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rehearsal stage. We have to move from thinking it, to doing it, to being it. Conveniently, those three stages also have three corresponding steps that are necessary in order to move through that process.My friend’s coach, the baseball pitcher, who mentally rehearsed against the opposing team’s lineup, learned something each time he went out and actually pitched. He didn’t mindlessly repeat the same sequence of pitches against every hitter, or against every team each time he faced them. In fact, the next time he pitched the team that was his nemesis, he used what he had learned in the previous winning outing against them to formulate a new plan of attack. Knowledge that we pay attention to, we learn.He also solicited instruction and feedback from his catcher, his own. pitching coach, and another pitcher on the team. This process of self- observation and self-awareness falls under the domain of the frontal lobe. By quieting all of the other centers of the brain, the frontal lobe helps to sharpen skills of observation. By self-correcting and learning from our mistakes, we will naturally perform better the next time. This is how we evolve our thoughts, actions, and skills. What is wonderful about going out and demonstrating our skill, or a newly minted aspect of our personality, is that we will receive immediate feedback. If we’re really fortunate, we’ll also receive additional instruction. Receiving feedback and instruction are crucial to the process of evolving ourselves. Whenever we decide to make a change in our life, learn a new skill, adopt a new attitude, enrich our beliefs, or alter a behavior, we make a conscious choice. Whether this choice completely reflects our innate and altruistic desire to be the best person we can possibly be, or is forced on us by negative circumstances, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we know that we desire something greater for ourselves. Most important is the idealized self that we construct. The building blocks of that model consist of information that we gather from a variety of sources, regarding who we want to become, or what we want to change about ourselves. Consider that nothing we’ve learned has come without knowledge as a forerunner and as a fundamental part of that learning. On the simplest level, our personal development has relied on our ability to learn and to gain knowledge. Think of the spectrum of skills and information that we use just to navigate our way through any

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one day, and then think of that knowledge acquisition from a more long- term perspective, as we’ve developed from an infant into an adult.No matter whether we are learning how to line dance, shed pounds, become a more cheerful person, overcome insecurity, or cut seconds off a 5K race time, we use a three-step process as the opening moves in our attempt to meet our goals: Knowledge Instruction Feedback THE INTERPLAY OF KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE To illustrate how knowledge can personalize and alter an experience, let’s say I showed you a painting of water lilies by Monet. After studying the canvas, you might comment, “This painting is beautiful.” You would have one experience of Monet’s work. What if I then took the painting down and told you the following things about Monet’s life, career, and technique: He liked to capture different types of light with pastel colors. He was particularly interested in morning and evening light and how they looked in nature. Monet hoped to inspire people who experienced his work to look at nature and the world in a new way. He worked diligently at seeing things differently than the common man. Throughout his life, Monet looked to see how all things were connected. He was known to make statements such as, “The wisteria and the bridge are one and the same.” I could also say that as Monet got older, he developed cataracts, which began to diffuse and blur his vision. Since he only painted what he was seeing, those characteristic pixels or impressionistic dots that typified his work were really just the way he was processing sensory information. Now, imagine that I showed you the same Monet painting a second time. You might see it differently, based on the knowledge

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you just learned about him. Nothing in your environment would have changed; you’d simply acquired new semantic knowledge, and that knowledge had altered your experience of his painting. You made a few important synaptic connections that modified your personal perception. Because of the interplay between knowledge and experience, it’s likely that you would remember both the semantic knowledge and the episodic memory, and store them in your long-term memory.This simple example demonstrates how important is our perception of reality. When we are exposed to new information, we accumulate new experiences. They upgrade the neural nets of our brain, and we begin to see/perceive/experience reality differently, because we have made a new level of mind in our brain’s existing hardware.There’s another point to consider about perception and the role it plays in evolving our brain: perhaps we are missing out on what really exists. Do you remember our earlier description of the wine connoisseur? The same fabulous bottle of wine may be shared by an expert and by a novice. The connoisseur’s more evolved mind with its more enriched circuitry will enable him to enjoy a greater level of reality. We, too, can upgrade our brain, and when we do, we upgrade our experiences, and thus we upgrade our perceptions of our life and reality. Knowledge and its application change us from the inside, and change our world from the outside in.Gathering Self-Knowledge What we are primarily concerned about now is acquiring new knowledge with a purposeful intentas a means of evolving our brain and, by extension, our life. We discussed this at length in chapter 11, so we know how important it is to secure a baseline of knowledge that we can expand on. To become a more patient person, for example, we need to think about people who exhibit this quality, read books on the art of acceptance and tolerance, read accounts of people who’ve demonstrated a remarkable ability to endure hardships, and so on. We also have to

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gather some self-knowledge and observe how we respond in various situations, so that we can compare ourselves to the model we’re creating.Let’s make this even more concrete. One of the most frequently cited desires for change is to gain self-control in the form of losing weight. The first stage of many weight-loss programs is to have those enrolled gain knowledge about proper nutrition, the caloric values of foods, body mass index, the hypoglycemic index of various foods, portion control, the do’s and don’ts of when and how to eat, and hundreds of other concepts. Many diet programs also recommend that we keep a food diary, noting everything we eat in a day to show ourselves exactly how much we consume. This eye-opening exercise is designed to help us gain self-knowledge. Knowledge allows us to look at who we are being, what we are doing, and how we are thinking, and to compare and make the distinction between that and who we want to become.Seeking Out Instruction After learning different concepts, the next step is that we receive a great deal of instruction from the experts. This can be in meal preparation, balancing our intake of various food groups, exercise routines, and so on. Without this key component of instruction, most diets or self-improvement plans-will fail. We can seek out knowledge and information on our own. But at some point, our progress slows, and we need assistance from someone with more expertise than we have, to get us to the next level. Instruction, usually from someone who has experienced what we are endeavoring to learn, teaches us how to apply knowledge. Instruction teaches us how to do what we intellectually learned.For example, I know someone (I’ll call her Melissa) who learned to play the guitar. She was self-taught, and her grasp of strumming, picking, and basic chords was impressive for someone who never took a lesson. Although her initial progress was rapid, the learning curve flattened out. She grew frustrated and a little bored, so she sought out a teacher who could help her to progress at a faster rate than she could have on her own. One of the key ingredients of instruction is that we are given guidelines as to how to reach an intended result, by someone who

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has mastered a skill to some degree. Instruction is the how-to stage.How Am I Doing? The Role of Feedback in Evolving the Brain As we attain knowledge and receive instruction, getting feedback allows us to know how we are doing. Melissa knew that she was doing some things incorrectly, but it took expert eyes and ears to help her pinpoint her weaknesses and assist her in finding ways to overcome them. Feedback, in its strictest sense, is a response to an input. Generally, it can be either positive or negative. It answers our “How am I doing?” questions. Sometimes we seek out feedback explicitly by asking that question of others and ourselves, and sometimes, agents in the environment provide feedback without our asking for it. For example, if we are driving erratically, either other driverswill beep their horns at us, or the lights of the police cruiser pulling us over will let us know how we’re performing that task.Ideally, we have the ability to self-monitor, but that isn’t always the case. As is true of all aspects of human behavior, how we react to feedback varies from person to person. Some people respond more favorably to negative than to positive feedback. I’ve worked with several people who, during informal performance reviews, have stated, “That’s nice of you to compliment me, but I really learn more from criticism. than praise. Tell me where I need to improve. I already know what I’m doing well.” Conversely, I’ve worked with individuals who crumbled in the face of criticism and needed to have their negative assessments couched in very soft language. How people respond to the timing of feedback also varies. Some people appreciate receiving immediate feedback; others prefer that it be delayed, so that they are no longer in the heat of the moment. Immediate feedback is often the most beneficial, because the cause-and-effect nature of the input is clearer.Feedback in any form and from any aspect of our immediate environment should never be taken personally. It simply helps us make the distinction between when we are doing (applying knowledge) something correctly, and when we are not.

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One of the chief reasons many diets don’t work is that most people like to receive immediate feedback. In talking about the baseball pitcher, we saw that he received immediate feedback in terms of his performance. For a pitcher, a ball whizzing past his head on a line drive toward center field delivers a pretty clear message: don’t throw that particular pitch, in that particular spot, to that particular hitter, at that particular count again.For dieters, on the other hand, the feedback mechanism is not as immediate. Many programs include weigh-ins and the measurement of body parts to monitor progress. Perhaps even more important to dieters is recognition from family, friends, and peers: “You look great!” and “Have you been exercising?” or even “Something’s different about you.” That can and often does have an even greater effect than tipping the scales a few pounds less than the previous week.For any committed person who wants change, feedback can also come in the form of the efforts he or she makes. For example, a person who is altering his lifestyle over time can chart what he should eat daily in proper amounts, along with the exercise he wants to do. By looking at that chart over time, he will see the fruits of his disciplined efforts. The visual feedback of seeing his chart fill up with the records of daily wins will serve as important self-recognition. He is on target by matching his intent with his actions.Often, we also receive self-feedback from our body, based on our own emotional or physical responses to changes we are making. If we are working to lose weight, and we notice that our respiration rate doesn’t skyrocket when we walk up the two flights of stairs to our office, that internal feedback and sense of “I feel pretty good” serves as a strong motivator.Feedback Can Overcome Paralysis In an experiment performed at the Department of Neurology at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, researchers created a testing and feedback environment to make the paralyzed limbs of stroke victims work again. How is this possible, based on our model of what we know about the brain’s ability to learn and change?

