Tag:brain

Achieve Your Goals Through Conscious Habit Implementation

Thursday, 01 October 2009 Written by Ben Anderson

The Brain's Propensity for Pathways

Your mind is made up of connections. Millions and millions of connections. Each cell in your brain connects with thousands of other cells. Neurons fire electrical impulses from one to another, triggering chemical reactions and coordinating our thoughts. This mass of connections forms a mesh through which there are hundreds of thousands of pathways through. An electrical impulse could travel from one side of your brain to the other every minute of your life and never need to follow the same path.

The interesting thing is that they do follow the same paths. The neurons in your brain tend to utilize the same paths over and over again. Each time a particular pathway is used, it becomes strengthened. The next time that function is needed, or that thought recalled, it hops along the same neurons in the same order. This is the formation of habits. This is also the basis for learning. As we continue to utilize a particular thought sequence, it becomes further ingrained into our brain. We become more proficient as a result of the increased traffic through that pattern.

Particular patterns become worn and are more likely to be activated. They also operate at increased efficiency. Think of them like grooves that are worn in your brain. The deeper the grooves become, the more likely those actions and pathways are to be used. These pathways can also represent associations themselves. A song can remind you of a particular time period in your life. This is due to the strong association that you have in your brain between the two memories.

Put Your Mental States To Work For You

Friday, 04 September 2009 Written by Ben Anderson

An Introduction to Brain Waves

Your brain waves are important. Heck, your brain is important. For something that controls so much of what goes on in our lives, you'd think we'd know more about it.

Literally everything that you experience is filtered through your mind and/or created by your mind. Your thoughts and belief systems form the world that you live in. Your subjective experience is determined by your state of mind. Whether you're happy or sad is a choice that you have the ability to make. And it all comes down to what's in your head.

There are a lot of aspects of this conversation. There are a lot of different ways to examine your mind. To me, they all have value. Some more than others. One of the most valuable studies of your brain and your mental state involve your brain waves.

The study of brain waves can grant us insight into many mental phenomena. We haven't yet scratched the surface of what our minds are capable of, or exactly how they work. Every piece of information helps, every experiment brings us a little bit closer to understanding. There are experiences we have that are hard to explain. There are people that seem to do impossible things with their mind. Just because we haven't figured out how these things are done, does not mean there isn't a good explanation for them. To reference Arthur C Clarke's third law of prediction: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

In this article, I'm going to cover an introduction to brain wave science. What it's about and what it's told us so far. It is quite easy to expound on these ideas and draw additional conclusions, which many have done. I feel these are all worthwhile ventures, and will continue down this path in future articles.

ExamineHealth

Tag:brain

Achieve Your Goals Through Conscious Habit Implementation

The Brain's Propensity for Pathways

Put Your Mental States To Work For You

An Introduction to Brain Waves