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- Herausgeber: Books on Demand
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Your brain is constantly changing. The connections between neurons change, cells become active or inactive, and they regenerate, die, are born, and generate new networks of connections. Your brain is in constant motion. This is why what you are, what you feel, and what you do are also constantly changing: your world is an experience produced by your brain. The question is whether you wish to influence the direction into which and the speed at which your brain – and your world – are changing. If you wish, you can use this guidebook to study the basics of how to develop your brain using skills. However, the key objective of this guidebook is to motivate and assist you in engaging in high-quality concentrated repetition that will gradually change your brain.
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Seitenzahl: 119
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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“Zeal for doing, lust for action, leaves many a person, especially in this hurried and impatient human environment in which we live, with experience of an almost incredible paucity, all on the surface. No one experience has a chance to complete itself because something else is entered upon so speedily.” John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART 1: WHAT SHOULD YOU KNOW ABOUT YOUR BRAIN?
S
AME
B
RAIN
, N
EW
E
NVIRONMENT
T
HREE
W
AYS OF
P
ERCEIVING THE
B
RAIN
K
NOW
Y
OUR
B
RAIN
– B
IG
F
IVE
P
ERSONALITY
T
RAITS
H
OW THE
B
RAIN
W
ORKS
– F
IVE
N
EURAL
N
ETWORKS
B
RAIN AND THE
E
NVIRONMENT
– F
OUR
M
ODES
Y
OUR
B
RAIN
N
OW
– M
INDFULNESS AND THE
T
HREE
L
EVELS OF
E
XPERIENCE
C
HANGING
Y
OUR
B
RAIN
– T
WO
S
TRATEGIES
H
OW SHOULD THE
B
RAIN BE
D
EVELOPED
?
PART 2: BRAIN SKILLS
F
OCUS
M
OTIVATION
V
ALUES
M
ANAGING YOUR TIME
R
ESILIENCE – THE
A
BILITY TO
D
EAL WITH
P
RESSURE
A
BILITY TO
R
ECOVER
I
NFLUENCING
C
OOPERATION
S
KILLS
CONCLUSIONS
SOURCES AND INSPIRATION
PART 1: WHAT SHOULD YOU KNOW ABOUT YOUR BRAIN?
Your brain is constantly changing. The connections between neurons change, cells become active or inactive, and they regenerate, die, are born, and generate new networks of connections. Your brain is in constant motion. This is why what you are, what you feel, and what you do are also constantly changing: your world is an experience produced by your brain. The question is whether you wish to influence the direction into which and the speed at which your brain – and your world – are changing.
If you wish, you can use this guidebook to study the basics of how to develop your brain using skills. However, the key objective of this guidebook is to motivate and assist you in engaging in high-quality concentrated repetition that will gradually change your brain. Did you know that your brain has an astonishing ability to learn, regenerate, and adapt itself?
With your brain, in the same package, you get your mind – your subjective experiences about yourself and your environment. Unlike, for instance, the computer I'm using to write this book, a human being has an experience of his or her existence. The brain and the mind are two sides of the same coin: they influence each other and are much more flexible than you'd think. The mind is a user interface that you can use to directly influence the way your brain works. The exercises described in this book will change your brain, which you can feel in your mind.
How does your mind actually work, then? What do you experience? Your experiences are made up of the four parts listed below.
Perceptions: what you can see, hear, smell, or taste with your senses.
Thoughts: the words, sentences, images, and ideas you turn over in your mind.
Emotions: what you feel, such as happy, sad, timid, angry, or astonished.
Your bodily experiences: whether you are refreshed and relaxed or tired and nervous, for example.
Take a pause and focus on your experiences. It might seem like a waste of time, but I can assure you – it definitely is not! If you take a look at your experiences to answer the question of what's going on right now in my mind, you will learn a lot about yourself and your brain. In the long term, your way of experiencing things determines how you use your brain and what you can achieve with it. Your brain has a unique ability to generate experiences – perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations. We have experiences of ourselves and the world around us – just because we have a brain. The subjective and ever-changing experiences generated in your brain determine who you are and what you do. This is why you should stop and pay attention to your experiences. And not just stop but take action to influence them.
Take a pause to look at your current experience. What is the primary thing you are experiencing right now (such as “Excellent – I feel like singing out loud” or “Half-hearted – I couldn't be less interested in what I'm doing”)? Sharpen your focus – drill deeper and go wider; study everything about your experience: what are your perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and feelings? What do you feel deep down?
You can influence your experiences – and thus your brain – but only if you know what is your current primary experience and possibly also your secondary experiences. An experience consists of several simultaneously occurring and sometimes even contradictory levels that are changing. This does not have to be the case, but it often is.
Now, concentrate on thinking about what you should be doing. Are you in the right state of mind? Does your experience correspond to what you should be doing? If the answer is yes, it's the optimal time to get to work. If the answer is no, however, think about how you could flip your 'brain switch'.
So, how can you change the mode of your brain? Examples of good basic means include mental imagery, going to a new location, music, humor, discussions, coffee, and moving about, but basically only your selfknowledge and imagination limit how you can influence the mode of your brain – and the experiences it generates.
If you feel that studying your experiences is trivial, weird, or a manifestation of modern narcissism and people's tendency to be overly wrapped up in themselves, try to rise above these prejudices! The key to developing your brain lies in your own mind, and that is also where you can find the opportunity to get a happier, healthier, and more balanced life.
