It used to be believed that consciousness was the byproduct of the physical brain, and that we all shared a constant, stable reality.

However, quantum physics is turning many of the old beliefs upside down.  Studies have shown irrefutably that what we think of as solid objects are actually comprised of tiny particles of matter that are really waves of potential representing different possible outcomes which, only when observed, collapse into a single perceived result to be seen again as a particles.  Hence, what is observed, the physical world,  reality, is dependent upon and intricately connected to the observer.  (See blog:  In Two Places At Once)

According to Deepak Chopra’s video, The Rabbit Hole – What Is Consciousness?, “The physical world, as we see it, is not reality.  The true nature of reality is pure potential, infinite possibilities, infinite creativity.  This true reality has no beginning and no end.  It does not exist in time and space.  Time and space exist within it.  And this, we call consciousness.”

In the blog, Air Head Is A Compliment…Really, I wrote:

We can use CAT scans and MRIs to show the activity of the brain, but that doesn’t prove that the mind arises in the brain.  These are maps showing the terrain of the brain as a thought or emotion crosses it.  Deepak Chopra says in his book Life After Death “They don’t prove that the brain IS the mind any more than a footprint in the sand is the same as the foot.”

In the book, Proof Of Heaven, Eben Alexander, M.D., a highly trained neurosurgeon for 25 years, tells how his brain was attacked by bacterial meningitis rendering him in a coma for a week. Because the disease damaged the entire surface of his neocortex, which houses much of our humanness, it perfectly mimicked the death of his brain.  Despite the part of his brain responsible for thought and emotion not functioning according to scans, lab numbers, and neurological exams, Dr. Alexander existed in an “ultra real,” super physical state of consciousness.  He journeyed beyond this world to what he calls the Realm of the Eathworm’s-Eye View, the Core, and the Gateway where he met and communicated with beings, including the Divine source of the universe itself, and went on, against all odds, to make a full recovery.

Before undergoing his near death experience (NDE), Dr. Alexander was a scientific skeptic, who nodded politely when patients relayed similar experiences, unable to reconcile his medical neuroscientific knowledge with any spiritual belief. After his NDE,the neuroscientist in Dr. Alexander ran down the list which he knew his colleagues and he, in the old days, would have offered to explain away his NDE.   Discounting all of them, he writes:

But while I was in a coma my brain hadn’t been working improperly. It hadn’t been working at all.  The part of my brain that years of medical school had taught me was responsible for creating the world I lived and moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down and out. And yet, despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and reality.

Similarly, when I was severely mentally impaired, as the result of a pill popping suicide attempt, I became aware of a separate, distinct part of me observing the damaged me. Even though huge chunks of my personality were gone and my mental processes weren’t functioning properly, my spirit, soul, or whatever you want to call it, was intact and fully aware.  Objectively and compassionately, this higher self, remaining whole and undamaged, watched life play out for the  physical me.  As a matter of fact, this higher energy emerged stronger and more clearly defined as my ego was quieter and less imposing.  (See blog:  I think Therefore I Am…Really?)

Dr. Alexander’s concluded from his experience:

…I would say the universe is much larger than it appears to be if we only look at its immediately visible parts.

…We – each of us- are intricately, irremovably connected to the larger universe.  It is our true home, and thinking that this physical world is all that matters is like shutting oneself up in a closet and imagining that there is nothing else out beyond it.

Each of us is more familiar with consciousness than we are anything else, and yet we understand far more about the rest of the universe than we do about the mechanism of consciousness.  It is so close to home that it is almost forever beyond our grasp.

Count me as a believer!

Research has shown that nerves, throughout the body, carry impulses at varying speeds up to a dizzying 240 miles per hour.  However, once inside the congested network of our heads, impulses tend to crawl along much more slowly at 2 to 20 miles per hour.

Hence, while consciousness is fast, it’s not instantaneous. A minimum of 10 to 20 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) are required for any sensory message to reach the brain, and, then, the brain takes more time to formulate a response.

While conducting experiments on free will, Benjamin Libet, found that there was a 200 millisecond delay between becoming aware of an intention, for example, to move a finger, and the completion of the action, moving the finger.  In this time lag, sometimes referred to as “the magic quarter second,” albeit brief, is the power of free will.  Now, controversy does exist over what exactly constitutes “awareness to act” and whether it’s an evolving, dynamic process or a sudden state.  However, there is little debate over whether we humans possess veto power in the gap.

