How The Brain Rewires Itself
January 25th, 2007This is pretty wild, especially considering the mental prisons we could be building for ourselves with our thoughts…
The brain is going to build whatever structures you empower it to build (or allow others to build), good or bad.
Via: Time:
It was a fairly modest experiment, as these things go, with volunteers trooping into the lab at Harvard Medical School to learn and practice a little five-finger piano exercise. Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed the members of one group to play as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome’s 60 beats per minute. Every day for five days, the volunteers practiced for two hours. Then they took a test.
At the end of each day’s practice session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain, located in a strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear. The so-called transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS) test allows scientists to infer the function of neurons just beneath the coil. In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much of the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practice, the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn.
The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it. But Pascual-Leone did not stop there. He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practicing the piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they would move their fingers. Then they too sat beneath the TMS coil.
When the scientists compared the TMS data on the two groups–those who actually tickled the ivories and those who only imagined doing so–they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the physical structure and function of our gray matter. For what the TMS revealed was that the region of motor cortex that controls the piano-playing fingers also expanded in the brains of volunteers who imagined playing the music–just as it had in those who actually played it.
“Mental practice resulted in a similar reorganization” of the brain, Pascual-Leone later wrote. If his results hold for other forms of movement (and there is no reason to think they don’t), then mentally practicing a golf swing or a forward pass or a swimming turn could lead to mastery with less physical practice. Even more profound, the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.
I shall now commence mentally bitchslapping my boss.
I just rememebered I am self-employed. Wish I had thought of that before I tried the above experiment.
Gives some backing the idea of “picture what you want to do” before actually do it. e.g. making a free throw shot.
That’s what ‘What the Bleep Do We Know’ tried to tell us. We can change the world for good or evil. Why do you think that peon in the Bush admin told the reporter: “We are creating reality. You can sit back and analyze what we do and while you are analyzing we will create a new reality.”? I’m paraphrasing, but they GET IT! Why can’t WE get it? You try to tell people this and they act like you are some kind of lunatic. Then bitch about the neo-cons creating their reality. Sheesh!!
Mtlouie,
One problem with that: like everything else people will simply use the ability to “create their own reality” to capture more energy. Which leads to depletion of resources, emission of more C02, war and competition over those resources, etc.
Ask yourself what the 5 or 10 things you’ve attempted to use visuliazation/imagination/reality-creation and you’ll see most likely they put you in a position where you will either be capturing more energy or where you are more secure in which case you are more likely to have children thereby leading to more depletion of resources.
If you imagine a nice peaceful world, as an example, you will help overpopulate the planet leading to more warfare.. Why? because people have more children when they percieve things are nice and secure. (See the 1945-1970 baby boom in this country as an example.)
Matt,
You wrote:
“…people have more children when they percieve things are nice and secure”
The data on this, however, shows that the opposite is happening. In poorer countries, people have more children. In richer countries, people have fewer children.
Why?
http://www.globalissues.org/EnvIssues/Population/Hunger/FoodFirst/Past.asp
“In the United States, the move to two-children families took place only after a society-wide transition that lowered infant death rates, opened opportunities to women outside the home, and transformed ours into an industrial rather than agrarian economy, so that families no longer relied on their children’s labor. If we contrast Lappé’s grandmother’s story to a latter-day urban middle-class family, we can see that children who were once a source of needed labor are now a source of major costs, including tuition, an extra room in the house, the latest model basketball shoes, and forgone earnings for every year that a professional mom stays home with the kids.
The United States advanced through the falling-birth-rate phase of the demographic transition in response to these societal changes, well before the advent of sophisticated contraceptive technologies, even while the government remained actively hostile to birth control.
…
…where poverty is more extreme and widespread, we can now extend our hypothesis concerning the link between hunger and high fertility rates: both persist where societies deny security and opportunity to the majority of their citizens-where infant-mortality rates are high and adequate land, jobs, education, health care, and old-age security are beyond the reach of most people, and where there are few opportunities for women to work outside the home.
