Previously, I wrote about when I think we should follow new curiosities and when we do better by Saying No. I suggest that when we’re on-purpose we should put on our blinkers, go full-immersion, and Say No to almost everything else.

Here’s another reason – our biology will work for us to increase the number of epiphanies we have by strengthening connections between relevant ideas and pruning away connections to irrelevant ideas, providing we tune our biology towards our purpose journey.

Our brain is continuously making connections, figuratively and literally. In the literal sense, it’s creating synaptic connections – pathways between brain cells.

When we encounter something new it’s easier for our brain to have an ‘ah-ha’ moment if what we’ve just encountered fits into our existing mental pathways.

I call this ‘ah-ha’ moment of recognition ‘illumination’. Solutions and puzzle pieces that fit into our existing mental network are illuminated. Our brain shines a big spotlight on these illuminated ideas so that we notice them through all the noise.

(A note of caution : this is also called confirmation bias, which is the unhelpful side of this coin, and something we should definitely be aware of.)

Our biology works to illuminate ideas and situations that we’ve told it are important. We tell our brain which pathways and ideas are important by the amount of time we allocate to those ideas. Our brain recognises a well used neural pathway and deems that because it is frequently used, it must be important or useful.

Likewise, connections and ideas that are hardly used are removed via the process of synaptic pruning.

“synaptic connections that get used less get marked by a protein, C1q (as well as others). When the microglial cells detect that mark, they bond to the protein and destroy–or prune–the synapse.”

Judah Pollack & Olivia Fox Cabane for Fastcompany

The ideas and habits we focus on regularly will get more connections, and those connections get stronger. Ideas related to these stronger mental networks will be illuminated more often, and we will have more epiphanies related to ideas in the network.

This is a powerful reason to deep dive when we’re on-purpose and Say No to almost everything else. Doing so will create a strong neural network around our purpose track, while pruning away the irrelevant connections that drag us off course. We end up with better ideas, more often, and more relevant to our purpose.

This is one of the mechanisms by which meditation, mindfulness, gratitude and visualisation produce results, why spaced repetition works for learning, and why practice makes perfect.

Unfortunately, the converse is true as well.

If we spend a lot of time immersed in Netflix, then those are the pathways that we tell our brain are important, and we’ll start connecting the dots in Game Of Thrones, but we’re less likely to illuminate connections related to our purpose.

Thus we should consciously and carefully choose where our attention goes, because it has a compounding effect on our mental network of ideas over time.