In her book, Mind Whispering, Tara Bennett-Goleman calls this the “mindful quarter second.”   She suggests that these pauses represent an invaluable opportunity in which to become aware and exercise our choice in how to respond and behave.

In the book, which brings together the latest in cognitive psychology, the neuroscience of habit change, Eastern philosophy and her experience with horse whispering, Bennett-Goleman proposes that by becoming present and listening to the murmurs of the mind, we can openly investigate our habits and reactions, in the moment, and better determine what is needed and choose how to respond.  The art of mind whispering, involves three steps bearing Tibetan names: drenpa, sesshin, and bayu.

Drenpa - is a deliberate pause to remember the instructions.  She writes, “Drenpa pauses, checks the mode temperature and asks ‘what’s happening?’”

Sesshin -  is the mindful awareness that reconnects to those instructions putting them into practice.  ”Shesshin takes the information from drenpa and asks ‘what’s needed?’”

Bayu - consciously chooses how to implement what is determined to be needed or the remedy in the particular situation.

According to Bennett-Goleman, “Practicing these three steps together builds the habit of waking up to the present moment, finding the apt mode shifter, and changing conditioned pattern.”  She refers to unconscious habits as “modes.”  When automatic habits are brought into awareness, control shifts from the basal ganglia, a more primitive part of the brain, to the executive circuits of the prefrontal cortex, and we gain conscious choice over ourselves and our lives.

Bennett-Goleman writes:

Opening up a space in our minds gives us more choice in the moment so we can recognize that a habitual mode has been triggered.  Then we have the chance to make an intentional shift…. And everytime we free ourselves from the grip of habit, that very act is a small liberation, a reward in itself.

On Facebook the other day, I spyed a post which read: “What screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of how it’s supposed to be.”  For decades, I was the world’s best at fabricating this illusory bubble and criticizing myself mercilessly for not measuring up.

Through eighteen years of marriage and for several years of single motherhood after, I tried to live up to the picture I held of a with-it woman who could keep her man happy, use a power drill, edge the yard, and whip up a mouth watering dinner in a sparkling kitchen resembling an ad on the pages of a magazine while she looked effortlessly fabulous the whole time.  Needless to say, I nor my life ever fit this description – not even close.  After a messy divorce and disastrous post marriage relationship, I found myself feeling like a miserable failure as a woman and mother.  I was the furthest I’d ever been from my ideal image.

“This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!” I huffed. Eventually, after one insult piled on top of another, my answer to straying so far off of the “should” path was to try to commit suicide, resulting in a serious brain injury and losing custody of my sons.  And, I thought things were bad before?

In the almost six years since the suicide attempt, I’ve evolved to understand that I was causing my own suffering and torturing myself with expectations of what should be.  I’ve come to realize that there is no “should be.”  There is only what is.  I can alleviate almost all pain and suffering by getting rid of the “shoulds” and consciously being accepting and open to whatever unfolds. Many philosophies teach and I’ve found that emotional torment and suffering comes from our attachment to thoughts about what happens, not what actually happens.  Pain originates in the space between our thoughts and reality.

In Loving What Is, Byron Katie explains:

A thought is harmless unless we believe it.  It is not our thoughts, but the attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Thoughts are like the breeze or the leaves on the trees or the raindrops falling.  They appear like that and through inquiry we can make friends with them.  Would you argue with a raindrop?  Raindrops aren’t personal and neither are thoughts.

Katie advises us to meet our thoughts with understanding and inquiry and proposes that behind every uncomfortable feeling, there’s a thought that’s not true for us.  To change the stressful, uncomfortable feelings, we must understand the original thought causing it rather than looking outside of ourselves at circumstances or people.

After the reflexive “aack!” feeling, my acceptance of what is closes the gap between expectations and reality, ending the pain, and, only then, can I begin contemplating how to make the circumstances work best for me.  While not always possible, I try to eliminate expectations as much as I can and remain open to whatever unfolds.

