X/80. Brain
Health is subject to the regulation of the brain.
We try to control ourselves all our lives. We must learn to use the strength of our mind to change and control our physical brain, enabling endless benefits and possibilities.
––John Roberts
Exerting your brain intellectually, starting in childhood, spurs brain cells to explode with new branches, creating millions of new connections, or synapses, between neurons. This means consistent mental stimulation actually builds more brain tissue, giving you a “bigger memory board,” so you can think more quickly….The brain is like a muscle––using it makes it grow and expand; disuse causes it to atrophy. Thus, education makes brains more resistant to deterioration and disease, because people who earn degrees tend to exercise their brains more, building a more lively, resilient, and complex brain.
––Jean Carper, Your Miracle Brain, 2000
Mind and brain correlate their functions, but we actually don’t know the exact ways in which brain activity and mind function mutually create each other. It is too simplistic to say merely that the “brain creates the mind” as we know that the mind can activate the brain. The process that regulates the flow of energy and information, our definition of the mind, can directly stimulate brain firing and ultimately change the structural connections in the brain. How we pay attention promotes neural plasticity, the change of neural connections in response to experience.
––Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., The Mindful Brain, 2007
Buddhist practitioners familiar with the workings of the mind have long been aware that it can be transformed through training. What is exciting and new is that scientists have now shown that such mental training can also change the brain. Related to this is evidence that the brain adapts or expands in response to repeated patterns of activity, so that in a real sense, the brain we develop reflects the life we lead. This has far-reaching implications for the effects of habitual behavior in our lives.
––The Dalai Lama (Foreword). Sharon Begley, Train Your Brain, Change Your Brain. New York, Ballantine Books, 2007
The mind and the brain are physically one and the same. Both the advanced thinking of the mind and the memory and instincts of the brain are nothing more than collections and connections of neurons. A simple memory of a thing may be a combination of neurons in many different parts of the brain storing information on what we heard, saw, touched, or thought. Happiness, sadness, or love involve complex connections to many different areas. There is a basic survival capacity for fear in the core of the brain, but new fears may be added to other areas.
We need to understand how our brain works in order to change and use it effectively. In the past few decades, science has shown us how. When we study and think about some thing or concept, the neurons involved in our brain change, grow stronger, and make more connections with others. So, if we concentrate and repeat our thinking in certain ways, we can actually strengthen and make physical changes to the neurons in our brains. This enables us to change our behavior and build our motivation and strength to pursue our goals. It even makes changes to our subconscious that bubble up in various ways.
If we think positively about a subject––regularly, consistently, over a long period of time––something miraculous happens. Our motivation and positive attitudes get stronger and become a permanent part of our conscious and unconscious being. So, we must visualize our goals in an optimistic way, examine the paths and problems along the way, and build images of the solutions. Soon, slender bundles of neurons make thousands of new connections to other neurons and evolve into strong trunks of attitude and belief; they wend their way to distant parts of the brain that are assigned to certain tasks and kinds of thinking. The whole network grows stronger, and resistant to those negative thoughts that constantly attack.
Begin with a goal; think about it again and again, and think positively! With self-control and repetition, the brain, and your behavior, will change. Stop thinking about bad memories or negative ideas and those neurons will slowly whither away and become less prominent in our mental activity. We can change our brains, which in turn changes our future thinking and physical condition. There are many new books on this concept. See the Brain section of the Bibliography.
