Your Brain in a Nutshell

On Tuesday November 18th I was musing on the idea of being able to catch non-productive or unhealthy thoughts as they arise and realize them for what they are and let them go. How do we do this is the question I posed. Well, I’ve been doing a little research on that very topic so I can enlighten you while you waste your boss’s time reading blogs and having that extra cup of coffee before you really get to work.

I picked up this fascinating book called “Train Your Mind Change Your Brain” by Sharon Begley (with a foreword by His Holiness The Dalai Lama). This book is touted as a “groundbreaking collaboration between neuroscience and Buddhism”. Before I go any further I should warn you that I think physics textbooks are entertaining. I also think scientific experiments are engaging. I love to learn how people learn about all kinds of interesting things.

I’m about half way through the book now, and it’s all about the ways that the brain can grow and change, even after your body is fully grown. It’s called brain plasticity, and it’s all the rage among neuroscientists, even though just a few years ago the concept of brain plasticity was laughed right out of all the best scientific journals. This is a good example of how narrow minded science can be, the people who are supposed to be discovering new things often don’t even want to talk about new things!

Previously it was thought that you are born with a bunch of brain cells, you grow a bunch more when you are a baby learning all kinds of new things, you start to loose brain cells when you become an adolescent (maybe they are transformed into excess hormones), and this loss continues through young adulthood (accelerated greatly by your choice of recreational chemicals), and speeds up as you age until you eventually die with a shriveled up brain the size of a walnut.

Now however, it has been proven that this is not true! No, science has traveled into the unknown to prove that you only loose all those brain cells if you don’t take care of them, nourish them and invite them to grow.

Now I’m not going to tell you the whole story, read the book if you want that, but I will tell you there are dozens of experiments detailed so the reader sees the progression of one theory to the next and the amazing discoveries that first led researchers to imagine the brain was actually adjusting its cells, functions and usage, based on the persons activities.

I will throw this little bit of information out at you: voluntary exercise on a regular basis makes your brain grow. Bad news for couch potatoes I know. And I say voluntary because the experiment looked at brains of mice who exercised for fun (turns out mice love to run on those little wheels you see in gerbil cages), and brains of mice who were forced to exercise ( picture a white coated lab tech holding a mouse at gun point and forcing it to lift weights) actually, that is not how they did it, I won’t go into the details, but bottom line, the voluntary mice grew to be much smarter.

Now skip ahead to the part on applications for humans and we find that people with obsessive compulsive disorders can be trained to watch their thoughts as the compulsions come and rationalize what these thoughts mean, and how they arise from a chemical imbalance rather than being an intrinsic part of the person and sure enough, after they practice for a while, the obsessive behavior patterns lessen and disappear.

So dear readers, this takes us right back where we started. When you are in a situation that causes thoughts of anger or anxiety to arise, if you try to look at the thoughts and analyze them before you react, your brain will actually learn from what you just did, add more brain function resources to repeating this task in the future, and make it easier for you to do this again.

See? You are not alone! Your brain is helping you! You can learn to think before you react. You can become the type of person who is able to react with compassion rather than anger. You can learn to put that wave of anxiety to bed and think calm healing thoughts even when the going is rough.

Now, I’m sure as I get further into that book I will learn lots of tid-bits about how the process is actually done, but for now, I will just share how I think it might be done.

Next time someone you know acts like an ass and you start to get mad- catch the mad feeling. Stop for a moment and ask yourself what am I feeling? Acknowledge your feelings, then ask yourself if you can imagine any reason that person might be acting like such an ass.

Maybe they had a worse day then the one you are having. Maybe someone they know died, or left them, or is in the hospital, or is missing. Maybe they got fired, divorced or a speeding ticket on the way to work. Maybe they are hungry, hung over or really mentally unstable. Maybe they are all kinds of bad things you can imagine.

Now, this does not excuse them, but it does give you an opportunity to say to yourself- I’m glad I’m not like that. I’m glad I don’t have any of those horrible imagined problems they have. I’m gonna shine that on. I’m not taking the bait. I feel sorry for that ass. They must be having way bigger problems than I have. (if nothing else they have a big problem because they are such an ass no one likes them), Than you can ignore their assy-ness, or ask them if they are OK, or maybe even ask if here is some way you can help them because they are obviously having a bad day.

The same steps can be used for anxiety. When you feel it coming on – Like the Obsessive Compulsion disorder patients,( which, by the way, OCD is an anxiety problem,) you can say to your self- I’m feeling anxiety. This situation is a real ass, but it won’t help for me to be an ass back. Let me just calm down. This situation will soon change. (here’s where that Buddhist concept of impermanence comes in real handy), If I just remain calm and take steps to peacefully resolve this situation things are going to change. My anxiety does not change any thing, things just change.

Now, according to this research I’ve reviewed, if you just keep practicing this over and over it will become easier. From the looks of the news headlines, you may be getting a lot of practice, and this skill is going to become very valuable in the coming months.