Enlightened individuals, I understand, may never even experience initial alarm and surprise because they are free of expectations.  With a nonchalant shrug, a highly cultivated mind might think “Oh, now this.”  While I’m not anywhere near there yet, I’m much closer than I used to be. I find it helpful to remind myself that, just because events cause me pain or aren’t what I expected or wanted, that doesn’t mean that whatever’s happening isn’t in my highest good or can’t turn out OK or for the best even in the end.

So many times, circumstances, which I pegged as dubious, at first, turned out to be just fine, when all was said and done.  From experience, I’ve learned not to even begin to presume that I know what’s “best” in any situation.  What we like, want, and think we need isn’t always going to provide growth or even get us to our goal, oftentimes.  By trying to force a certain outcome, I limit many other possibilities which could be awesome and bring what I was seeking in the first place (happiness, love).

Life gets infinitely easier when I remain open without expectations.

I read somewhere that the more you love yourself, the less effect fear has on you.  In what has seemed like a slow motion, evolution process, taking years, initiated by a suicide attempt and resulting brain injury, I think, I’ve finally moved out of my longstanding, fear-based existence moving forward as boldly as I can manage which usually amounts to taking tip toe, baby steps into the great unknown.

In the Heart Of The Soul, Gary Zukav, posits that energy leaves the body, through thinking, speaking, and acting, in one of two ways: as fear and doubt or as love and trust.  As suggested by the Law of Attraction and other philosophies, when a person exudes fear and doubt, it leads to one occurrence and, when a person emits energy as love and trust, a different experience is created.

According to Zukav, when energy exits as fear and doubt, the result is always painful producing anger, jealousy, grief and vengefulness.  Energy released as love and trust produces scenarios yielding gratitude, contentment, and joy.  Experiencing painful emotions is always a signal to you that energy is being discharged as fear and doubt.

Fear is produced when your amygdala, a primitive part of the brain responsible for the flight or flight response, kicks in doing its job ensuring self preservation.  However, in this day and age, when we are unlikely to encounter a life or death situation, it doesn’t need to be so vigilant.  While Mother Nature was kind enough to program the amygdala with certain fears at birth, we pack on many more, learned from the world around us, the people in our lives and our experiences. When we get that foreboding feeling, we need to ask ourselves if it’s warranted or just an instinctual reaction to the unfamiliar and unknown.  From your brain’s perspective, to get over a fear, you have to expose yourself to it. 

My amygdala has been on high alert most of my life.  I’ve calmed it down with mindfulness practices and by consciously doing that which scares the heck out of me. Those around me have heard me say over and over that “I refuse to live a fear based existence.”  These days, if I’m scared of something, I’ll usually, eventually, take it on because I know there will be a sense of freedom and growth on the other side.

A while back, I attended a social gathering by myself where I only knew one person well with a few people that I could call acquaintances, but barely.  For some, this may be no big deal.  If you’re one of these, I’m in awe of you.  With a speech impairment, from the brain injury/suicide attempt, and social aversion, showing up solo was hard for me – damn hard!  Even before the brain injury, I would’ve gladly rather gone to the dentist.

Upon arriving, I sat in my car not wanting to go inside, asking myself, “Would just making it to the parking lot be good enough?”  I already knew the answer.  If I didn’t go inside, I’d be severely disappointed in myself.  So, pulling on my big girl panties, I took a deep breath and a few more, and, with constant positive self talk and thought reframing, I braved going inside.  While I didn’t stay long, I can’t say that I enjoyed it, and my amygdala was in turbo mode the whole time, I’m glad that I didn’t chicken out.

Because I over ruled my dread, I know that doing something similar will be easier the next time and even easier after that.  By confronting and moving through fear, the fear subsides because the amygdala learns not to respond as if life or death and, while the alarmed feeling may never disappear completely, it will lessen.

As my amygdala has settled down, so has my life.  Living a fearless life doesn’t mean just recklessly throwing caution to the wind because the two aren’t the same. I have to be very honest with myself to know the difference, sometimes.  To consciously choose actions and thoughts that coincide with desired growth and intentions, even if fear inducing, is always an option.

Through these choices, I am deciding who I want to be.  Dr. Joe Vitale said “You are the masterpiece of your own life; you are the Michelangelo of your experience. The David that you are sculpting is you.”

It’s often said that you can become an expert in anything by logging ten thousand hours in the subject.  This “10,000 hour rule,” derived from Malcolm Gladwell’s book,  Outliers: The Story of Success, however, is an over simplification of the information he presented.

