The brain acts as a laboratory. Its an architect. It designs models, and it puts the pieces together.
JOE DISPENZA
It seems funny that humans have explored the ocean’s bottom and planetary moons, and developed all sorts of amazing technology, but still are in a mystery about the brain. Scientists are pushed into bringing in quantum effects, complexity theory and holographic models into their theoretical models in order to explain basics like perception, consciousness and memory.
It’s not surprising. It has been calculated that there are more possible connections in one human brain than there are atoms in the entire universe. Even in a small brain, the workings are incredible. It’s been estimated that to solve the problem of a bird landing on a branch in the wind, the largest supercomputer would take days to calculate a solution, if it could. This problem may be computationally unsolvable. Yet bird brains do it all the time, and in no time.
Traditional models compare the brain to a telephone switchboard or a supercomputer. But these comparisons conjure up images of something clunky and machinelike, and the brain isn’t like that; it’s a very alive, plastic and flexible organ, capable of learning, understanding and dynamically rewiring itself based on our demands.
Even though science is far from fathoming the full extent of the brain’s capabilities, there are many things that are known. We do know that it is the most complex structure on the planet, hence in our known universe. It directs and regulates all of our bodies’ activities, from heart rate, temperature, digestion and sexual functioning, to learning, memory and emotions. And even though we don’t know a lot about how it works, what we do know answers many questions as to why we do what we do.
In the words of brain researcher Andrew Newberg:
The brain is capable of millions of different things, and people really should learn how incredible they are, and how incredible their minds actually are. Not only do we have this unbelievable thing within our heads that can do so many things for us and can help us learn, but it can change and adapt, and it can make us into something better than what we are. It can help us to transcend ourselves.
And there may be some way that it can actually take us to a higher level of our existence, where we can understand the world and our relationship to things and people in a deeper way, and we can ultimately make more meaning for ourselves and our world. There’s a spiritual part of our brain; it’s a part that we all can have access to; it’s something that we can all do.
What follows is an extremely simplified version of brain structure and processing. The study of the brain is an immensely fascinating area that is great fun to explore. What is discussed here are just the basics that are needed to see how these structures interact with our day-to-day experience of the world and ourselves. We are loading up the tool chest of transformation with knowledge and ideas about how we’re wired and unwired, strung up and strung out.
Amazing Facts About Our Brain
• The brain is at least 1,000 times faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world.
• The brain contains as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way—about 100 billion.
• Number of synapses in cerebral cortex = 60 trillion.
• A sand-grain-sized piece of a brain contains 100,000 neurons and a billion synapses.
• The brain is always “on”—it never turns off or even rests throughout our entire life.
• The brain continually rewires itself throughout life.
Neurons and Neuronets
The brain is made up of approximately 100 billion tiny nerve cells called neurons. Each neuron has between 1,000 and 10,000 synapses, or places where they connect with other neurons. These neurons use the connections to form networks among themselves. These integrated or connected nerve cells form what are called neural networks or neuronets. A simple way to think about this is that every neuronet represents a thought, a memory, a skill, a piece of information, etc.
However, these neuronets do not stand alone. They are all interconnected, and it’s the interconnection of them that builds up complex ideas, memories and emotions. For example, the neuronet for “apple” is not one simple network of neurons. It is a much larger network that connects to other networks, such as the neuronets for “red,” “fruit,” “round,” “yummy” and so on. This neuronet is itself connected to many other networks, so that when you see an apple, the visual cortex, which is also connected in, fires that network in order to give you the image of an apple.
Everyone has their own collection of experiences and skills, represented in the neuronets in their brains. As Dr. Joe Dispenza comments: “Whether we grew up in a single-parent family, whether we were raised with many other children, whether we went to college, what our religious beliefs were, what our culture was, where we lived, whether we were loved and encouraged as a child, or perhaps were abused physically—all of that forms the neuronets in our brains.”
All those experiences shape, neurologically, the fabric of what’s taking place in our perception and in our world, says Dr. Dispenza, and when stimuli come in from our environment, “certain aspects of those neuronets are going to kick in, or click on, that are going to cause chemical changes in the brain.” These chemical changes in turn produce emotional reactions, color our perceptions, and condition the responses we make to the people and events in our lives.
Nerves That Fire Together, Wire Together
A fundamental rule of neuroscience is that nerve cells that fire together, wire together. If you do something once, a loose collection of neurons will form a network in response, but if you don’t repeat the behavior, it will not “carve a track” in the brain. When something is practiced over and over again, those nerve cells develop a stronger and stronger connection, and it gets easier and easier to fire that network.
