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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

A Neuro-Mythical Creation Story

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First I have to dispense with the Monty Python meme: and now for something completely different! Nearly 20 years ago, I took a mythology class right after I finished Biological Psychology. Lots of writing was required in the mythology class, one of the assignments being a creation story. At the time, I described what I wrote as “very loosely based on Buddhism and quantum physics’ theory of the unified field.”

I didn’t yet know about the distinctions of System 1 and System 2 because they were just being made. And although I knew what dopamine was, I wasn’t aware of the important role it plays in so many areas of our lives. When I read the piece now, it seems to be “very loosely based on” dopamine (which is desire), the relationship between wanting and liking, and by extension, System 1 and System 2.

The Yearning of Desire

In the beginning, All was One, and the One was nameless and without form. Within the One existed All Things. But there were no distinctions within the One: no thing was separate from any other thing. Countless aeons passed, yet there was no experience within the One of the passage of time. Gradually, from within the center of the One, arose the beginning of Desire. At first Desire was like a small bubble rising to the surface of a perfectly still lake. At first Desire was only the softest whisper of the wind. Desire wanted to give form to the formless and to name the nameless. Desire yearned for forms to touch and to surrender to.

As more aeons passed, Desire continued to grow within the One. Desire pulsed within the center of the One, louder and stronger, and the pulsing of Desire gave form to Spirit, that which inhabits all and everything. Spirit allowed himself to be inspired by Desire and to contemplate all the possibilities that form could take. Spirit saw that formlessness needed form, just as form needs formlessness. Spirit saw that formlessness needed form to complete itself. Spirit then dreamed the dream of the universe taking form, from its beginning to its end, which was not really an end but only a return to formlessness. As Spirit dreamed the dream of creation, Desire allowed herself to be infused with Spirit, and as she did, she took the shape of a large, graceful bird, covered in the palest of green iridescent feathers. Spirit was the air that she breathed.

Spirit longed for the forms that he had dreamed of. And Spirit longed to be inhaled by Desire, just as Desire longed to breathe Spirit. With each inhalation of Spirit, Desire flapped her pale wings. As the flapping of her wings increased, the colors of her feathers deepened into verdigris and copper, turquoise and silver, aqua and gold. She spread her wings and flew in a wide, lazy arc, and she sang the purest, most exquisite songs, whose haunting echoes trailed behind her. She coasted on the currents of air that were Spirit.

As Desire breathed in more of Spirit, she too began to visualize the forms that Spirit had dreamed of. As her yearning increased, so did the flapping of her wings. Her tail feathers grew longer and their color changed from pale green to deep red. She swooped and glided through Spirit, inhaling more and more of his visions. The feathers of her body turned crimson and saffron. Desire felt something growing inside her, in the same place where her yearning had first begun its delicate pulsing so many aeons ago. She flapped her wings again and soared upward. An indigo band formed around her neck. Her singing became louder, more rhythmic, and more intense. It filled the entire universe with its insistent, rapturous vibrations. Spirit was enthralled by the songs of Desire and continued to fill her with the countless forms he had dreamed of.

Desire was full of a longing so powerful that she thought it could never be filled. The feathers of her head changed to amethyst and violet, and a royal purple crest took shape along the top and back. She opened her mouth to cry out but no sounds of any kind emerged, neither cry nor song. Instead, when she opened her mouth the countless forms of the universe began to spill out into the air, into Spirit. Each time she opened her mouth more forms issued forth until everything that Spirit dreamed had been given its form. Spirit was satisfied because he was everywhere, inhabiting all of the forms of the universe. But Desire, without whom no form could exist, could not touch them, could not fully satisfy her yearning.

It is the nature of Desire to remain unfulfilled. And we, too, who were given birth through Desire, know that no matter what we have, something is always missing. Though Spirit fills us and gives us joy, there is a place in our hearts that it cannot touch. Desire is the permanent longing in our hearts for home, for the One, for formlessness.

Desire animates us, motivates us, and energizes us. It’s a powerful, creative force. Dopamine propels us toward what we are missing because:

Our brains were not designed for us to sit around contemplating what we already have. —Dr. Loretta Graziano Breuning

Craving

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If craving were a person, he or she would definitely be from the wrong side of the tracks. Probably tattooed. Maybe a smoker. Definitely a drinker. A little bit slutty. A silver-tongued devil capable of talking you into doing all kinds of things against your better judgment. Someone your parents would have warned you—in the strongest terms—not to hang around with.