What Gladwell said was that you needed ten thousand hours to be a phenom at something, which is beyond expert all the way to freakishly awesome.  By phenom, he was referring to that person who’s head and shoulders above everyone else and is good enough to be recognized by one name, like Tiger, Jordon, YoYo Ma, or Venus.

Gladwell studied the lives of extremely successful people to find out how they achieved such heights.  He tells of a study of violin performers in Berlin where  it was determined that elite performers put in more than double the practice hours, in excess of ten thousand, than other performers. While no “naturally gifted” talent emerged, psychologists did find a direct statistical correlation between the amount of hours practiced and achievement.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen dropped out of college in 1975 and founded Microsoft, now a household name.  Prior to starting the company, Gates and Allen had thousands of hours of programming experience as youngsters and teenagers, which was rare for that time when computers weren’t readily available.

The Beatles, who seemed to burst onto the music scene in 1964 and sky rocket to success, had actually been playing together in local clubs for years before.  By the time they became popular, the band had played over one thousand concerts together which is more than most bands play in their whole careers today.

OK, these are rare, long shot examples.  But, guess what?  The great news is that you don’t have to put in anywhere near the same amount of time to become good at something.  In order to be successful at a  hobby, business pursuit, or skill of any kind, it isn’t actually necessary to be THE elite or even an expert.  While you do have to dedicate the time to hone and perfect your craft, thousands of hours are not required.

In The Winner’s Brain, by Marke Fenske and Jeff Browne, the authors indicate that one key to becoming a winner is to practice a skill until it becomes committed to implicit memory:

…when a task is practiced to the point of being automatic because it’s easier to free up nueral resources when you don’t have to waste attentional energy thinking through each of the meticulous steps involved.  Well-automated tasks and thought processes reduce the load on attention and focus by habitually ensuring that the brain relies on implicit memory – implicit in the sense that we don’t have to consciously retrace the steps of our previous experience to complete it.

… this leads us to an essential Winner’s Brain strategy… Practice, practice, practice – until you can perform on autopilot.

While it is unrealistic to think that practice, or anything else for that matter, will lead to perfection, putting hours into a skill shifts your brain into winning mode and stacks the odds of success on your side.

In Choosing To Be, Kat Tansey details her healing journey from depression through learning meditation while under the tutelage of her Buddha Master cat, Poohbear.  Combining two of my favorite things: mindfulness and cats, the book is really an easy-to-follow meditation guide disquised as light, entertaining reading.

Tansey takes us through her frustrations and triumphs as she spends time on the cushion crying, feeling angry, squirming, and falling asleep and overcomes each one to reach new levels of insight and peace.  Persisiting with her meditation practice despite hardships and distractions, Tansey observes:

I’m feeling joyful much of the time now, and I think the reason is I’ve learned that what is happening in my life is not the determining factor for whether I can feel joy.  It isn’t what is happening outside that counts, it is what is happening inside that counts.  How I view life, things, people – all of it- that’s what makes the difference between joy and sorrow.”

Similarly, I recovered from depression and a brain injury, resulting from a pill popping suicide attempt, using meditiation, among many other tools.  In the blog, The Myth and Magic Of Meditation, I proclaimed:  ”Meditation is the closest thing to a happy pill that I have found.”

The life-changing abilities of meditation that Tansey and I experienced firsthand are being confirmed by science.  On a physical level, a person is learning to alter the way their brain functions by changing their thought patterns. Through neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change its structure and function through repeated thought and activity, meditation and mindfulness strengthen connections and expand circuits in the brain that are frequently used while weakening and shrinking those areas rarely engaged permanently changing how the brain functions.

Brain scans of people who practice meditation show increased activity in the frontal lobes, the rational brain, and reduced activity in the amygdala, the fear center of the brain.  According to Frontiers in Human Neuroscience:  ”meditation training may induce learning that is not stimulus – or task-specific, but process specific, and thereby may result in enduring changes in mental function.”  In studies, just eight weeks of training in meditation quiets the amygdala to response provoking stimuli in people even when in a non-meditative state.

Neuroscientists have discovered that meditation can stimulate significant increases in activity in regions of the left prefrontal cortex—an area of the brain associated with positive emotions while decreasing activity in parts of the brain related to negative emotions. A mindfulness practice can grow the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for learning and memory, which is being connected to lower depression scores.  Areas of the brain associated with empathy and compassion seem to grow with a meditation practice.

