How To Change Your Mind

I need you to count how many balls I have.

That’s a strange request, but trust me… I’m a magician. No, really, trust me: it’s a quick psychological test that reveals A LOT about your brain. Give yourself only a second or two, a quick glimpse (don’t cheat- I will know!), it’s not a trick question and there’s no camouflage, just… count how many red balls I have in the picture below:

Pretty simple, yes? 5 red balls.

You might have guessed by now, but this has nothing to do with my balls, sorry about that. This is all about your brain, and what you don’t notice. Look back at the picture again (nothing has changed, we’re magical, but we’re not THAT magical) and instead of counting the balls, count my fingers.

Yes, I cheated – this isn’t a real image, and we are magicians, mind-readers and mystery entertainers, we always cheat – but, did you miss something as obvious as the fact I had six fingers?

Magic people do this ALL the time. You have probably heard of misdirection (only a partially accurate description, but that’s another blog for another time) where the magician makes you look at her left hand whilst she does something skilful, intelligent and cheeky with her right hand, but this isn’t a demonstration of that particular principle. This is about the amazing wonders of Neuroplasticity.

Look back at the picture one more time, you might have looked directly at my hands but completely missed them the first time, but now? Now you CAN’T NOT notice I have 6 fingers. Your brain is crying out that something is unusual, and now you know, you can’t go back to ignoring my extra digits. You can’t unsee what you’ve already noticed. You haven’t changed the picture, you’ve just changed what that bizarre and beautiful interface between your brain, your optic nerves and your eyeballs are interpreting as reality. You quite literally changed your brain; and THAT is the simple, powerful and radical power of Neuroplasticity.

The Universe’s Biggest City

Before I get into how we can use Neuroplasticity, let me give you a quick and dirty analogy that helped me wrap my own head around this stuff.

See, growing up, I was told that the human mind stopped growing somewhere between the ages of 16 and 21. In the traditional model of neurobiology, all of the connections we were ever going to have were stuck in our tiny little brain cavity somewhere between those heady days of downing Blue WKD on top of car parks and the sinking realisation that no one told you life was gonna be this way, your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s D.O.A. (clap clap clap clap).

But seriously, that was the way our brains were thought to be – it was thought, like much of Victorian views of the human body – to be like a highly detailed clockwork mechanism. You took all the separate parts, mushed them together, spun the dial, turned the gears and the whole thing would tick along for as long as it lasted, before dust, rust and entropy began to rot at the physical pieces and we would all deteriorate as we got older.

Yet, as it turns out, those stuffy scientists with equally stuffy collars and ridiculously luscious beards, were completely misguided. Not wrong, exactly, but certainly not right.

You see, instead of a clockwork mechanism that is set once and runs its course, the brain as we know it now, is much more like the Universe’s most complex, interweaving megacity.

It has its centres and hubs of activities (like the City of London acts as a financial district, for instance), it has vast amounts of interconnected streets and roads, some larger to accommodate for more heavy traffic, and some smaller for more relaxed and wandering journeys. It even has huge motorways that connect it to other vital centres of the body… see, this metaphor hasn’t just been thrown together!

Each of our brains are made up of interconnecting streets, roads and alleyways, powered by the chemical and electrical signals we put into our bodies. These little signals (citizens of our wonderful city) are passed through our neurons (the roads, streets and alleyways), and every single one of these roads connects at different junctions (our synapses).

Most importantly, however, like any modern, thriving city, when treated with the right care, attention, fuel and funding, it can be made to shift into a swirling pattern of change, regeneration, and growth.

The most amazing thing about this is, the more connections we have, the more connections we can have!

To prove this, let me take you far away, to a Nunnery…

The Nuns of Neuroscience

Who knew ‘Get thee to a Nunnery!’ could be such good advice, but, turned out old Will Shakespeare knew a thing or two.

Still ongoing after 40 years of research, The Nun Study has been studying the activities and mental capabilities of aging nuns (psychologists aren’t the most imaginative at naming things) and has found that even though the sisters over the age of 80 developed the physical symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, they showed little or no signs often attributed to it.

It was proposed that due to their lifestyle, as older nuns were expected to carry out equally physically and mentally laborious tasks as much as the younger or middle-aged sisters (carting sacks of food up stone steps, memorising and reciting large parts of scriptures, etc), though the physical effects of Alzheimer’s showed up in autopsies of their brains, the nuns rarely exhibited the symptoms, as NEW neural circuits were wrapped around the diseased areas.

Please, please, please, read that las sentence again, and really let it sink in: NEW neural circuits were wrapped around the diseased areas.

It wasn’t that the nuns were just stubborn little old ladies who couldn’t give a monkeys about these new-fangled degenerative diseases, it’s that their brains PHYSICALLY rewired themselves in order to carry out their duties. Or, maybe, it was the other way round. Causality is difficult to establish in this realm, but the point stands: the brain was physically changed.

And hey, you know what’s the really good news? You don’t have to even own a wimple if you want to do this yourself! (Though, if you do have a wimple, feel free to keep reading!)

That’s all of what Part Two is about, so… Stay tuned to learn more about Neuroplasticity, NICE models and to see how our dynamic duo escapes the fearsome chainsaw of their arch-nemesis, Captain Boredom…

Same Mindsways Time, same Mindsways Channel…