Other books by Shad Helmstetter, Ph.D.:
What to Say When You Talk to Your Self
The Gift
Who Are You Really, and What do You Want?
The Self-Talk Solution
Self-Talk for Weight Loss
Choices
What to Say When You Talk to Your Kids
Network of Champions
Finding the Fountain of Youth Inside Yourself
You Can Excel in Times of Change
The Power of Neuroplasticity
Published by Park Avenue Press
362 Gulf Breeze Pkwy., #104
Gulf Breeze, FL 32561
Copyright 2013 by Shad Helmstetter. All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in reviews, without written permission from the author.
Helmstetter, Shad
The Power of Neuroplasticity
ISBN-10: 0972782184
ISBN-13: 978-0-9727821-8-0
Dedication:
This book is dedicated, with love, to my wife, Judith Ann.
I cannot thank enough the many people who have contributed so greatly to this book. First and always, my editors have been unerring in their dedication to making sure that every thought, sentence, comma, semicolon, and form is as it should be. If there are any errors, they are mine.
I would like to thank my many online friends who so graciously offered their comments and suggestions, and to others who contributed so generously, especially Tai Chi master Jerry Levine. I am also especially appreciative of the staff at The Bistro, in Milton, Florida, who allowed me to work on my manuscript in a quiet place near the river, where I could write in the solitude of uninterrupted thoughts.
I also thank, with deep respect, the researchers and authors who have courageously brought the science of neuroplasticity and the capabilities of "mind" into the mainstream of public awareness. Many of these teachers have come from widely diverging backgrounds, but have come to many of the same conclusions on the role of "mind" and its importance in the management of our everyday lives. Through their intelligent insight and work in this field, looking at the mind and brain from daring new perspectives, we have a brighter light on the path to guide us on our way into the future.
Chapter 1
Neuroplasticity — Big Word, Beautiful Meaning
Chapter 2
The Holy Grail of Personal Growth
Chapter 3
How it Works
Chapter 4
The Brain that Changes Every Day
Chapter 5
Your Neuroplastic Programming
Chapter 6
The Programs You Get from the World Around You
Chapter 7
The Mind that Lives Beyond Your Brain
Chapter 8
The Seven Rules of Neuroplasticity
Chapter 9
Rule #1 — Mindfulness
The Vital Role of Awareness
Chapter 10
Rule #2 — Choices
Taking Control of Your Programs
Chapter 11
Rule #3 — Intention
Setting the Goal
Chapter 12
Rule #4 — Focus
The Power of Detail
Chapter 13
Rule #5 — Repetition
How Pathways are Formed
Chapter 14
Rule #6 — Emotion
The Secret Ingredient
Chapter 15
Rule #7 — Belief
The Quantum / Spiritual Element of Success
Chapter 16
The Noise
Chapter 17
The Neuroscience of Self-Talk
The Scientific Process of Programming
Chapter 18
Using Self-Talk in Your Everyday Life
Chapter 19
How to Use Positive Self-Talk to Rewire Your Brain
Chapter 20
Neuroplasticity with an Attitude
Chapter 21
The "Top 12 Positive Attitudes" to Wire In
Chapter 22
The Brain that Keeps You Young
Chapter 23
Neuron-Building Activities
Chapter 24
Living "Aware"
Chapter 25
Making Mindfulness a Way of Life
A 31-Day Way to Change Your Brain
Chapter 26
Meditation, Neuroplasticity, and the Brain
Chapter 27
The Transformational Retreat
Chapter 28
Super-Charging the Next 6 Weeks
Chapter 29
What Tomorrow May Bring
"You are creating, at this moment, the person you are going to become tomorrow."
This is a book about giving people freedom, and giving people hope.
For many years, we believed that the human brain stopped growing or changing when we were young — and everything we were taught about our behavior was based on that belief. We now know differently.
The breakthrough of the discovery of neuroplasticity is that the brain is designed to change throughout our lifetime. Your brain is changing at this moment. Right now, no matter where you are in your life or what age you are, while you're reading this, your brain is literally rewiring itself.
From the latest research and from the use of new technology that allows us for the first time to look deeply into the human brain while it's working, we have begun to learn more about how the brain is wired and how it works. And most importantly, we have learned the role that our thoughts play in the wiring of the brain and the creation of our success as individuals.