Without resources to secure their future, people can rely only on their own families. Thus, when poor parents have lots of children, they are making a rational calculus for survival. High birth rates reflect people’s defensive reaction against enforced poverty. For those living at the margin of survival, children provide labor to augment meager family income. In Bangladesh, one study showed that even by the age of six a boy provides labor and/or income for the family. By the age of twelve, at the latest, he contributes more than he consumes.
Type “Sub-replacement fertility” into Google:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGGL_enNZ177&q=Sub-replacement+fertility
Where is population declining?
In places where people, “percieve things are nice and secure,” they put their energy into creating ipods and garbage, not into making babies.
In the developed world, lots of educated people perceive having children as being a threat to their lifestyle (as the globalissues.org piece above demonstrates).
I like this one from Germany, where people are being paid 25,000 euros by the government to have a baby!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16438879/
Germany is a very nice and secure country. So nice and secure, in fact, that the government has to offer a massive cash bribe for people to have babies!
Where, however, is the majority of the energy consumed? That’s right: In countries with at or below sub-replacement fertility.
What’s a bigger problem? Billions of people living in mud huts, spending all of their time trying to figure out how to survive, or a few hundred million people living like Europeans and Americans, systematically murdering the planet?
That’s not a rhetorical question. I don’t know. Neither extreme seems good to me.
I live on a fraction of the energy used by most people in the “developed world.” On the other hand, compared to the poorest people on the planet, I live an extravagant lifestyle.
With the appropriate use of technology and careful allocation of resources, it’s easy to theorize how replacement fertility rates can be maintained without having to destroy the planet. But that would require restraint and forethought, which are always in tight supply when considering aggregate human behavior.
Kevin,
Actually, things have plateaued in places like Germany and the U.S. since about the 1970s. I’ve written about this extensively on LATOC, how per-capita increases in energy availability were incredible from 1950-to-1970 and then began stagnating sometime in the 1970s. And that’s also when happiness peaked at least if you believe the studies. I don’t know anybody in the U.S. who feels things are nice and secure.
People feel things “aren’t like they’re suppossed to” and that “it’s harder to get ahead” and they’re right when you do a net-energy analysis. PEople are working much harder and longer than 25 years ago but only for a few extra BTUs of energy in return. So they have fewer children. My parents, for example, had they been able to visualize more economic assets into existence would have hade more kids. A lot of folks feel that way.
In less tech-advanced societies they have to have more children just to survive.
As far as your situation, do you feel more or less secure then you did before your move? My guess is more. I’m also going to guess that the chances of you feeling comfortable enough to have kids in your current location are far higher then they would be if you were in the U.S. Now I don’t know if you intend to have kids. Maybe you don’t. So let’s say there’s a 1 in 100 chance you and Becky would choose to have them now in NZ. My guess is that would be a 1 in 1,000 if you were still in the u.S.
Does this make sense?
BAsically it boils down to this:
substantial increases in energy availability = sense of economic security.
sense of economic security = “let’s have more kids!”
This is exactly what we had during the BAby Boom here in the states.
Once yearly increases in per-capita energy availability peaked around 1970, so did people’s sense of economic security even though from an aboslute standpoint they might be better off. Things stopped getting better so they stopped percieving a sense of security and they stopped having as many kids as in the decades prior.
Hey Matt and Kevin, what do you say we start a Hedge Fund in the Cayman Islands with the sole purpose of accumulating control of Quads of alternative energy sources?
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1.html
Quad = 10 to the power 15 Btu = 2.931 x 10 to the power of 11 kilowatthours.
I want to have a Quad of Happiness!