The benefits of meditation and mindfulness are not limited to the brain. Meditation has been proven to strengthen the immune system, reduce blood pressure and the risk of stroke, minimize pain sensitivity, and enhance cognitive function. Research is showing that mindfulness practices cause lasting changes in the brain similar to those caused by exercise or learning a musical instrument.

It is now known that a healthy emotional style and mental habits can be intentionally cultivated and learned like any other cognitive skill through mindfulness and other mental health practices.  Meditation is being called “botox for the brain.” Giving your brain a work out with meditation, just like you would work out any other muscle, has been found to prevent the normal shrinkage of the brain that happens with age related decline and prevents cellular aging.

If you already meditate, good for you. Keep it up.  If you don’t, start today!  It will change your life.  It did mine.

In Scientific American Brave New Brains, Judith Horstman writes “We’ve learned more about the brain in the past fifty years than in the preceding fifty thousand, and the cooperation of sciences over the next two decades may even surpass that record.”  According to Sharpbrains, a leading market research firm, the digital brain health market will grow to $1 Billion by the end of this year, and likely to $6 Billion by 2020.  Information about how to maintain a healthy brain and how it influences our lives for better or worse is exponentially different than what was thought to be even a decade ago.

In their book, Super Brain,Deepak Chopra M.D. and Rudolph E. Tanzi Ph. D. combine cutting edge research and spiritual wisdom to dispel long standing myths about the “three-pound universe” in our skulls. The five most widespread brain myths are:

• Myth 1. The injured brain cannot heal itself – Now we know that the brain has amazing powers of healing, unsuspected in the past.

Study after study has confirmed that,when neurons and synapses are lost due to injury, neighboring neurons  undergo “compensatory regeneration” trying to reestablish connection replacing the damaged neural network.  Through neuroplasticity,changes in neural pathways and synapses due to behavior, environment and thoughts, your brain is constantly remodeling itself.  The authors describe neuroplasticity as: “if a rose were plucked from a bush, and the bush next to it handed it a new rose.”  Neuroplasticity takes place every day in healthy brains too.

The authors write:

Neuroplasticity is better than mind over matter.  It’s mind turning into matter as your thoughts create new neural growth. In the early days, the phenomenon was scoffed at and neuroscientists were belittled for using the term neuroplasticity. …. Neuroplasticity overcame a rough start to become a star.

• Myth 2.  The brain’s hardwiring cannot be changed. – In fact, the line between hard and soft wiring is shifting all the time and our ability to rewire our brains remains intact from birth to the end of life.

Hebbs law, “neurons that fire together, wire together,” means that as brain regions interact in novel ways, fresh circuits are created.  In everyday life, if a  person learns a new skill, exposes themselves to a different environment or experience, or does familiar things in unfamiliar ways, their brain responds by rewiring and improving itself.

The authors conclude:

The bottom line is that we are not “hardwired.”  Our brains are incredibly resilient; the marvelous process of neuroplasticity gives you the capability, in your thoughts, feelings, and actions, to develop in any direction you choose.

• Myth 3.  Aging in the brain is inevitable and irreversible. – To counter this outmoded belief, new techniques for keeping the brain youthful and retaining mental acuity are arising every day.

With age, people tend to simplify life, limiting mental and physical activity and reducing new experiences as they retreat into their comfort zone.  This lifestyle paves the way for decline of both the mind and brain.

The authors stress:

You can  choose to follow an upward learning curve no matter how old you are.  By doing so, you will create new dendrites, synapses, and neural pathways that enhance the health of your brain and even help stave off Alzheimer’s disease (as suggested by the latest research findings).

• Myth 4. The brain loses millions of cells a day, and lost brain cells cannot be replaced. – In fact, the brain contains stem cells that are capable of maturing into new brain cells throughout life.

According to the book, our brains lose around 85,000 cortical neurons per day or about one per second.  While this may sound like a lot, it is only .0002 of the 40 billion neurons in your cerebral cortex. “At this rate, it would take more than 600 years to lose half of the neurons in our brain!”