In the following pages, you'll find information and ideas that will help you reintroduce yourself to your own mind in some amazing ways. Although this book includes information that originated from research in the field of neuroscience, this isn't a textbook with scientific jargon that requires a background in neuroscience to understand it. I've done my best to bring a great deal of information together, sort it all out, condense it, and put it in words anyone can understand.
You'll find the tone of this book to be positive and uplifting. In writing it, I've applied the same principles we'll be talking about throughout the book — principles such as intention, focus, and repetition.
You'll also notice there's a deliberate balance between information and action steps you can put into practice right away. The suggestions and ideas I recommend to you are practical and down to earth, and you should be able to use and apply them even before you finish reading.
Whether you find just one new gem of an idea here, or a dozen new thoughts or ideas that apply to you, rest assured that by the time you read the final chapter, you will understand what your own mind and brain can do for you, and what you can do to make those positive changes happen.
As you read, I encourage you to open your mind, let the new ideas flow in easily and let them sink in. Read the book with your determined intention to gain every ounce of new knowledge and awareness you can possibly glean from the ideas presented here.
There's a reason to do this. We have learned that your conscious intention to do something increases your brain's ability to wire in new ideas! It is my hope that with your conscious intention to learn the ideas expressed here, they will make a positive and valuable contribution to how you think, the actions you take, and the results you achieve.
The discovery of neuroplasticity did not begin with what it can do for the mind. The initial discovery started by helping stroke victims regain the use of muscles they once thought useless, and teaching people with learning and physical disabilities how to literally rewire and retrain their brain functions.
But it is what lies beyond the world of medical research, moving into the world of mind research, which promises to affect the lives of even more of us in truly incredible ways. It is how we can personally use the discovery of neuroplasticity in our everyday lives — and learn to rewire our brains for ourselves — that is making a critical difference for countless individuals.
It was research in the field of neuroscience that first alerted researchers in other fields such as medicine, education, training, and counseling to the properties of what the brain's neuroplasticity offers us. In this book, we will focus on the aspects of neuroplasticity that deal with improving brain potential and function, such as:
Personal growth
Reaching your goals
Mindfulness
Intention
The importance of belief
Creating a positive attitude
Changing your self-talk
Overcoming negativity
Mental sharpness and clarity
Meditation
Increasing your level of happiness
Improving your brain's acuity
Staying younger, longer
Not only have we learned what the most essential tools of brain enhancement and personal growth really are, we have also finally learned how positive, personal change actually takes place in the brain, and how to use that amazing neurological process to make our lives better.
What we've learned is about to change everything.
What goes on in your mind and in your life — changes your brain, physically. When you think or do something repeatedly, your brain actually changes its physical structure. Your environment, your experiences, your emotions, your attitudes, your self-talk, all of your perceptions — your brain is imprinting itself with every message it gets. And this discovery means that because your brain is constantly rewiring and changing itself, you are creating now, the person you're going to become tomorrow. That is the remarkable power of neuroplasticity at work.
Your brain's neuroplasticity works both in grand ways and in small ways. Some people who put this power to work in their own lives will change things like an attitude that's negative, a career that isn't working, finances that don't add up, or a relationship that isn't going as well as it should.
Many readers will use this book to enhance or change their career path, turn the dream of a new home into a reality, or reach high-level goals like traveling the world, creating a legacy of long-term wealth, or helping the less fortunate.
Still others will read this book to learn to use the increased power of their brain to become sharper, have a better memory, get smarter and more in control, and stay younger longer.
We all have our dreams and our goals. Wherever you are in your life right now, and whatever positive goal you have in front of you, you get to direct it. You get to literally wire your brain to take you there.
With the discovery of neuroplasticity in the human brain, our old notion that our lives are set, that we are destined by our genes and our past to follow the path that fortune gave us, has been thrown out the window.
With what we have learned, your past isn't what counts. Because your brain is constantly rewiring itself with the repeated new messages it receives, how you decide to wire your brain next is what counts.
One of my favorite Bible passages is Romans 12:2, which says, "… be transformed by the renewing of your mind." That's a powerful exhortation, and I couldn't agree with it more. As we will see, your brain's ability to be transformed, literally happens in very practical and life-changing ways — as a result of the renewing of your mind.