If we do something over and over and over again, by the mere fact that we’re repeating it, the process of learning whatever we’re learning starts to become simple, and it starts to become automatic. It starts to become familiar. It starts to become easy. It starts to become natural, and it starts to become subconscious.
—Joe Dispenza
If you keep hitting the repeat button in the neuronets, those habits become increasingly hardwired in the brain and are difficult to change. As a connection is used over and over, it gets stronger, better established, like forging a path through tall grass by walking it again and again. This can be advantageous—it’s called learning—but it also can make it difficult to change an unwanted behavior pattern.
Luckily there’s a flip side: Nerve cells that don’t fire together, no longer wire together. They lose their long-term relationship. Every time we interrupt the habitual mental or physical process reflected in a neuronal network, the nerve cells and groups of cells that are connected to each other start breaking down their relationship. Dr. Dispenza compares this to an experience most of us have had. When you graduate from college and part with the roommate with whom you’ve shared so much, you promise to exchange postcards, once a month or so, just to maintain your friendship and let each other know how you’re doing. As time passes, you start sending cards only at Christmastime, and the relationship begins to weaken and fade.
The Vedic tradition is founded upon the premise of the ultimate unity of life, and the capability of the human brain, a very precious instrument in the universe, to directly experience that core unity and live it. And if you look at the structure of the human brain in detail, you see that it’s specifically designed and carefully engineered to experience the unified field, to experience the unity of life.
—John Hagelin, Ph.D.
This effect is an exact reflection of what is going on inside the brain. As you think less and less about the roommate, the neuronets’ connection lessens, until there’s no connection at all. What’s happened is the very fine dendrites spreading out from the cell body that connect to other cells unhook and are available to rehook to other nerve cells, letting the old patterns go and potentially forming new ones.
Learning
The brain learns in two major ways. The first way is through factual, intellectual data that we master and/or memorize. For example, you study history and commit names and dates to memory, or you read Plato and draw conclusions about his concept of ideal government. Each name and date, each logical argument, adds to the neuronets in the brain. The more you go over the material, the more firmly established it will be in your memory—because the neural networks become stronger.
The second and generally more powerful way the brain learns is through experience. You can read a book about how to ride a bicycle, and by intellectually processing all the information about how to shift gears going uphill or downhill, how to balance, how tight the spokes should be, you’ll get some idea about riding. But it’s not until you actually get on the bike and start pedaling that the information is integrated.
Regardless of which type of method, learning is essentially integrating neuronets together to form new neuronets. In the example of the apple, it wasn’t just a single neuronet of “apple,” rather apple linked into those other neuronets of round, red and so on. Really learning is building new structures based on previous structures. Watch a baby, and you’ll see those basic concepts being formed, generally by experience.
Remember the A Matrix of Words section in “Why Aren’t We Magicians?” (See you formed a net on it!) In it, there was the exercise of linking together a series of words in different relational ways. Each of the links gave meaning to the concepts linked together. And the more the different relational links were examined, the better each concept was understood. That is how the brain learns and how it’s wired. And that is why reexamining core ideas and beliefs is life-changing. By reexamining, you can go through all the links and find buried assumptions that are triggering our reactions through the process called Associative Memory.
Associative Memory
With more possible neural connections than atoms in the universe, the brain has a big problem: how to find a memory. And if the proverbial tiger in the jungle is headed your way, or Aunt Rosie, looking very tipsy, is charging your way, how does the brain find the right memory quickly? Emotions help you.
So emotions, which are themselves, in part, a neuronet, are tied into all the other neuronets. These connections allow the brain to find the most important memories first. They also insure that something important, like not putting your hand on the stove, is not quickly forgotten. It’s why everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard about 9/11 and the World Trade Centers coming down, or President Kennedy being shot.
Does that mean emotions are good or emotions are bad? No. Emotions are designed so that they reinforce chemically something into long-term memory. That’s why we have them.
—Joe Dispenza
The up and coming “Emotions” chapter talks about how associative memory affects our behavior and reaction to the world, but there is one important brain-related function to go over. We said that emotions are, in part, neuronets. The other part is that emotional neuronets are connected to a small organ in the brain—the hypothalamus. This hypothalamus takes proteins and synthesizes them into neuropeptides, or neuro-hormones. And we all know what hormones do—at least everyone past puberty does. They prepare the body for action!
