Change Your Brain

“How Thinking Can Change the Brain” Science Journal by Sharon Begley

The Dalai Lama, who had watched a brain operation during a visit to an American medical school, asked the surgeons a startling question: Can the mind shape brain matter?

Over the years, neuroscientists had explained to him that mental experiences reflect chemical and electrical changes in the brain. When electrical impulses zip through our visual cortex, for instance, we see; when neurochemicals course through the limbic system we feel.

But something had always bothered him about this explanation, the Dalai Lama said. Could it work the other way around? That is, in addition to the brain giving rise to thoughts and hopes and beliefs and emotions that add up to this thing we call the mind, maybe the mind also acts back on the brain to cause physical changes in the very matter that created it. If so, then pure thought would change the brain's activity, its circuits or even its structure.

One brain surgeon hardly paused. Physical states give rise to mental states, he asserted; "downward" causation from the mental to the physical is not possible...
The Dalai Lama had put his finger on an emerging revolution in brain research. In the last decade of the 20th century, neuroscientists overthrew the dogma that the adult brain can't change.

The kind of change the Dalai Lama asked about ... would come from inside. Something as intangible and insubstantial as a thought would rewire the brain. To the mandarins of neuroscience, the very idea seemed as likely as the wings of a butterfly leaving a dent on an armored tank. Neuroscientist Helen Mayberg had not endeared herself to the pharmaceutical industry by discovering, in 2002, that inert pills -- placebos -- work the same way on the brains of depressed people as antidepressants do...
Attention, for instance, seems like one of those ephemeral things that comes and goes in the mind but has no real physical presence. Yet attention can alter the layout of the brain as powerfully as a sculptor's knife can alter a slab of stone… "This positive state is a skill that can be trained," Prof. Davidson says. "Our findings clearly indicate that meditation can change the function of the brain in an enduring way."

The article goes on to say that they studied changes to the brain that occurred during meditation and how the brain changed after meditation. The grand epiphany was that after meditation changes to the brain lingered and remained. The brain was physically different after meditation
The butterfly of positive thoughts and attention could dent the armored tank of our minds.

Things previously thought impossible are quite common. This has two key messages for us.
First, expand your imagination of the possibilities. Things in your life that you have always considered impossible could be quite common. All you have to do is change the way you look at it.

Second, this knowledge is a powerful tool to change the chemistry of your mind. Changing your thought processes to a positive perspective will change the way your brain is wired, bring better health and also open your mind and add power to your processing possibilities. You will begin to have more capabilities to change your life and to change the world.