Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind

by Joe Dispenza

when we are sitting with a group of people and someone cannot stop bouncing his leg up and down—his basal ganglia is slightly overactive and is discharging anxious energy.

The source of this myth may be that the corpus callosum does account for a significantly greater percentage of the total white matter in women (2.4 percent in females versus 2.2 percent in males). This fact just might mean that women are able to process the two types of thoughts (emotional and analytical) between the two hemispheres of the brain a lot faster than men. If the greater distribution of total fatty myelin, or white matter, in the female corpus callosum does account for speedier neurological transmission between the brain hemispheres, this may explain why men are often dumbfounded when observing womenʹs problem-solving abilities in action.

The part of the new brain that we will refer to most often is the outer layer, the neocortex or cerebral cortex, also called our gray matter. Although it is only about 3 to 5 millimeters thick (to ¼ of an inch), this layer is so rich in neurons that, aside from the cerebellum, the neocortex has more nerve cells than any other brain structure.

callosum.The corpus callosum is the largest fibrous pathway of neurons in the entire body, totaling approximately 300 million nerve fibers. This large band of white matter possesses the greatest number of nerve bundles anywhere in the brain or the body.

Nerve impulses constantly travel back and forth across the corpus callosum, giving our new brain the specialized ability to observe the world from two different points of view.

Tal vez por eso la percepción sin amos lados es lo que hace el drama de la vida

In general, the frontal lobes are responsible for intentional action as well as for focusing our attention, and they coordinate nearly all the functions in the rest of the brain (the motor cortex and language center are part of the frontal lobe). The parietal lobes deal with sensations related to touch and feeling (sensory perception), visual-spatial tasks, and body orientation, and they also coordinate some language functions. The temporal lobes process sounds, perception, learning, language, and memory, and they are the centers that process smell. This lobe also includes a region that facilities our ability to choose which thoughts to express. The occipital lobes manage visual information and are often called the visual cortex.

We are literally mapped for procreation to ensure the propagation of our species.

The temporal lobes are intricately involved in storage of some types of memory and facilitate the making of long-term memories.

Por eso es más fácil memorizar con música

Scientists who experiment on the temporal lobes using low-voltage electrical stimuli have reported that their subjects experience immediate sensations of déjà vu (an uncanny sense of familiarity and memory), jamais vu (a feeling that a familiar person or place is unfamiliar), heightened spontaneous emotions, and/or strange spiritual reveries or insights. The temporal lobes also have a visual association center that links what we see to our emotions and memories. It is the storehouse of many of our visual emotional memories. Once we see something in the external world, our brain uses this association area to process what we see with what we remember and how it may feel emotionally. In other words, the temporal lobes process visual symbols with meaningful feelings. When this part of the temporal lobes is electrically stimulated, subjects report vivid visual imagery, equally as real to them as their external surroundings. We use the stored database of the temporal lobes when we associate what we know to better understand what we are attempting to learn that is new and unknown. The temporal lobes also help us recognize familiar stimuli that we have already experienced.

Thus, the temporal lobes are responsible for language, hearing (processing sounds), conceptual thinking, and associative memories. The temporal lobes associate most of what we have learned and experienced via our senses throughout our lifetime to people, places, things, time, and past events in the form of memories. We can associate what we hear, see, feel, taste, and smell, and it is the temporal lobes that facilitate this skill.

Six distinct layers are allocated to interpret visual qualities like light, movement, form, shape, depth, and color.

The frontal lobes. If you are asked, “Where do you, as a conscious being, think, dream, feel, focus, concentrate, and imagine?”

The frontal lobe is the resting place of conscious awareness. When we are the most conscious and the most aware, our frontal lobe is at the height of activity. Although the visual cortex, the temporal lobes, and the parietal lobes can serve to create a picture, a concept, or an idea, it is the frontal lobe that willfully keeps an idea on our mind, calling it to the stage for an extended review. The frontal lobe is also where self-awareness is born. The most highly evolved area in the brain, it is the place where the self can express itself. Because of the frontal lobe, we break from the outmoded view that a human being is merely the byproduct of accumulated sensory experiences. Instead, the frontal lobe allows us to take our emotions and define them into meaning. The prefrontal cortex is the laboratory where we paste together thoughts with their associations to derive new meaning from what we are learning. The frontal lobe gives us the privilege to gain meaning from the external world.

Free will is a major keyword we use to describe the frontal lobe. The seat of our free will and self-determination, the frontal lobe allows us to choose our every thought and action and, in so doing, control our own destiny. When this lobe is active, we focus on our desires, create ideas, make conscious decisions, assemble plans, carry out an intentional course of action, and regulate our behavior. The evolution of the human frontal lobe bestowed on humans a focused, intentional, creative, willful, decisive, purposeful mind, if we will only put it to use.

With its enlarged size, the cerebral cortex is what separates us from other species, in our ability to consciously learn and remember by processing data derived from our senses. The neocortex is the seat of your executive mind, your identity, your personality, and your higher brain functions. It is the home of the “you.” At this very moment, you comprehend the information on this page by using many different regions of your neocortex. Mapped within the neocortex are the capacities for rational thought, reasoning, problem solving, freewilled decision-making, planning, organization, verbal communication, language processing, and computation, to name just a few.