Matt
“I” personally wouldn’t do any such thing, i.e. keep populating. But, again, by everyone going immediately to the gutter, it only keeps the whole ball of wax going downhill. How to change it? I don’t know that. I do think I know that all this hand wringing: “Well, that’s what they have planned for us. The New World Order. “They” are going to win.” etc. etc. just feeds the momentum of the wrong type of thinking. I feel it’s a bit irresponsible to think that mankind, er humankind, can’t change at all. That’s the point of all of it. That a momentum-like group of people will decide, “Damn it. Enough. We are going to change things.” ‘What the Bleep’ talked about a group of 2500 meditators that got together in Washington D.C. and dropped the crime rate by 25%, or some such number. The police initially said, “The only way crime will drop by 25% is if we have a blizzard.” By the end they signed on and supported the meditators. That is momentous! I hope you read this, because I read you all of the time and I would like to have a discussion about moving away from desperation thinking and moving toward imagining a new way. It IS possible. It’s as simple as thinking of ourselves as transmitors and receivers. We send and receive the very things we think about. Just like the study says. They thought about their music and they later transmitted it, perfectly.
Kevin has a link to Rigorous Intuition. The world is a weird place. I read it and think, “You know we could turn this place into more of a living hell than it’s ever been.” OR we could make this the most beautiful place that’s ever been. Arundhati Roy says two things: “A different world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.” and “Change is coming. It can be beautiful or it can be bloody. It is up to us.” I think we might want to try to move away from the status quo, don’t you? I mean, why let them win?
Matt,
You wrote:
People feel things “aren’t like they’re suppossed to†and that “it’s harder to get ahead†and they’re right when you do a net-energy analysis. PEople are working much harder and longer than 25 years ago but only for a few extra BTUs of energy in return. So they have fewer children.
…
As far as your situation, do you feel more or less secure then you did before your move? My guess is more. I’m also going to guess that the chances of you feeling comfortable enough to have kids in your current location are far higher then they would be if you were in the U.S. Now I don’t know if you intend to have kids. Maybe you don’t. So let’s say there’s a 1 in 100 chance you and Becky would choose to have them now in NZ. My guess is that would be a 1 in 1,000 if you were still in the u.S.
Does this make sense?
It makes sense, but the premise of your argument, which is that energy is the grand unifying motivator of peoples’ actions, is flawed, at least as it applies to Becky and me.
Becky and I moved to a place that will be first to lose access to oil. Yet, we feel much more secure than we did in the U.S. How can it be that we are feeling happier and more secure (and indeed considering having children) with less access to energy and less energy security, if your theory is correct?
Actually, people feel things aren’t like they’re supposed to feel and that it’s harder to get ahead because the richest 2% own more than half the world:
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=1806182006
And that 2% is using the ridiculous notion that there isn’t easily enough energy from the sun, oceans and wind to control us with the manufactured myth of energy scarcity.
The energy scarcity myth must be kept in place, because it allows Them to control access to the resources that remain (water, copper, wheat, whatever). Plentiful, clean energy would totally upset the apple cart, and lead to cascading resource scarcity issues in other areas.
The system is doomed with plentiful energy and it’s doomed without plentiful energy. I’m bored with this path. Besides being dark, it leads nowhere.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way, Louie:
http://farmlet.co.nz
Kevin
Of course. I don’t know how old you are and I know Matt is in his late 20s (I think.) I’m 45, so I’m getting to the point where I’ve seen some things and done a few more. I lived the life you’re living, more or less, for about twenty years. Hard, hard work. I don’t particularly remember it fondly. Animals mean you never leave and we built our own log home and I did most of my cooking on a wood stove, etc. Oddly enough, my children (26 and 23) do. My daughter is starting to live that life. I still have my herb beds, but a new husband and a completely different life. Of course, most of my friends say they’re just coming to my house because I know how to survive the apocalypse. Perhaps you get that, too.
I was just on Ran Prieur’s site. Haven’t visited in awhile and just love it. The idea that things can’t change certainly isn’t justified if you read his postings. Especially his postings from around January 17. People are getting fed up. It seems like the corporate juggernaut is winning and god knows with the articles you and Matt link, it sure looks like we are going to hell in a hand-basket, but I refuse to give up. They’ll have to pry my visions of peace from my cold dead fingers 🙂
Seriously, I think we either will go the way of the empire or through a complete metaphysical transcendence. The idea that people will wake up one day and change- well, it’s like expecting Americans to voluntarily start using the metric system. Ain’t gonna happen. But change CAN happen. It begins, I think, by what Ran Prieur posted about people dropping out of the system for a happier life (like you) and this: “Want change? Keep it in your pocket. Your dollar is your vote.” That was posted by a reader at the ‘Deconsumption’ site quite a long time ago. I think it should be the clarion call for the new paradigm. It just takes the beginning of a tipping point. I want to be part of it.
