As regular readers of our tips, or participants on our workshops will know – here at Kaizen we’re passionate about what we can learn from neuroscience that helps us to create
- Leadership that inspires
- Change that engages and
- Learning that really sticks
And there’s loads! One fascinating recent development comes from the field of Contemplative Neuroscience, as reported by Professor Willoughby Britton from Brown University, which studies how thinking changes the very composition of our brains.
By the way, if you’d like to find out more about all this and get some really practical tools for how to create the emotional states you want more of the time – come along to an evening workshop I’m facilitating called “Living @ 10” on 30th August at De Vere Hunton Park – see the Events page for more details.
Our brains change depending on our habitual patterns of thinking. Professor Britton has been studying neural networks and, specifically, the way they can be altered using daily practices and exercises, such as meditation, gratitude lists and so on.
Like going the gym for a physical workout changes our bodies, doing mental exercises actually changes our brains.
We are creatures of habit – if you tend to ‘do sad’ quite a lot, this becomes automatic and effortless for you – it’s where you live. You’re actually strengthening the neural networks that help you to ‘do sad’ – or ‘happy’, or ‘angry’, or ‘frustrated’ or ‘grateful’ or ‘caring’ or any other emotion.
Recently, we’ve come to learn about the nature of happiness itself.
The typical assumption about happiness used to be that if we get what we want, and get rid of everything we don’t want… we’ll be happy. Totally logical, and totally wrong!
The neuroscience is now telling us that being happy is a SKILL – not a trait you were born with, not the weather, not your bank balance (in fact, hardly anything to do with your external circumstances) but rather where you habitually put your attention.
Happiness seems to be inextricably linked to ATTENTION – where we put our focus, or where it naturally goes. And human beings seem to have a pervasive tendency to not pay attention. Research published in Science Magazine in September 2010 (“A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert) shows that HALF of the time people are not paying attention to what they’re doing in the moment – their mind is somewhere else.
The connection between attention (mostly handled by the pre frontal cortex) and happiness – is further strengthened by the weak pre-frontal cortex activity associated with such conditions as depression, schizophrenia, substance abuse, eating disorders, anxiety, and of course Attention Deficit Disorder.
In summary, experience-dependent neuro-plasticity means that our brain changes with experience, and we get good at what we practice. The thoughts (neural networks) you never have, or have less often, get weaker.
The most powerful way to change your brain is not medication – it’s mental BEHAVIOUR.
The good news is that with some effort, habits can be changed. There are mental training practices that cultivate positive qualities of mind.
So my question to you today is this: What skills are you practising today, and are these the skills you want to be getting better at?
I hope your neural networks are serving you and the people around you.
Like Ghandhi said, we must become the change we want to see in the world…