You try to stay away—to be good. But craving is just too hard to resist. Eventually you give in, and it feels so good in the moment, but you always end up hating yourself the next morning. You really want to break up with craving, but you can’t.

At least that’s the perspective many people appear to have about craving. Craving is associated with wanting things that are “bad” (unhealthy, illegal, dangerous, or excessive) or with being out of control. The logical result of this view of craving is to attempt to squash it, eliminate it, beat it in to submission: to conquer it.

What Is Craving?

The best definition of craving I’ve come across is a strong wanting of what promises enjoyment or pleasure.

Essentially, craving is wanting or desiring something. Wanting is driven by dopamine in your brain. But the neurons that respond to dopamine are interspersed with neurons that respond to opioid and cannabinoid neurons that provide the experience of pleasure (liking). In a sense, the brain likes to want, which is why, according to psychologist and neuroscientist Kent Berridge, “we are hardwired to be insatiable wanting machines.”

So even if you could do it, it makes no sense to try to break up with craving. Your life would be so much less enjoyable. But you can minimize your cravings for some things by cultivating cravings for other things.

We often think of desire and the objects of our desire as inseparable. We think it is the indulgence itself—the luscious ice cream, the rush of nicotine, or the flood of coins from a slot machine—that motivates us. To a greater extent, however, it is the expectation of these rewards, the luxurious anticipation of them, that fires up our brains and compels us to dig in, take a drag, or place another bet. —Chris Berdik, Mind over Mind

The unconscious part of your brain (System 1) is always looking for—expecting, craving—the next reward. Untrained, it will go for the most immediate, readily available source of pleasure. Craving is persistent and hard to resist. So applying willpower to avoid indulging in that pleasure, whatever it may be, is an ineffective strategy.

Rejigger Your Pleasure Experiences

“Pleasure is a potent driver of behavior,” as Anjan Chaterjee says in The Aesthetic Brain. But:

Our cognitive systems can reach down into our pleasure centers and rejigger our pleasure experiences.

Rejiggering our pleasure experiences is an essential component of long-term behavior change. You can’t stop your brain from craving, but you can redirect its path from one pleasurable or rewarding object to another. You can only train it to respond to a different reward, however, if it actually craves that reward.

Yes, craving sometimes goes too far in the pursuit of pleasure. Makes you want things you don’t want to want and do things you don’t want to do, at least after you’ve done them. But craving also drives you to take action to get what you want. Craving motivates you to learn and create and expand…to modify your behavior…to effect change in the world…to experience beauty. Craving is frequently misunderstood—but definitely worth the effort to get to know.

31 Ways to Be Good to Your Brain

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Here are 31 things you can do to be good to your brain so your brain can be good to you. It’s the best win-win situation I can think of.