If it is a tiger, a hungry tiger, the hypothalamus secretes chemicals to get the body ready to run. Blood leaves the brain and the central part of the body and moves to the extremities—“fight or flight.”
Emotions evaluate the situation quickly, in fact, without you even thinking about it, and send the chemical messengers off to fight or flight, smile or frown.
The downside with associative memory is that because we perceive reality, and treat new experiences based on our stored mental/neuronal database of the past, it’s difficult to see what is really out there in the moment. Instead, the tendency is to just reference experiences from the past. This would seem to create a perpetual Groundhog Day, where the same old, same old happens day after day.
And who would the same old be happening to? Who would be reacting to situations based on the past? That vastly integrated cluster of neuronets that we’ve been calling “the personality.” Just like all the cells of the body come together and interrelate with each other to produce a functioning organism, so the neuronets all interrelate, or associate, to produce that entity that we think of as our personality. All the emotions, memories, concepts and attitudes are encoded neurologically and interconnect, the result being what has been variously called the ego, the son of man, the lower self, the human, the personality.
The brain likes surprises. After a surprise, the neuroplasticity in the brain goes way up. It’s easy to see why: Suppose you’re walking in the deep jungle, and Aunt Rosie in a leotard jumps out in front of you. Surprise! Your brain has to immediately go into high gear to work out a way to deal with a new situation. Connections have to fire instantly to link up all possible solutions and help you choose among them. You have to process the information very quickly in order to survive.Neuroplasticity also increases after laughter. And since neuroplasticity is the prime ingredient to learning, you learn better after a good laugh.
In cases of split personalities, there are multiple integrated clusters, which are by and large not connected to each other. That is why when the personality shifts, there is no memory of the “other person.” The cluster of nets that the person is operating from is not connected to those memories.
From this it becomes apparent why a hardwired brain results in a hardwired, unchanging, rigid personality. And while the personality may change from liking cappuccinos to lattes, that change doesn’t really shift the personality to a new one. There’s a million other nets that stay the same, thus the aggregate remains “you.” Even though this sounds pretty grim, luckily the brain was created to take an incarnating spirit all the way to enlightenment, which is why it came equipped with neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity
Just as the Bill Murray character in Groundhog Day finally changes the behavior that is keeping him stuck in time, everyone has that option. It is possible to break the brain’s wired-together neuronets, change habits and gain freedom. The key lies in the brain’s natural ability to form new connections. Neuroplasticity is the term for the brain’s ability to make those new connections—in other words, for neurons to connect to other neurons.
Where it was once believed that by adolescence the brain was pretty well wired for life, more recent research has confirmed that the brain is not only very plastic and malleable, even into old age, but that it also creates new cells. As Dr. Daniel Monti explains:
The good news is that there’s enormous potential to change the kind of behaviors and characteristic patterns that we’ve fallen into. And the potential for change, within our nervous system, within our entire physiology, is tremendous.
In fact, if you’ve listened and remembered anything that I’ve said, your physiology is different than it was before! That memory has been encoded, and your genetic structure has changed. And while we previously would talk about the nervous system as this very rigid thing that didn’t have much capacity for change, we now know that on many levels, that isn’t true. There’s a tremendous amount of plasticity, which basically means ability to change, within the nervous system.
The research cited by Dr. Monti fits right in with the Human Potential Movement, which always said we are much more unlimited than anyone’s ever realized. To think that our growth stops at adolescence is, in the words of John Hagelin, “a barbaric view of human potential.”
The Vedic tradition not only talks about the unified field, but very precisely describes it and provides experiential techniques, meditative techniques to experience and live it. And the practical benefits of living the unity of life are immense. There are hundreds of studies I could cite on the profound health benefits, the profound mental benefits, when orderliness of brain functioning is systematically developed.
Coherent brain functioning results when we experience the unity within, and this coherent functioning of the brain translates to rising IQ, increased creativity, better learning ability and academic performance, moral reasoning, psychological stability, emotional maturity, quicker reaction time, greater alertness. Everything good about the brain depends on its orderly functioning.
And now orderliness of brain function can be longitudinally, systematically developed in students of all ages, even after the age of sixteen, when IQ traditionally is supposed to start to erode. “It’s all downhill from there,” it used to be believed. But that’s not the case. It’s a barbaric view of human potential. We are meant to, designed to, engineered to evolve in creativity and intelligence throughout life—but to do that you have to access the innate capability of the brain, and the tools, the key, to really develop the brain holistically is to experience the holistic reality, the meditative state, so-called spiritual experience, the experience of the unified field at the source of thought.
