How to rewire your brain (Part One)
Over the next two posts, I want to talk about how you can rewire your brain and why you'd want to do it in the first place.
Before we get stuck into that though, it helps to know how your brain works. So let's start with that!
Our brain is made up of separate lobes that control different functions of our mind and body.
Our sense of sight is involved with our occipital lobe, an area located at the back of our brain. Our temporal lobes are the sides of our brain, and are involved with the senses of smell and sound, music rhythm, and the processing of meaning in speech and form in vision.
All these components of our brain work independently, but still ‘talk’ to each other. This is why a person can undergo a head injury and lose long-term memory, but still know how to speak and walk. Or a person can suffer from a severe stroke and be unable to speak or walk, but still have perfect intellectual function.
When under stress, some areas of our minds are temporarily shut down while other areas are heightened.
Different parts of our brain are slower to mature than others.
Deep inside our temporal lobes is our limbic system. Our limbic system is our evolutionary primitive brain. It controls the areas of life that are essential to self-preservation and survival. We are born with our limbic systems mostly intact, and this is the area of our brain that drives our survival instinct.
As babies, we don't need to learn to be hungry. If we did, most of us wouldn’t have survived more than a few days. As we grow, other innate fears and precautionary behaviors manifest. We don’t need to learn to fear heights, or back away from fire. We do this naturally and automatically. Because part of our survival instinct is around aggression and reproduction, our limbic system also controls these emotions and motivations. The limbic system is like our primal or caveman brain - basic and pure survival.
According to Dr. Donald Stuss of The Rotman Research Institute, the frontal lobe is a critical center and it controls the "essence" of our humanity.
Our frontal lobes are where most of our emotions and judgments around sympathy and empathy come from. They also recognize sarcasm, irony, humor, wit and wordplay. They give us the ability to understand another person’s mental process, which is a vital trait in the way we socialize.
The ability to plan out a series of movements or a sequence of events is another function controlled by the frontal lobes. This involves any task with multiple steps, such as preparing a meal. They also control the flexibility in thinking processes; both in focusing on a single thought and recognizing other alternatives, and in mood changes.
Impulse control (including sex and aggression) and reasoning from our frontal lobes are basically what stops us from attacking someone who has annoyed or upset us. It is also what stops us from cheating on a spouse when our limbic system identifies a person we meet as attractive.
Our frontal lobes are what shape our personalities, behavior and higher thinking.
Higher thinking is regarded as the ability to recognize future consequences from our current actions, to choose between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actions, and to override and suppress unacceptable social behaviors and responses.
What is most interesting about our frontal lobes is that they are not fully developed until the age of 25. This is why children will physically lash out at one another when they’re angry, and why teenagers seem to be reckless.
It also explains why ideas, thought patterns and experiences you had in your younger years (especially as an adolescent) can stay with you throughout your life.
Here’s a basic example of how this can work: a good friend of mine hates lemon meringue pie. Hates it. Can’t stand the smell, or even the thought of eating it. Why would any person hate lemon meringue pie, right?
When she was about five, she picked up a stomach bug. Nothing too serious, just the 12 hour vomiting bug that I’m sure every one of us has had at some point.
During this time, her mum had made a lovely dinner and a lemon meringue pie for everyone. Though she was sick, she managed to get down a tiny amount of dinner and a small piece of pie.
About an hour later, you can imagine what happened. It all came back up again.
Right at that moment, even though she was sick anyway, her brain made a connection between being sick and eating that pie. It was hardwired into her brain, and more than twenty years later, the thought of eating that pie still makes her feel sick.
She literally feels nauseous.
Your brain makes decisions and connections based on what is happening to you, even if they’re not always correct. If we take the pie scenario, imagine what happens if the idea that we’re 'not good enough’ gets hardwired into our brains based on a throwaway remark from a teacher, parent or peer? Comments, feelings, behaviors, and habits are all being hardwired into our brains for the first 20 – 25 years of our lives.
Your habits, thoughts, reasoning patterns and personality are being wired up based on everything you are experiencing at that stage of life… and if you’re not having a great time, the results can have a negative effect for decades.
Have you ever met a beautiful woman who is astoundingly insecure about her looks because she was teased for being awkward in high school? She still sees herself as that awkward girl, and finds it difficult to accept that she is no longer that same person. Or a person who was bullied in school who continues to be intimidated by teenagers even 30 years later?
Our experiences during this time are being hardwired into our brains. It does make it tough to get over. Not impossible, but tough.
To change the perception you have of yourself from negative to positive, or to change negative behaviors and thought patterns, you basically need to rewire your brain.
And that's exactly what we'll cover in the next post.
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