Category Archives: mind

BOOK REVIEW: Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman

Posted on by
Reply

Challenger DeepChallenger Deep by Neal Shusterman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

“Challenger Deep” is the story of a smart and artistically talented young man, Caden Bosch, who is afflicted with Schizophrenia. There are essentially two story lines being told in parallel. One is the real world, and in the chapters in this line we see Caden’s descent as it takes place. From references to past events, we gain insight into how Caden was before the disease. In the early part of the book, these chapters are set at school and at home, and then later at the mental hospital at which he’s admitted as a patient.

In the other story, Caden is on a sailing ship headed to the Challenger Deep—the deepest portion of the Marianas Trench at almost 7 miles down, and—symbolically—Caden’s rock-bottom . Shipboard life is Caden’s hallucinated experience of the mental hospital. Over time the reader begins to match up characters from the real world with those from the delusion—both patients and staff members. This is a mutinous vessel, and the tension reflects the pull between Caden’s desire to be well and the appeal of the world of delusion.

Over time the author shows key events in both lines and the reader can connect them up to interpret how delusional Caden experiences the world. The story isn’t strictly told in a chronological order, though the broad sweep of it is. The bits of disjoint create no confusion while helping to convey the nature of a fractured mind. This works, in part, because the book is told over 161 short chapters, and, because the chapters are so short, a diversion doesn’t take one far and it’s easy to show the match up of events. The book artfully conveys the bizarreness of a dreamlike world of delusion while remaining clear and readable. Any confusion in the early chapters becomes rectified as the author reveals how the delusional world and the real world zip together.

This book was imaginative, enjoyable to read, as well as allowing the reader insight into the nature of mental illness. Atypical of a work of fiction, there is a resources section that provides contact information for organizations that support mental health.

I’d highly recommend this book for fiction readers.

View all my reviews

BOOK REVIEW: How We Feel by Giovanni Frazzetto

Posted on by
Reply

How We FeelHow We Feel by Giovanni Frazzetto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

Frazzetto’s book tells us what neuroscience can and can’t tell us about seven core emotions: anger, guilt, anxiety, grief, empathy, joy, and love. Doing so puts the neuroscience of emotion into a broader context of art, philosophy, the humanities, and the legal / political domains. Most often this serves to make the book more interesting by offering stories beyond the case files of neurologists and neuroscience researchers, but it does result in occasional editorializing.

The book consists of seven chapters, each of which is linked to one of the emotions listed in the preceding paragraph. These chapters always tell us the rudiments of what science has learned about the brain’s role in said emotion, but they often offer insights from other disciplines as well as providing more general information about the brain that the author found particularly relevant to the topic at hand.

The first chapter delves into anger. Besides the neuroscience of rage, we learn a bit about the expression of emotion (e.g. through facial appearance; a theme revisited in other chapters), and the degree to which genetics plays a role in proclivity towards anger. This chapter serves to set up general concepts, and so we also learn about what an absence of emotion looks like (e.g. indecisiveness.) And in compliance with the law that every pop science book on neuroscience tell the story of Phineas Gage (the foreman who got rebar shot through his brain and lived to tell the story—though in an uncharacteristically hostile way), Frazzetto knocks it out early.

Chapter two explores the topic of guilt. It should be noted that some of these chapters discuss more than one related emotion, and here we learn how shame and regret are differentiated from guilt. There’s an interesting story about Caravaggio and how his own guilt-ridden story influenced one of his most famous paintings.

Chapter three is about anxiety, and also takes on fear. In addition to the neuroscience, we get a discussion of relevant philosophy, specifically that of Heidegger. Here, the author also describes brain plasticity.

The next chapter investigates grief. As I suggested above, there are multiple points where emotional expression is discussed, and this chapter has one of the most extensive of such discussions. In terms of general concepts, Frazzetto introduces the reader to neurotransmitters. One also learns how grief is related to physical pain.

Chapter five elucidates empathy. A lot of this chapter discusses acting, and the need for actors and actresses to be able to acquire empathy from the audience. The reader learns the story of Stanislavski, and how he went about creating his self-named acting system which remains widely used. This chapter also explains mirror neurons that allow one to recognize expression and to mimic others.