It's not where you've been, it's where you choose to go next, that counts. It's not who you've been; it's who you decide to become — and that changes everything.
When I decided some years ago to write my first book, "What to Say When You Talk to Your Self," about how our self-talk changes our lives, the people I knew at that time could be divided into two groups: those who thought I would write the book, and those who doubted it, or thought it was a foolish or impossible idea. The ones who spoke against the idea of writing the book thought it would fail. Those who thought I would do it decided to believe in my goal, and waited to see what would happen.
I made the choice to try something new — a way to rewire my brain with the belief that I could do it — and not accept any mental wiring that said that I could not. What I decided to do was to leave any disbeliefs or doubters behind, and approach the goal in a different way.
On Thursday, October 3rd, 1985, I got on an airplane and flew from Phoenix, Arizona to Corpus Christi, Texas. There, I rented a car and drove to a ferry that took me to the small gulf-side town of Port Aransas on Mustang Island off the coast of Texas, where I rented a condo unit overlooking the Gulf. While I was there, in complete isolation, I wrote my book.
But I didn't just go to the island and immediately start writing. For 2 weeks after I arrived, before I wrote a single word of the book, I did nothing but walk on the beach by myself, look at the waves, watch the seagulls, and talk to myself about the book I was going to write.
Instead of listening to the doubts of others or any doubts from my past, I decided to bring a goal to life. The goal was that the book I had come there to write would still be on the shelves of bookstores, not a year or two later, but 20 years later. A tall order! At the time, most self-help books would be popular for a year or so, and then usually fade out of sight. My goal meant the book I was going to write would go 20 years better than that.
After walking on the beach, watching the waves, talking to myself and using a lot of positive self-talk for 2 long weeks, I went back to the condo unit I had rented, sat down at my computer, looked out over the water, and began to write. The first words I wrote were:
"You are everything that is. Your thoughts, your life, your dreams come true. You are everything you choose to be. You are as unlimited as the endless universe."
For the next 3 months, along with continuing to walk on the beach each day, talking to myself, and listening to self-talk, I wrote every day. My schedule was: write, go to bed, sleep, get up, write, go to bed, sleep, get up, and keep writing.
I don't remember a day during that intense writing time that I looked back at the doubts or the doubters. I just focused forward, kept talking to myself in the most positive possible way, and kept writing.
Because of my long walks on the beach each day for 2 weeks before I began to write, instead of being guided by doubt, I was guided by my goal — to write a book that would help people get better, all over the world, and to deliver a message that would be just as relevant 20 years later, as it was when it was written. (My reasoning was that if I was determined to write a lasting book, each sentence and paragraph I wrote would be written more clearly and more meaningfully.)
Three months after I had arrived on the island, I packed up my computer, paid my rent, took the ferry back to the mainland, turned in my rental car at the airport, and flew home with my completed manuscript in hand. A few months later, my book had been edited, and the final draft went to press. Not long after that, the book was in full release nationwide, and I was appearing on television programs like Oprah Winfrey and CNN.
The book did what it was supposed to do. I reached my 20-year goal a few years ago, and that book remains on the self-help best-seller lists nearly 30 years after it was published. In fact, I recently worked on "What to Say When You Talk to Your Self" again, when I wrote a complete update of the book for its publication in the new e-book editions.
During the writing of the book you're reading now, I received a box of books in the mail. They were from a publisher in India, who sent me newly published editions of "What to Say When You Talk to Your Self," printed in Telugu, Tamil, and Hindi. The book some people thought I would never write is now published in over 65 countries.
I'm not applauding myself for the life that book has lived. I did nothing more than set a goal and choose to see it through. I simply refused to listen to the impossibilities of my past and the doubts of others, and chose instead to do something others told me could not be done.
The important point to this story is this: day after day, walking on that beach, looking at the sky and the seagulls and the sandpipers and the waves along the shore, I was thinking with clarity, focus, and intention about what I must do and the steps I must take to make my dream become a reality. By so doing, I literally wired my brain to help me accomplish my goal. The steps that made it work were the steps I was taking in the sand.