How is the human head able to accommodate not only the reptilian brain and the mammalian brain but also the new brain? To reiterate our computer analogy, when our new bio-computer evolved, we gained the world’s most powerful processor, the most advanced operating system, the largest hard drive, and the greatest amount of memory. The neurons themselves should never be thought of only as wires that connect to each other. Instead, each neuron should be seen as a complete, individual super-processor system that performs millions of functions daily.

Why do human beings as a whole seem to use only a small fraction of our potential? In our defense, Homo sapiens sapiens is a relatively young species, and we have only had a few hundred thousand years to start learning how to use our new brain efficiently. Perhaps we are still novices, and we have barely begun to take our new brain out for a test drive.

“There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses,” Aristotle preached,

we now know that we process those senses within the framework of a brain that is genetically prepatterned.

Just four weeks after conception, a human embryo is already producing more than 8,000 new nerve cells every second. That is about a half million neurons made every minute during the first month of life.

During the end of the first trimester and the beginning of the second trimester, the fetal neurons begin to develop dendrites, which establish synaptic connections with neighboring neurons to form vast regions of interconnected neural networks. Every second, an estimated two million synaptic connections form during this critical period of development. If we do the math, the brain is busy making close to 173 billion synaptic connections a day during this growth spurt.

The second growth acceleration begins during the third trimester of pregnancy (seventh, eighth, and ninth months), continues after birth and through to approximately six months to one year of age. An enormous increase in the total number of nerve cells occurs during this period. During the third trimester, the fetal brain develops and refines all the structures or regions that make up the adult brain and make the human brain distinct from other species, including all of the folds and valleys described in chapter 4. The brain’s initial wiring is firmly established during this second neurological growth spurt. In fact, at this time, the baby possesses more brain cells and synaptic connections than it will ever have throughout her normal adult life. These are essentially the raw materials with which the child will begin her lifelong process of learning and change. The number and health of synaptic connections is more important than the total number of nerve cells. For as we now understand, the density and the complexity of dendrite connections wire the brain for greater development, enriched intellectual and practical learning, accelerated skills, and permanent memory.

After birth, the brain’s development is shaped not only by genetics but also by input from the environment. As the infant begins to have experiences, her senses gather vital information from her surroundings. Stimulation from sensory input that she receives repeatedly will cause her brain to develop strong synaptic connections.

De nada sirve que los padres le dediquen mucho al estímulo intermitente si en su ambiente común este no se da constantemente

Recent scientific studies have demonstrated the crucial role of parental feedback in this process. When one group of babies made cooing or babbling sounds, their parents were instructed to give them immediate feedback in the form of smiles and encouragement. With a second group of babies, their parents were told to smile at them at random moments unrelated to their children’s attempts to produce sounds. The babies that received instantaneous feedback progressed more rapidly in their ability to communicate than the infants who received little or no reinforcement from their parents.

These results suggest that immediate, consistent parental encouragement plays a vital role in stimulating babies to experiment with making new sounds, and in helping infants neurologically wire (learn) the elements of language.3

By the age of two, the human brain approaches its adult size, weight, and number of nerve cells. Most neurons continue to multiply through the second year of life. (In some parts of the brain, such as the cerebellum, nerve cells continue to multiply and divide into adulthood). The greatest number of synapses present in the neocortex also seems to be at two years old. By this age, the circuits of the frontal lobe begin to develop. (However, the frontal lobe does not finish developing under the genetic program until our mid-twenties!) The selective pruning of synapses that began before the age of two now continues to change the brain further, based primarily on repetitive experiences as well as genetic influences. By age three, a child’s brain has formed about 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, about twice as many as in a normal adult.

Another growth spurt of neural nets happens genetically at puberty, as the brain makes another necessary sprint that corresponds to the genetically accelerated growth and changes in the body. For the most part, the corresponding chemical and hormonal changes will cause structural changes in the brain, independent of the environment. During adolescence, for example, neural nets that have to do with emotional centers in the midbrain (especially in the amygdala) are activated and developed.

we think clearer and better after our mid- to late twenties than we were able to in our earlier years.

The brain does not even stop there in terms of its advancement. Until recently, many scientists considered this stage of growth in the mid-twenties as the end of human ability to develop the brain any further. The truth is that we are not as rigid or hardwired as science once speculated. In fact, the human brain is extremely neuroplastic, meaning that by persistently learning, having new experiences, and modifying our behavior, we may continue to remold and shape the brain throughout our adult years.

Before we are born, these genes also begin giving the orders to shape the initial patterns in which our nerve cells wire together. Beginning around the sixth month in utero, an infant’s brain is following her parents’ uniquely combined genetic instructions to lay down patterns of prewired synaptic connections. Through this process, in a most simplistic explanation, her brain’s neurons begin to assemble and organize to reflect portions of her parents’ combined genetic blueprints. The blueprints of the child’s genetic map become a completely unique makeup, allowing the child to express a distinctive combination of short-term traits. We therefore may inherit some of the emotional and behavioral tendencies of our parents.