According to Chopra and Tanzi:

The bottom line for now is that as we age, key areas of the brain involved with memory and learning continue to produce new nerve cells, and that this process can be stimulated by physical exercise, mentally stimulating activities (like reading this book), and social connectedness.

• Myth 5. Primitive reactions (fear, anger jealousy, aggression) overrule the higher brain.  - Because our brains are imprinted with genetic material over thousands of generations, the lower brain is still with us, generating primitive and often negative drives like fear and anger.  But the brain is constasntly evolving, and we have gained the ability to master the lower brain through choice and free will.

The brain is a multidimensional entity with checks and balances between desire, restraint, and compulsion.  The sentiment of the authors is:

Accepting that biology is destiny defeats the whole purpose of being human…  But surely to label human beings as puppets of animal instinct is wrong, in the first place because it is so unbalanced.  The higher brain is just as legitimate, powerful, and evolutionary as the lower brain….  The choice is always there.

 With the new information available to us dispelling these long held brain myths, anyone can take control of and transform their life by doing the same with their brain.

“The stakes are very high when it comes to letting your brain use you.  But if you start to use it instead, the rewards are unlimited.”

Like trying to squeeze water, the harder you try to be creative, the more infuriatingly impossible it often becomes. Creativity is one of those elusive things that just will not be forced.

While the right side of the brain has traditionally been credited with creative thought, recent brain scans show that creative thinking engages the whole brain through a part of the brain called the associative cortex. The associative cortex sits in the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes of the brain linking senses, emotions, logic, social abilities, language skills, memories, movement and thoughts in potentially novel ways.

Although not aware of it, you use your associative-creative brain every day.  For instance, it allows you to recall the taste of apple pie when seeing a picture of it or recreates the thunder of a train when reading about one.  Everyone has this basic level of creative thought and, while some people are naturally more imaginative than others, extraordinary creativity can be developed and encouraged.

Unlike conscious thought, creativity requires letting go, relaxing, and allowing ideas to flow without censorship, judgment, or comparison.  Being creative requires an altered state of mind, different from the alert, waking state, in which logical reasoning is suspended and a mind open to new perceptions.  Eric Maisel, author and creativity coach, says that the more someone recognizes and encourages creativity, the more it flows.

In her book, A Better Brain At Any Age, Sondra Kornblatt offers these tips from neuroscientists, writers and coaches to increase the creative juices:

• Get bored.  Reduce your entertainment: TV, internet, computer, video games, and movies.  Boredom spurs your brain to get busy.
• Dive in.  This is the opposite of the above.  Read as much as possible.  Visit art museums.  Listen to music.  Get inspired.
• Make it a ritual.  Build creative time into your daily routine.  Whatever your interested in, do it everyday and make it a habit.
• Make a creative space.  Having a studio or a corner where you have easy access to the tools you need, can display your work, and affirm your artistry will aid it in flourising.
• Meditate.  Meditation connects neurons more strongly, helps retrieve memories, generates new associations, reduces anxiety and diminishes emotional blocks enhancing creativity.
• Honor anxiety.  Let anxiety give you a different approach and cause you to question your habitual ways of doing things, but don’t let it stop the process.
• Make a mistake. Quiet any perfectionist pressure by messing up already.  A mistake adds uniqueness and makes the creation process more enjoyable.
• Get up and move.  The movement cortex of the brain is also involved in thinking and emotions.  Movement unleashes your mind.  Take a break and exercise, have sex, stretch.
• Let go.  Let go of old habits and embrace new perspectives.  Step out of your routine.  Write with your nondominant hand.  Do something you’ve never done before. Be eccentric.
• Reframe the problem.  Assume a new vantage point – look at the issue from a different side or above or below.  Ask questions. Be curious.
• Create a “crummy” version first.  Just get started.  Allow yourself to create without any judgement or critiquing.

Creativity is a vital dimension of human intelligence (See blog:  Everybody Is A Genius) which can be activated through intention and attention. Instead of chasing creativity, let it catch you!

We’ve all heard of the the experiments showing rats will do anything for a pleasure fix. Typically, caged rats are given access to a lever which they can press freely to give themselves drugs that activate their pleasure centers while also being able to manipulate identical levers to acquire food and water.  Becoming addicted, the rats will hit the drug lever repeatedly, while the food and water levers often go untouched, until they drop dead from exhaustion or starvation. It has largely been assumed humans would do pretty much the same if given the chance.