When I was walking on the beach and talking to myself each day, I was rewiring my brain.
The secret to the true source of personal growth has been sought through the ages, and this quest has continued to the present day. Mystics, spiritual leaders, philosophers, and today's motivational trainers have all searched for the true path to personal success. What is the secret to each man or woman's destiny? Why do some people fail, while others succeed? With the answers to those questions, the future of mankind is much brighter and more hopeful than it was just a few years ago.
Many people have looked for the answer in the field of self-improvement. For more than 50 years, a generation of self-help authors taught us what they were discovering about how each of us could improve our lives. And they told us we would find the best in our lives when we learned and practiced the "rules" of personal growth they had discovered.
The rules they gave us were not difficult to understand. And, not surprisingly, most of the popular self-help authors, in one way or another, identified many of the same rules. If you read the greatest self-help books of the past decades, you'll recognize the rules they taught us: set goals; think positive; learn to be organized; manage your time; remember that you create what you believe in most; focus on what you want to achieve; work hard, and never give up.
(In these pages, we'll meet some of these ideas again, but we'll be looking at them in a new, updated and more scientific light. As we've now discovered, the key to each of them working is neuroplasticity.)
When I wrote the book "What to Say When You Talk to Your Self," I had studied self-help concepts that were working in many lives. Because the ideas were working, and were literally changing lives, it became clear to me that these concepts must have their basis in the physical, neural anatomy of the brain itself.
The science behind the development of personal growth was not yet fully understood, of course. However, it was undeniable that personal improvement methods like changing one's attitude, thinking positively, and setting goals, were working.
I wanted to know why they were working. I believed that the rules of personal growth, while sound, should be taken to the next step into how the brain itself works — physically, chemically, electrically — neurologically. Lasting success had to be a product of the mind, but also a product of how the brain is wired.
"What to Say When You Talk to Your Self" presented my findings that personal growth in any repeatable form is never an accident; that success is the result of mental programs that begin at birth, and often stay with us throughout our lives. The book identified the importance of self-talk as a practical way to change those programs, based on the premise that your brain is changed by the thoughts you think.
Interestingly, during the time that many thousands of people were applying the principles of personal growth and clearly improving their lives as a result, "self-help" also had its doubters. These were well-intentioned critics who questioned the promises of positive attitude and other forms of self-help, saying that things like positive thinking were nothing more than wishful thinking, and that there was nothing scientific about them. As surprising as it seems now, some of that skepticism came from the field of neuroscience.
While Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, and Dr. Maxwell Maltz, three of the most popular proponents of personal growth of the 20th century, were saying that your attitude and your thinking could change your life from the inside out, neuroscientists were still saying that positive thinking was like any other kind of thinking, and that it could not actually change the human brain. Those neuroscientists were defending the long-held scientific paradigm that the brain stops growing or changing early in life, and as a result, you could not actually "change" your brain no matter what you thought.
It was clear that many neuroscientists were continuing to defend a picture of the brain that was out of line with what we were observing in our studies of human behavior.
My own study and findings disagreed with views that I believed to be outdated. I recognized that many people, whether they were very young or were in their 80s or older, were making dramatic and often permanent changes in their lives, and they were clearly making those changes by changing the way they thought.
So I continued to research and write several more books on the subject, and continued to present my position that the human brain could be rewired and changed by what we thought — the input we gave it.
Meanwhile, schools and universities continued to teach that the brain is set, and stops growing and changing, before we reach adulthood. According to the textbooks from that time, each of us had to live with the brain we ended up with for the rest of our lives. We were taught that our genes determine who we are and who we become, and that the brain cannot grow or change. We were told that with aging, the brain inevitably loses its vitality and suppleness, and in time, even its memories.
And that was that! For years, that's what we were told, that's what all textbooks taught, and that's what most people believed.
Fortunately for us today, what our textbooks were teaching us then, was wrong.
Finally, after many years of thinking the old way about the brain, within the space of a few short years, a new era of computer-imagining technology stepped in. New experiments could be conducted that proved the right kind of self-help thinking had been on the right track all along. With the new technology, scientists were able to see a very different picture of the human brain. And neuroscience began to change its mind.
