans. They showed significant changes from their own original scans and those of peers who did not complete the training.

What does this mean for the rest of us?

Most professions aren’t studied so deeply by neuroscientists. I imagine many jobs, if done long enough, can change our brains. This seems like an understudied phenomenon.

After leaving my corporate career, I noticed I’d been evaluating almost every decision through a capitalistic lens. What’s the return on investment? I’m certain I did not leave college with that mindset. I majored in psychology and filled most of my elective hours with dance classes. I had zero interest in business and found the idea of it somewhat distasteful. Down with the man! Rage against the machine!

Then I became “the man”, or rather a middle management female representation of that machine.

We are social beings, prone to absorb and mimic the lexicon and habits of those around us. Evidence that our jobs can physically change our brains shouldn’t be a surprise.

I did a brief stint in sales, a sabbatical experiment for a future newsletter edition. In about a month I went from “I hate sales, would be terrible at it” to having to stop myself from seeing every person walking in the door as a potential commission. Not a good feeling. It’s even more powerful when our income, our survival, is linked to succeeding at a task.

I take away two things from this:

1. Be aware of a job’s power to change you; guard against unwanted changes

2. Rather than seeking the perfect career, perhaps we should seek something we wouldn’t mind growing from

Photo by Biel Morro on Unsplash

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Next week: I’ll write about new book on a similar topic—Simone Stolzoff’s The Good Enough Job.