In his book, This Is Your Brain On Joy, Dr. Earl Henslin tells of one researcher, Bruce Alexander, who noticed a flaw in the experiments.  The rat participants in the studies were isolated in their cages with nothing else to do but press the lever.  ”If I was strapped down alone in a cage, I’d probably want to get high too,” he thought.

Alexander conducted his own similar experiments.  However, one group of rats were placed in a specially designed “rat park,” which was spacious and brightly colored with running wheels, toys, mazes, abundant, good food and water and even other rats with which to socialize and mate. He put the control group of rats alone in bare cages as in the past experiments.

Both groups of rats were given equal access to morphine laced water.  Well, what do ya  know?  The rats in the cages got addicted, while the park rats may have tried the happy water once or twice, but ended up rejecting it.

Even more amazing, when the caged rats, who had been addicted to morphine for fifty-seven days, were put in the park, they avoided the drugs too. They were even observed trembling and shaking as they detoxed, but opted to stay off of the drug.

While humans, their environments, and other influencing factors, such as relationships, are certainly more complicated than rats in a rat park, the study does point to some interesting conclusions.  Henslin writes that “Life itself was meant to be our natural high.”  His book, which incorporates neuroscience and biblical insight (interesting combination, indeed!), likens an enriched environment to life in the Garden of Eden.

Henslin suggests taking a three pronged approach to create a brain prone to reside in joy.  The three categories are:

• Enriching your outer world (creating a joyful, brain-stimulating environment)
• Enriching your inner world (feeding your mind and soul nourishing thoughts)
• Enriching your body-mind chemistry (through what you put in your mouth and how you move your muscles)

Did you know that a large part of how we respond to the world, interact in relationships, think of and talk to ourselves is determined by shadows from our past?  These shadows, or implicit memories, which are below conscious awareness, cannot be directly measured or retrieved yet are very real and can prevent healthy relationships, achieving goals, and happiness.

In her book, Rewire Your Brain For Love, Marsha Lucas, PhD, neuropsychologist, psychotherapist, and self described neuroscience geek, calls implicit memories the “unthought known” and labels them the “unconscious effects of your past experiences.”  Implicit memories are the nonverbal recordings formed when the hippocampus, in the brain, is not online to contextualize and organize the information.  She writes:

These memories got quickly and permanently stored, even though you don’t have conscious awareness of them as memories – they’re just kind of “in there,” informing and influencing you without any kind of time stamp,  and without your being aware of their influence.

All memories before about eighteen months old get processed implicitly because the brain simply isn’t developed enough to do anything else.  Most memories before the age of around five are also implicit because forming explicit memories, the ones you can consciously retrieve, requires focused attention.

This means that your little brain formed its earliest impressions of the world from experiences with your primary caregivers and deeply stored these implicit memories because your life, literally, depended on it.  These interactions were hugely influential in making you “you” and determining your relationship style as well as social and emotional behaviors as an adult.  Many later experiences, when you weren’t paying attention or when your hippocampus was offline for any reason, such as when extremely emotional or under the influence of some medications or alcohol, also formed implicit memories.

Lucas writes:

When an implicit memory gets called up in the here and now, you won’t know it’s a memory – you’ll  just experience it through emotions, behaviors, and (in all likelihood) body sensations as well, such as a tightness in the throat or the pressure of tears coming to your eyes.  

While you’ll express the effects of these memories in the now and probably attribute the feeling to something happening in the present, you’re really being influenced by a shadow from the past.

As Lucas conveys, neuroscience has proven that you can step out of the shadows, change your brain, and deter the effect of these implicit memories.

The good news, though, is that you can rewire your brain for better relationships.  You can change your old “relationship brain” neural pathways and develop new and improved ones using simple, 2,500-year-old mind training techniques that are more precise than a neurosurgeon’s blade and without all the mess.  The ancient practice of mindfulnesss meditation, as it turns out, produces real, measurable changes in the brain in key places so that deeper connections, better love, and healthier relationships can take hold.

In as little as 20 minutes a day.

The book outlines specific mindfulness practices and meditations to transform your brain to communicate with more love, build emotional resilience, reduce reactivity, and even have better sex!

(For more information on mindfulness in general, see blog: The Meaning Of Mindfulness)