For the first time, with new research technology such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), and other new tools for brain imaging and mapping, neuroscientists were able to "see inside" the brain, while it was working. And what they saw, literally changed their overall picture of the way the brain actually works.
For the first time, scientists saw that the human brain, instead of being set and static, continually reprogrammed and restructured itself. They saw that the brain grew and changed, moment by moment, input by input, and thought by thought. The brain was plastic, malleable, and it was not only growing new neurons, it was rewiring itself! And this amazing plasticity wasn't only happening in the brains of the young; it was happening throughout the entire lifetime of each individual!
With the discovery that the brain is continually rewiring itself based on new input it receives, we had finally found the scientific "holy grail" of personal growth. It is that the brain itself is plastic, and able to change, and that plasticity creates a neural activity feedback loop. That is, the brain sets up a continuing, self-perpetuating cycle of success or failure that lies at the heart of why we act, live, and feel as we do.
It is the one scientific discovery that stands above all others in the field of personal growth — and it explains why the truth about neuroplasticity itself is so important.
The "holy grail" of personal growth has been an elusive goal for so many people who wanted to make their lives better. Now, with the discovery that the brain rewires itself with the input we give it, we have found the answer we were looking for: if you want to change your life, change your wiring.
The latest research from the field of neuroscience is incredibly promising. You get to go past the problems or the self-imagined inadequacies of your past, and create the better, more amazing person you would like to be. And you don't have to hope for a miracle, or wait for luck to happen. This time, science is on your side. We have found the holy grail of personal growth: You can rewire your brain.
The process of rewiring your brain in your favor is a complex process in the brain itself, but as we've learned more about how it works, we've become more able to understand it and simplify it.
Your brain grows and changes based on feedback. What you tell it, changes it. And while it's rewiring itself, your brain then feeds those new programs, those new pictures of yourself, back to you. It's a feedback "loop." What you put in, you get back out, in a continuous "neural activity feedback loop."
Even for readers who are not accustomed to the terminology, this is easy to understand. The neural activity feedback loop just means you're talking to your brain, and your brain is changing based on what you tell it. And your brain responds by giving you an update on how it's doing. It's growing and changing, and it lets you see those changes in the way you think and how you feel.
By the time you've read this one chapter, you'll have a good understanding of that feedback loop, and why it's so important to you.
The neural activity feedback loop is the process by which:
Everything we think, feel, or do, imprints or rewires our brain. Our rewired brain, in turn, affects everything we think, feel, or do … which again, in turn, imprints or rewires our brain.
Our perceptions wire our brain, and our brain, in turn, affects our perceptions. It is an endless loop that begins before we're born and continues to the moment of our last breath.
Here's an example of how the neural activity feedback loop works in one person's everyday life.
Let's say that when Mark gets up in the morning, he hasn't slept well, and he has the feeling it's going to be "one of those days" — not a good sign. Mark gets dressed, has breakfast, and anxiously gets ready for the day. He's been worried about how well he's going to do with the presentation he has to make at work today, and he feels he'll be lucky if he gets through it without a stumble. He's afraid he's going to mess it up. As he drives to work, he doesn't notice his fingers endlessly drumming on the steering wheel, another sign that he's far from being at his best. When he greets his boss, Mark's smile is painted in place, but underneath he's doing anything but smiling.
In spite of his reservations, Mark has to make the presentation, so he does. As he expected, it doesn't go well, and he's not surprised. He's never felt he was very good in front of a group. At the end of the day, Mark goes home and, after an evening of feeling dejected and watching television, he goes to bed. He does his best to forget the day — it wasn't his first day like this. Maybe tomorrow will be better. "Probably not" is the last thing he hears his mind say to him as he finally drifts off to sleep and leaves the day to the past.
Here's what actually happened: Mark didn't get up on the wrong side of the bed; he got up on the wrong side of his programs.
Every message Mark gave his brain was that it was going to be a bad day, that he was going to do a terrible job giving the presentation, and that nothing would work out right. Most of us know the dangers of a negative pep talk. But chemically, in Mark's brain, there was more going on than just a few momentary misgivings.
With each questioning thought, Mark was sending messages to his brain that called up other negative programs of self-doubt that he'd already programmed in and stored up in the past. So he started the day with the message to his brain that said, "Make me fail. That's what I've done before. That's what I expect to do today."