The starting point of this guidebook is studying your own experiences and molding them. The method is simple:
What am I thinking right now? Identify what your current experience is.
What am I supposed to do? How can I influence my brain function right now?
Now that we have reached the right dimension – experiences – and have warmed up a bit, we can start thinking about why shaking up the brain of a person of the information age is a good idea.
SAME BRAIN, NEW ENVIRONMENT
The human brain is ancient. The latest hardware update took place tens of thousands of years ago. At that time, the environment in which our brain lived was very different, for good and for bad. Life was short and dangerous, but probably also simple and meaningful. The brain of a human being of the information age dates back to that era.
Each era gives rise to people who are happy and unhappy in a way typical for the era. The modern world is full of information, change, stimuli, opportunities, and diversity. It improves people's wellbeing and makes them happier, but it also leads to overloaded brains and stress, makes people long for time alone and the company of others, and presents them with a challenge of absorbing the huge amount of world views, ways of thinking, experiences, and behaviors that the open and free world generates. It's the brain that created the information age and that enjoys the opportunities it offers, but it's also the brain that carries within itself bits of code based on the ancient circumstances that cause trouble. The brain should be able to navigate also in this new environment, guide its bearer, and provide the bearer with a coherent and continuous experience of life.
This is why we should shake our brain to bring it to the new millennium. You don't have to do this, but you should at least consider it. Your brain will be fine, don't worry about it. The biological machine inside your skull is amazingly adaptive and efficient: most of the time, it manages just fine on its own. However, the information age of the new millennium challenges your brain in a couple of ways to which your brain is not very well equipped. If you pay attention to these challenges and exercise your brain, you will be rewarded with an even more efficient one. The brain of a person in the information age has huge potential. You can free this potential to achieve things that are important to you. You can determine yourself what these things are, but you can achieve at least any of the following three: creativity, efficiency, and happiness. Creativity means an ability to create something new, efficiency means an ability to achieve things, and happiness is a unique experience that the brain offers its user as a reward for skillfully managing it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone gained wealth, won new friends, or learned to influence people as a result of good use of their brain.
THREE WAYS OF PERCEIVING THE BRAIN
The workings of the brain can be considered at three levels: the level of neurons, different brain areas and the connections between these, the level of the neural networks that guide activity and their regulation, and the level of the experiences generated by the brain. This is somewhat similar to the three levels at which you can look at a rock band: the sound engineer who is in charge of the band's sound and instruments, the mixer who fine-tunes the sound on stage, and the fan who listens to the band.
The engineer's approach to music consists of instruments, their components, and their properties. The engineer studies how each component works and how they are connected to each other. The engineer is familiar with all of the instruments, devices, and cables on stage. The engineer is familiar with their components and subcomponents. The engineer knows which components are connected to each other. The engineer knows the operating principle of the instruments and devices and knows how to fix them.
The mixer uses the mixing table to adjust the sound. Signals from all of the instruments and microphones enter the table which includes a long row of controls and buttons the mixer can use to change the relative power of the different signals. The mixer can also add other digital sounds and sound effects to the mix. Mixing is all about adjusting the power and duration of these sources of sound in relation to each other. The mixer fine-tunes the sound as the total sum of the interaction between the instruments. The final result is the band's sound on stage.
The fan, on the other hand, focuses on the experience. Some people are willing and able to analyze their concert experience to write a review in a music magazine, for example.
Experiences are generated by the brain in interaction with the environment – this is what the brain does. Its functions change and fluctuate in relation to the changing environment. Since the environment is continuously changing, the brain is continuously changing as well. And the experience due to this interaction continuously changes.
There are and always have been people who have spent a lot of time paying conscious attention to their experiences through meditation or similar practices. They have become experts in the field of brain and mind like reviewers of rock concerts are experts in their field of experience. Are you familiar with your brain and your experiences?
All of us can become experts in this field with some practice. We can develop ourselves and take control of our brain and our experiences. It's possible to develop your ability to experience how your brain works in the same way as it's possible to develop your ability to experience music. You can become more aware of what your experiences include and how your brain is currently working.
The basis of brain research has been created by studying the brain like an engineer. This is why we know a lot about the brain: how neurons work, how the brain processes the information provided by the senses, how it changes and remembers, how it produces speech, how it guides movements, and how it processes emotions. We can study the way the brain works down to the level of single neurons.
Based on this information and due to new research methods developed, brain research has started in the past few decades to study the neural networks that create experiences and guide our behaviors: researchers have started to study the brain from the viewpoint of a sound mixer. However, one challenge still to be conquered by brain researchers is what the studied person feels when their brain is working. The situation is similar to a mixer trying to adjust the sound while wearing hearing protectors.
The person using their brain – you or me – has a major advantage over the brain researchers: we know what it feels like when our brain works and thus we can influence how our brain works. The challenge we face is not having a clear idea of the controllers available in our brain and how they should be adjusted. So, one needs both experience about the brain and knowledge of how the brain works.
This is exactly how you – the user and developer of your brain – should study your brain. The functions of your brain present themselves in your experiences, and the key to changing how your brain functions also lies in your experiences. If you look at your brain from the viewpoint of a mixer, you'll work with your experience by adjusting the controllers of your brain. But to be able to do this you need to know your experience like an experienced music lover knows how the band sounds like.
