Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind

by Joe Dispenza

According to quantum physics, the brain itself consists of quantum possibilities before we measure it, before we observe with it. If we, our consciousness, were a brain product, we would be possibilities as well, and our “coupling” with the object would change neither the object nor us (our brain) from possibility to actuality. Face it! Possibility coupled to possibility only makes a bigger possibility.

There is a third way of thinking, and this one leads to a paradigm shift. Your consciousness is the primary fabric of reality, and matter (including the brain and the object you are observing) exists within this fabric as quantum possibilities. Your observation consists of choosing from the possibilities the one facet that becomes the actuality of your experience. Physicists call this process the collapse of the quantum possibility wave. Once you recognize that your consciousness is not your brain but transcends it, once you recognize that you have the power to choose among possibilities, you are ready to act on Joe Dispenza’s ideas and suggestions. It will help additionally to know that the “you” that chooses is a cosmic you, a state of consciousness available to you in non-ordinary situations. You reach such states when you have a creative insight. In those times, you are ready to make changes in your brain circuits. Dr. Dispenza shows you how.

Dispenza’s book is a welcome addition to the growing literature of the new paradigm of science: he emphasizes the importance of paying attention to emotions. You may already have heard the phrase emotional intelligence. What does that mean? First of all, it means that you don’t have to fall prey to your emotions. You do because you are attached to them; or as Joe Dispenza would say, “You are attached to the brain circuits connected with the emotions.”

There is a story that when Albert Einstein was leaving Nazi Germany for America, his wife became very concerned that she had to leave behind so much furniture and other household items. “I am attached to them,” she complained to a friend. To this, Einstein joked, “But my dear, they are not attached to you.” This is the thing. Emotions are not attached to you;...

I invite you to have a single thought, any thought. Whether your thought was related to a feeling of anger, sadness, inspiration, joy, or even sexual arousal, you changed your body. You changed you. All thoughts, whether they be “I can’t,” “I can,” “I’m not good enough,” or “I love you,” have similar measurable effects.

But how are you capable of performing all of those actions? We can all intellectually understand that the brain can manage and regulate many diverse functions throughout the rest of the body, but how responsible are we for the job our brain is doing as CEO of the body? Whether we like it or not, once a thought happens in the brain, the rest is history. All of the bodily reactions that occur from both our intentional or unintentional thinking unfold behind the scenes of our awareness.

For example, is it possible that the seemingly unconscious thoughts that run through our mind daily and repeatedly create a cascade of chemical reactions that produce not only what we feel but also how we feel? Can we accept that the long-term effects of our habitual thinking just might be the cause of how our body moves to a state of imbalance, or what we call disease?

As human beings, we have the natural ability to focus our awareness on anything. As we will learn, how and where we place our attention, what we place our attention on, and for how long we place it ultimately defines us on a neurological level.

Thus by paying attention to pain on a daily basis, we are wiring ourselves neurologically to develop a more acute awareness of pain perception, because the related brain circuits become more enriched.

Your own personal attention has that much of an effect on you. This could be one explanation to how pain, and even memories from our distant past, characterize us. What we repeatedly think about and where we focus our attention is what we neurologically become. Neuroscience finally understands that we can mold and shape the neurological framework of the self by the repeated attention we give to any one thing.

By the time you have read this far in the book, you have changed your brain permanently. If you learned even one bit of information, tiny brain cells have made new connections between them, and who you are is altered. The images that these words created in your mind have left footprints in the vast, endless fields of neurological landscape that is the identity called “you.” This is because the “you,” as a sentient being, is immersed and truly exists in the interconnected electrical web of cellular brain tissue. How your nerve cells are specifically arranged, or neurologically wired, based on what you learn, what you remember, what you experience, what you envision for yourself, what you do, and how you think about yourself, defines you as an individual. You are a work in progress. The organization of brain cells that makes up who you are is constantly in flux. Forget the notion that the brain is static, rigid, and fixed. Instead, brain cells are continually remolded and reorganized by our thoughts and experiences.

