Name: Evolve Your Brain
Rating: 4.7 (473 reviews)
Author: Joe Dispenza

What’s in it for me? Discover the incredible power of your brain, and use it to change your life.

For most of medical history, humans misunderstood their own brains.

It was thought that the brain, like the stomach or lungs, stayed pretty much the same once it had formed. But modern neuroscience has probed the mysteries of the brain to the point where the exact opposite is now understood to be true. As the thinking organ, the brain isn’t just shaped by nature – your genetics – but also by how you nurture it. In other words, how you use your brain influences its structure and functioning.

But if you’ve ever wondered why it was so difficult to change your habits around something even when you really, really wanted to, you know that the awesome power of the brain has a downside. The more you strengthen some areas, through bad habits or recurring thoughts, the more the brain will try to stick to them – and play electrochemical tug-of-war to get you to go along.

Given the outsize role your brain plays in your perception of reality, understanding how and why it works can unlock a host of possibilities to use it wisely and well. So if you’ve never thought about what you’re thinking with, read on.

Your brain and you

Take a moment, and picture what you did this morning. Maybe even close your eyes to help you summon up the details.

Whether you slowly shuffled to make your morning brew, or sprang from bed full of energy and ready to take on the day, your brain did a lot just revving itself up into an active state. Perhaps your morning included making breakfast, grooming yourself, and getting dressed. Did you plan out your day, check emails, or chat with family?

Let’s break that all down, and consider how many remarkable things your brain is doing in the first hour of the day.

Moving from sleep into waking consciousness is a complex electrochemical process. To stand up and move, your brain processes sensory input from your environment and sends signals for muscle movement. Your visual cortex processes your journey to the bathroom even if your eyes are barely open, and your memory of previous mornings helps your brain anticipate what comes next.

You didn’t even have to think about breathing or blinking or swallowing. You didn’t focus on keeping your heart beating, your body temperature steady, or your blood circulating either. And things get even more complex when food or drink hits your system, and a flurry of chemicals called neurotransmitters are released, causing a cascade of effects from raising your blood sugar to kicking off digestion.

If you thought about the day ahead, you activated even more areas of the brain – ones that handle reasoning and decision-making. Adept at predicting the future from past experience, these areas help you make good long-term decisions. After all, you might not feel like going to work or paying bills today, but you’ve learned that not doing so can come with serious consequences.

If you woke up with challenges like pain, trauma, addiction, or mental illness, you know all too well how the brain shapes the way you experience the world. But does that make your biology or history your destiny? Not necessarily, because the brain is also incredibly adaptable.

The matter of the mind

Taking a closer look at the brain begins to unravel how all this activity is possible. If you could zoom in on a small piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand, you’d see it contained about a hundred thousand neurons, or nervous system cells. Your whole brain has over a hundred billion of these cells.

Resembling tiny trees, each separate neuron is adept at gathering information through its branches and passing it along to the next cell at incredible speeds. Electrical nerve signals travel at 250 miles per hour and jump the gaps between individual cells like a spark in a spark plug.

It’s all connected

So human brains developed in three increasingly sophisticated parts over the course of hundreds of millions of years, yet function as a single organ. How? Chemistry.

Along with electrical signals, chemicals known as neurotransmitters carry information through the brain. You’ve probably heard about serotonin or dopamine – two chemicals that play a big role in mood. But there are many others, and it’s these chemicals that conduct the neurological symphony that is your perception of life.

The evolved brain keeps evolving

As modern science has accelerated our understanding of the brain’s remarkable abilities and evolution, one thing has become extremely clear: the brain changes and adapts with use, not the other way around. In other words, the brain’s structure is shaped by how you use it. Science has dubbed this neuroplasticity.

To understand how it works, imagine you could look at brains using an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, while they were active

Change yourself, and your brain follows

Real brain changes are going on inside of you right now as you read this Blink. Your visual and language centers are processing these words, and your brain is organizing the information it’s taking in and testing it against older information. You’ve stored some in your memory too – if your brain decided it was important information to store. In other words, just reading with a curious mind has made your brain change.

Bringing your full awareness to this process can be a powerful tool for overcoming personal challenges and living the life you want. For instance, awareness that the brain will grow new pathways as you learn something means that, even when the process is frustrating, it’ll get better with practice.

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