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The subjects first learned some important knowledge about what might be possible for stroke patients, and then received specialized instruction. After rehearsing a new plan in their mind, patients were ready for a new experience. Using the frontal lobe, they wired new information in their brain, beginning to cause their neural circuits to organize into corresponding patterns.Now it was time to practice, to turn their knowledge into experience. The patients began to pay attention to immediate feedback they were receiving, on a monitor that showed their brain-wave activity. In the initial part of the experiment, each subject was asked to focus on moving his or her healthy limb, while observing on the screen a specific pattern of his or her brain activity. After repeating this pattern at will through repetitive practice, in a short amount of time patients could easily reproduce the same mind patterns on the screen by their thoughts alone. Each patient became aware of the automatic, unconscious level of mind that it took to move their healthy limb. As the experiment progressed, the subjects then concentrated on that healthy pattern-thinking about that pattern and making an intentional decision to move the healthy limb (without actually moving that limb). They eventually learned to transfer the healthy brain pattern to the paralyzed limb. The result was dramatic: the paralyzed limb was able to move again. Through feedback, patients learned to repeatedly create the same level of mind by causing their brain to fire in the right combination of neural nets in the same sequence and order. And by doing so over and over, that new level of mind became a familiar, routine activity. Each time they recreated the brain pattern on the screen, it became easier, because the feedback they were receiving showed them when they were doing the task or action correctly.Feedback helps us distinguish between when we are reproducing the right level of mind and when we are not, so that we can navigate our way to a particular end. When, through repeated feedback, these subjects were able to create the “level of mind” of normal, healthy movements, they began at will to transfer that mind, to make their paralyzed limb move just as the healthy one did. It took the same frame of mind for these stroke patients to move their paralyzed limb that it

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took to move the healthy one, and the body will always follow the mind.This was one of the first experiments to validate that the mind can influence the body through the proper feedback and instruction. Need an Attitude Adjustment?When we get out in the world and put into practice our new skill, belief, or attitude, we’re taking a necessary step in evolving ourselves. What’s important to note is that when we demonstrate our skills and receive feedback, that feedback supplies more knowledge and instruction that we can use, to refine ourselves and our approach to the goal we’ve set. If we receive great knowledge and expert instruction, and we can properly apply that information to produce action, we should expect to accomplish exactly what we set our mind to do. Until we can repeatedly accomplish that end at will, we need feedback to hone or enhance our actions. To finally achieve our intent is the ultimate feedback that makes the experience complete.Suppose you’ve decided to reduce your level of anger. You’ve long exhibited a hair-trigger response, and you want to become a more understanding person who doesn’t blow up so easily. So you create a new internal representation of serenity, and undertake a process of mental rehearsal. Each day, you do your mental rehearsal exercise, firing together and wiring together new circuits in your gray matter by remembering and reaffirming whom it is you want to become. You feel you’ve been able to get the frontal lobe to quiet all those other areas of the brain, so that you can plan and focus on your goal. The brain then combines and coordinates different neural nets of philosophy and experience to invent a new model of being. When each mental review session is over, you are in the desired frame of mind.After a month of following this regimen, you feel it’s time to take this new attitude out for a test drive. So you visit Mom. You and your mother have been at odds in the last few months. She’s had to struggle wit some minor health issues, but based on how much she talks about them, you’d think she has only one month to live and is in excruciating pain. Every conversation turns into a recitation about her woes and anxieties.You have tried to be sympathetic, but there’s a limit.

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After not seeing Mom for a month, you go to her house for a visit, and it’s a repetition of the same old situation. She doesn’t ask about you, your recent promotion, or anything to do with your family, your siblings, or the rest of the world. In the past, you would call her on her behavior, but this time, you simply sit and listen, nod when appropriate, empathize with her, and then leave after an hour, still on good terms with her. You feel like you’ve done a good job of producing a different result. But on the drive home, you notice that your teeth are clenched and you’re strangling the steering wheel, and when you get home, a splitting headache drives you to bed. How did you really do?When we set out to demonstrate our new skill or ability, we inevitably rely on the environment to provide clues to how we’re doing. Whether we want it to or not, the feedback from our environment is going to give us a status report. This is fairly simple when it comes to improving a physical skill. I knew, based on the number of times I fell, felt out of control, or didn’t cut a turn as sharply as I wanted to, how I was doing when I first learned snowboarding. If the number of words we type per minute increases, we know we’re moving toward a higher level of proficiency. But what if we’re trying to be less prone to displays of anger?When our goal is to change an unwanted neural habit, replace it with a new level of mind, and then demonstrate our new attitude automatically and naturally, if our demonstration (external feedback) does not match the internal state of our body, we are still not there yet.In our example, even though you demonstrated patience and control in being with your mother, you still left the scene in a suppressed state of rage and frustration. In your mental rehearsal you had practiced being not angry, but compassionate. By visiting Mom, you received some good feedback that you can work with, because you controlled your impulses; however, you did not complete your intended desire. Your internal state did not match your external demonstration and, therefore, you were not “being” compassionate. When the demonstration of our modified actions produces the desired external feedback, and our internal state matches that intent, we are controlling the mind and the body, both neurologically and chemically.How can we accurately assess our new level of mind? We must self-

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reflect to examine whether what we are doing is congruent with how we are feeling. If it is not, then we must insert a new plan in our mental rehearsal so that the next time, we improve both our actions and our feelings.Priming, Behavior, and Implicit Memory When we make anything implicit driving a stick shift, knitting, buttoning our shirt, playing the martyr-we do these things without the intervention of the conscious mind. We have wired those circuits to the cerebellum, and both the brain and the body have these tasks. memorized almost like blinking, breathing, repairing cells, and secreting digestive enzymes.Once we have a conscious thought in our neocortex, an unconscious thought/associative memory/implicit memory fires in response to our environment, and causes us to think equal to this stimulus. This process is often referred to as priming: we have an unconscious response to an external source that makes us think and act in a certain way, without even being conscious of why we are doing it. Priming finds its origins in the nondeclarative memory system.Have you ever noticed that if you think about flowers and recall the image of a rose, the other flowers you have stored in your brain are likely to fire as well? That’s an example of priming. Psychologists use the term priming because of its relation to the priming of a pump. To get a pump system to function properly, a liquid must already be present in the system in order to get the pump to draw more liquids out.In neurological terms, priming involves the activation of clusters of neural nets that are surrounded by, and connected to, other clusters of nets holding similar concepts. When one cluster is activated, those other nets connected to it will be more likely to come into consciousness.Priming can also refer to a phenomenon that we’ve all experienced: once we buy a new car, say a Nissan Sentra, we begin to notice many more Sentras on the road than we did before. Because of our exposure to one event or experience, we’re more acutely aware of other, related stimuli.With priming, a brief, imperceptible stimulus provides enough activation for a schema (a mental structure of some aspect of the world)

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to be rolled out. Schemas enable us to function in the world without necessitating purposeful thought. For example, we have a schema for a door, so that no matter what kind of door we encounter, we negotiate it.Unfortunately, we also have schemas that are stereotypes, scripts, or even worldviews to help us understand the world. That is why we may have unconscious, reflexive responses to happenings in our environment. Many African-American males, for example, report that when they enter an elevator with Caucasians, they notice that the women will clutch their purses more tightly, and men and women will both edge farther away. If we were to ask Caucasians why they exhibit these behaviors, they are either unlikely to recall having done so, or claim that it meant nothing it was simply a habit. Priming is an implicit reaction that happens beyond our conscious awareness.Along with this kind of response to stereotypes, we exhibit a host of other behaviors that are implicit, hardwired body memories, which have either been conditioned as a part of our genetic inheritance, or that we have taught the body to do automatically through repetition. For example, our environment constantly triggers implicit responses. Why is it that we can be having a pleasant day, and then, inexplicably, one irritant (a neighbor’s son drives by with a thudding sound system in his car) sets off a cascade effect of mood-dampening responses? We immediately recall the slight irritation we felt when the same neighbor invited nearly everyone else on the block over for a holiday get-together, but didn’t invite us. Then, anger swells as the vision of our mailbox dangling from its post, the clear victim of a baseball bat attack, rises before our eyes. Suddenly, we’re running all the programs in our head that tell us how much people disrespect us. That nice day turns dark, and we can’t explain why, because so much of this has been an unconscious, reflexive response.These functions that produce what we commonly refer to as our mood are part of our limbic system, which acts as a kind of subconscious thermostat. Because these are also subconscious systems, the body will follow the command of the brain, because that is what we have trained it to do so well. It doesn’t ask questions like, Are you sure, boss? It just takes orders and follows through on the commands of the mind. The more unconscious our thoughts are, the more we are allowing the body