The penultimate chapter is about joy, and here we learn more about expression of emotions and, specifically, the seeming universality of smiles. There is a discussion of poetry as it pertains to the emotion at hand. Having introduced neurotransmitters earlier, the reader learns about dopamine, its role in happiness, and how a number of drugs have been created that increase our natural dopamine’s effect or mimic it.

The last chapter is about love. Of course, we learn about oxytocin and vasopressin, two neurochemicals famously associated with loving behavior. There is also a fascinating discussion of Capgras Syndrome. In this condition, the patient feels that his loved ones have been replaced by impostors. That may not seem relevant until one realizes that the proposed mechanism for this illness is damage to parts of the brain that control emotional connection. Without an emotional connection, the person feels that said individuals can’t be his / her dearest friends and family—though his senses register that they are exact duplicates in every way. The brain builds a rationalization that they must be impostors. Of course, no emotion evokes more resentment towards materialist explanations rooted entirely in biology than that of love.

The book is extensively annotated and also has a bibliography. There are many graphics throughout the book from line drawn diagrams of brains to photos of brain scans to the artwork “David with the Head of Goliath” mentioned relative to the discussion of Caravaggio’s guilt.

There are a number of books in this domain (i.e. the neuroscience of emotion) and if you were only going to read one, I don’t think I’d recommend this one as it. However, if you are into this topic, it is definitely worth a read. It’s interesting and insightful, and has a unique approach.

View all my reviews

BOOK REVIEW: Sitting Still Like a Frog by Eline Snel

Posted on by
Reply

Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids (and Their Parents)Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids by Eline Snel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

Anyone who’s ever taught children mindfulness, concentration, or relaxation knows that one can’t use the same tried and tired approach one does with adults. One must recognize the strengths and weaknesses that children’s level of cognitive development brings. [That said, I’ve found myself in front of a room full of kids who sat with the unflinching stillness of bronze Buddha statues, but that’s because regular practice was part of their school experience.] This is the twin premise of Snel’s book: that one needs to tailor one’s approach to teaching children to be mindful, and that their practice needs to be integrated into their life on the whole.

It should be pointed out that the book isn’t just a collection of exercise for children. It’s also a book for parents to help them align their approach to parenting to the mindfulness that the child is developing. It’s also a book of application. That is, it’s not about practicing mindfulness meditation in the abstract; it’s about using the understanding that arises from that practice to improve behavior and emotional coping.

Chapter 1 introduces the topic of mindfulness and sets up the book’s approach as well as explaining the use of the audio exercise that go along with the book. The second chapter explains a mindful approach to parenting by which parents can adopt a calmer and less emotionally charged approach to interacting with their child. Chapter 3 explains how and why breath is used as the basic anchor point to life in the here and now. Chapter 4 suggests how attention can be improved, and mindful eating is used as a tool to advance this objective. The next chapter explores how mindfulness can be practiced using the body as a means to anchor one’s awareness while simultaneously being more aware of what’s going on with one physically. There is discussion of mindful walking, but most of the chapter is about teaching children to be more cognizant of what they feel as a precursor to being more emotionally aware.

The next several chapters cover emotional awareness and how to improve response to emotional situations (both for the child and for the parent.) Chapter 6 uses the analogy of a weather report as a means for children to evaluate their emotional state. Chapter 7 expands on the topic by considering how one can manage one’s response to emotions. The crucial topic of witnessing the changing nature of emotional states is the subject of Chapter 8.

The last two chapters examine how to cultivated desirable character traits in children. The penultimate chapter describes how kindness can be fostered as a skill in children. The last chapter is entitled “Patience, Trust, and Letting Go” and that probably adequately describes the gist of the topics covered. The concept of an “inner movie theater” is discussed as a tool to facilitate building the desired characteristics.

There’s a single page bibliography and a table of audio exercises at the end. As far as graphics are concerned, they are mostly whimsical drawings of frogs.

I found this book to be concise, informative, and designed to appeal to the child’s need for concrete–as opposed to abstract—conceptualization of this, otherwise cerebral, topic.

I’d recommend this book for parents, teachers, and others who interact with children.

View all my reviews

5 Thought-Provoking Novels About Mental Illness

Posted on by
Reply


5.) Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

Premise: A young woman who attempted suicide is told that in the process her heart was damaged and she now has only five days to live. While it might seem that this would be all the same to a suicidal patient, it turns out to matter.