This time, instead of physically demonstrating the finger exercise, I want you to practice doing that same action in your mind. That is, remember what you did just moments before and mentally touch each finger the way I asked you to earlier: thumb to pinky finger, thumb to index finger, thumb to ring finger, and thumb to middle finger. Mentally rehearse the activity without physically doing it. Do it a few times in your mind, and then open your eyes. Did you notice that while you were practicing in your mind, your brain seemed to imagine the entire sequence just as you actually did it? In fact, if you paid full attention to what you were rehearsing in your mind’s eye by focusing on mentally practicing those finger actions, you fired the same set of nerve cells in the same part of your brain as if you were actually doing them. In other words, your brain did not know the difference between your doing the action or your remembering how to do the action. The act of mental rehearsal is a powerful way you can grow and mold new circuits in your brain.

Recent studies in neuroscience demonstrate that we can change our brain just by thinking. So ask yourself: What exactly do you spend most of your time mentally rehearsing, thinking about, and finally demonstrating? Whether you consciously or unconsciously fabricate your thoughts and actions, you are always affirming and reaffirming your neurological self as “you.” Keep in mind that whatever you spend your time mentally attending to, that is what you are and what you will become.

The frontal lobe navigates your future, controls your behavior, dreams of new possibilities, and guides you throughout life. It is the seat of your conscience.

We humans have a unique capacity to change. It is via the frontal lobe that we go beyond the preprogrammed behaviors that are genetically compartmentalized within the human brain, the recorded history of our species’ past.

We choose to remain in the same circumstances because we have become addicted to the emotional state they produce and the chemicals that arouse that state of being.

We choose to live stuck in a particular mindset and attitude, partly because of genetics and partly because a portion of the brain (a portion that has become hardwired by our repeated thoughts and reactions) limits our vision of what’s possible.

When it comes to evolution, change is the only element that is universal, or consistent, to all species here on earth. Essentially, to evolve is to change, by adapting to the environment. Our environment as human beings is everything that makes up our lives. It is all of the complex circumstances that involve our loved ones, our social status, where we live, what we do for a living, how we react to our parents and children, and even the times we live in. But as we will learn, to change is to be greater than the environment. When we change something in our life, we have to make it different than it would be if we left it alone. To change is to become different; it means that we are no longer who we used to be. We have modified how we think, what we do, what we say, how we act, and who we are being. Personal change takes an intentional act of will, and it usually means that something was making us uncomfortable enough to want to do things differently. To evolve is to overcome the conditions in our life by changing something about ourselves.

We can change (and thus, evolve) our brain, so that we no longer fall into those repetitive, habitual, and unhealthy reactions that are produced as a result of our genetic inheritance and our past experiences. You probably picked up this book because you are drawn to the possibility that you may be able to break out of routine. You may want to learn how you can use the brain’s natural capacity of neuroplasticity—the ability to rewire and create new neural circuits at any age—to make substantial changes in the quality of your life.

Let’s face it, changing is inconvenient for any creature unless it is seen as a necessity. To relinquish the old and embrace the new is a big risk.

When we no longer learn new things or we stop changing old habits, we are left only with living in routine. But the brain is not designed to just stop learning. When we stop upgrading the brain with new information, it becomes hardwired, riddled with automatic programs of behavior that no longer support evolution. Adaptability is the ability to change. We are so smart and capable. We can, in one lifetime, learn new things, break old habits, change our beliefs and our perceptions, overcome difficult circumstances, master skills, and mysteriously, become different beings. Our big brains are the instruments that allow us to advance at such an enormous pace. For us as human beings, it seems that it is just a question of choice. If evolution is our contribution to the future, then our free will is how we initiate the process.

We have far more power to alter our own brain, our behavior, our personality, and ultimately our reality than previously thought possible.

I understood better than ever before that our thoughts affect not only our body but also our entire life.

For a long time, scientists believed that the brain was hardwired, meaning that change is impossible and that the system of responses and tendencies you inherited from your family is your destiny. But in fact, the brain possesses elasticity, an ability to shut down old pathways of thought and form new ones, at any age, at any time. Moreover, it can do so relatively quickly, especially compared to the usual evolutionary models in which time is measured in generations and eons and not in weeks. As I’m beginning to learn and as neuroscience is beginning to acknowledge: • Our thoughts matter. • Our thoughts literally become matter.