That, of course, turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But here's why: Mark's brain, using its neural activity feedback loop, recorded his mood and his lack of confidence. Then his brain immediately began to search for other, previously stored neural networks that agreed with his self-doubt — and in this case, there were a ton of them.
When his brain pulled all those other, equally negative programs together, chemically and electrically in his brain, they voted. The vote was taken, and in seconds, the results were in. Mark was right. He was going to have a bad day.
In this case, Mark fed negative, doubting messages to his brain; his brain recorded those messages, and then fed them back to him, along with a whole lot of other negative programs of the same kind. That's the feedback loop.
It was not even how stressed Mark was, or how tired he was, that caused him to fail. It was not fate or luck. And it wasn't the day. It was a series of neural, chemical, electrical connections in Mark's brain that brought up failing programs from his past, that he called upon to help him fail — and they did.
Mark did not know he was doing this, of course — directing his own failure. It was almost entirely unconscious. All Mark had to do was set it up, and his brain, with its years of negative programs stored up for an occasion just like this, took it from there.
For each of us, our neural activity feedback loop does all that because it's designed to get input, record it, store it, and with enough repetition, wire in a new neural pathway — and finally, act on that pathway as though it were true.
Had Mark set up the day differently, in advance, it might have worked out differently. Better instructions to his brain would have set up his day in an entirely different way. His brain would have called up better, more positive programs from his past. That same brain that helped him fail could have helped Mark create an attitude of belief, inspiration, and optimism — instead of the opposite — and it very likely would have created different results.
Because of his brain's neural activity feedback loop, Mark simply got back out of his brain what he had put into it — and what he had told it to do. In so doing, Mark's brain duly recorded one more failure, and quietly and competently strengthened the pathway of failure, cementing it even more firmly into place in his brain.
We can learn a lot from seeing even a small picture of a single day in Mark's life. It lets us see how this feedback loop works in even the smallest details of life. But it is the larger, macro view of the neural activity feedback loop which gives us a greater insight.
Instead of dealing with just a single day, that loop deals with every day of our lives, and will continue to do so for each of us from here on out. What this feedback loop does, will affect virtually everything about us.
No matter what it is, when you think it, your brain records it.
In that same moment, your brain compares that thought to every other neural program it has previously stored that agrees with it.
In that moment, your brain not only acts on those programs, but it also begins to record the same messages again, making them stronger.
In time, your brain will continue to rerecord programs, making them so strong that you can actually believe they are "real," part of who you are. And thought by thought, moment by moment, day by day, you act out the results.
A friend of mine was visiting a doctor who was working in her lab, studying brain samples of people who were deceased.
The doctor would examine a sample of a brain under a microscope and say, "Unhappy brain." Then she would examine another sample and say "Happy brain." Studying a number of brain samples, commenting on each of them in turn, she said, "Unhappy brain … happy brain … unhappy brain … and so on.
My friend was very curious about what she was doing, and asked the doctor what it meant.
"You can see a microcosm of their lives in these tissue samples of their brains," she said. "Some brains lived an unhappy life. Other brains look healthy. I call them happy brains. You can almost tell, from looking at their brains, which people lived happy lives and which people didn't."
When people hear that story, the first question that comes to mind is what their own brains look like. It makes you wonder how your own brain would fare. There's a way to get an idea of what your brain might look like, while there's still a chance to do something about it.
You may already suspect what you'd find. But if you could actually see what the woman in the lab saw by looking at a picture of your own brain, you'd want to know for sure whether your brain was a "happy brain" or an "unhappy brain." There's a way you can do that, without having to wait for a lab technician to examine a sample of your brain after you've passed on.
Here's how to do it. Artists who create illustrations of the brain often use different colors to denote different areas of brain function. In this case, I'd like you to "color your brain" in a different way.
Let's say you have a picture of your brain, a simple outline sketch with nothing colored in. Now let's say you have three colored pens. One is gold, one is gray, and one is neutral, with no color. What we'll do in this illustration is to color your brain with the thoughts you think.
The gold pen is for your most clearly positive, healthy thoughts. The gray pen is for your negative thoughts. And the neutral pen without color is for thoughts that are neither one nor the other.
