Monday, November 29, 2010

Personal Development – It’s How You Use Your Brain That Matters

For anyone interested in their own personal development, you may be interested in recent research that shows that “thinkers’ brains are different”. The suggestion is that how you think depends on the development of certain regions of the brain – but in fact, it’s the other way around: the development of particular regions of your brain is related to how much you use them! Your mind power is dependant upon the choices that you make.

Nobody is born a ‘thinker’ – just like nobody is born a London cabbie or taxi driver, yet an area of their brains is highly developed and, in fact, larger than the normal brain because of the hoops that they have to jump through to learn ‘The Knowledge’ – how to get from A to B using all kinds of circuitous routes. Some years ago, research proved that the use to which these guys and girls put their brain had a measurable effect on the size and shape of their brain.

More recently, neuro-psychological research demonstrates that the human brain exhibits a considerable capability for what is called plasticity – in other words, the shape, characteristics and development of the brain depends on how it is used and the extent to which one area of the brain may have to take control of the functions of another part of the brain that has been damaged.

The important point is that our brains, their functionality and capacity, depends on what we do with them – not the other way around. Many people with whom I’ve worked in my practice thought that they were stupid, slow or incapable of understanding things that ‘clever’ people understood. Their perception of their own intellectual skills did not relate to the physiology of their brains – it was related to the fact that, during their formative years, they had incorrectly learned their own self-image which, as adults, prevented them from employing their brains in an expansive way.

Each of us has limiting perceptions about ourselves – we were each conditioned during our childhood years – now, those self-perceptions hold us back from accessing and benefiting from our natural potential. However, all you have to do to be all that you can be is to drop your preconceived notions. Even the size of your brain will respond to your new found self understanding.


View the original article here

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