Coincidence #1: An Innate Higher Intelligence Gives Us Life and Can Heal the Body The people I spoke with who experienced a spontaneous remission believed that a higher order or intelligence lived within him or her. Whether they called it their divine, spiritual, or subconscious mind, they accepted that an inner power was giving them life every moment, and that it knew more than they, as humans, could ever know. Furthermore, if they could just tap into this intelligence, they could direct it to start working for them.

Please stop reading for one second. Just now, some 100,000 chemical reactions took place in every single one of your cells. Now multiply 100,000 chemical reactions by the 70 to 100 trillion cells that make up your body. The answer has more zeros than most calculators can display, yet every second, that mind-boggling number of chemical reactions takes place inside of you.

Most marvelous of all, this life force knows how to start from just two cells, a sperm and an egg, and create our almost 100 trillion specialized cells.

Coincidence #2: Thoughts Are Real; Thoughts Directly Affect the Body The way we think affects our body as well as our life.

Your every thought produces a biochemical reaction in the brain. The brain then releases chemical signals that are transmitted to the body, where they act as the messengers of the thought. The thoughts that produce the chemicals in the brain allow your body to feel exactly the way you were just thinking. So every thought produces a chemical that is matched by a feeling in your body. Essentially, when you think happy, inspiring, or positive thoughts, your brain manufactures chemicals that make you feel joyful, inspired, or uplifted.

When the body responds to a thought by having a feeling, this initiates a response in the brain. The brain, which constantly monitors and evaluates the status of the body, notices that the body is feeling a certain way. In response to that bodily feeling, the brain generates thoughts that produce corresponding chemical messengers; you begin to think the way you are feeling. Thinking creates feeling, and then feeling creates thinking, in a continuous cycle. This loop eventually creates a particular state in the body that determines the general nature of how we feel and behave. We will call this a state of being.

Thus, a person who wants to improve his health has to change entire patterns in how he thinks, and these new thought patterns or attitudes will eventually change his state of being. To do this, he must break free of perpetual loops of detrimental thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking, and replace them with new, beneficial ones.

Conscious thoughts, repeated often enough, become unconscious thinking.

These unconscious ways of thinking become our unconscious ways of being.

Coincidence #3: We Can Reinvent Ourselves Motivated as they were by serious illnesses both physical and mental, the people I interviewed realized that in thinking new thoughts, they had to go all the way. To become a changed person, they would have to rethink themselves into a new life. All of those who restored their health to normal did so after making a conscious decision to reinvent themselves.

“What if” questions were vital to this process: What if I stop being an unhappy, self-centered, suffering person, and how can I change? What if I no longer worry or feel guilty or hold grudges? What if I begin to tell the truth to myself and to others?

mental rehearsal stimulates the brain to grow new neural circuits and changes the way the brain and mind work. In 1995, in the Journal of Neurophysiology, an article was published demonstrating the effects that mental rehearsal alone had on developing neural networks in the brain.6 Neural networks are individual clusters of neurons (or nerve cells) that work together and independently in a functioning brain. Neural nets, as we will affectionately call them, are the latest model in neuroscience to explain how we learn and how we remember. They can also be used to explain how the brain changes with each new experience, how different types of memories are formed, how skills develop, how conscious and unconscious actions and behaviors are demonstrated, and even how all forms of sensory information are processed. Neural networks are the current understanding in neuroscience that explains how we change on a cellular level.

At the end of the five-day study, the experimenters used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation along with a few other sophisticated gadgets, in order to measure any changes that took place in the brain. To their surprise, the group that only rehearsed mentally showed almost the same changes, involving expansion and development of neural networks in the same specific area of their brain, as the participants who physically practiced the sequences on the piano.

This concept in neuroscience is called Hebbian learning.7 The idea is simple: Nerve cells that fire together, wire together.

