Evolve your brain

Thoughts Are Real; Thoughts Directly Affect the Body The way we think affects our body as well as our daily life, therefore we use the expression “mind over matter.” Many people share this belief and they also apply it as a basis for making conscious changes in their own mind, body, and personal life.

The thought-feeling loop: this happens when the body responds to a thought by having a feeling, this initiates another response in the brain. The brain, which constantly monitors and evaluates the state of the body, notices that the body is feeling a certain negative feeling. In response to that bodily feeling, the brain generates thoughts that produce corresponding chemical messengers; now you begin to think the way you are feeling. Thinking creates a feeling and then feeling creates thinking, in a continuous cycle. This loop eventually creates a particular state in the body that determines the general nature of how we feel and behave. We can call this a “state of being”.

We think the same thoughts over and over again, which then produces the same chemicals inside the body. This very process will cause the body to experience the same feelings. In the end, we can become even modified physically by our own thoughts. Depending on the energy or intensity of our thoughts, what we think about will determine our health, our choices and ultimately our quality of life.

As a starting point, if you want to change your yourself, you should start by paying constant attention to your thoughts. In particular, it is important to make a conscious effort to observe your automatic thought processes, especially the harmful ones. To most people it is a big surprise, to find that most of the persistent, negative inner statements we tell ourselves are not even true. In other words, just because we have a thought does not necessarily mean that it is true.

if conscious thoughts are repeated often enough, they become unconscious thinking. A good example for this, is that we must consciously focus on every action when we learn how to drive a car. But after months of practice, people can drive 100 miles from point A to point B and not remember any part of the trip, because the subconscious mind is typically steering the wheel. We have all experienced being in an unaware state during a routine drive, only to feel our conscious mind re-engaging in response to an unusual engine sound or the rhythmic sound of a flat tire. So, if we continually entertain the same thoughts, they will start off as conscious ones, but they will ultimately become unconscious, automatic thought programs.

It takes awareness and effort to break the cycle of a the thinking process that has become unconscious, and therefore automatic. First, we need to step out of our routines so we can look at our lives. Through contemplation and self-reflection, we can start to become aware of our unconscious programs. Next, we must observe these thoughts without responding to them, so that they no longer initiate the automatic chemical responses that produce habitual behavior. Within all of us, we possess a level of self-awareness, which can observe our thinking. We must learn how to be separate from these programs and when we do, we can willfully have control over them. Ultimately, the objective is to take full control over our thoughts. In doing so, we can neurologically break apart the negative thinking that has become hardwired in our brain.

1. By learning new information (semantic memories) and having new experiences (episodic memories) we make new synaptic connections and evolve our brain’s hardware.

2. We learn by association! We use what we already know to understand the many unknowns we encounter. When neurological networks fire that are already developed from our past knowledge and experience, these parts of the brain are now receptive to making new synaptic connections for new information. This is Hebb’s Fire together wire together model of learning.

3. We remember by repetition! When we put our full attention on what we are learning and practice it repeatedly, firing these synaptic connections time and time again, chemicals are released that cause the synapses between neurons to form long-term relationships. Neurons that repeatedly fire together, wire together more strongly.

4. We have hardware in our brain that enables us to learn, to make the unknown know on both the Hebbian level of neurons (microscopic) and on the level of dual-brain (macroscopic) processing.