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to be in command. This is why it takes conscious awareness to stop the process.How much of our day is about allowing the environment to cause us to think? This is exactly what priming is. When we allow the environment to rule our thoughts, it turns on all the implicit, associative memories we have hardwired, and we are then running programs- unconscious streams of consciousness with no conscious awareness. This means we are unconscious most of our waking day. We are “being” our familiar memories that we have wired from so many unconscious habits. If we are not getting the chemicals we have become accustomed to, a voice from our past begins to fire in our brain. Once we have that thought (which is a result of our chemically addicted body screaming back to the brain that it needs a fix), the corresponding neural network will fire. The next thing we know, we are unconscious and acting without thinking, creating states of anger, depression, hate, and insecurity.In what may be an example of priming, several studies suggest a link between acts of homicide in school settings and continuous exposure to violent video games. Although this is difficult to prove, such games, along with many other factors, may contribute to priming certain at-risk youths to commit violent actions, in what could well be unconscious demonstrations of aggression.5Advertising is a key priming mechanism. Sometimes an unconscious thought triggers a circuit that fires as a result of the numerous, repetitive television commercials we see. We tune into mental programs that highlight sickness, or feelings of being deprived, or a separation from self. As a result of the “mental rehearsal” of seeing so much advertising,and having practiced these feelings mentally and instructed our body on,how to demonstrate them so well, the next thing we know, we think we,need a new prescription drug for a syndrome we’re now sure we have, or we feel that our old car is now inadequate, and we have to replace it. All this happens without much conscious thought. We all unconsciously respond to cues in our world, matching our own social and personal limitations. Are we really freewilled? What’s so remarkable is that we allow this process of creating

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unconscious conditioning to produce the current (and perhaps, sad) state of our existence. When we are living from our past unconscious memories, we are priming what is familiar in us. In truth, the more routine we are, the more controlled we are by the environment, our associative memories, and our unconscious social beliefs. To be primed is to be unconsciously controlled by the external world, and we behave accordingly.Turning the Tables on Priming A break in our routine-whether a two-week trip or another alteration of our daily life can sometimes prompt this type of perspective shift. Most people who go on vacation will vouch that by being out of their environment, they can get a greater sense of perspective. Mental rehearsal is another type of escape from the enslavement of environmental priming. Going within to rehearse provides us with the type of perspective alteration that is a necessary precursor of truly evolving our brain and behavior. When we rehearse long enough, we will produce a deeper change that occurs at a deeper level of consciousness.Just as priming allows us to notice more cars like the one we recently purchased, if we focus on becoming a more grateful person in our mental rehearsal, we will not only realize more things that we have to be grateful for, but we will also witness more acts of gratitude that we can assimilate into our ideal. When we change our implicit perception from a negative one (the world is inherently unfair) to a better one (1 deserve good things and I have them all around me), we go from seeing things unconsciously, based on past memories and experiences, to seeing things consciously. When we consciously choose to focus our attention on exploring more evolved virtues, we have gone from an implicit, unconscious view of the world to an explicit perception. As we practice this new attitude consistently, we will change this new state of mind into an implicit memory.We can use this concept of an unconscious cue triggering our implicit system to our advantage. Mental rehearsal serves as a self-priming mechanism. If, for instance, we work on creating a model of ourselves as

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a restrained and patient person, then as we sit in solitude, that concept of ourselves becomes more real than anything in our environment. Thus time and space recede, and our past identity and experiences as an angry, impatient person also recede. If that thought of the new version of our self becomes real to us, then we have primed ourselves for another, more positive kind of cascade effect. We have primed ourselves to be tolerant, instead of the environment causing us to think and act with unconscious neural habits. Because priming activates circuits that cause us to behave in certain ways, we can prime our brain to function. equal to a focused ideal. Instead of spiraling downward, we can rise upward. In this way, we demonstrate that it is possible to change, that we can disconnect ourselves from the environment and the collective influences that have shaped us. When we mentally rehearse, we are priming the brain to help us be at cause in the environment, instead of feeling the effects of it. Self-priming allows us to be greater than the environment. And being greater than the environment is what evolution is all about.Let’s go back to the example of the booming car stereo triggering our internal war with the neighbors. Our perception of the events themselves could be altered, if we had been doing the kind of mental rehearsal we’ve discussed, and had trained our frontal lobe to still the emotional centers that (in our example) run riot in our brain. Instead of thinking, “That damn kid drives up and down the street just to piss me off,” we would either ignore the sensory input entirely or think, “Mark must be on his way to work.” Instead of thinking, “They took out my mailbox. Everyone’s out to get me,” we would think instead, “Random acts of stupidity and violence are everywhere. I should be grateful it wasn’t worse.” That shift in perception will start out as explicit and ultimately become implicit.In reality, we have been mentally rehearsing those negative states of being and demonstrating them our entire life. Our unconscious thoughts and behaviors dictate what we believe and how we behave. Why is it that we can focus on one little irritant of a stimulus to the point that we create an entire web of unhappiness, frustration, and anxiety? We can in the grocery store, and just as we are approaching the shortest line, theclerk says that the person just in front of us will be the last one he will

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clerk says that the person just in front of us will be the last one he willcheck out. Every other line is jammed with people. We have only 15 items, and we’re in the express lane. It’s clear that the person in front of us is well over the limit. There’s that conspiracy again those who play by the rules get screwed in the end. And now, because of the jerk in front of us, and the miserable clerk who probably can’t count to 15, we’re going to have to get into one of those other lines and wait. The litany could go on, and it does, in our head. As the old adage goes, reality is eleven-tenths perception… and somehow the mind seems to be a factor in influencing it.What we may fail to understand is that the brain doesn’t discriminate among thoughts on the neurological level. It takes no more effort to form a positive thought than it does a negative one. Attitudes are simply accumulations of related neural nets, and positive attitudes are as easy to construct as negative ones. (I use the terms positive and negative to demonstrate actions, behaviors, attitudes, and thoughts that serve us and don’t serve us.) Yet, few people construct those positive ones. Few people arrive at the conclusion that just as we can develop the habit of being depressed, angry, sullen, suffering, or hateful, we can be happy, content, joyful, and fulfilled. We take the negative states of mind that we’ve inherited from our parents and other ancestors, and we reproduce them. We then reinforce those states of mind, based on our own prior experiences. Scientific evidence shows that the brain is as changeable as the words we write in our word processing program. The irony of this is that the way out of the mess we’ve created requires us to use the same tools we used to get ourselves into it. We don’t need a simple twist of fate to write a happy ending to our own life story; considering things from a slightly different perspective may be all that’s required.All we can ever know is based on what we perceive. What we perceive is based on what we experience, along with the tools of interpretation we inherited and employ, time and time again. Do we perceive the world as a place filled with negativity, because we have trained ourselves to look for it and ultimately be its reflection? Colin Blakemore and Grant Cooper at the Cambridge Psychology Laboratory conducted an experiment on cats that sheds some light on this question of how and what we perceive. The researchers placed kittens in two groups. The

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first group was raised in a chamber lined with horizontal stripes. The second group was raised in a chamber lined with vertical stripes. Because the kittens were placed in their environment at a critical time in the development of their sensory apparatus, and because they were exposed to only one type of line, their visual receptors were limited. The so-called “horizontal cats” were unable to perceive vertical objects. When a chair was placed in their environment, the cats walked right into the legs as though they weren’t even there. The so-called “vertical cats” could not perceive horizontal objects, so when they were placed in an environment with a tabletop, they would either avoid going on it, or they simply walked off its edge. All the objects in the cats’ reality already existed, but they could not see them. The lesson here is that we are able to perceive only what our brain is organized to tell us.Could it be, for example, that our brain is organized to perceive injustices directed against us? Might this have happened because we inherited from our parents, and then heard while growing up, constant reinforcement of the idea of persecution and incessant replays of life’s unfair events? If so, then we aren’t able to perceive the opposite situation. We lack the receptors for fairness, and no matter what we do, we won’t perceive a situation as anything but unfair. Clearly, how we perceive and respond to the environment is intrinsically linked to our habits of being and our state of mind on a most nondeclarative level.Remission RevisitedNot everyone gives in to self-imposed or inner-directed perceptual biases. We saw this illustrated clearly in chapter 2 with people who experienced healing from disease. As we recall, the prognosis for most of them was not good. They could have retreated and run all the programs that were hardwired in their brain, but instead, they chose to believe a different set of truths than most people would in their situation. For example, they believed that an innate intelligence inhabited their body,giving them life and possessing the power to heal them. Along with that conviction, they held firm to the notion that our thoughts are real and can have a direct effect on our body. They also held that we all have the power to reinvent ourselves. In the process of inward attention, they

