MindLift (eBook)

1. Our Brain Is a Miracle Machine

How awesome would it be to have a device that can make you happy, healthy and successful? A tool that can drastically improve your quality of life and enables you to learn, work and develop yourself at lightning speed. A device that is equipped with performance enhancing systems, stimulating drugs and healing medication. A machine that can provide you with creative solutions, original ideas and unique insights. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Well, you can start smiling because you have unlimited access to this awesome device for the entire duration of your life.

The All-Rounder

Every experience, every emotion, every insight, every spiritual epiphany you ever had — no matter how transcendental it appeared to be — came about through connections and reactions in your brain. All of your movement, everything you do — consciously or subconsciously — happens by order of your brain. From holding this book and chewing your food to the blinking of your eyes and the growing of your hair, everything you know, learn and remember, and even some things that you seem to have forgotten, have a place in that wonderful brain of yours.

With some hundred billion neurons, our brains have the most connections of all animal brains on Earth. Even though our brains only represent two percent of our body mass, they use up a quarter of the available energy. For most people that is about five hundred calories per day (the equivalent of the energy in a whole bar of chocolate). Because of the high demand for energy, it is important that this machine operates as efficiently as possible, perceives at the highest possible pace and adapts and learns from the situations we encounter. Even before you were born, your brain was developing, and for every phase of your young life, new growth awaits: gross and fine motor skills, language, recognition of sounds, faces, words and symbols, the ability to express yourself, distinguish things and to bond with your parents. The order in which these functions and abilities are being developed is completely adapted to the different needs in every phase of life.

Most devices experience wear and tear and become less valuable the more you use them, but the brain only becomes stronger, more efficient and smarter as it is challenged by new stimuli and experiences. It has an organizational structure with communication, task division and execution efficiency that even the most successful companies can learn from.

Let’s take a look at a rough three-way division of our brain — as described by the triune brain theory — based on the different roles and functions in our lives.

The Reptilian Brain: Instinct, Intuition and Survival

The most primitive part, “the reptilian brain” autonomously regulates all kinds of essential life functions that you never have to think about — from the beating of your heart and the digestion of your food to the cleansing of your blood and the fighting of diseases. This part saves your life on a daily basis by activating “fight or flight” in dangerous situations and gives you the urge to protect yourself and your loved ones. From foraging for food to the selection of a suitable life partner, this part of the brain gives you the instinct, intuition and drive to survive.

The Early Mammalian Brain: Emotion, Reward and the Medicine Cabinet

The emotional, “limbic” part of your brain consists of a range of different structures, systems and glands that work together to direct your long-term memory, motivation, emotions and behavior. This system is, among other things, your built-in medicine cabinet — a chemical factory that produces substances and dispenses them when you need them. When you find yourself in a threatening or stressful situation for instance, this system for instance directs the production of adrenaline, a hard drug created and released by the adrenal glands, which causes you to be more alert and have more energy and, for a short period, makes you stronger, smarter and faster. Temporary super powers! When dusk falls, melatonin is released, a substance that makes you want to rest or go to sleep. When the sun rises, you are given a stimulating substance so you can start your day bright and alert.

If you do something you enjoy or that is good for you, this system rewards you with wonderful happy drugs like dopamine. Good food, a problem solved, a physical achievement or an intimate moment with a loved one makes this drug enter your blood stream and give you that fantastic feeling of euphoria. The system not only dispenses these narcotics and stimulants, but it also remembers situations that caused them to be released to you. This is why a painful experience can influence our well-being, behavior and even the chemical composition of our blood for years to come. Both the fear system and reward system are linked to long-term memory and act as chemical motivators to move you away from pain and toward pleasure. By connecting chemical rewards to your memories, you can still swoon at reliving that first kiss of your summer love during that romantic sunset or miraculously heal when your mother kisses your boo-boo, even as a grown-up. However, you can also instantly be transported back to the pain of schoolyard bullying when someone says something nasty about how you look.

The Modern Brain: The Neocortex with our Uniquely Human Functions

The primitive and emotional parts are regarded as the oldest parts of our brain from an evolutionary point of view. What separates human brains from other animals is a very modern part — the neocortex, which holds some pretty amazing features that aren’t found in the brains of any other animals. Take, for example, the power to empathize, to really feel and experience something that someone else is going through as though you are living it yourself, even though you are not.

Crying over a sad movie, getting butterflies in your stomach from a love story or imagining yourself into lifelike euphoria that you have won the lottery. There is no entertainment center that even comes close to the intense, three-dimensional, multisensory experience that our brain offers us every second of the day. We human beings have the unique ability to imagine things that are long past, have not happened yet or don’t exist at all. And we can translate those experiences into symbols, signs and language. The fact that I can put my personal life experiences into black code on white paper, that you are currently scanning with your brain, experiencing my story through your imagination, feeling with me and honestly getting to know me is absolutely astounding.

By creating super-fast connections, we can save information to subsequently arrange, compare, reason and opinionate. We can think about things that do not exist but that could be. This allows us to be creative, to look at things from multiple perspectives, to combine multiple variables and to experiment with them in the laboratory of thought and imagination. Creativity and innovation are abilities that only humans so innately possess.

The neocortex allows us to be conscious of our individual identities and our own thoughts, to have self-awareness. It’s where the conscious mind lives. These “three brains” are connected. They inseparably and continuously work together to provide you with all your life functions. They develop roughly from primitive to modern, from back to front, completely in line with the different stages in life.

The last part of your neocortex to reach complete, adult development is located in your forehead — the frontal lobe or prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain has some important, typically human functions — the so-called “executive functions”. It is like the management department of your brain. . It compares the present to the past, predicts a possible future outcome, connects cause and effect, inhibits inappropriate thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and directs conscious attention. The neocortex holds the qualities that we associate with being a responsible, independent, grown-up human being. It’s no coincidence that children and adolescents have such a difficult time planning, thinking long-term, and controlling their impulses. The prefrontal cortex, the filter if you will, does not reach full development until around the age of twenty-five years old. So before that time, you will have more trouble controlling impulses and making long-term predictions as to what might be the consequences of your actions.

This is why it is important for children to learn and follow rules and accept guidance from their parents. It is also why it is so important to test and try the validity of every one of those rules during puberty. If you don’t test what you’ve learned and see for yourself what works for you, it’s difficult to live an independent adult life.

So not only is the prefrontal lobe like a mental sketchpad, it is also the mental filter. It determines and remembers what is logical, sensible, and important, and it works to filter out — not react or pay attention to — things that are unimportant or unwise. This means that it holds your ability to concentrate — to decide where you direct your attention, to control whether you react to an impulse, and thus to ignore distractions.

And these exact functions — directing attention and controlling reactions to impulses — are severely tested in this modern...