print article&comments‘Me smart? You’re kidding!’ – You are what you think
By Alex and David Bennet,
Mountain Quest Institute.
I can’t possibly be smart, you think. If that’s what you assume, you’re right. You’re not smart. Do you know why? Because you don’t believe you’re smart! That’s all there is to it. Henry Ford got it right years ago. If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you can’t.
Ford’s statement is now backed up with new discoveries in neuroscience.
And there’s more, much more. You’ve got to watch what you’re thinking as well as what you believe. Your thoughts – that is, patterns of neuronal connections and synapse strengths – can change the physical structure of your brain. But beware; this is a two-way street. Changes in the neural physiology of your brain also affect the thoughts in your mind. What does that mean? Well, first off, it means you’ve got to keep your brain healthy. Stop. That’s a lot on the table all at once. Let’s break it down a bit.
Mind or brain? What’s the difference? It’s like the relationship between the waves of the ocean and the water in the ocean. The waves are patterns; the water is particles. Similarly, the mind represents the patterns created by neuronal firings, their synaptic connections and the strengths between the synaptic spaces. The brain is the atoms and molecules that make up those patterns. Since you can’t see your own mind’s patterns, to you they are your thoughts, ideas, visions, feelings and more. A single thought might be represented by a network of a million neurons with each neuron connected to 5,000 other neurons! Not as ridiculous as it sounds when you consider there are about 100 billion neurons in your brain.
The brain has a high degree of plasticity; it has the capacity to change in response to experience and learning. It’s designed to co-evolve with its environment – the perfect instrument for adapting and readapting to the increasing Change, Uncertainty, Complexity and Anxiety (CUCA) that results. And even when simple information comes into your brain, it creates a physical alteration of the structure of neurons. This is how you learn.
Learning? As long as you stay alive, you are learning; the more you learn, the more you can learn. Information is continuously entering the brain through all of your senses from the external world. This information is then mixed and integrated – a process called associative patterning – with all the information previously stored in your memory, patterns that represent all your experiences, thoughts and feelings. Quite literally, almost everything you’ve learned in life. However, those incoming signals are being captured in invariant form.For example, hat means only part of an image of your friend is being stored. That’s all that’s needed. The mind/brain develops robustness and deep knowledge (understanding, meaning, insights and anticipation of the results of actions) from its capacity to use past learning and memories to complete incoming information. This marvelous system allows you to use what you know and what you’ve learned in varied and uncertain situations – something that in the future only a biological computer could hope to accomplish.
What about my DNA? DNA blueprints are not set in concrete at the birth of the cell as was once thought. Genes do not determine who we are or who we will become. Through studies in epigenetics – which literally means control above genetics – it is now recognized that genes cannot be expressed without influence from the immediate environment of the cell. Thus nature, nurture and our own personal choices all play significant roles in our learning and development. Our thoughts, feelings and actions determine our success, while our genes playing a smaller role.
Mind health. There is a direct relationship between your health and increased levels of growth and integration in your mind. When you exercise your body, you increase the amount of blood that’s flowing through your brain which boosts your brain power. But there’s more to it than that … your mind needs exercising too, just like the rest of your body. Circuits in your brain that go unused grow weaker and eventually die. The very best mind exercise is new learning – thinking about and trying things you’ve never done before, acquiring new knowledge. It doesn’t matter how old you are – 20 or 70; you can still learn and learn well if, and only if, you really want to.But for goodness sakes, don’t feel too stressed about it! Emotions impact your learning, with maximum learning occurring when there is a moderate level of arousal. A little bit of stress is okay or, even better, if you feel good about what you’re learning, you learn more. By the way, the same thing is true for physical exercise. If you don’t want to do it but you do it anyway, there’s not much gain. That’s just the way it is.
The unconscious. You may have realized by now how much stuff is going into your unconscious. A healthy mind/brain is a powerful, self-organizing, complex adaptive learning system (quite a mouthful, but it does mean something) that is only limited by the quality and quantity of incoming information and your own choices.The really good news is your brain doesn’t take Starbuck breaks and doesn’t require sleep. It’s on call 24/7. Focused on your learning and well-being, day and night it goes about discovering associations among what you already know and all that stuff you send in through your senses, building patterns that might help you take the best actions tomorrow. Imagine the amount of social networking continuously underway among your neurons! You don’t need to worry about overloading your mind by learning too much – that’s not a smart way to go. In the course of your lifetime, your mind/brain will have created many more patterns with their connections than there are particles in the Universe.