In our illustration, we're not coloring in one or another area of the brain to show the sections of the brain and what each of them does. We're coloring in the entire brain, to show us the quality of our thoughts.
Let's start by coloring your "brain picture" for just one day. I'll ask you to imagine keeping your brain picture with you for the entire day. As we begin, to give you an example of how it works, I'll start your day by asking you the question, "How are you today?"
(You can answer that, now, in your mind.)
If your answer was "Fine," or "Okay," now imagine you take the "neutral" colored pen, and make a neutral mark somewhere on your brain picture. If you said, "Incredible," or "Outstanding," mentally use the gold pen and make one gold mark anywhere on the picture. If you said, "My day is terrible," or "Who cares?" visualize selecting the gray pen and making one gray-colored mark on your picture.
As you go through just this one day, every time you think a conscious thought that you're aware of, stop for a moment, mentally select the pen that most accurately describes your thought — positive, negative, or neutral — and make a mark on your brain picture. Do the same thing for the entire day. Everything you say, everything you think, take a moment, decide what color it should be, and mark your picture.
There are different views on how many thoughts each of us thinks in a day; estimates range from 12,500 to 70,000 or more. For purposes of coloring in our brain picture, we'll use the number 35,000 as the number of individual thoughts each of us has in a day. That would mean you'd have to make 35,000 colored marks on your brain picture in one day. (Big job!)
At the end of the first day, how would your picture look? If you had actually colored in everything you said, and every thought you thought, either gold, neutral, or gray — positive, neutral, or negative — what color would your brain picture show the most?
Imagine doing that for a month. Then imagine doing it for a year. At the end of a year, if you had marked in a color that represented everything you said and every thought you thought, what color would your brain picture be?
The purpose of this exercise is to let you know that although you may not be carrying colored pens with you and coloring in each thought you think, your brain is doing exactly that. Coloring your brain is the essence of the neural activity feedback loop. Your brain is, right now, looking at the color of your thoughts, recording them, programming them in, and sending those colors back to you as a picture of you.
Think of anyone you know, and ask yourself, "Is that person a "gold," "neutral," or "gray?" Whatever color they have, remember that their own words and thoughts — their programs — are giving them their colors.
Now, instead of looking at your brain picture to see what color it is after coloring it in for just one day, or even for a year, let's look at that same picture of your brain over your entire lifetime. When you look at your own brain picture now, fully colored in with every thought you've ever thought, what is the predominant color of your brain? What color is it most?
If it's filled with gold, that's good. That's also unusual. Most people have a lot of negative, gray marks that came from gray experiences and self-doubts that were recorded by their brains, as though that's who they are. (That's not who they have to be; that's just what their brains have recorded in the past.)
Your brain is designed to feed back to you, and reproduce, the "colors" — the attitudes, the opinions, and the beliefs about life and about yourself — you have that are the strongest. That's why people who have the most positive disposition create more of the same, and why people who are down and negative continue to act and think in a negative way. Life around us can change, but each day we view life through the color that dominates the picture of our brain.
In our earlier example, what was the color of Mark's brain? In the short picture we saw, Mark had created a brain that was not colored gold. It was colored gray, and bordering on dark gray.
As you can easily imagine, a different Mark — one who looked at things differently, one who had a brain with more gold in it, more positive programs — might have used his brain's feedback loop completely differently.
This better, wiser Mark, knowing he had an important presentation to make at work the next day, would properly prepare himself the night before for his presentation, and also reassure himself of his most positive possibilities for the next day. He wouldn't be lying to himself, or kidding himself; he would be presenting his brain with the best messages of success he had stored up in his past.
In the morning, in the first moments of awareness, this Mark would fill his mind with the uplifting emotions of positive potential, and he would restate the self-talk that says, "I can do this. Now is my time. Today is my day. I'm on top, in tune, in touch, and going for it!"
That's how the neural activity feedback loop works, every day, in real life. You decide to think in a more positive, self-directed way. Your brain "gets it" and records your thoughts. When you repeat the same thoughts often enough, your brain wires them into neural pathways, and connects them to other, similar pathways you have already stored. Your brain then sends those same messages back to you as "thoughts," "beliefs," and "attitudes" that you act on.