  1. Snack Healthy. Try almonds and blueberries. They lower blood sugar, and the omega-3s in the almonds and the antioxidants in the blueberries keep your brain functioning correctly.
  2. Ballroom Dance. Learning new moves activates brain motor centers that form new neural connections. And dancing calms the brain’s stress response.
  3. Swap Croutons for Walnuts. The omega-3s in walnuts improve mood, calm inflammation, and replace lost melatonin.
  4. Walk Your Dog. Walking for 20 minutes a day can lower blood sugar, which improves blood flow to the brain and, therefore, thinking. If you don’t have a dog, go with a friend—or by yourself.
  5. Become a Tour Guide. Learning new facts and thinking on your feet help to form new neural pathways in your brain, while interacting with others can ease stress.
  6. Try a Different Puzzle. Switch from Sudoku to crossword (or vice versa). When you get good at one puzzle or brain teaser, master a new one to help your brain create new neural connections.
  7. Take a Class. Taking classes, even auditing them, improves and maintains brain functioning. Learning something new is one of the best ways to keep your brain in good working order.
  8. Have a Glass of Wine. Make it a red to get a hit of resveratrol, an antioxidant that may prevent free radicals from damaging brain cells.
  9. Add Cinnamon to Your Oats. The oats scrub plaques from your brain arteries; a chemical in cinnamon is good for keeping blood sugar in check, which improves neurotransmission.
  10. Listen to the Music. Instead of watching TV, listen to your favorite music. Music lowers stress hormones and increases well-being and focus.
  11. Change Your Environment. Rearranging or redecorating can alter motor pathways in the brain and encourage new cell growth.
  12. Engage in a Debate. If you can avoid getting overly angry, engaging in a good debate can form new neural pathways and force you to think quickly and formulate your thoughts clearly.
  13. Get a Good Night’s Sleep. Sleep not only reenergizes the body, it also clears waste from the brain and supports learning and the consolidation of memories.
  14. Join a Book Club. Frequent reading is associated with reduced risk of dementia. And reading literary fiction has a host of additional benefits including improved focus and an enhanced ability to approach and deal with obstacles.
  15. Play a Board Game. Board games (Risk, Pictionary, Scrabble, etc.) not only require you to socialize, they also activate strategic, spatial, and memory parts of the brain.
  16. Engage Your Senses. Go camping or spend some time at a farmer’s market where you can look, touch, sniff, and taste the produce to activate and engage different regions of your brain.
  17. Add Some Strength Training. Even a little strength training can help protect brain cells from damage done by free radicals. It also encourages new brain-cell growth. You can just strap some weights on when you walk or practice yoga.
  18. Take a Nap. Sleep’s boost to concentration and memory happens during the first stage, so your brain can benefit from just a 30-minute nap.
  19. Develop a Hobby. Learning and engaging in a hobby has similar benefits to meditation. In addition, hobbies can act as antidepressants and protect against brain aging.
  20. Eat with Chopsticks. Using chopsticks, if you’re not already adept, will force you to focus on what you’re eating. If you are adept, try using them with your other hand.
  21. Read Aloud. Reading aloud engages the imagination in a different way. Different areas of the brain are activated depending on whether a word is read, spoken, or heard.
  22. Try Something New. Novel experiences trigger the release of dopamine and stimulate the creation of new neurons. Go somewhere you’ve never been or try a cuisine that’s unfamiliar.
  23. Turn off the GPS. Learn how to get around town by reading maps and using your sense of direction. Using your brain instead of your GPS can increase the size of your hippocampus, which stores and organizes memories.
  24. Widen Your Circle. Stimulate mental growth and challenge your current way of thinking by connecting with people who have different interests or who are from different social or cultural environments.
  25. Meditate. Training your mind to be quiet can reduce stress, improve memory and mood, and increase learning ability, focus, and attention.
  26. Shake Your Booty Body. Gently bouncing your knees and shaking out your limbs for a few minutes in the morning and at night reduces levels of cortisol and triggers relaxation and alertness that keep your brain sharp.
  27. Use Calendars & Planners. Taking advantage of tools like calendars, planners, maps, shopping lists, etc. to keep routine information accessible means you don’t waste mental energy on them and you are better able to concentrate on learning and remembering new and important things.
  28. Master Something. Once you become proficient with something, the mental benefit is reduced because your brain becomes more efficient at it. Challenge yourself with the next level of difficulty or learn a related skill.
  29. Take Care of Your Heart. Risk factors for cardiovascular disease and stroke, such as obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes, can negatively impact your cognitive health. So take care of your heart in order to take care of your brain.
  30. Protect Your Head. Avoid a head injury that could lead to cognitive decline or dementia by wearing a helmet when riding a bicycle or motorcycle and a seatbelt when traveling in a vehicle.
  31. Laugh More. The more spontaneous laughter you have in your life, the lower your level of cortisol is likely to be—and lower stress means better memory. Just thinking about something funny can be beneficial.

Listen to the Music!

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Want to stay mentally sharp? There are all kinds of things you can do: listen to music, read a book, gaze at a building, help someone out, get involved in a hobby. These activities not only make you feel good, they also happen to be very good for your brain in a variety of different ways.

Listening to music, for example, lowers stress hormones and increases well-being and focus.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been so focused on increasing my level of physical activity over the past couple of months, but what I appreciate the most about music and the brain is the fact that music helps me exercise. I enjoy listening to upbeat music, of course, but the benefit extends way beyond the enjoyment.

Over 100 years ago, a researcher discovered that cyclists pedaled faster when they listened to music than they did in silence. Now I know it’s not my imagination that I get a better workout with music than I do without it. I also know why.

