Transcend Yourself #1: Understanding Your Brain

How We Grow and How It's Expressed

Your brain is the most beautiful object in the entire universe. Especially yours, dear reader.

Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the brain is that it is the only consciously self-altering, self-creating machine to ever exist. But we’ve been told our whole lives we can be anything we want, achieve our dreams. Yet we’ve never been taught how. By knowing the mechanism and tools you can use to change your brain, you can finally achieve adaptations beyond your wildest imagination.

You first need to understand that discipline and knowledge and skills are not ephemeral ghosts, immaterial concepts you wish you possessed. Every thought, every desire, every talent, every emotion, every weakness is physically expressed in your neurons. Playing guitar, shooting a basketball, writing a novel, all of these skills exist in the brain. They are literally hardwired into your anatomy. And by virtue of neuroplasticity and your own agency, you can top-down alter and upgrade your programming.

Understanding the nature and of these neural pathways and the process by which they are created and destroyed is crucial to achieving your desired outcomes.

The first step is understanding how these connections are created.

You ever wonder why, after reading the same paragraph 10 times the night before an exam, you didn’t retain a single word? And yet the most horrible memories you wish to forget haunt you in the most vivid detail? Why did the brain decide to remember what you didn’t want to and not what you did?

Because nobody told you why memories are formed, why the brain changes. Here’s how:

1. Emotion: Emotion determines the number of neurons and connections between neurons. Awe, fun, happiness, pain, sadness, boredom… Neurotransmitters such as dopamine, epinephrine, glutamate, and GABA signal for the neuron to enhance its synaptic activity, increasing connections, strengthening its bonds. Everybody remembers where they were on 9/11.

2. Novelty: Uniqueness stimulates the brain’s center for adaptation, integrating unknown information. If you saw a 7 footer in a clown costume walking and alligator, you would remember it.

3. Repetition: Neurons are strengthened through behavioral and recurring thoughts, reinforcing the strength of the pathway, as use of a body part strengthens the muscle.

4. Beliefs: Positive beliefs open the mind to neuroplasticity, where negativity shuts down the ability to learn (this is difficult, I’ll never understand it, I’m too stupid, I’ll be lonely forever, this is dumb anyways, etc.).

It must be noted that constant elevation of cortisol (stress) severely limits the brain’s capacity (hippocampus) for adaptation. People with chronic stress with find it much more difficult to change than those in relaxed states.

Why did the brain evolve those three main inciters of adaptation?

Survival. The potency of information (magnitude of emotion) combined with its value-judgment (good vs. bad) determines the strength of neuron formation to change behavior. You avoid extremely bad things, you chase extremely good things. By remembering the extremes, the brain filters out the mundane, ensuring survival.

If you frame your goals and bad habits through this lens, you can more accurately condition yourself into repeating the good and avoiding the bad.

So what do these neural pathways look like?

As expected, the strength of the knowledge, habit, or skill is determined by the number of neurons within the pathway. More neurons = stronger pathway. Tiny wires are spooled together to create ropes of corresponding strength.

But that’s the half of it.

Neural pathways contain clusters of neurotransmitters almost identical those present when they were created. Which means, negative experiences physically exist in the mind as pockets of untapped negative emotion waiting to be burst when the pathway is taken once more, either through thought or action.

This is why smells trigger memories. The expression of that smell was sitting inside that neural pathway on the odd chance you smell it again. That’s the same reason when you’re sad you are reminded (re minded, experienced again) childhood tragedy, times of low self-esteem, memories of failure.

The stimulus taps into the previous experiences of that stimulus.

By being able to bear in mind the structure and mechanisms of the brain, it becomes far easier to understand how it is changed. By utilizing the miracle of consciousness, you can fidget with your programming, develop amazing skills, prune away your weaknesses, and actualize the person whom you desire to be.

Tomorrow I’ll be releasing the Actionable Steps to Accessing this Neuroplasticity and Altering Your Brain.