4.) Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Premise: The lead character, Toru, doesn’t suffer from mental illness, but his life is shaped by those who have. He must decide between two women. One of whom, Naoko, has been institutionalized since her boyfriend, Kizuki, committed suicide. Kizuki had been Toru’s high school best friend, and this weighs heavily in Toru’s feelings of obligation. Add into this Naoko’s roommate–a sage influence in Toru’s life, despite being institutionalized herself.



 
3.) Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman

Premise: An adolescent boy, Caden Bosch, is transformed from a model student to a paranoid schizophrenic. The title refers to the deepest point on Earth, down in the Marianas Trench, and comes into play because the institutionalized Bosch believes he’s on a ship who’s Captain thinks all the treasure in the oceans got swept to the deepest point.




2.) Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Premise: The unnamed narrator meets the eccentric Tyler Durden and soon Fight Club is born. It’s fueled by a feeling that men have been tamed to be turned into consumers. However, the underground fights are only the beginning, and our lead character is dismayed to discover that from the Club has sprung Project Mayhem with a nefarious terrorist plot.




1.) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Premise: Randle McMurphy has convinced authorities that he’s insane for the purpose of getting out of hard labor in prison and into a “cushy” insane asylum. The ward is run by the iron hand of Nurse Ratched. McMurphy on the other hand is rebellious and unruly. The clash is inevitable. McMurphy increasingly disrupts Ratched’s sedate and harmonious ward (re: heavily drugged and cowed into submission.) The story is told from the perspective of a patient named Chief Bromden who has the staff convinced that he’s deaf and mute. Like McMurphy, he’s not what he appears. The book is a scathing indictment of how mental health care was conducted in Kesey’s day.

5 Minds You Meet in Meditation

Posted on by
Reply





No matter what style of meditation you practice, you’ve probably heard the following refrain: “And if you find your mind wandering, non-judgmentally make a note of where your mind went, and let that thought drift away as you return your awareness to __________.”



I’ve certainly heard many takes on that teaching, and had plenty of opportunity to implement that advice. In the process, I’ve noted that the places my mind wanders can be classified into several categories.



5.) The Planner: Our conscious mind is first and foremost about answering the question, “What’s the worst that can happen, and how can I make that worst case less bad?” The mind wants to anticipate undesirable events and either make an end run around them or figure out a way to make them less troubling. The Planner wants to rehearse everything from making dinner to being interviewed for a job to having a dreaded conversation.



4.) The Entertainer: This is the mind that sticks songs in your head and replays clips of movies.



3.) The Walter Mitty / The Bolsterer: This is the daydream mind which cooks up scenarios in which you are the hero.



2.) The Subconscious Image Generator: In a relaxed state in which the conscious mind is quieted, one may find oneself seeing images that probably don’t make a lick of sense. The pictures may come and go in a way that make them hard to maintain even a glimpse of. This is the same kind of imagery that one experiences in the hypnagogic state–as one is drifting towards sleep.



1.) The Critic: Saving the most despicable for last; this is your inner critic. The one who thinks that you won’t succeed at any given task.

5 Tools to Hulk Your Way Out of Your Comfort Zone

Posted on by
5


5.) Take a class / Join a group: While I’m partial to yoga and the martial arts, the class could be in any area that presents a challenge.  However, there are a couple of advantages to the aforementioned two (to which I would add dance.)

 

First, these disciplines train one to be expressive with one’s body and to move more freely. This can do wonders for confidence. People store tension in their bodies without even realizing it. Many have postural problems that effect confidence and self-perception.  A 2014 New Zealand study found that posture can have a strong effect on emotional state.

 

Second, no matter who one is, one will be challenged by new approaches to movement.  The average person has great difficulty learning to use their body in new ways. One needs to drill in movements conscientiously to achieve competency. Our conscious mind, frequently gets in the way. Even the most athletic and coordinated people will need to work it, failing repeatedly until they succeed.

 

Why is the challenge so important? Many people go through life afraid to fail, but far too few fear never failing. Sounds idiotic. Nobody wants to fail. I have some hard news. If you’ve never failed, it’s not because you are unmitigatedly awesome in all things. It’s because you’re living in a box and cherry-picking life experiences that feel unthreatening.

 

If, like me, you’re an introvert, this approach offers the additional benefit of social interaction that is of a predictable / schedulable nature. One needs the interaction, but the problem comes when one has social interactions and / or sensory stimulation that go on too long and in an unpredictable fashion. Therefore, being able to schedule such time is a good way to go about being a more productive introvert.

