If changing external circumstances can improve brain physiology, so can mental effort. “Intention and attention exert real, physical effects on the brain,” Dr. Schwartz explains.9 Not surprisingly, the brain area activated in studies looking at the effect of self-directed mental effort is the prefrontal cortex, the apex of the brain’s emotional self-regulation system. It’s also an area where, we have learned, the brains of addicts are impaired. The mental activity most critical to the development of emotional self-regulation has been called “dispassionate self-observation” by the authors of an
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