mtlouie,
It begins, I think, by what Ran Prieur posted about people dropping out of the system for a happier life (like you) and this: “Want change? Keep it in your pocket. Your dollar is your vote.â€
Yep. I came to that conclusion long ago. I formally studied insurgency and counter insurgency in college. I have a pretty good grasp of how low intensity warfare works, theoretically. I thought long and hard about how I could strike the most damaging blow possible to this diabolical system.
Drop out.
Dropping out to the extent possible is the best choice. Doing that hurts this system in a serious way.
And, nope, it’s not easy out here on the Farmlet. But nobody said it was going to be easy! If I ever start to feel as though it’s too rough, all I have to do is think about that corporate prison camp reality I left behind. Fixes me right up.
Re: I think we either will go the way of the empire or through a complete metaphysical transcendence.
The difference between people like us and people like Cheney is that Cheney kills people like us to to get results.
People like us, well, we sit around and read books and write things on the Internet, raise livestock, tend our gardens, etc. While anything could happen, and there might be some kind of metaphysical transcendence, Cheney will continue to kill people like us.
Again, the best way to stop Cheney, et al. is to pull the money out from under him. But we have to take that work VERY seriously. I take that work VERY seriously. I don’t know how to take it any more seriously!??
If you carry the drop out theory out far enough, though, I think you’ll wind up back on the land, with the slop and the animals and the back breaking labor. This is the part most people don’t like.
Kevin
That’s where the new paradigm comes in. I think completely new thinking is the order of the day. What is it? Well, I don’t know. But I know it’s out there. I figure if it’s been “this way” for so very long then surely it’s time for another way. Don’t you?
It would seem the only option is “back to the land” and back-breaking work, but surely there is something beyond this. “This” is really just the reality that a few white men have handed us for several thousand years. It’s their reality. I think our creativity and imagination have been sapped to the point that we don’t think there’s anything else but their way or back-breaking labor. But I believe that metaphysics tries to tell us there is something else. I realize this sounds a bit like some imaginative nirvana- impossible to achieve. Is it? We think it is because that’s what we’ve been told. True transendence comes not from imagining the status quo, even from a religious perspective, but imagining an entirely different realm. And don’t think I think like this all the time. I read the news you guys link. I write angry letters and call my senators and congressman with desperation in my voice. We must get past it. We must or succumb.
Kevin, you said: Again, the best way to stop Cheney, et al. is to pull the money out from under him.
That’s sort of my point. Not that that isn’t good and exactly what I try to do, but it’s really just a reaction. In order to truly change the paradigm we must create, not react. Remember, “We create reality.”
mtlouie,
You wrote:
It would seem the only option is “back to the land†and back-breaking work, but surely there is something beyond this. “This†is really just the reality that a few white men have handed us for several thousand years. It’s their reality. I think our creativity and imagination have been sapped to the point that we don’t think there’s anything else but their way or back-breaking labor. But I believe that metaphysics tries to tell us there is something else.
I’m all for visualizing and re-visioning and co-creating and all the rest of it. My mother was taking me to meditation and “mind psi” classes from the time I was five. All of this What The Bleep stuff is 30 years old to me…
And here we are. At the brink of oblivion.
You’ll have to forgive me for not fully embracing the sitting-in-a-circle-and-holding-hands-path. It’s only because I’ve been there, done that. I got hungry at the end of the day. I had to eat. In order to eat, I needed money. In order to get money, I had to get a job….
The what the bleep stuff is a “reaction” to corrupt religions. You still need to eat at the end of the day. Bleep or no bleep. I don’t see too many innovations, outside of hard work, for resolving that issue.
But I’m open to suggestions!
[…] not be following comments. For the record, I did this re: resource scarcity at the bottom of this comment, where I wrote, “The system is doomed with plentiful energy and it’s doomed without […]