Normally, when the body is tired and wants to stop, it signals the brain for a break. Well, music can turn down the volume on the brain’s complaints about being tired. Music competes for the brain’s attention, so during low- or moderate-intensity exercise it helps us override our fatigue, which means we can exercise longer and harder.

Music also helps us use our body’s energy more efficiently and effectively. Cyclists in a 2012 study who listened to music used 7% less oxygen than their counterparts who didn’t listen to music.

Another study with cyclists showed that the tempo of the music can have a significant effect on athletic performance. After listening to some popular music while riding stationary bicycles, one group listened to the same music slowed down by 10% and another group listened to the same music sped up 10%. Here’s what happened:

When the tempo slowed, so did their pedaling and their entire affect. Their heart rates fell. Their mileage dropped. They reported that they didn’t like the music much. On the other hand, when the tempo of the songs was upped 10 percent, the men covered more miles in the same period of time, produced more power with each pedal stroke and increased their pedal cadences. Their heart rates rose. They reported enjoying the music – the same music – about 36 percent more than when it was slowed. But, paradoxically, they did not find the workout easier. Their sense of how hard they were working rose 2.4 percent. The up-tempo music didn’t mask the discomfort of the exercise. But it seemed to motivate them to push themselves. As the researchers wrote, when “the music was played faster, the participants chose to accept, and even prefer, a greater degree of effort.”

It’s pretty easy to create your own workout playlist, but experts recommend incorporating songs that have 120 to 140 beats per minute. There’s no benefit to increasing the bpm above 145. You can calculate the beats per minute of a song by counting or by using a site such as songbpm.

Here’s one of my favorite workout songs, clocking in at 124 bpm:

Exercise has plenty of positive effects on the brain, but if you’re like me, you also do it just because it feels good.

Here are some of the other things you can do that both you and your brain might enjoy. (Click on the links to read the full articles.)

Be good to your brain and your brain will continue being good to you!

Note: A much-abbreviated version of this post was published on 12/4/14.

What Will You Do Next?

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YOUR BRAIN is always trying to solve the same problem: what will you do next? It really, really wants to solve that problem because taking action is what it’s all about. It doesn’t want to take just any action, although the actions it takes might seem arbitrary or mysterious or at least contrary to the actions YOU would like it to take.

System 1 (the unconscious part of the brain that runs you) is what I refer to as YOUR BRAIN. System 2 (the conscious part of the brain you identify with) is what I refer to as YOU. YOUR BRAIN is not intellectually inclined; nor is it a long-term, goal-oriented, analytical, or reflective thinker. But it can definitely think on its feet, which is what it evolved to do. It’s fast and efficient.

The brain appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant motion. —John Medina, Brain Rules

Since YOUR BRAIN is focused on survival, when it’s trying to solve the problem of what to do next, it looks to your past experience: what have you done in the same—or a similar—situation. Obviously, you survived taking the action you took then, and that’s a good enough endorsement for YOUR BRAIN.

Little hits of dopamine supplied within YOUR BRAIN’s reward system spur your brain on to keep solving this same problem of what to do next over and over and over again. So speed is also a factor. The quicker YOUR BRAIN can come up with an answer, the quicker it gets its reward.

Remember that in the moment, YOU have less than two-tenths of a second to veto YOUR BRAIN’s impulse. Given that YOUR BRAIN finds solving the problem of what to do next rewarding in and of itself, if it already has an answer based on what you have done before, it has absolutely no investment in considering alternatives. That would only delay delivery of the reward!

This is what you’re up against if you want to change your behavior: a fast and efficient system operating outside of your awareness that assesses situations before you’re even know you’re in them, determines the action you’re going to take now based on the action you took in the past, and gets rewarded not for astuteness or for pleasing YOU but for economy of mental/neural processing.

What’s Normal for You

Whatever you have done before is what you are extremely likely to do again. The best way to surmount the situation is to work with it, not against it. This three-step method for doing so falls into the category of simple but not easy:

A.  Identify what you want to change.
B.  Determine your desired outcome.
C.  Employ the appropriate contrivance (tool) to get you from A to B.

Since YOUR BRAIN is already getting rewarded each time it does what you don’t want it to do, you need to reward it each time it does what you do want it to do. Rewarding yourself for good behavior may seem contrived—meaning unnatural, awkward, or forced—to YOU. But it’s the language YOUR BRAIN understands.

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