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experienced the ability to focus so intently that time and space seemed to disappear. As a result, they were able to employ their mind in doing work very similar to what I’ve described as mental rehearsal. They used knowledge, instruction, and feedback to affect cures on a wide variety of conditions and diseases. They constructed a paradigm of themselves as healthy, and they held that idealized image in their frontal lobes with an intensity of concentration that literally cured them.We spoke extensively about change in the previous chapter, and this model should help you to understand how change is possible. To change is to have a new mind in spite of the body and the environment, and to train the body to follow in that new direction. When the body has become trained by our repetitive actions and experiences to be the mind, it will take all of our conscious will to stop the body’s conditioned mind from controlling us. To change is to break the physical and mental conditioning of being ourselves that is, what we repeatedly think and do. If we can modify our regular, normal, unconscious daily actions enough times by using our conscious mind, we will redirect the body toward a new experience of ourselves and our reality. When we learn something new and want to apply it, we must take control of the habitual actions of the body’s mind, and use the conscious mind as a compass. With the proper knowledge, instruction, and feedback, we can replace those old patterns of thinking, doing, and being with new ones, and evolve our brain through new synaptic connections and rewired neural networks. Then the same subconscious mind that is keeping our heart beating will navigate us to a new future.From Unskilled to Skilled When we are learning anything new and taking it to a level of skill and mastery, we follow four basic steps. First, we start out unconsciously unskilled. We do not even know that we don’t even know.As we learn and become aware of what we want, we become consciously unskilled.

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As we begin to initiate the process of demonstration (the “doing”), if we keep applying what we learn, we eventually become consciously skilled. In other words, we can perform an action with a certain amount of conscious effort.If we go further, continuously putting our conscious awareness on what we are demonstrating, and we are successful in performing the action repeatedly, we become unconsciously skilled. When we begin the process of change, this is where we want to end. Take a look at Figure 12.3 to examine the flow chart of skill development.UNCONSCIOUSLY UNSKILLED CONSCIOUSLY UNSKILLED CONSCIOUSLY SKILLET) UNCONSCIOUSLY SKILLED Figure 12.3 Skill development.I briefly mentioned snowboarding earlier when I was describing learning a new skill. A few years ago, I decided to learn to snowboard. I was unconsciously unskilled. Once I decided that I wanted to learn how to do this new thing, I crossed into the territory of being consciously unskilled. I knew that I didn’t know how to snowboard. Through the process of instruction, in which I gained knowledge about the how-to’s of snowboarding, and put that knowledge to use when I practiced the activity, I made the transition to being consciously skilled. I was able to perform the skill with conscious awareness in other words, I had to think about what I was doing nearly every second in order to remain upright, pointed downhill, and in control. I had to be consciously present every second with my intent, and when I lost my concentration, the result was pretty painful. With any skill we learn, this formula applies- whether it is a sport, an attitude, a virtue, or a supernatural feat. To master anything is to make it an implicit memory and make it look easy.

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In time, with more practice, and fewer falls, I could make it down the hill without having to remind myself of every bit of instruction I’d learned about how to snowboard. Then my body had to relax enough to make snowboarding second nature without too much exertion. I began to think less, and let my body remember what to do. Once I got to the point when I didn’t have to think about what I was doing and was able to just do it, I was now at the stage of being unconsciously skilled.From Thinking to Doing to Being As I was researching this book, one of the people I interviewed told me that he had suffered from debilitating depressive episodes from his adolescence through his late twenties. This surprised me, because upbeat, compassionate, and spontaneous Larry seemed like the last person in the world who would have a history of depression.Like many functionally depressed people, he was a good actor: most of his colleagues at the design firm where he worked would have never guessed Larry harbored a secret. He often stayed late on the pretext of having to work, but in reality, he feared going home to an empty apartment.During weekends, Larry purposefully avoided most human contact, because routine social exchanges were a reminder that he lacked meaningful and emotionally intimate relationships. Thus, he had become a member of what he called the Dawn Patrol. On Sunday morning, he’d arise before 6 a.m. to do his weekly marketing. He’d developed the habit because, following the painful dissolution of the one long-term relationship he’d had, he’d be in tears as he walked the grocery aisles,plagued by memories of the two of them shopping together. After a failed marriage, he went into a tailspin, ultimately not showing up for work and lying in bed, his apartment strewn with garbage. After that, a psychiatrist diagnosed his problem and suggested antidepressants. Larry declined.Just a few months after his diagnosis, he was feeling as good as he ever had in his whole life. He told me that when he discovered that what was causing his oddly morose behavior was biochemical in nature and not some parental curse (his parents were undiagnosed depressive

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recluses who remained emotionally distant from Larry and his siblings), he felt enormous relief. Once he could apply a label to the disorder in his life, he could formulate a plan to overcome it.Larry applied some mental discipline to his personal transformation. He read up on depression and its causes and cures. He even dabbled in some self-help reading. But instead of imagining how he could regulate the action of his serotonin uptake inhibitors, he started thinking about who he wanted to be. He created a mental catalogue of the circumstances and events from his past and from his observation that he could label as “happy.” Larry then created an ideal of what he wanted his life and his personality to be like.It was easy to find inspiration for this “creature” he was “Frankensteining” together. He’d spent the better part of his life admiring the ease with which other people seemed to move through their days and engage in social activities. From one person, he “stole” a sense of humor; from another, a social adroitness that manifested in always being able to say the right thing; and from another, a self- confidence that never veered into cockiness. When he’d assembled parts from donors real and imagined (he did a lot of “homework” watching television and movies, imagining how the newly configured Larry would behave), he speculated about how that conglomeration of parts would make up his new personality.Larry inserted himself mentally into situations, real and imagined, to practice the behaviors that he would have to change. He already had a strong set of skills; his professional life was a good platform from which to build. That Larry hadn’t been able to transfer those skills to his social life was one of the major symptoms of his particular form of depression. He saw that there were two different Larrys. For a long time he had to ask himself in social situations, “WWWLD?” (What Would Work Larry Do?)After he’d assembled all that knowledge, much of it semantic, he set out to demonstrate what he’d learned and mentally rehearsed.Intuitively, Larry understood that he had to change some of his habitual actions. One of the first things Larry did in his quest for change was to force himself to go shopping after work or in the middle of the day on Saturday. Larry also practiced being “happy” on the weekends. In time,

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he was able to leave his apartment anytime he wanted, or whenever he felt himself sliding too comfortably into his old routine. Eventually, when he went to the grocery store or for a run or a bike ride around the neighborhood, he noticed that people would smile at him, and he could smile back.In addition to taking up karate, Larry challenged himself by taking classes at a local improv theater. He had no intention of ever performing -although the last class project was to participate in a show-but he wanted to be able to think more quickly on his feet. At first, he responded more in his head than aloud during classes and exercises, but his confidence blossomed, and he emerged from his shell in surprising ways. Larry understood the implications of his on-stage transformations.Over time, Larry was able to stop asking himself, “WWWLD?” When he applied some of those social skills to his personal life, people responded to him. Once those new circuits were more firmly wired, once he was out in the world practicing being more open and exposing himself to new experiences, he eventually got to the point where Work Larry and Home Larry were just Larry. Being this new, modified, version of himself was becoming easy.Eventually, Larry even started to date Rebecca, a brown belt in his karate class and an intensely vivacious woman any man would be attracted to. Her presence provided a whole new set of emotional experiences that he loved and enjoyed.There were still occasional bumps in the road. Sometimes Larry felt like he was slipping into his old routines again, but he eventually learned not to compare himself to others. He knew he still had a ways to go but, as he said, the very fact that he could tell me all of these things about himself was a pretty good indication of the level of comfort he felt.He had grown so accustomed to being this new Larry, that the other Larry seemed to be a character in some dimly remembered movie he’d rented. In a final, shrewd observation, Larry told me that he didn’t want to forget about the other Larry entirely. “It’s like when I learned that I was clinically depressed: the fact that I could identify the source of my unhappiness was a great comfort.I need to keep in mind who I was and

