Beating your brain into shape

The machinelike side of the mind

When I walked out of the Fundamentals of Engineering exam last month, the gears in my mind spun as if I still sat in front of that screen, solving problems. Stepping out of the building, I found myself trying to guess the coefficient of friction between my shoes and the sidewalk. Driving off the parking lot, I thought about the torque my hands applied to the steering wheel. The FE exam forces you to think in ways that are quick, straightforward, and self-contained: a tight loop of collecting information, inserting it into calculations, and solving for physical quantities you need. So automatic, in fact, that it resembled a mantra. It excluded all other thought; it drowned out distractions and doubts. There was only: Gather. Calculate. Solve. Over and over again. Everywhere my eyes landed, the loop echoed in my head. I hit a pothole on the road and my mind flew through the steps of calculating the spring constant of my car's shock absorbers. Gather. Calculate. Solve.

My best engineering professors emphasized that the point of solving homework problems is to absorb a thinking style. Dragging your mind through a very specific set of steps, and doing it often over a long period of time, makes it automatic. The hope is that you learn to do it quickly and apply it to other situations as well. As you transition to a real job where the problems aren't as obvious as the ones in the textbook, you've trained your mind to gather the correct information you need to solve any problem you might encounter in your career. Only a few professors would say this explicitly, but if they did, they never missed an opportunity to remind us. The point is the thinking style. The point is the rigid, hyper-organized set of steps used to tackle any problem. It's hard enough to learn to perform a series of challenging tasks; allowing those tasks to restructure your bedrock thinking habits requires an uncommon willingness to change. Everyone encounters difficult work in an engineering curriculum; the people who succeed are the people who can change enough to grow past an obstacle. In changing, they bring their thinking more in line with what the work requires. Although the curriculum put me through this change a whole bunch of times, I didn't notice it nearly as vividly as I did when I took the FE exam this year.

The Fundamentals of Engineering exam is five hours long and comprised of 110 questions. Five hours is a long time, but paradoxically, you're pressed for time on individual questions. For each one, you have about three minutes, which means you have to solve them rapid-fire like an onslaught. You get all of the time all at once, and you have to pace yourself on purpose to allocate it. It leads to a strange limbo where you have enough time to fully relax into the work and let it absorb you, but you never stop charging ahead with a sense of urgency. Never get to linger too long on any one problem. It's designed to give you tunnel vision. There is only the next question. Your mind grows to adapt, in five hours, to one single mantra: solve the next engineering problem. It grows all over this goal like moss and your brain becomes so tightly fixated on it that you can feel the echoes of the mantra for hours after you leave the testing room. Your brain retains the contours of the thinking style it settled into for the last five hours. Even after the test is done, you cast a constant, pointed glance around your environment, searching for the next engineering problem to solve. It's neither relaxing nor stressful, neither positive nor negative: just an acutely noticeable driving force.

I can't tell you how much this made an impression on me. As often as my professors talked about adopting the thinking style, this illustrated it for me. I suddenly saw it so clearly that I couldn't forget it ever again. The idea that you can shape your mind into walking a certain path, following a certain tightly-controlled loop, and giving you specific results, made a huge impact on me. This is useful, I thought. This is inspiring beyond anything.

I don’t know if I could've discovered this any sooner. Rigid discipline and structured thinking aren’t easy to find in the general population. All I ever hear, at work and in college, is people clamoring to relax. Relax the standards just as much as they relax themselves. Everyone wants less homework and fewer work hours. Giving yourself grace is a very popular idea. If you opine about how you want nothing from life except to relax in your cottagecore backyard or something, people nod sagely and agree that slow living is wise. And by pursuing the path of least resistance, the path of slow and relaxing and no-push no-shove doing-whatever-you-want, you’ll settle into a kind of mental vacation, and you won't end up with a "thinking style" to speak of at all. You'll never have the experience of sharpening your mind into a weapon. The more you relax and look around for low-friction idle pastimes to occupy your time, the less your mind will be optimized for doing anything specific. That's perfectly all right, if it's what you want. But I liked becoming a weapon an awful lot. It’s easy to crave single-mindedness like that again.

The whole experience taught me that you really can change how you think. Before this, I always thought that the kind of thoughts you have, the way your mind circles around some ideas, are a factor of your personality and not necessarily changeable. This blew that idea out of the water. I learned you can train your mind and twist it to whatever purpose you want. Might take a little help—god knows I would've never reached this point without the years of laser-focused education I've had—but it is possible and it is practical. You can learn to think fast. You can learn to think slow. You can spiral upwards in positive loops or downwards in negative ones. You can become a kind of machine with a fixation on whatever task you want. For five hours during my exam, my mind became a tool designed to do exactly one thing well. For those unparalleled five hours, it was solving engineering problems. A steady drumbeat of gather-calculate-solve that eclipsed everything else. A welcome relief from the noise of my everyday mind. I don't know if I would've ever discovered this on my own; my college experience, years of being held tightly by external forces to developing this thinking style, are what allowed me to develop it in the first place. Before that, I didn't even know it was possible. I've written before about how I taught myself to draw; that was meandering and slow, nothing at all like this experience. I can hardly convey the excitement of learning that you can beat your brain into whatever shape you want. It takes years, sure, but why would you want to spend your years any other way? Doing anything other than exactly the kind of thing you want to do?