 

 

4.) Writing  / Visualization:  These two approaches to mentally rehearsing allow one to keep one’s inner critic in check. The problem with simply day-dreaming it is that critic can chirp in without being that cognizant of it.

In visualization, one quiets the mind and can then non-judgmentally acknowledge and dismiss the negative thoughts. In writing–be it as a journal entry, poem, or a story–we may not notice the nagging voice of the inner critic on the first draft, but you can take note of it and undo it in rewrites.

 

 

3.) Travel / Living abroad: I should point out that not just any old travel will have the desired effect. Many people plan their travel with the objective of being comfortable at the fore.  They eat at places that serve the same kind of food as at home. They stay in hotels with virtually all of the comforts of home, and sometimes many more. This is understandable because the traveler might just be seeking rest.  However, if one is seeking the epiphany or enlightenment experiences talked of by backpackers and ashram-dwellers, that’s not something that comes from staying in resorts or eating at American fast food joint. Those kinds of brain changing experiences come when one is stripped from the familiar and has to surrender one’s attachments to the way one thinks the world should be. One’s perception of culture and worldview changes radically when immersed in a foreign environment.

 

 

2.) Game it / Roleplay: There’s a big movement to gamify all manner of everyday activities.  In her book, “Reality is Broken,” scholar of game design Jane McGonigal describes a game called “Chore Wars” that incentivizes the doing of mundane household chores.

 

What is it about games that help one move beyond one’s limits? First of all, it incentivizes actions. And if you’ve ever noticed people playing games on their phone or FB for hours on end, you’ll note that it doesn’t take much reward to keep people plugging away—as long as the game is structured well.

 

Second, good games provide a built-in process of “leveling up.” This means that the challenge keeps being intensified as our skill level advances. Those familiar with Csikszentmihalyi’s conception of “Flow” will recognize that matching skill level to challenge level is one of the most crucial elements in facilitating flow-state.

 

Roleplaying is a bit like the previously mentioned tools of visualization and gaming in that it’s a way to have a low-cost rehearsal. If one has someone with whom one can engage in such a roleplay, than one also has someone to help make you aware of your inner critic and its deleterious effects. And that brings us to the final tool:

 

 

1.) Have a spouse, partner, and or confidant: In “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” Robert Sapolsky tells a story of being interviewed by a magazine. He was asked what the number one thing that they could tell their readers about reducing stress.  To which he replied that the most well-established factor in stress reduction is to have a spouse / life partner with whom to share one’s challenges.  Unfortunately, this was a magazine for women business leaders, a significant portion of whom had given up on permanent relationships and families. They, therefore, asked him what else he had.  Still it’s hard to overlook the anxiety-fighting effects of having someone around with whom to share one’s dread.

POEM: River to Sea

Posted on by
Reply

The river twists through a barren landscape.

Filling with flotsam, detritus, and silt,

dragging death downstream,

it will pour into a bright, blue sea.

You should savor that scene,

but your view is from above,

and so you see a shit-colored plume

splaying into the clear, calm waters.

And you fear the shit stain

will spread across the sea.

But it doesn’t.

It seems to settle.

You never knew the clear and calm could

subdue those murky, mucky waters.

BOOK REVIEW: Wired to Grow by Britt Andreatta

Posted on by
Reply

Wired to GrowWired to Grow by Britt Andreatta
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

This is one of those books that is hard to rate and review. It does a thing well, and if one is looking for a book of its strengths, it’ll serve one well. That thing it does well is to concisely and clearly summarize research in neuroscience relevant to learning new skills. If that is something one is interested in, and one hasn’t done much reading on the subject yet, this book will get one up to speed in just over 100 pages while offering insight into where to go to flesh out what one has learned.

That said, if one has read up on pop-sci neuroscience and /or self-help books applying said research, one is likely to find that this book offers little value-added while lacking the depth and narrative approach of competing works. The latter is particularly intriguing as this is a book about effective learning, and it seems clear that humans like learning through stories. However, Andreatta does little story telling beyond brief mentions of approaches she’s used in her seminars and occasional recaps of the stories of the researchers whose work she’s drawn upon. Some may find this isn’t so bad because it keeps the book compact. Story telling is page intensive. On the other hand, a lack of story-telling means that the material is a bit less prone to stick than it might otherwise be.