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how I was, before. I don’t think about that often, but every now and then, I take those pictures out and look at them as a reminder. The thing is, I can look at them, but I don’t go back there.” Larry had certainly produced a different outcome in his life, and the fact that he could revisit that past self and didn’t have to bury it completely seemed a remarkably healthy thing.You see, Larry intellectually understood from his doctor’s diagnosis that he had a hardware problem in his brain. His neurotransmitters, circuits, and brain chemistry were out of balance and had resulted in depression. He also realized that a software problem had contributed to his depression: the stressful events of his divorce and their ensuing memories had changed his behavior. He needed the knowledge that he had both a hardware and software problem, but that intellectual understanding didn’t change how he felt. Medications and therapy might have helped him to some degree, but relying on pharmaceuticals meant to him that the moment he stopped the medications, his depression. would return. For those reasons, he took it upon himself to intentionally change both the hardware and software in his brain, by using a progression of thinking, doing, then being.Let’s look at Larry’s healing from a more neurological perspective. When he decided to change his life, one of the first things he did was create a new model of himself, based on semantic knowledge and episodic memories. Drawing on his past and his workday behaviors, he assembled new circuits based on previously stored and wired concepts. He added new information that he could try out and ultimately become. Larry used mental rehearsal to develop that new self-image in his frontal lobe. He spent a lot of time planning that new ideal, to the point that those novel combinations, patterns, and sequences of freshly acquired and stored information could be hardwired in his brain as a new level of mind.But Larry still had to modify his behavior, not just his thinking.Altering some of his old habitual behaviors in the process, he attempted to apply what he knew. Although he had speculated about the possible approaches he could take in his encounters with other people, and posited what his life would be like if he did x, y, and z, the possibilities that his frontal lobe created weren’t yet personalized. He had to apply

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what he had been rehearsing to create new experiences for himself. Once he had his first pleasurable experience, repeating these experiences began the process of forming implicit memories.All of what Larry wanted went against the chemical continuity of depression. He really didn’t feel like doing any of this-what was more familiar and comfortable for him were all those feelings that reminded him of his depressed self. What had always felt right before was to be unhappy, unworthy, and miserable, and it took much will to want to feel anything else. The moment he tried to do anything contrary to how he was used to feeling, he felt out of balance.As a result, Larry initially felt uncomfortable, because he was no longer thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings, making the same brain chemicals, and being the same person he was previously. In the beginning, he felt like his personality was under assault and his chemical addiction to depression was being attacked. The mental chatter and subvocalization that screams and makes deals with us arrives in the brain when we have made the body the ruler.Larry had experienced all of this. Before he decided to change, he could intellectualize that his habit of being depressed was not healthy for him, but it was difficult to see a future beyond how he was feeling. His mother called every day, and he complained to her about his failed marriage. His sister brought him dinner once each week. His house cleaner listened to his lamentations and heard all about his insomnia. All of this was whom he had become, so what would happen if he changed? No dinners, no maternal offerings of comfort, nothing to talk to his housekeeper about. His whole identity had been wrapped up in being depressed. It took applying that insight and seeing what effect his efforts had created, to both personalize that knowledge and produce a new experience. Larry learned from his mistakes, and rehearsed how he would behave differently at the next opportunity. He reviewed his actions every evening with self-awareness and self-observation. He consciously changed his behavior and produced different outcomes as a result. Every day, he repeated this process and evolved his thoughts, actions, and attitudes.

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In time, his actions were consistent with his thoughts. He stored new memories as a part of his evolving neural network of a more social and more happy Larry. The best way for us to be rid of old memories and painful past associations is to make new memories. We can steal the neural growth factor that once cemented those painful old memories, and redistribute it to create new bonds.What is crucial to understand is that Larry was able to summon these new patterns at will. He wasn’t just firing off stored patterns at random: he was consciously picking and choosing from a menu of behaviors that he hoped would fit each social situation in which he found himself. In time, the level of consciousness necessary to fire those newly formed and still-evolving patterns decreased. The new, more socially balanced Larry had become an automatic, unconscious process. He broke the old habit of self and formed a new habit of being.The cerebellum played an important role in this conversion from highly conscious to unconscious storage. When Larry first repatterned his past knowledge and experiences, and incorporated his new knowledge and experiences into his revised neural network, it was stored in the neocortex. As Larry’s familiarity with these circuits and subroutines grew, the information wired itself to the cerebellum, the site that governs the body’s coordinated memory functions. When we hardwire some trait or action to be implicit, the cerebellum, like a microprocessor, sends power to the neural net that contains those functions, attitudes, and beliefs. It takes just a small amount of brain activity to turn it on, and the cerebellum has a direct conduit to the neural nets stored in the neocortex.Like Larry, at this stage, we don’t have to consciously activate the system responsible for our new happiness, our snowboarding, our patience, our gratitude, or whatever retuning of skills, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors we’ve made a conscious effort to change. Just as we develop implicit memories, we can also train our brain to have implicit systems of behavior that are as subconscious as all the other systems that sustain our life. Our ultimate goal in evolving our brain is to move not only to a higher level of mind and consciousness, but also to move through the evolutionary process to the point at which we don’t have to keep our attention fully focused on this new ideal.

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Nurturing Nature and Natural Nurture We can evolve our brain only by first becoming conscious. When we awaken our consciousness and become aware, we can make a new mind. That new mind then creates a new brain system, by leaving the efforts of our conscious mind in the neural patterns in the brain it has helped evolve. If we take this process to the next level, the brain will continue to upgrade its systems through experience. As we hardwire these new neural networks to the body and we chemically signal the cells to activate new genes through new experiences, these new systems will be a part of the genetic legacy now stored and expressed in the body. Once the physical body has been trained to know what the mind knows, that vital information is passed on to the next generation. By neurochemically encoding repeated events through the mastery of learning and experience, we will genetically become what we have mastered. We inherently encode what becomes “natural,” and it manifests itself in nature. Once we can perform anything naturally, it is now our very nature. Then we can pass on what we learned and experienced exactly as it is, contribute it to nature, and leave our mark for future generations to nurture. It is our job to nurture our very nature until what we nurtured becomes natural. That is evolution.Of course, one experience is not enough to produce this cascade of permanent effects. We have to be able to adapt to life’s circumstances, and then repeat an experience many times in order to be able to pass it on. Think of any species that has overcome its environment by consistently being able to endure harsh conditions. An organism must master its external environment by altering its internal chemical state until the change is incorporated as a natural way of being. To unfailingly reproduce a new level of mind and body in a changing environment, and not revert back to old habits, initiates true evolution. Therefore, whatever specific adaptation that allows a species to survive tough conditions will be passed on, not just once, but repeatedly over generations, until it becomes a characteristic of that species. In the case of domesticated animals and selective breeding practices, we choose which specific traits we want to propagate and which we want to extinguish. Through careful selection and monitoring of breeding pairs,

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we are able to produce animals with the most desirable traits. While we may not want to control mating choices as a part of our human evolution, we should consider the traits that we want to pass on to future generations. Evolving our brain can have a more long-term effect than simply improving our own life.Biofeedback and Scientific Objectivity A question remains: how do we know when we know, and when we can move beyond conscious thought to our ultimate goal, an implicit hardwired system we have evolved of our own will?Communication theorists refer to anything that prevents a message from being accurately conveyed as interference. This interference can be one of two types.External interference refers to anything that has the potential to disrupt communication and that arises from outside the two communicators-a radio playing loudly that prevents them from hearing one another, for example..Internal interference refers to anything that prevents a message from being communicated that arises from within one of the two communicators-one of the pair being distracted by a problem, for example.Just as a large part of our success in conversational communication depends on feedback (someone folding her arms and rolling her eyes tells us a lot about how successful we’re being in persuading her), the same applies to our attempts to evolve. Internal or external interference can occur in any feedback situation when we are attempting to demonstrate the neural nets we evolved during our mental rehearsal. To eliminate some of the interference, we can use tried-and-true technologies to reduce some of the human unreliability factor.Technology allows us to measure various elements of brain function, to provide us with ever more accurate pictures of what our brain is doing. In the 1940s, the concept of feedback gave rise to a new field of study called cybernetics. This was an attempt to link mankind and human

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minds to machines. According to the cybernetic model, humans are like machines, in that inputs and outputs can be measurable, changeable, and valuable. The theory held that we could be programmed like a machine to operate more efficiently.Later on, biologists applied their own spin to the theory to create a field of study called biocybernetics. These scientists were primarily interested in how the brain manages to regulate the many functions of the body. For example, our blood’s acid level has to stay within a very small range, and that range can be difficult to sustain, given how widely diet and other environmental factors can influence it. Eventually, the question arose that, because all these regulatory functions occur at an unconscious level, can we do anything willfully and purposefully to influence some of those body functions?Some of the early experiments in what is now called biofeedback involved subjects who were taught to modify their blood pressure. They also were able to change their heart rate. Finally, they were instructed on how to change the heart rate and blood pressure together, but in opposite directions to raise their heart rate and lower the blood pressure, and vice versa.Of interest here is that most subjects didn’t note a difference in how they felt, and they didn’t think they’d had much impact on how they responded. The brain couldn’t monitor itself to know what it was accomplishing, but the results were there the subjects were able to do what was requested of them. One way to understand this brain “numbness” is to consider that if someone were to stimulate the region of the brain that involves our being able to move our toes, we could feel the toes moving, but not the stimulation that influenced that movement. How, then, can we transform information from the interior of the body into some form of external signal the brain can use to increase its power of self-regulation?Because all the brain’s activity is electrochemical, scientists had to devise a way to make biofeedback speak the same language as the brain.In time, they devised machines that could take those measurements of activity and translate them into visuals they could use with their test subjects. What they arrived at was based on some early studies of color visualization. Barbra Brown, Ph.D., UCLA Medical Center, developed a