Why is the brain organized into subregions and compartments in the first place? As our species developed over millions of years of diversified experiences, certain universal, long-term abilities that proved conducive to survival were encoded in the human cortex in networks of synaptic connections.

The malleability of these zones depends, for the most part, upon our ability to learn and pay attention.

The brain is a highly interactive organ.

Nature: The Long and Short of It Our genetic inheritance is a combination of long-term genetic information that is common to all members of our species, plus short-term genetic instructions from each of our parents.

Short-term genetic traits from our parents and from their parents, going back a few generations, give us our individuality. Both kinds of genetic traits, long-term and short-term, become hardwired in the brain as it develops before birth and especially during the first year of life. When we speak of certain definitive areas in the brain that are hardwired, we are referring to fixed, inherited patterns of nerve connections that give us our very personality, facial expressions, coordinated motor skills, intellect, emotional propensities, reflexes, levels of anxiety, internal chemical balance, mannerisms, even creativity and artistic expression. Both long-term and short-term genetic traits are what nature has given us as an inheritance. We can say it is “our nature.”

In addition to our genetic inheritance, what has shaped and molded—in other words, nurtured—the brain over millions of years is what we have learned and experienced from interaction with our environment, how we stored that information, and how the brain has adapted. Nurture also concerns our individual life experiences, which are recorded in the brain.

Recent studies have demonstrated the impact of nurture and point out that we are significantly shaped by experiences during our early years of development. In the first decade of life, humans form synaptic connections from the experiences gained through learning and normal developmental lessons.

The way the brain is wired, then, is a combination of genetic (long-term and short-term) traits and learned experiences throughout life. The brain evolves not via nature or nurture, but by a remarkable interaction of both these processes.

The genetic circuits that we inherit are merely a platform for us to stand on to begin our life. In order for the brain to learn new things (keep in mind that learning involves making new synaptic connections), it needs some existing connections with which to make additional new connections. Thus, we began life with our existing inherited connections and the learned memories of past generations, and we use those connections as a foundation to make new ones. Given that humans are born with certain behaviors, propensities, traits, and talents that are really the hardwired memories of generations gone by (especially those passed on from parents), it makes sense that we come preloaded with long-term and short-term circuits that define who we are. If nature and nurture are in a constant exchange, then what we experience from the environment only adds to nurturing the “self ” as a true work in progress. Every time we learn something new, we forge additional neural connections of our own, we add a new stitch to this three-dimensional tapestry of our neural fabric, and the self is changed.

if you inherit from your parents the neural networks that they have mastered in their own lives, and then use those circuits to build the 50 percent of personality that is based on genetic programs, the other 50 percent of personality that is learned from the environment is most influenced by the people from whom you inherited those programs. Does your individuality stand a chance?

De aquí que el ambiente es tan importante

In humans, as well, the recorded experiences that we call “memory” or “learning” become mapped as the synaptic wiring that reflects who we are. Long-term genetic patterns of neural circuits and structured brain systems that are indigenous to our species are the result of learned, encoded experiences that were passed down individually through the years. The genetic neural circuitry that we inherit also carries the encoded memories of learned experiences from our lineage. Our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents stand as immediate contributors to our prewired genetic brain matter by the ways in which they shaped and molded their brains through life’s experiences. (This may give credence to the practice, dating back to antiquity, of a royal family preserving its bloodline.) This is where the influence of culture, creed, and even race can further influence our specific wiring.

Learning allows us to change; evolution allows us to transmute our genes. Learning takes place when nature is nurtured; evolution happens when what is nurtured gives back to nature. This is the cycle of life.

Merely to learn intellectual information is not enough; we must apply what we learn to create a different experience.

This signifies that, by consciously paying attention and applying repetition, the brain is plastic enough to begin to reassign new areas to compensate for the change in type of stimuli. The fact that the brain of a blind person will map new dendrite connections in the visual cortex for sound or touch challenges the model of genetic predeterminism. This is a fine example of neuroplasticity overriding a genetic program.

Nerve cells that continuously fire together, will ultimately wire together.

We also see neuroplasticity at work when greater-than-normal sensory input extends the usual boundaries of genetically premapped sectors of the brain. In other words, the more we use one of our senses, the larger the portion of the cerebral cortex assigned to process that input.

What we learn, and how we remember what we learn, shapes who we are. As Buddha put it, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.”

What does this mean for us? Maybe our brain stays the same throughout our adult life because we tend to do the same type of things in the same, routine ways, and this constantly sends the same type of stimulation to our brain. If we change the way we do things, the brain will change as well.

Because the neocortex is the newest brain for most species, including humans, it has fewer hardwired programs. The frontal lobe is the least hardwired of all, since it is our most recent neurological development.

The neocortex is most malleable because it serves as the stage of conscious awareness, memories, and learning. It facilitates our ability to think, act, and choose differently, and it records what we have consciously learned as well. This is the area where we grow new synaptic connections and modify existing neural networks. In this way, the neocortex is constantly being rewired.