CHAPTER 1
The Human Brain
The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.
— James D. Watson
One of the first things you learn when looking at any cognitive science is that you can't think without a brain. Although obvious, when you delve into the details, it's actually quite profound. Much of what you do — your references, your beliefs, and the 98 percent of "unconscious" thought processes — is physically represented in your brain. And that fact matters enormously to you and to your life, because no matter where you've been or where you are right now, you're in charge of your life going forward. You can choose the direction that life will take.
Today, understanding the brain is considered one of the most complex challenges known to science. But that hasn't always been the case. In ancient times, the heart was believed to be the source of all thoughts and intelligence. Ancient Egyptians, who went to great lengths to honor their dead and to carefully preserve the heart, scooped the brain out through the nostrils and threw it away.
Centuries later, most ten-year-olds can recite a rudimentary description of the central nervous system as the brain, the spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system. If they're still paying attention in high school, they'll be able to describe the functions of neurons and neurotransmitters. It isn't until they're well into medical training that they realize that we really haven't even begun to scratch the surface in understanding precisely how the brain works to control every aspect of our decision-making lives. It determines the answers to such diverse questions as who our friends should be, who we should marry, where we should go to school, what career we should pursue, and what we should have for dinner.
The brain is physically the central point of our ability to perceive and "make sense" of the world we live in. Our brains are constantly scanning our world for danger, trusted resources, and solutions to our problems. This chemical mixture of physical and psychological factors results in the experience you know and have today. Let's take a closer look.
Biological View
From a biological perspective, our brain is as important to our individual existence as the CPU is to an individual computer. Like CPUs, bigger brains correlate to more processing power. Faulty CPU instruction sets (like the 1994 bug in the Intel P5 Pentium floating point unit) are similar to dysfunctional brain processes; both can lead to erratic results. On the other hand, when there is alignment and harmony between the internal complexity of our brains and the external environment, it is like a flowing river with healthy high performance as a result.
Today, we have neural implants that provide deep-brain stimulation to patients with Parkinson's disease and vagus nerve stimulation to the clinically depressed. But unlike CPUs, brain upgrades are still a long way off. That means it's critical that we guard the one brain that we've each been given and optimize its ability to serve us well throughout our entire life-span. After all, as neurologist Dr. Daniel Amen is fond of saying, "Our businesses, governments, communities, and families are run by brains. Shouldn't we understand them?"
Physiological View
From a physiological perspective, the brain mediates a wide array of complex electrical and biochemical processes to maintain homeostasis and respond to stimuli. Hormones and neurotransmitters play key roles in signaling current information to the brain and facilitating execution of the responses that have been directed by the brain. If the physical structures of the brain are viewed as a CPU in a computer, the physiological view of the brain would be represented as the operating system. Operating systems help disparate parts (other computers) communicate.
Human beings have a similar operating system: their brains that help them communicate. Even without words, people can understand others. Dr. Albert Mehrabian at UCLA claimed through his research that only 7 percent of a message is communicated through words; 38 percent is communicated through tone and 55 percent is through body language. Although his research was often misquoted, most of us get the idea that communication is more than just words.
Psychological View
From a psychological perspective, brain functions are central to the mind and critical to the social, behavioral, and cognitive activities that influence people, groups, and societies. The mind is a collection of functions related to perception, interpretation, imagination, and memories, including those that a person is not aware of. The mind is where the ability to dream, to believe, to manage, and to lead resides. Psychology is highly complex and often subjective, but it can't ignore the biological and physiological underpinning any more than an iPhone app can ignore the iOS or the underlying iPhone that it's stored on.
Not only do the underlying physiological and biological functions affect our emotional responses, but how we choose to interact with our world affects the underlying physiological activities and biological structures. This holistic view is often difficult to grasp, as we in Western culture are very comfortable segmenting complexity to get a better understanding. (Medicine and business are good examples.) Unfortunately, we forget to put the whole back together again. This can lead to making a problem worse than it originally was. This is referred to as an iatrogenic effect in medicine, which is when a physician creates the illness. Many management theories are prone to failure because they attempt to ignore the physiology involved and the wholeness of the organization. Leaders can have an iatrogenic effect on the very problems they are trying to solve.