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device that would illuminate a blue light whenever the test subjects’ brain waves indicated they were in a relaxed state (as measured by an EEG that detected between 8 and 13 Alpha waves per second), and researchers watched the light go on and off as subjects moved into and out of that relaxed state. Normally, we can’t readily measure our own brain-wave activity. We may think we are relaxed and believe we are relaxed, but this notion of a visual representation showing us whether or not we are truly in a relaxed state was definitive feedback of a kind the brain is not capable of producing.Based on this notion of biofeedback, researchers hoped that we could somehow learn to do what only Eastern mystics and yogis had been capable of doing-voluntarily slowing, or in some cases even stopping, their own heart. They termed this type of training visceral learning and thought of it in counterpoint to more classical types of conditioning. Visceral learning is voluntary, while conditioning (think of Pavlov’s dogs) generally occurs whether or not we are conscious of it taking place.To Consciously Access the Subconscious How are yogis able to reduce their heart rate and blood pressure? These functions are regulated on an unconscious level; they are subcortical functions. Accessing the subconscious is not a capability we ordinarily consider possible. In truth, however, we can access our subconscious and consciously control those functions.As you know, I studied and practiced hypnosis, and that is essentially what hypnosis allows us to do to consciously enter the subconscious realm, to reformat the implicit systems there. We are able to do this because we regularly move through four states of brain activity every day. To offer hypnosis instruction is beyond the scope of this book, but as we will see, we have already learned a tool that we can use by ourselves, to produce similar results.When the neocortex is functioning and circuits are firing, and our level of awareness of the environment is active, that electrical activity is referred to as the Beta state. It produces the highest frequency of waves while we are, quite obviously, fully conscious. The Beta brain-wave state

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is our thinking state, when we have our awareness on our body, the environment, and time.When we relax, take a few deep breaths, and close our eyes, we shut out some of the sensory stimuli that are being measured as electrical activity. As a result of that diminished input from the environment, the neocortex slows and, consequently, so does the electrical activity in our brain. We enter what is called the Alpha state. This is a light meditative state, but just as when we are in Beta state, we are conscious (but less conscious of the external world).The third state we can enter is called the Theta state. We’ve been in this state when we are halfway between a wakeful condition and asleep. The door between Alpha and Theta is like a half-awake, somewhat conscious state, but the body is relaxed and catatonic. We can also get to this state when we employ our frontal lobe to quiet the other centers in the brain and still the neocortex. As the frontal lobe signals circuits to calm down and cool off in the remaining neocortex, brain-wave activity decreases there because mind is no longer being processed in that part of the brain. Thinking decreases and we begin to slip into deeper subcortical brain regions, away from the neocortex.Last is a subconscious level called Delta state. When we are experiencing deep restorative sleep, our brains are producing Delta waves. For the most part, in this state, we are completely unconscious and catatonic, and there is very little activity in the neocortex.This ability to move among these four states is important because if we can remain conscious and slow the brain’s rate so that we are producing Theta waves, we can be conscious in the subconscious realm. Because most of our associative memories, habits, behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and conditionings are implicit systems and are, by definition, subconscious, as we move into deeper levels of brain-wave activity, we are moving closer to the root of where these elements are held in place. Unfortunately, our will works only in the conscious realm. If we want to change those habits, associations, and conditionings that are responsible for our unhappiness, we have to access them somehow. Using our conscious mind and the Beta brain-wave level of consciousness will produce little result.

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Therefore, if we could train ourselves, just when we fall asleep, to let the body begin to relax further (the body, which has become mind, is no longer in control), we could gain dominion over somewhat subconscious mechanisms. We would be entering into the area of the brain where nondeclarative memories or subconscious memories are held in place.This is where mental rehearsal enters the picture again. When the frontal lobe cools off all the other centers in the brain, and we are able to focus and hold in our mind a single thought, we move from a Beta state to an Alpha state to a Theta state. The reason is the same: conscious mind has been vacated from the rest of the neocortex, because the frontal lobe silences those centers so that our thought can be the only object of our attention. Our mind is no longer preoccupied with the environment and needs of the body. It is now in a creative state, and it has no tendency to react to the outside environment. When this happens, thinking slows down, we change the frequency of brain-wave patterns, and now, if we can stay pseudo-conscious of where our attention is, we will be able to change unwanted patterns, because we are now in the realm where they are housed. Finally, if we continue to focus and make our thoughts more real than anything in our environment, we can unify our conscious and unconscious minds.In this state of mind, by rehearsing a new way to be, we are able to change our behaviors because we have gained access to the subconscious realm, bypassing our analytical faculties. We gain access to the implicit systems. The new image we hold in our mind replaces our old image and repatterns it in the brain as a new, implicit system. By being able to enter the subconscious realm through entering deeper brain states, we arrive at a state of mind where our habits and behaviors are first formed, and where they are eventually held deeply in place. Now we are in the realm where true change happens.Biofeedback Revisited As the study of biofeedback continued, most applications of its principles involved the subject receiving either visual or auditory cues that represented some function of the body. For example, subjects in blood pressure experiments learned to associate a particular color or

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sound with a lower blood pressure measurement. Through association and repetition, the brain learned that a visual or auditory input corresponded to the regulatory process by which the blood pressure could be lowered. While researchers still don’t understand how the brain and the body are able to do this, we do know that the process produces results we can voluntarily lower blood pressure through biofeedback training. In a sense, this is much like learning how to control our bladder. We gain conscious control over somewhat subconscious mechanisms.This has enormous implications for us in terms of evolving our brain, and it may provide another clue as to how the people who were able to affect spontaneous remission were able to heal themselves. The simplest definition of an illness is that it has deregulated the normal functioning of the cells in an organ or a system. The brain is responsible for regulation; consequently, it is responsible for maintaining our health.Similarly, our mental and emotional health is also a function of regulation, and what is called disregulation. For example, if we have frequent and debilitating acid indigestion, it is because our body can’t properly regulate the amount of acid our stomach is producing. If we have generalized anxiety disorder, that’s a malfunction related to our brain’s inability to regulate the stress chemicals we produce. The hope is that the brain can be taught to take measures to terminate this. disregulation in the body and once again seize control. We used a metaphor very early on to describe some regulatory functions of the brain as operating like a thermostat. When we move into deeper brain states slowing down thinking in the neocortex-we enter deeper levels of the subconscious mind, where we can better influence our autonomic nervous system. That is the hope and promise of biofeedback: that our brain can be taught to regulate its own functioning to enable us to control both our health and our emotions.It Takes Time The Law of Repetition is crucially important in the creation of wired neural nets. “Once and done” won’t get us where we need to be; it is physically impossible to wire circuits that way. As much as I wish I

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could say otherwise, the truth is that it takes time and effort to make the kinds of neurological and behavioral changes that we desire. We have to think and use our brain in new ways, rather than relying on entertainment, media, or the environment to cause us to think in certain predictable ways. Thinking in predictable ways takes neither will nor effort, just rote reactions that allow us to be lazy. We must begin to assemble new thoughts with information that we have not experienced previously. We have to make a conscious effort to plan our future actions and behaviors, and rehearse those actions in our mind so that our body will be trained to follow. Once we can begin to change how our brain is working on a daily basis, we have forced our brain to work differently and, therefore, to produce a new mindset. Once we can self-reflect and become more acutely aware of how we are doing each day, we can reinsert more data on how we can be the next day, so that we add to the ideal of who we are becoming.Any new state of being will initially take a lot of conscious effort to achieve. We are replacing the neural habits of our old self with an ideal of our new self, so that we can become someone else. The next stage in our evolution-wisdom-involves becoming subconsciously great, noble, happy, and loving, and that will feel as easy and normal as brushing our teeth.So, aligning our intentions with our actions, or matching our thoughts with our behaviors, leads to personal evolution. To evolve, we must progress from explicit memories to implicit memories; from knowledge to experience to wisdom, or from mind to body to soul. Mental rehearsal prepares the mind. Physical rehearsal trains the body. The union of mental and physical rehearsal is the union of mind and body to a new state of being. When the mind and the body are one with anything, we have now reached true wisdom. And wisdom is always recorded in the soul.