Frontal Lobe and Free Choice
The major factor that distinguishes human beings from all other species is our large frontal lobe, and the ratio of that frontal lobe to the rest of the brain. The frontal lobe is an area of the brain that enables us to focus attention and to concentrate. It’s central to decision-making and to holding a firm intention. It enables us to draw information from our environment and our storehouse of memories, process it, and make decisions or choices different from the decisions and choices we’ve made in the past.
But many choices are far from free. Much of our behavior consists of conditioned, learned or automatic responses to stimuli. Dr. Joe Dispenza offers this example: “If you were in a dark alley and I threatened you, the normal choice you would make would be based on a physiological response of fear, which means your body mechanism would give you signals to run for your life or stay and fight.” A similar process occurs when other neuronets kick in and produce automatic responses, like reacting to someone you know, lighting a cigarette or heading to the refrigerator when we are feeling stressed. These habitual, automatic responses hardly qualify as “choices.”
A second way of making choices occurs when we consciously separate ourselves from the environment and its stimuli, and stand back from our habitual or biological behavior and become the observer. From this quiet vantage point, as Dr. Dispenza puts it, we can then “reason carefully, based on what we know . . . The frontal lobe takes information that we’ve developed through our lifetime, through experience and through factual intellectual data, and it says, I understand this neuronet, and I understand this neuronet, but what if I take those two neuronets, and I integrate those two concepts to build a new model, a new ideal, a new design?”
We’re back to the observer. As Dr. Wolf notes:
It seems mind-boggling that an observer would have any power in the world at all. In a certain sense, the observer has no power. In another sense, the observer has a tremendous amount of power. In the sense of no power, we would say, observations that are carried out, in a way that they were previously carried out, over and over again, in a repetitive sense. So, it gets to a point where we don’t see the role of our observations anymore, because they become habitual. It’s kind of like being an addict to something. You lose the power of observation. When you regain the power of observation, you can see that by your choices, you can actually alter, restrain, or change what you see “out there.”
In the first scenario, the biological neuronets make the choice. The brain reacts to its environment, and certain aspects of the brain turn on automatic centers that cause the body to respond, like the blinking of the eye when an object gets too close or the classic “knee-jerk response” when the doctor taps your knee. In the second scenario, says Dr. Dispenza, “consciousness is moving through the brain, and using the brain to examine its options and possibilities.” Instead of the brain going on autopilot and running us, we begin to use the brain. Consciousness begins to have dominion over the body.
Consciousness, the Observer, Intent and Free Will
We’ve examined these concepts before. And here we are again, inside the most complex structure in the known universe, the brain, once more looking at these concepts.
Of course we have free will. Free will resides in our frontal cortex (lobe), and we can train ourselves to make more intelligent choices and to be conscious of the choices we’re making.
—Candace Pert, Ph.D.
Remember in the quantum world how we: Intend to ask a question of reality (process 1), the possibilities (process 2) then arise, whereupon observation collapses them into a definite choice (process 3)? What Dr. Dispenza is saying is that it is possible to collapse choice into a new life: “Maybe we’re just poor observers. Maybe we haven’t mastered the skill of observation, and maybe it is a skill. And maybe we’re so addicted to the external world and so addicted to the stimulus and response in the external world that the brain is beginning to work out of response instead of out of creation. If we’re given the proper knowledge and proper understanding and given the proper instruction, we should begin to see measurable feedback in our life.”
How do we translate this into action for change and transformation? From his scientific investigation into intention imprinting electron devices (IIEDs), Dr. Tiller has learned: “It is terribly important to sustain the thought and the intention if you want to make a transformation occur . . . when one wants to focus intent, you want to be a singleness of mind.” And the reflection of that in the brain is the frontal lobe.
The tools for change and transformation are building . . .
And how you FEEL about that will ultimately determine which ones you use, and which ones stay in the tool chest. But that’s the next chapter.
It does seem logical that the most malleable, complex, sophisticated physical device would be the interface between the “intangible” spirit world, and the “tangible” material world. And that it would mirror processes in both worlds. “As above so below, as within so without.”
Ponder These for a While . . .
• List three concepts or neuronets you have associated with happiness.
• Now list three neuronets associated with those listed. How many levels do you go before you loop back to happiness?
• Can you think of an apple without thinking about round?
• Fire your neuronet for PENCIL. Now fire your neuronet for your favorite food. Do you feel different?
• We just spent twenty minutes trying to come up with some image that you would have no associations with. The best we could do was PENCIL. Can you think of something that you have no associations with?