Spiritual View
From a spiritual perspective, science has a long way to go before it will catch up to the ancient understandings. Thanks to technological advancements and scientific curiosity, we are beginning to see scientific confirmation of the effects that energies, spiritualism, and religious beliefs have on our own physical bodies and on each other. Seemingly simple activities like meditation have been shown to have lasting physiological and psychological effects on the people who participate. People who share a strong social attachment have been shown to demonstrate synchronized physiological reactions to stress. Even lovers experience harmonized heartbeats and respiration rates when they're near each other. Science is just beginning to confirm what we've always intuitively understood: we are naturally wired to be social creatures.
Neural Anatomy
At around three pounds, the brain accounts for roughly 2 percent of the body's weight. Yet it consumes nearly 20 percent of the body's total energy and oxygen (and 95 percent of that 20 percent is used by gray matter). Even in the face of severe and massive brain trauma, if the brain stem is intact, the body can continue to survive for decades. However, if the body's circulatory system becomes too compromised to deliver oxygen to the brain, it begins to suffer irreversible anoxic damages in as few as five minutes.
The brain is an extremely complex organ, but our goal is not to make neuroscientists out of our good readers. Instead, we will provide brief descriptions of only those components that are of interest in our goal to understanding the transformations that need to happen in individual and group harmonization.
"The brain is a three-pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light-years across." —
Marian Diamond
White Matter Vs. Gray Matter
The central nervous system is made of two distinct types of tissue called white matter and gray matter.
Microscopic examination shows that the cell bodies of neurons are located only in gray matter which also contains dendrites and axons starting from or ending on the cell bodies. Most of the fibers within the gray matter are unmyelinated.
On the other hand, the white matter consists predominantly of myelinated fibers. It is the reflection of light by myelin that gives this region its whitish appearance ... In the cerebrum and cerebellum there is an extensive, but thin, layer of gray matter on the surface. This layer is called the cortex.6
If you can bring to mind the thickness of four to five playing cards, you get the approximate thickness of the cortex. White matter acts like a conductive highway transporting signals (information) to and from the gray matter, where it is actually processed.
Neurons
Inside each person's brain is a vast network of over one hundred billion nerve cells, called neurons that send and receive electrochemical signals. Each neuron has on average ten thousand connections with other neurons. These connections are uniquely organized according to our own personal life experiences. The connections are formed when our activities cause dendrites (from the Greek word for "tree") to grow out in branch-like structures, reaching toward the axons of other neurons. When the dendrites and axons come close enough to pass signals between them, the space between them (the connection where the signal is passed) is called a synapse.
The combined activity of these billions of connections sending signals creates a natural harmonization that is the rhythmic and repetitive activity of the central nervous system. Much of this activity is autonomic, meaning you don't have to consciously think about it. Your heart will beat, lungs will breathe, and synapses will fire. Behavior becomes autonomic as well. You don't have to think about tying your shoes, brushing your teeth, or doing your morning ritual. These are habits, and harmonization requires understanding where certain thought habits are working and where they are not.
The neural oscillation can be recorded as wave forms by EEG tests. These wave forms are characterized according to frequencies. Some of the more commonly known are alpha, beta, and gamma waves. Looking at these recordings, a specialist can make educated guesses about the patient's state of arousal or identify physical illnesses, such as epilepsy.
The most interesting of these wave forms are gamma waves, especially those that oscillate around forty hertz. Scientists theorize that gamma waves originate in the thalamus and sweep over the brain at a rate of forty times per second, drawing all of the brain's neurons into a synchronized state so that even neurons with no physical connection fire in harmony. They believe that this synchronization generates a coherent, coordinated cognitive state by amplifying weak, even normally undetectable, signals through resonance.
Meditation was once viewed as a process of calming the mind into a state of stillness. But, scientists who compared experienced Tibetan Buddhist monks with novice meditation practitioners have discovered that meditation produces highly synchronized gamma waves, with the more experienced monks producing extraordinary gamma wave activity capable of inducing a state of maximal brain sensitivity. When experienced meditation practitioners were asked to generate an objective feeling of compassion while being monitored, their brain activity harmonized into rhythmic, coherent patterns that produced the largest gamma-band oscillations ever documented in healthy humans.
Research in gamma waves seems to be pointing us toward the physiological explanation for the heightened sense of consciousness, bliss, and intellectual acuity noticed after mediation. It also seems to provide at least some explanation for the associated health benefits of stress reduction, mood elevation, and increased longevity of cognitive function in routine practitioners. Even when beginners were coached to meditate over a period as brief as a week, they produced increased gamma-band rhythms, leading scientists to believe that the intentional production of gamma waves can be a learned skill.