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NITRUCTION MORAN SNOWLEDGE Figure 12.4 Evolving This methodology can take you from being unconsciously unskilled, to consciously unskilled, to consciously skilled, to unconsciously skilled, so that you can move to the point at which you have implicit systems fully wired and in place. Then you will have evolved your brain to such an extent that your responses, behaviors, and attitudes are as natural and effortless as the original circuits you chose to modify. At the end of this process, you will be able to summon these new behaviors at will.After all, our thoughts are created from our memories. Our sequential thoughts are linked together to produce our attitudes. The totality of our attitudes creates our beliefs. Our beliefs, when synthesized, make up our perceptions of the world and determine the choices we make, the relationships we have, the creations we manifest, the behaviors we demonstrate, and ultimately the life we live.From willing ourselves to change, to changing ourselves at will, the process of evolving our brain is limited only by our imagination.

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EPILOGUE: A QUANTUM CHANGE Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.-DAVID BOHM U ntil now, we’ve talked about how changing our mind on a permanent basis has an impact on our physical and mental states of being. But does our “being” a new person or our creating a new attitude have any consequences in our life? If we believe that our thoughts have anything to do with our future and we evolve our brain to think differently, shouldn’t that alter our life in some way? Put simply, if we modify our thoughts, does our reality change?While pioneers on the frontiers of brain science are providing exciting new evidence that such is the case, another area of science is engaged in exploring the very foundation of our query: do our thoughts influence our reality, and if so, how is this possible? In terms of human evolution, we have barely begun to consider that everything in our environment is just a single manifestation of an infinite variety of possibilities, so to answer this question, let’s start by examining what scientific theory- specifically in the field of quantum physics-has to say about mind and the nature of reality. Then we’ll go on to some final thoughts on how we as individuals can live from an expanded state of mind.For hundreds of years, the scientific explanation for the order and nature of the universe consisted primarily of a mechanistic view of reality, i.e., that everything in nature was predictable and could be readily explained. In the late 1700s, the scientist/philosopher/mathematician Rene Descartes developed a rational justification for a universal, mathematical/quantitative understanding of nature. To arrive at his understanding that the universe

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operated as a kind of automaton whose principles were knowable, he had to create an important intellectual division-between matter and mind.As Descartes considered relatively large objects in space to follow repeatable principles, he decided that all matter was controlled by objective laws and, therefore, fell under the category of science. Concerning the human mind, on the other hand, there were just too many variables to deal with; the mind was too personal and subjective to measure and calculate. Because the mind has such freedom to choose, Descartes relegated the concept of mind to the auspices of religion. He thought that God must have a part in what is personal, what is inside us; and science has its part in what is neutral, what is outside of us. Essentially, Descartes stated that mind and matter are entirely different aspects of reality. Religion and philosophy should deal with mind, and science could deal with matter-the two were not to be mixed. This concept of mind and matter being separate (Cartesian dualism) was the pervasive mind-set that ruled Europe for centuries.One hundred years later, along came Isaac Newton, with his mathematical laws that codified the mechanistic underpinnings of Descartes’ dualism by providing equations and scientific constants that made classical physics a repeatable science. Now, the laws of matter were knowable and consistent and predictable. Nature was really just a machine, and man could offer rational explanations for how it functioned. Newtonian physics ruled the day until the century passed, and Einstein and his theories rocked the world.Einstein’s theory about the nature of matter and energy stands as one of the great intellectual achievements in human history, because his new concepts provided an explanation as to how energy contributed to the formation of matter. Unifying matter and energy was a giant leap forward in understanding the nature of reality. Einstein’s work also opened the door to other new areas of inquiry. He postulated, for example, that if we take large bodies and accelerate them, the fastest they can move is the speed of light.Relativity, based on Einstein’s model, made it clear that the laws of physics are essentially the same for all matter (objects and particles) and energy (light and waves) that are traveling at the same speed. For

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example, if I am driving my car at 55 mph, and you are traveling in a train alongside of me at the same speed, it appears to the two of us that we are not moving, because our relative speed creates relative time for both of us. Therefore, space, time, and even mass are all relative to how fast we are traveling, where we are in space, and whether each of us is moving closer to or farther away from any destination.Eventually physicists ran into an intellectual conundrum when they considered the nature of one of the fundamental elements of life on Earth-light. Although scientists initially thought that light was a wave and behaved wave-like in all instances, they later observed that light sometimes behaved like a wave, and at other times, like a particle. For instance, how do we explain light’s ability to bend around a corner? Through a series of experiments by Maxwell Planck, Niels Bohr, and others, the physics community came up with the idea that light is both a wave and a particle. We had arrived at an understanding in scientific thinking called quantum physics, which told us that light behaved in certain ways because of the influence of the person observing the phenomenon.Thus the tidy world of classical physics with its precise laws began to break down in the early 1900s, when innovative quantum physicists noted that when they measured and observed the very small world of subatomic particles, these did not behave like larger objects in nature. For example, scientists discovered that electrons appeared and disappeared when releasing energy. When energy acted on an electron, causing it to move toward the nucleus, instead of it behaving in a smooth and continuous fashion (like that apple falling from the tree, as demonstrated in classical Newtonian physics), electrons behaved more like a ball rolling down a set of stairs, gaining and losing energy.The laws of classical physics and quantum physics diverged even further when physicists realized that the tiny particles that make up atoms responded to an observer’s mind. For example, waves changed into particles when they were measured and observed. Moreover, whether an observer was present or not changed the outcome of quantum experiments. Subjective mind therefore influenced the behavior of energy and matter. All of a sudden, the objective world of matter and the subjective world of mind were no longer separate. Mind and matter

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were now related, and in the quantum world of subatomic particles, mind showed a direct effect on matter. This is a powerful and influential idea that I’ve greatly simplified for our purposes, but the essence of this radical shift in our understanding of how the universe operates is what’s important to understand.Make no mistake, most quantum physicists will tell us that the observer has an influence on the infinitesimally tiny world of subatomic particles. They will also tell us that when it comes to the very large world of objects and matter, classical physics still reigns. The observer has no influence on large objects and the objective world of matter, they will politely inform us. And the notion of using our mind to control an outcome in our life, according to their experiments, is simply impossible.I have had such conversations with quantum physicists, and I always counter their arguments the same way: If basic particles on the subatomic level are capable of changing into energy and back again, and are subject to the effect of the observer, then we humans have enormous potential power to affect the nature of reality. When they tell me that our subjective mind and our observation affects the very tiny, but not the very large world of “solid” things, I assert that maybe we are just poor observers. Perhaps we can train the brain and the mind to work better, so we can become more mindful participants in observing reality. By evolving our brain and mind, we can possibly exert a greater influence on the objective world. The theory is simple: Mind and the observer are paramount in the understanding of the nature of reality. There is an infinite field of energy that exists beyond our present concept of space and time, which unites all of us. Reality is not one continuous and consistent stream, but is instead, a field of infinite possibilities over which we can exert enormous influence that is, if we tune into the proper levels of mind. The more powerful the subjective mind, the more influence it has on the objective world. We learned in this book that we have the ability to change the mind and the brain. We saw how Buddhist monks, through the use of the frontal lobe, produce a more coordinated mind by practicing inner focus.We know that learning knowledge alone will wire the brain to see things in new and unusual ways. Remember the example of the Monet painting

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in chapter 12 just a few bits of information helped us to view the same picture of reality with new insight. We also now understand that experience further shapes the brain. Think of the wine connoisseur who, with repeated moments of being present with taste and aroma, perceives what others never know exists. Maybe the same applies on a larger scale to how we perceive our life. When we truly change our mind, we change our life.It appears that we keep seeing the same things the same way in our life because we have been conditioned to keep looking for the same. Does the brain see or do the eyes see? If the brain sees, then we can only perceive reality based on what we have wired into our brain. In a simple experiment several years back, subjects were given goggles with colored lenses to wear for two weeks. Each lens was divided in half. One half was yellow and the other side was blue, so that when subjects looked to the left, the world appeared blue; when they looked to the right, things looked yellow. As they wore the glasses daily, while performing their routine activities, over time the subjects no longer saw the colors of the world any differently than they had before they started wearing the special lenses. The study demonstrated that it is the brain that sees, and not the eyes, suggesting that the subjects were filling in reality based on their memory, and that behavior is determined by what is perceived. On a daily basis, do we perceive reality based on our memory? Do we, too, habitually see from our prior experiences instead of our future possibilities?As we get better at paying attention and applying willful intention, our thoughts can affect our life. Throughout human history, great people who aligned their intention and actions moved mountains and transformed the future with the same brain apparatus that you and I possess. Studies using random event generators have proven that mind does change the objective, typical 50-50 upshot of a coin toss. Many more studies are underway to explore the barely charted territory of the interaction between mind and matter. As I said in chapter 1: Thoughts matter and they become matter. We can’t separate them like Descartes did. Our thoughts influence physical phenomena; they interact with all the matter in the universe. In truth,