Sheila’s experience of curing her digestive illness illustrates this process of reinvention. Sheila had resolved that she would no longer revisit memories of her past and the associated attitudes that had defined her as a victim. Having identified the habitual thought processes she wanted to release, she cultivated a level of awareness where she had enough control to interrupt her unconscious thoughts. She therefore no longer fired the same associated neural networks on a daily basis. Once Shelia gained dominion over those old thought patterns and no longer fired those neurological habits of thinking, her brain began pruning away those unused circuits. This is another, related aspect of Hebbian learning that we can sum up as follows: Nerve cells that no longer fire together, no longer wire together. This is the universal law of “use it or lose it” in action, and it can work wonders in changing old paradigms of thought about ourselves. Over time, Sheila shed the burden of old, limited thoughts that had been coloring her life.

Coincidence #4: We Are Capable of Paying Attention So Well That We Can Lose Track of Relative Space and Time The people I interviewed knew that others before them had cured their own diseases, so they believed that healing was possible for them too. But they did not leave their healing up to chance. Hoping and wishing would not do the trick. Merely knowing what they had to do was not enough. Healing required these rare individuals to change their mind permanently and intentionally create the outcomes they desired. Each person had to reach a state of absolute decision, utter will, inner passion, and complete focus. As Dean put it, “You just have to make up your mind!”

This approach requires great effort. The first step for all of them was the decision to make this process the most important thing in their life. That meant breaking away from their customary schedules, social activities, television viewing habits, and so on. Had they continued to follow their habitual routines, they would have continued being the same person who had manifested illness. To change, to cease being the person they had been, they could no longer do the things they had typically done.

Para poder transformar tu vida primero tienes que cambiar todo aquello que te recrea a ti. Todas las evidencias que dejas que te hacen ser quien eres

these mavericks sat down every day and began to reinvent themselves. They made this more important than doing anything else, devoting every moment of their spare time to this effort.

At first they wondered what would happen if they began to fall into habitual thought patterns. Would they have the strength to stop themselves from going back to their old ways? Could they maintain awareness of their thoughts throughout their day? But with experience, they found that whenever they reverted to being their former self, they could detect this and interrupt that program. The more they practiced paying attention to their thoughts, the easier this process became, and the better they felt about their future. Feeling peaceful and calm, soothed by a sense of clarity, a new self emerged.

Generar el cambio, sólo se puede lograr si eres consciente de tus pensamientos y de el dolor que puede generar que no hagas el cambio y regreses a las antiguas actitudes

everyday, conscious awareness is typically involved with three things: • First, we are aware of being in a body. Our brain receives feedback on what is happening within the body and what stimuli it is receiving from our environment, and we describe what the body feels in terms of physical sensations. • Second, we are aware of our environment. The space around us is our connection to external reality; we pay attention to the things, objects, people, and places in our surroundings. • Third, we have a sense of time passing; we structure our life within the concept of time. However, when people inwardly focus through serious self-reflective contemplation, when they are mentally rehearsing new possibilities of who they could become, they are capable of becoming so immersed in what they are thinking about that, at times, their attention is completely detached from their body and their environment; these seem to fade away or disappear.

When this phenomenon occurs, these individuals are aware of nothing but their thoughts. In other words, the only thing that is real to them is the awareness of what they are thinking.

Memory, then, is simply a process of maintaining new synaptic connections that we form via learning.9

Contrary to the myth of the hardwired brain, we now realize that the brain changes in response to every experience, every new thought, and every new thing we learn. This is called plasticity.

Repetition was the key to their ability to rewire their brain.16

Sir Julian Huxley, a British biologist during the early part of the 1900s and author of several writings relating to evolution, must have foreseen the question, “Is the brain a good enough explanation for describing the mind?” His answer is paramount in the history of biology. “The brain alone is not responsible for mind,” he said, “even though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation. Indeed, an isolated brain is a piece of biological nonsense as meaningless as an isolated individual.”17 He knew that there must be another component to the mind.

The brain is, therefore, not the mind; it is the physical apparatus through which the mind is produced.