Neurotransmitters
When electrical signals travel across the synapse, neurotransmitters carry and influence how those messages are received. Oxytocin release creates feelings of trust, love, and belonging. Serotonin levels influence our self-esteem. Dopamine plays a role in our willingness to take risks, in addictive behaviors, and our feeling of being rewarded for our efforts. Our physiology continually regulates these and many more neurotransmitters throughout our entire bodies. Sometimes, the regulation mechanisms aren't quite right, and we see individuals who take medications to assist these processes. We also know that we can affect the levels of specific neurotransmitters with specific foods. Who hasn't heard about how chocolate increases the levels of endorphins in the brain? And, even if we don't think about neurotransmitters at the time, our morning coffee (one of the most-consumed beverages in the world) is increasing dopamine levels while elbowing out the adenosine that's trying to let us know that we need more sleep.
But an often-overlooked impact on our neurotransmitter levels is the effects of other people. We impact those around us, and they impact us. Sometimes, we forget that because we like to view ourselves as rugged individualists. From childhood, we instinctually struggle to achieve autonomy and independence and to become captain of our own ship. But, that ignores that we have the longest period of juvenile dependency of any species. When we look at how we stack up in the wild, we're slower than most and have no adaptations to survive even mildly inclement weather. Other animals can see and smell us long before we're even aware that they're anywhere nearby. And, those animals that don't avoid us are generally very willing and very well equipped to have us for dinner. Our strongest evolutionary advantage is, and always has been, our brain — and its abilities to plan, work, and reason together.
We are a social species and are connected to each other through a myriad of invisible forces that are ubiquitous and powerful. Neurotransmitter responses are just one of those forces. That is how a compassionate touch, made from feelings of trust or love, elicits increased levels of trust and love in the recipient. That's why like begets like among people. Seeing or being the recipient of friendliness, respect, or helpfulness increases neurotransmitters associated to those feelings and makes us more likely to show those same attitudes to others. On the other hand, being witness to or experiencing negativity or hostility, primes us to act out toward others with similar negativity or hostility.
Consider Newton's law of motion: that a body in motion will not change its velocity unless external forces act upon it. If we don't want negativity or hostility in our lives, we need to become our own external force to step in and resist what are sometimes very powerful physiological reactions. That old saying "treat others as you would like to be treated" takes on a whole new meaning when you realize that how you treat others is a factor, sometimes a very big factor, in how they treat you. We can even take that a step further by taking action on behalf of others. We can decide to be the external positive force for those who are in need of a bump in a more positive direction. But, we can only do that if we are self-aware and consciously resist primal biochemical processes while seeking positive for both ourselves and our Earth mates.
Peripheral Nervous System
Our nervous system is broken down into two major parts. The brain and spinal cord are considered the central nervous system, and then there is all the rest called the peripheral nervous system. Despite the lowly title, it's the peripheral nervous system that connects all of your limbs, organs, and muscles to your brain, enabling that brain to experience the world around you and to pursue purpose in that world. Unlike the central nervous system that's protected inside boney structures of the skull and spine, your peripheral nervous system is quite literally living on the edge of your existence. It's your primary interface to everything that surrounds you, your early warning system for physical danger, and the means through which you experience much of life's joys.
(We could provide a much more technical explanation, but it's not relevant to our purpose)
Key Concepts
Now, we're going to look at three key concepts that underpin the tools that we will be presenting in the remaining chapters.
Brain Plasticity
Some of our readers may remember a time when children were taught that our peak number of brain cells for life is reached in our youth. After that point, not only would there be no more new brain cells created, but also just about everything in the universe was conspiring to kill off our limited supply. Drinking, smoking, watching too much TV, the wrong foods, and even the wrong environment would kill off millions of brain cells and push us that much closer to being left drooling in a wheelchair at an "old folks' home." While those things are in fact damaging to our brains, scientists now understand that new brain cells are created on a routine basis. The good news is that even those who failed to heed the warnings of our youth, or who pursued brain damaging careers like military combat, firefighting, or professional football, have hope of increasing our brain's function under the right circumstances. To be clear, the first priority is to avoid further damage wherever possible because brain cells are not created nearly as quickly as muscle cells! But, scientists have seen noticeable increases in brains scanned using MRIs in as little as three months. That means that we all have the power to physically increase the volume of our gray matter and push aside the fog that hampers our minds.