The author’s approach to making the material stick is to hang it on a three-phase model (learn-remember-do) and to keep it brief. Many of the chapters consist largely of bullet points, and in places the book feels like a PowerPoint handout. (I’ll let the reader decide whether that’s a good thing or not.)

The book is organized into twenty chapters arranged in five parts. (That tells one a lot about the brevity of chapters, given the book is 102 pp.) The five parts consist of: I.) an overview of neuroscientific fundamentals; II.) a description of research related to the “learn” phase of Andreatta’s model; III.) the same for the “remember” phase; IV.) coverage of the “do” phase; and V.) a section called “design” that helps the reader to apply what they’ve learned in the earlier parts to build approaches to teaching and learning.

There is some useful ancillary material. First, there are many graphics of a variety of types (pictures, line drawings, tables, and graphs) that are nicely drawn and effective. Second, there are “Your Learning Journey” sections interspersed throughout the book. These are one page or less exercises that are designed to help one put one’s learning to use. Thirdly, there is a bibliography that includes crucial reference materials divided by type: i.e. journal / scholarly research, books, journalistic / media accounts, and cited scholars. Finally, there are apparently additional resources accessible online, e.g. downloadable pdf files, but I didn’t investigate these features.

I would recommend this book for those looking for a concise summary of recent developments in neuroscience as they apply to education and learning. If you’re well-read on the subject, however, you might not find that this book delivers much extra. It should be noted that the author is speaking from an educator’s perspective (i.e. not a scientist or psychologist) and readers may find that a plus or not.

View all my reviews

5 Ways to Fake It til You Make It

Posted on by
2

5.) Adopt a power posture: There’s been a lot of research in recent years suggesting that posture isn’t a one-way street–i.e. body doesn’t necessarily have to follow our mental state. One can reverse the flow, improving one’s mental state by adopting a strong  and confident posture.

One of the most thorough discussions of this phenomena is in Amy Cuddy’s book Presence, which famously mentions the “Wonder Woman” pose. However, another widespread example is using the up-and-outward fist pumping posture that is widely seen among humans and even other primates (i.e. with arms outstretched as Usain Bolt is seen above.)

 

I got my eye on you

4.) Master eye contact: This is dreadfully difficult for an introverts such as myself. We tend to look anywhere but the eyes.

If one is traveling in risky places, it’s important to have a grasp of the fine art of eye contact. If one doesn’t make any eye contact, then one risks looking zoned out–potentially inviting aggression. If one rapidly  looks away, offering too short an eye contact period, one appears intimidated–potentially inviting aggression. However, if one’s eye contact is too long, it may trigger some primal fight impulse, or–at a minimum–suggest you have taken more interest in the individual–which may invite aggression. This means one has to balance a fine line that says, “I see you, you know I saw you. Now I’m going to do me and let you do you.”

 

3.) Adopt the opposing viewpoint:  Say you find yourself obsessing about some perceived slight or wrong.  While you want to address this issue, you want to be calm enough to avoid saying or doing something you’ll regret. You want to be seen as a sensible individual while being persuasive. The key is seeing both sides, and taking a moment to realize that your opposition is probably not the black-hearted villain of his own story. He likely has some reason for his behavior. Maybe it’s even a reason you can empathize with, given your own experience–i.e. being overworked and distracted, facing a decision that only allows for a best worst option, etc.

 

2.) Visualize it: It may seem as though anything that occurs solely in the mind can’t have that much force, but–in fact–it can. Visualizing can help one get over one’s anxieties. By systematically considering how events will unfold, one can break the cycle of worst-case scenario creation that the brain readily falls into. This will make an activity seem less intimidating and more manageable.

 

1.) Start small: Often when a person would like to be more kind or compassionate, she’s flummoxed or overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. She sees problems that she can’t make a dent in. So schedule one small act of kindness in a week or maybe a bigger one monthly, or as is possible. Do it, see its value, and be content.

One also sees a need for starting small with advanced physical practices. If you can’t do a yogasana or martial arts move, figure out what capacity building or modifications one needs to get to the end goal. Then take it on bit-by-bit. There are many videos on how to systematically build up to challenging maneuvers like the press handstand or planche, moves that almost no one can do with out a great deal of prep work.

