Preconceived Notions 

November 22, 2025

By: K Siva Prasad

The Gita emphasises understanding our senses as they are the gateways between our inner and outer worlds. Modern neuroscience postulates, “Neurons that fire together wire together”. The Gita’s words also convey a similar message using the language of its time.

Our brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons. Some of them are wired by DNA to take care of automatic functions of the body, while others are wired by us over the course of our lives. On the first day, before the driving wheel, we all found it difficult to drive. We slowly got used to it with practice. This is because of the hard wiring done by the brain, with unutilised neurons, to coordinate all the activities involved in driving.

This kind of hard wiring happens with all skills, from simple walking to complex tasks like sports and performing surgeries. Hardwiring leading to the formation of neural patterns, saves a lot of energy for the brain and makes our lives easy.

A newborn is a ‘universal baby’ capable of many things.  The domestication done by family, peers and society lead to the formation of many neural patterns. These patterns compel us to look for a particular type of impulses and sensations from the external world. Our lives revolve around working hard to get these sensations.  For example, we all expect to hear praise about ourselves as our neural patterns enjoy the same. These neural patterns are foundations for expectations, prejudices and judgements.

The combination of these patterns, coupled with the efforts made, is nothing but ahankaar.In today’s world, success and happiness are defined as getting sensations matching our neural patterns. We get centred in the self when these are broken. As a result, joy flows as we are no longer dependent on external sensations, which Krishna calls ‘atma-raman’.

We can break these neural patterns by using various instructions and instruments given in the Gita to lead a joyful life.

(The writer is a senior IAS officer in the Punjab Government.)