So we’re back to the question we started with . . . me smart?
And the answer is . . . it’s your choice.
Alex and David Bennet are founders of Mountain Quest Institute, a research and retreat center situated in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia – mountainquestinstitute.com
Pull quotes
Knowledge is the capacity (potential or actual) to take effective action. Your mind/brain learns continuously in anticipation of your future actions.
Thoughts and beliefs create your reality. True. What you believe leads to what and how you think . . . which leads to your creation and sharing of knowledge . . . which defines what you perceive as possible . . . and leads to your actions.
| Three myths that keep you dumbMyth #1: I am a product of my genes. FALSE. Many genes are turned on and off by the environment – physical or learning. This can be likened to a dance between two partners intricately involved as a couple in winning the big prize. Who do you choose to let lead?
Myth #2: I’m too dumb to learn. FALSE. If you’re alive, you are learning. The mind/brain was created to help you learn in order for you to survive. If you’re not taking advantage of that learning, that is a matter of choice rather than capability. Note the role of nurturing and the environment have significantly more impact on learning capacity than previously thought. Myth #3: As you grow older your mental powers decrease from loss of neurons. FALSE. As long as you use your brain and continue to actively think – barring age-related disease – your brain capacity will sustain a good capability. While neurons continue to die as you age, active brains also continue to create neurons in several areas. Carl Jung did some of his best work between the ages of 73 and 83. |
Tags (keywords): anxiety, biology, brain, change, CUCA, DNA, genes, Learning, memories, mind, mind health, past learning, uncertainty, unconscious
2 Comments
Let me start this discussion.
The problem with our education system is the lack of emphasis on finding and recording information in your own life, so that you can use it later. This is where thinking begins. First of all, in finding something interesting. Second, in looking, observing, trying to understand so that you have mentally processed the experience. Third, in making a permanent written record, supported by other things if you like, but put the experience into words.
If you do those simple things once a day for 10 years, just recording a single incident each day, you will change who you are and greatly increase your potential to make meaningful contributions by the leading life you live.
The most significant thing you will learn is that all your memories, the recall that you think is so clear, isn’t a memory at all. Your memory lies to you and tells you how “good” it is. Your written record even if you try very hard, may not be the truth, exactly, but it will be good enough to prove to you how unreliable your memory really is. That’s the beginning of being a whole lot smarter. So where are you keeping that record of real experiences that you so badly need?
I’ve kept a journal in hard covered exercise books for over 30 years. This simple writing task is much more valuable than a university education, is very inexpensive, and can be done by anyone.
Participation in discussions like this one. have a very similar benefit. You focus on a topic, you decide what you really think about it, and you share that with others. There is an incentive to get what you say right. Others will comment. In the process of reading the views of others your own view is quietly moderated, or informed. The entire discussion is available to keep as a written record, and might remain online for many years. For most people that’s easier than keeping a journal, and it seems a more natural thing to do. Like having a conversation. But it’s a conversation that’s changing who you are.
My favorite educationalist is the late Professor Graham Nuthall, of University of Canterbury, NZ. He said that learning was confined to what people DO. So, yes you are what you think, but what you think is dominated by the things you have DONE. Participation here is doing something of the right kind.
Hi John.
Your comments on education are timely because the lead cover story in the upcoming May issue is titled ‘The Learning Factory’ and is written by one of the world’s top experts on education K-12. Here are some excerpts:
“There is a commonly told story, usually attributed to MIT’s Seymour Papert. It states that if a doctor from the 1890’s were to suddenly be time-warped into a modern twenty-first century hospital, he would not recognize how patients were being healed. The same would be true of office workers, farmers or most other professional or occupational environments. However, if a schoolteacher from the 1890’s were to step into many of today’s classrooms, he or she could easily pick up where she left off.”
“Education still reflects the industrial model. Children move along an assembly line where math, reading, science and social studies are installed. Then they must pass quality control.”
“At best, we are doing a better job of preparing our children for the 1950s.”
“Inept attempts to create different games and social networks to serve existing educational standards is viewed as ‘a creepy treehouse’.”
Jerry Ash
Publisher and first advocate
Smart People magazine