5 Neuroscience Fun Facts for Yogis & Yoginis

Posted on by
Reply

5.) IDEA: While our conscious mind feels like the sum of our mental world, in fact, it’s the tip of the iceberg of mental processes. Our decisions and actions are guided to a large degree by happenings below the waterline.

INTRIGUING EXAMPLE: In one study, interview subjects were randomly assigned to hold either iced or hot coffee. No attention was drawn to the coffee and it was set up as a mere accident of happenstance (the HR person directing the interviewees had her hands full.) The coffee was retrieved before the subjects made handshakes with interviewers. Unrelated to their verbal responses, those who had held the iced coffee were disproportionately described more in terms suggesting a cold personality (e.g. calculating, devious, etc.) and those who had held hot coffee were credited with a warmer personality.

RELEVANCE: Get your hands warm before you start making corrections.

REFERENCE: The coffee study is discussed by David J. Linden in his book Touch. However, there are many books on this topic, several that I’ve reviewed. In particular, I can recommend Eagleman’s Incognito and Mlodinow’s Subliminal.

 

4.) IDEA: Emotions play a crucial role in decision-making. We aren’t nearly so rationale and calculating as we think ourselves to be–particularly when there is uncertainty in the mix.

INTRIGUING EXAMPLE: Giovannni Frazzetto’s book describes cases of patients with lesions in their medial prefrontal cortexes who would deliberate ad nauseam and still couldn’t reach a decision.

RELEVANCE: This is why we don’t silence or stamp out emotions, but rather watch them dispassionately while avoiding a mental drift into a frenzy of illusion building.

REFERENCE: The Frazzetto book I referenced is: How We Feel, and it deals with anger, guilt, anxiety / fear, grief, empathy, joy, and love.  However, the patients described in his book were those of Antonio Damasio, and so you may want to check out Descartes’ Error, which I’ve heard good things about, but haven’t yet read.

 

3 .) IDEA: Experiences once thought to be supernatural, mystical, or fraudulent are increasingly being understood in scientific terms.

INTRIGUING EXAMPLE: For some, an Out-of-Body-Experience (OBE) is an impossible flight of fancy, while for others it’s a mystical / transcendent state beyond the physical realm. However, in recent years scientists have not only confirmed that people have these experiences, they’ve come a long way toward understanding such occurrences by actually inducing them via electrodes applied to the right angular gyrus. It seems that area of the brain is responsible for integrating sensory information from various senses, and its disruption creates an illusion of one’s consciousness floating outside the body.

RELEVANCE: As many have wisely advised, don’t spend a lot of time chasing siddhis–not only might it stunt your growth toward the ultimate goal, it might just be running after tricks of the mind.

REFERENCE: I highly recommend Anil Ananthaswamy’s The Man Who Wasn’t There. The book looks at the various ways in which “self” has been defined (one’s memories, one’s body, etc.) and it shows how neuroscience has learned a thing or two about the various dimensions of self, and how none of them fully defines an “I.” (i.e. The Buddhist conception of the self as illusion might turn out to be not far off the mark.)

 

2.) IDEA: Our brains can be rewired through practice and training. The property is called neuroplasticity, and it’s often described by the verse: “neurons that fire together, wire together.”

INTRIGUING EXAMPLE: You may have heard about  how London taxi cab drivers develop an enlarged hippocampus, which helps them meet the vast spatial memory needs required of the job. However, an even more fascinating example may be how some blind people have developed a capacity for echolocation–i.e. their mind registers changes as sound bounces off walls, curbs, and other obstacles.

RELEVANCE: One takes advantage of neuroplasticity when one works to be more kind and compassionate by recognizing and changing one’s behavior patterns.

REFERENCE: Fascinating reading on the topic can be gleaned from Kathleen Taylor’s book Brainwashing, but the most widely-cited book on the topic may be Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself.

 

1.) IDEA: We have neural circuitry that predisposes us to spiritual belief and inclinations toward the sacred.

INTRIGUING EXAMPLE: The evidence suggests that it’s not so important who or what you believe in, but the more positive the message the better. People of religion have demonstrated both better and worse health outcomes–all else equal–and it seems linked to whether you have one of those smiting gods or a more compassionate one.

RELEVANCE: Belief and surrender–religious or secular–can play an important role in one’s personal development.

REFERENCE: Newberg and Waldman’s How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain deals with these issues in detail.