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our personal reality is just a reflection of our personality.The implications for evolving our brain are extraordinary: if we think in new and different ways, we are altering our future. If we can go from thinking to doing to being by implementing the processes I’ve described in the last two chapters focusing our attention, using mental rehearsal, and employing the tools of knowledge, instruction, and feedback-and if we can demonstrate our intent and act upon it, we are no longer riding upon the backs of giants. We are the giant.We need not wait for science to give us permission to do the uncommon or go beyond what we have been told is possible. If we do, we make science another form of religion. We should be mavericks; we should practice doing the extraordinary. When we become consistent in our abilities, we are literally creating a new science. When our subjective mind has control of the objective world, we therefore are ahead of the present scientific laws and theorems. And when we repeat, over and over, the process of intentional observation by being a more evolved ideal of self, we become wired to be greater than our environment.Knowing that our thoughts are controlling the environment, instead of having the environment repeatedly create our thinking, finally puts us at cause instead of effect. We will no longer live in stress, because there is no loss of control and no anxiety about what might happen in a future moment based on our memory of a past experience. There is nothing to be stressed about when we know the end result of our thoughts-when we know our future. When we can trust ourselves, our mind, and the quantum field of infinite potentials, we are freed from our primitive “survival” state of mind. There will be no fear of the unknown or the unpredictable, because our mind has already created the outcome in our environment. And the environment is now a product or reflection of our mind, which has already experienced and recorded the events to come.We have learned that during mental rehearsal, the brain does not know the difference between what it is thinking (internal) and what it experiences (external). Applying these principles will cause the brain to be ahead of the environment. In other words, through mental rehearsal,we change our brain before the external experience happens, and the brain is no longer a record of the past, but of the future.

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We have also learned that feelings and emotions are only the end products of past experiences. If we believe that our thoughts have anything to do with our future, then to live by familiar feelings and past emotions is to live by past memories. Past memories are processed in the brain as feelings. When past memories are filtered down to feelings that the body lives by, we are unconsciously producing thoughts that are connected only to the past. Thus to feel is to think in the past. This might explain why so many of us recreate the same difficult relationships, jobs with the same dynamics, and other recurring circumstances in our life. When we unconsciously feel the same feelings every single day, we create more of the familiar.To rise above the familiar and routine and to become inspired is the true energy of creation. To think beyond how we feel is a great endeavor for any human being. If we cannot execute a level of mind greater than how we emotionally feel, we will never relate to anything unknown and unpredictable. Mind lives in the body when we live by feelings. To lift mind out of the body and put it back where it belongs into the brain- is a true act of human will. When we finally overcome thinking as a body instead of a mind, we are on the adventure of new and unlimited experiences.One of the factors that influence our ability to imagine and to create an ideal for ourselves is our limited perception of the order and the nature of the universe. Whether we’re a skeptic or a believer doesn’t really matter. What we need to understand is that the universe offers more possibilities than we have been trained and conditioned to accept. We must remind ourselves that we are more than the sum total of our biological processes. We are the self-aware, immaterial essence called consciousness that animates a physical body. At the same time, we are also unified to a greater consciousness that gives life and form to all matter. Both levels of consciousness are inseparable, they are within us, and, indeed, they are who we really are. Ultimately, at a deeper level of consciousness (the dimension before matter has any substance), we are connected to everything in the universe. The energy that holds the universe and all of its components together can be influenced by our conscious interactions in life, because we are made from the same energy. Therefore, we cannot change what we think, how we act, and

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who we are being, without altering the infinite web of energy. When we truly change, the field of potentials in our personal life should change as well. The outcome of such efforts brings us new and different life circumstances equal to who we have become.If there are innumerable events in the infinite possible universes of quantum physics, we can surely look forward to new experiences on our own horizon. We cannot even fathom what novel occurrences await us. With a new experience, comes a new emotion. New emotions, which we can create and recreate until they become our very nature, evolve us beyond our primitive animal programs. All we need is a new paradigm of knowledge that we can apply, so that we can embark on an improved experience of reality.Some may say that this is too difficult to imagine, let alone to be true. Yet, why is it that we have a natural propensity to pray to some higher power or intelligence when conditions become too difficult for us to handle? To pray is to hold a single thought or idea of an outcome in the mind, and make it more real than our present circumstances. It is intentional thought, which affords us the opportunity to make contact with a greater mind. When we can call upon that innate intelligence living inside of us by making our desire the only real intention, it will answer the call. When our will matches the will of this mind, when our mind matches the consciousness of this mind, and when our love for an ideal matches its love for us, it invariably steps in. It is a willful and uncompromising mind that initiates an idea bigger than what we intellectually know. When we can make our thoughts more real to us than the external environment, and when we lose track of the sensory perception of our body, the environment, and time, we literally enter into this unlimited field of possibilities. Our brain is already wired to be this way, through our enlarged frontal lobe. Can we develop a relationship with this innate order and mind? I say we can. How can this higher mind know all that it knows, and coexist with our conscious mind, but not be intelligent enough to respond to our intention? However, we do need to exercise our subjective free will and make the effort to contact our greater mind. When we take the time to interact with it, we should be bold enough to look for an answer in the form of feedback in our world. Now we are acting as the scientist of our

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who we are being, without altering the infinite web of energy. When we truly change, the field of potentials in our personal life should change as well. The outcome of such efforts brings us new and different life circumstances equal to who we have become.If there are innumerable events in the infinite possible universes of quantum physics, we can surely look forward to new experiences on our own horizon. We cannot even fathom what novel occurrences await us. With a new experience, comes a new emotion. New emotions, which we can create and recreate until they become our very nature, evolve us beyond our primitive animal programs. All we need is a new paradigm of knowledge that we can apply, so that we can embark on an improved experience of reality.Some may say that this is too difficult to imagine, let alone to be true. Yet, why is it that we have a natural propensity to pray to some higher power or intelligence when conditions become too difficult for us to handle? To pray is to hold a single thought or idea of an outcome in the mind, and make it more real than our present circumstances. It is intentional thought, which affords us the opportunity to make contact with a greater mind. When we can call upon that innate intelligence living inside of us by making our desire the only real intention, it will answer the call. When our will matches the will of this mind, when our mind matches the consciousness of this mind, and when our love for an ideal matches its love for us, it invariably steps in. It is a willful and uncompromising mind that initiates an idea bigger than what we intellectually know. When we can make our thoughts more real to us than the external environment, and when we lose track of the sensory perception of our body, the environment, and time, we literally enter into this unlimited field of possibilities. Our brain is already wired to be this way, through our enlarged frontal lobe.Can we develop a relationship with this innate order and mind? I say we can. How can this higher mind know all that it knows, and coexist with our conscious mind, but not be intelligent enough to respond to our intention? However, we do need to exercise our subjective free will and make the effort to contact our greater mind. When we take the time to interact with it, we should be bold enough to look for an answer in the form of feedback in our world. Now we are acting as the scientist of our

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own life. When we can see and measure how our thoughts and intentions unfold from our own inner efforts, we are now keeping track of our own personal experiment called life. It is my experience that as the mind of the unseen begins to respond, our creations come to us not on our familiar terms, but on terms that are new, exciting, unpredictable, and surprising. The emotions of joy and awe will then inspire us to initiate the process, again and again. Now we are developing a neural network to know that a greater power truly exists within us, and we can accept its gifts. We must inspire ourselves to give this personal experiment in creation a try. Otherwise we stay locked in the intellectual thinking stage of declarative memories, never experiencing the wonder and joy that change can offer. We have to transform ourselves from being an intellectual thinker to becoming a passionate doer, until we can “be” what we set our mind to become. And when we can be anything, we can observe reality from an expanded state of mind, instead of the desperate states of mind that plague humanity. Aligning our thoughts, actions, and intentions brings this field of possibilities to us. When we live in a future that we have not yet experienced with our senses but have lived in our mind, we live by what may be the ultimate demonstration of quantum law.It is not enough to put little time and effort into changing the mind. We must become that mind until it is natural and easy to express the new self. This is when doors open to novel and unexplainable possibilities. In order to evolve our brain, we have to transform thoughts and memories from explicit to implicit, so that all systems are now influenced by mind. By being one with any concept, we know how to create that particular state of mind. And according to our understanding of implicit memories, perhaps enlightenment simply is knowing that we know. Even if we cannot accept this new paradigm, we must admit that by changing our mind and our state of being, we will make a host of different choices that we would never have made when living as the old self. When we demonstrate a new expression of the self, we will think and act in new ways. By being a more evolved aspect of self, as one choice then leads to another, over time we will find ourselves in a new.life with new circumstances. That is a new reality. It is human evolution in its truest sense.