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This month, we feature videos of a Greater Good presentation by Rick Hanson, the best-selling author and trailblazing psychologist. In this excerpt from his talk, Dr. Hanson explains how we can take advantage of the brain’s natural “plasticity”—it’s ability to change shape over time. gobyg There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.” It’s true. The amount of knowledge we have about the brain has doubled in the last 20 years. Yet there’s still a lot we don’t know. In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. Ultimately, what this can mean is that with proper practice, we can increasingly trick our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind.
But in order to understand how, you need to understand three important facts about the brain. 1. 2. The Whole Brain Atlas. Brain Basics. 10 Psychology Tricks You Can Use To Influence People. Before we get started, it’s important to note that none of these methods fall under what we would term the dark arts of influencing people. Anything that might be harmful to someone in any way, especially to their self esteem, is not included here. These are ways to win friends and influence people using psychology without being a jerk or making someone feel bad. Trick: Get someone to do a favor for you—also known as the Benjamin Franklin effect. Legend has it that Benjamin Franklin once wanted to win over a man who didn’t like him. He asked the man to lend him a rare book and when the book was received he thanked him graciously.
As a result, this the man who had never wanted to speak to him before, became good friends with Franklin. Scientists decided to test this theory and found that those who were asked by the researcher for a personal favor rated the researcher much more favorably than the other groups did. Trick: Ask for way more than you want at first then scale it back later. Brain and Mind. Thoughts on Neuroplasticity. I recently read a fascinating book, The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. He describes case histories and research indicating that the brain is far more malleable than we once thought. We used to think each function was localized to a small area of the brain and if you lost that area of brain tissue the function was gone forever. We once thought you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Now we know better. Learning a new skill actually changes the structure and function of the brain, even into old age. One of the more intriguing experiments he describes was in monkeys. Researchers hypothesized that the monkeys had “learned” that one arm didn’t work in the period right after the surgery when the spinal cord was still in spinal shock, and then never re-learned that they could use it when the shock passed. Patients with phantom limb pain often have the illusion that the phantom limb is unable to move. Much of chronic pain is learned behavior. Rejuivenate Your Brain with Umbilical Cord Blood. Oliver Sacks, Author, Neurologist / Official Website / Hallucinations, Musicophilia, Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The Lobotomist. For neuroscientist the eye is a window to mind's workings (12/6/2007) Sabine Kastner likes to show people that the difference between Darth Vader and Yoda is largely a matter of perception.
"Put these glasses on," she says, offering a pair of goggles with two different-colored lenses, "then look at the screen and tell me what you see. " A glance at her laptop reveals the visage of Vader, the dark-helmeted nemesis of Jedi Knights from the "Star Wars" films, on the screen. But tell her so, and Kastner then asks, "Are you sure you don't see anything else? " As though succumbing to a Jedi mind trick, the viewer's brain suddenly morphs Vader's helmet into the wizened face of the elfin creature Yoda -- an image that was always there, but only visible to the left eye. Vader, drawn with a different color that penetrates the goggles' right lens, was the image the brain initially "chose" to see, the one that won out in the conflict for perception and awareness that goes on constantly within the mind.
A new approach to old questions An eye on the problem Post Comments: Neuronal Circuits Able To Rewire On the Fly To Sharpen Senses (12/19/2007) Researchers from the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), a joint project of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, have for the first time described a mechanism called "dynamic connectivity," in which neuronal circuits are rewired "on the fly" allowing stimuli to be more keenly sensed. The process is described in a paper in the January 2008 issue of Nature Neuroscience, and available online at This new, biologically inspired algorithm for analyzing the brain at work allows scientists to explain why when we notice a scent, the brain can quickly sort through input and determine exactly what that smell is.
"If you think of the brain like a computer, then the connections between neurons are like the software that the brain is running. When a stimulus such as an odor is encountered, many neurons start to fire. When many neurons fire at the same time, the signals can be difficult for the brain to interpret. Comments: