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Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week’s SDA distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposium. This week, for your delectation, here is Dr. Michael Merzenich, neuroscientist and professor emeritus at UCSF, presenting his lecture On Rewiring the Brain (23:07).
For today’s symposium, Dr. Merzenich explains how your brain is always actively going on rewiring itself, how that rewiring is subject to your attention, and thus how your allocation of your attention resources is relevant to the future of your brain, to how you nurture your brain, and to your happiness, your wellbeing, your abilities, and your capacities; and how you are responsible for that.
Interesting talk. I celebrate my neuroplasticity.
…” how you nurture your brain, and to your happiness, your wellbeing, your abilities, and your capacities; and how you are responsible for that.”
..
So we were designed to be libertarian.
It is indeed, Exetaz, time to celebrate, for as Matt
Ridley wrote in his April 2003 essay, We’ve Never
Had It So Good – And It’s All Thanks to Science:
I think, Bluetech, that what Michael is getting at is that if you think about and work on liberty, on maximal freedom, then your brain develops engines that recognize and process liberty information, whereas if you think about and work on righteousness and authority, then your brain develops engines that seek and produce tyranny. What’s interesting to me about today’s symposium’s lecture is the degree to which the application of one’s attention effects the development of such engines. I didn’t expect that, but thanks to science, now I know better.
I don’t think this hypothesis is entirely true. My brain thinks about sex all the time, but it still isn’t getting any. :0)
Seriously though, this sounds like a brain power thingy. I suggest is we all think a lot about Obama’s head exploding, it might happen???
Ohh, My brain just thought about scotch.
More Later and remember y’all … happy thoughts … happy life.
Bjorn Lomborg makes very much the same point in the “skeptical environmentalist”
“Mankind’s lot has actually improved in terms of practically every measureable indictator”
Momar..it, unfortunately, isn’t a situation of ‘mind over matter’…we can’t, no matter how hard we try, ‘think’ Obama to smithereens.
What is more probable is that the brain, which functions as a giant computer, develops connections, habitual links, via repeated usage of a particular connection. It’s the HABIT that’s important.
There are three major ‘movers’ in the development of the mind (and anything else for that matter). The first is potentiality..the potential to actually form connections. Don’t underestimate this openness to ‘otherness’.
The second is an actual connection. Ah, but it could only be a random act…until..the next agential force moves in. Habit. The connections become stable, and even, guide new input stimuli to the same output-interpretation.
This can be found in someone like Gaddafi who sees a conspiracy under every rock. Or, the leftist who automatically blames Bush, money, and capitalism. And it can be found in someone who seeks, always, a rational reason..and sometimes, there is no rational reason for an event.
The thing about the brain and its result, mind, is that it has the capacity to change that mind. You can learn new interpretations. If you want to. But this can be emotionally disturbing; most people don’t like the unsettling and isolationist feeling of Doubt.
The heart has reasons of which the reason knows nothing. Blaise Pascal. Mankind’s lot has improved materially; but emotionally?
Larry Bennett wrote:
“Mankind’s lot has improved materially; but emotionally?”
Speaking for myself, and probably most people, 99.9% of my emotional well-being is satisfied by having a full belly, not freezing to death, having shoes on my feet instead of rags, not having lost any extremities to leprosy, and not being tortured by a despotic ruler. The remaining 0.1% of emotional malaise is a luxury of having the liesure to invent existential angst and sissy neurosis.
That last 0.1% is remedied quite simply by following the good advice of my therapist, Australian master-criminal Chopper Ried:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EY7lYRneHc
I believe what Larry Bennett is hinting at is, “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his soul”. Even as we flourish physically we wither spiritually.
ET,
Thanks for the information. I do appreciate it and I am interested in this topic. My comments were meant to be pure crass humor.
today’s symposium’s lecture is the degree to which the application of one’s attention effects the development of such engines.
‘effects’
I can hardly believe Vitruvius made such an error. That is worse than UPPER CASE BOLD dude.
Perhaps I should have said “spiritually” instead of “emotionally”.
Because the brain actually rewires itself to create new engines relevant to one’s efforts, effects is the correct word. This is the central point to Dr. Merzenich’s lecture that some people seem to be misunderstanding. If one wants to be, for example, emotionally or spiritually successful or improved, then one must focus on, pay attention to, and practice being emotionally or spiritually successful or improved, in which case one’s brain will rewire itself in order to effect being emotionally or spiritually successful or improved. This is the sense in which one’s quality of life depends on one’s own responsibility, as Dr. Merzenich discusses: wanting or waiting for some third party or the government or one’s belief in some sort of mythical paranormal being to effect such changes in one’s brain is simply ineffective (even though in some cases they can affect how effective one’s own efforts are).
Contrawise, if one focuses on, pays attention to, and practices being upset, dissatisfied, or pessimistic, then one’s brain will rewire itself in order to effect being successfully upset, dissatisfied, pessimistic. We see a lot of this latter type of behaviour in the blogosphere, where a certain class of people who want to to be angry and dissatisfied with life pay attention to and focus on practicing their impotent rage, in the company of others who accrete for that purpose, and sure enough, their brain rewires itself to be successfully upset, dissatisfied, and full of impotent rage. If, instead, they paid attention to Dr. Merzenich’s lecture, and focused on and practiced the results of his research, they would find that their brains would rewire themselves to effect new engines that would produce emotional and spiritual improvements to their lives.
Excellent points.
if one focuses on, pays attention to, and practices being upset, dissatisfied, or pessimistic, then one’s brain will rewire itself in order to effect being successfully upset, dissatisfied, pessimistic.
Isn’t this all about outlook though (not to even mention self-fulfilled prophecies)?
Seeing schoolchildren singing the praises of Obama recently was “a little but much”. WTF was that all about other than indoctrination?
You watched the lecture, PiperPaul, do you think it’s all about outlook? I would have rather thought that focus and practice are significantly different from mere outlook, and I certainly didn’t see any data in the lecture suggesting that outlook alone is sufficient to effect the wiring of new engines. Whatever those kids were appearing to do, externally, what really matters is what they were internally focusing on and practicing. Most of them were probably focusing on something else and practicing not letting that be apparent to their teachers (unless kids have fundamentally changed since I was one, and I doubt that).
Point well taken, my assumption was that such an obvious attempt would be so blatant as to invalidate true belevers.
Look, theses days what is perceieved to be true is now filtered through agenda-driven “journalists”.
Anyone who has practiced self-administered cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) will know that this is provably true. Through mindfulness and an applied process of recognition, refutation and replacement of negative, unproductive or otherwise undesirable thoughts, one can in relatively short order entirely remodel one’s habitual thoughtscape.
Perhaps, PiperPaul, though I mostly don’t follow any journalist media any more (now that I’ve stopped reading most blog entries as well as not having any newspapers or the television); either way though this is straying too far from the topic(s) of today’s symposium, so let’s let it go at that or I’ll have to delete my own comment 😉