How powerful is the mind actually?
Mind Over Matter: The Remarkable Power of Neuroplasticity
This really is a great question!
If we think about a gymnast,
like a superstar athlete,
how much can you really train your body,
your muscles, your flexibility, your tendons and ligaments?
Well, we see that some people can do incredible feats.
Then if you transfer that same kind of questioning to the mind,
how far can we really strengthen or extend
basic capacities, for example, emotion awareness?
How refined can I feel and notice from moment to moment,
emotion, experience
or attentional abilities, of which there are many different kinds
of attention, or even the ability to observe
and notice others
and sense others and based on
both experience and research, and also working with people who've done
that work of training their minds over 10, 20, 30, 40 years,
it appears that we have much more capacity to refine
our innate or basic abilities than we currently believe.
Lifelong,
we influence in the same way that, you know, if you think about going to the gym,
you can build muscle strength and flexibility.
Likewise, we actually have access to lots of ways of training the body
and the mind that begin to influence the strength of the brain signal,
its relationship to other brain parts
and how networks interact, and that's across the entire lifespan.
And so the power of the mind to experience pain, to reformulate
our relationship to pain, for example, or to sensation is pretty powerful.
I'll give you one simple practice or idea.
I can have physical pain which, you know, millions or billions of people do.
But can I use my mind to reappraise,
to imbue the experience of pain to make it meaningful?
For example, may I experience this physical pain or emotional pain
so that someone else be free and suddenly
that pain has a different meaning.
And I relate to the pain differently.
Not because the pain itself has changed,
but something in my mind about that relationship has shifted.
Neuroplasticity is something that's
probably been around as a concept about the flexibility of the brain
for 30 or 40 years,
depending if you think about animal research to human research.
But essentially, it's the idea that's derived from thousands of studies
that what I choose to do every day:
eat, drink, exercise, hug someone or be isolated
or be socially interconnected, literally influences both
the anatomy and the function in my brain.
And more specifically, for example, if we think about somebody,
if I asked you to juggle for the next three weeks, hours per day,
then the manual dexterity that you begin to develop
actually manifests as more gray matter cells in the areas of the brain
that are for sensory and motor hand control.
So that's one example.
If you're a violinist for example, you might develop finger dexterity,
and that really begins to show how brain activity
and brain matter change in the areas that are related to fingers.
And likewise,
with what we do,
we literally sculpt and shape not only our prefrontal cortex,
but our entire brain networks by how we read,
think, sleep, eat,
which suggests that from one perspective,
we are the architects of our own brain.
Of course, yes,
we're born with a brain
that's influenced by the genetics of our parents and previous generations.
But we have an incredible architectural relationship
to sculpting our brain function,
how different parts of the brain communicate to each other.
And that suggests that
it’s a manifestation of plasticity,
that it's not a fixed physical entity
and that it can be modified, which brings a lot of hope
for a person who might think something's wrong with my brain, or I have a fixed notion
of who I am or what material I am.
Tonglen, for example, this idea
of taking on someone's suffering and then out of one's own understanding
of emptiness and compassion, sending forth well-being to others –
there's only one published study, empirical study.
I just looked at this last week for cancer survivors.
Having said that, I know there are other research teams
that are trying to start looking at these other
practices of mindfulness.
There's more research for compassion a little bit,
but this is a brand new, exciting time
where many other more specific kinds of practices are now
entering into the West and specifically Western science
that now are the purview of research and investigation.