How I rewired my brain in six weeks

BBC

How I rewired my brain in six weeks

There is growing evidence that simple, everyday changes to our lives can alter our brains and change how they work. Melissa Hogenboom put herself into a scanner to find out.

"It's surprisingly hard to think of nothing at all", is one of my first thoughts as I'm lying in the maw of a machine that is scanning my brain. I was told to focus on a black cross while the functional Magnetic Resonance Imagine (fMRI) machine does its noisy work. It also feels impossible to keep my eyes open. The hum of the scanner is somewhat hypnotic, and I worry a little bit that drifting off will affect how my brain appears on the resulting images.

As a science journalist I've always been fascinated by the workings of the mind, which is how I found myself inside a scanner at Royal Holloway, University of London, to have my brain examined before embarking on a six-week brain-altering course.

My goal was to investigate whether there's a way we can influence meaningful brain change ourselves. By altering aspects of my daily life, I hoped to find out if it is possible to strengthen crucial connections in our brain, and keep our mind healthier in the process. Along the way I learnt techniques we can all use – with some powerful results.
Simple mindfulness exercises can help keep our minds healthy, research shows (Credit: BBC)

More of this lurid nonsense at link: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230912-how-i-hacked-my-brain

 

She starts of by saying it's hard to think of nothing at all, but then that only her specific thoughts from her exercise were able to correctly rewire her brain? Wow! I didn't know neuroscience was this far, researchers have told me it's still in the stage of abstractions of Hodgkin-Huxley, but it seems she's got it all figured out. All she needs is another 6 weeks of brain rewiring where she opens her third eye telling her how "neurons that fire together, wire together" and soon after she should be smart enough that we can read her first paper on quatum field theory.

 

About as fascinating as the fact that using muscles will physically change them. Which it is, it's just very basic and doesn't mean much. All this mysticism is just a distraction. Maybe it would have been so much more interesting if celestial beings were behind nature and its physical laws, and magic existed, or something like it. But no, it's not and it can mostly be described with math. If you skip the observations and the math because you really want to find the cosmic dragons or some deity or another, you're not getting anywhere with it. And you know, stars and planets do influence life on Earth, doesn't make astrology any real.

The fact that the article keeps talking about "our bodies and our brains" as if our brains were not part of our bodies is just annoying. Of course they're tied together. Literally they are. Physically. It's an organism, a collection of organs working closely together as one system. That's also true of our livers and a bunch of other stuff. This woo is just boring and unimaginative.

 

hmm, the cult of meditation has been around a long while

I should know, when my ME started, something about the way my mind worked changed significantly along with the sudden onset of recurring virus and severe seasonal allergy. I felt like I was becoming a zombie. I was weak, very tired and cognitively it felt like mental collapse, like the vitality I thought of as my "self" had ceased to exist or had become somehow different. At the time I felt very lost and was in the process of negotiating with the powers that be to take an extra year to sit finals.

When I bumped into a friend, who was a medical student, he suggested I visit a meditation group he was part of. I was open to anything which might bring about beneficial change. It turned out to be a minor cult. Its methods were derived from the hippie era involvement with guru cults, like the Beatles' fling with transcendental meditation. These were vulnerable people, like myself, with the best of intentions but the poorest of teachers. Though it changes its name and its show runners, the chain of delusion stretches back for millenia, through generations and a series of cults. This is how memes evolve.

I was young and suddenly ill and in a vulnerable state. I was easily persuaded to try something new even though it went against my sceptical nature precisely because scepticism and science had got me nowhere and I needed a miracle. Medical doctors were unable to help and one even said, of my account of my symptoms, "that does not happen", turning scepticism against me as a patient to deny my existence and solve their problem that way.

The ideation of the meditation cult I encountered involved tricks of reason which I think had evolved as memes to bring about the suspension of critical faculties, which I now consider is one sign of a cult. I was lucky that within a few months the unstable politics of the cult leadership caused fractures in the facade of the divine guru and in the chaos I broke free and deprogrammed myself, realising immediately how badly I had been hoodwinked and all the while I was still suffering from quite severe ME and was deeply upset by having been drawn into this strange belief system.

I say that because I see the familiar signs of that same cult of meditation behind this BBC broadcast, which uses scientific empirical techniques to measure the effect of the behaviours recommended by the cult of meditation. Though these changes appear to be real, that does not prove a benefit. Its like the Lightning Protocol, people can believe anything if they think their salvation depends on it.

I would contend this learned behaviour involves an addictive element and depending on the individual, can involve narcissism and escapism as a way to addict individuals to repetitive practices which rewire their brains to be more narcissistic and more escapist in a self reinforcing methodology i.e. it is addictive but that does not make it good for you and its like anything, a healthy organism does grow and change to accommodate its activity.

The question is what is beneficial activity? My answer would be, whatever it is you want to achieve! Unfortunately, I have found my ME interferes with physical exercise, which I used to undertake as part of my rowing training. It appears to disrupt anabolic processes. All I have left is the plasticity of my nervous system, so I write about why ME needs to be understood better so that I get better at writing about why ME needs to be understood better! Because ...

 

Thanks and I know what you mean, IMHO as we have said before on S4ME though its worth stating again for the record, this kind of unrealistic magical "mind over matter" approach comes under the broader category of shamanic tendency and if you ask me, BPS is exactly this kind of perspective, translated into a pseudo scientific terminology.

The people in the group I briefly interacted with mostly accepted ideas about how 'past life karma' created the differences in current life experience. The misery of an individual was projected into a fantasy history augmenting their identity, which was self justifying in explaining their circumstances. It gave them a sense of detachment that they were something more than their suffering and would one day overcome it on the one hand but the price was ignoring the common sense idea of an external reality with happenstances we cannot control causing the differences in our respective fortunes, in favour of believing every misfortune was the individual's own fault and the individual had the power to overcome them if they just do more of the thing being sold, which is another psychologically addictive meme associated with many new age cults and pyramid schemes and is the same marketing trick as the patient blaming which goes on in BPS and LP "therapy".

I can see why commentators on S4ME would tend to reject this! See above.

Though I think it is worth talking about as it doesn't hurt to mull it over a bit and try to find eloquent and rational ways of putting it down, for those rainy days where it crops up in the media, again.

 

I often find myself thinking that this wave of post-psychoanalysis psychosomatic therapies is the product of the new age movement.

A lot of it is escapism fueled by a doctrine of positive thinking to cope with an unpleasant reality. Since "recovery" is a very positive thing, it figures prominently in the wishful thinking. It's all about psyching themselves up with positive thoughts, irrespective of whether there is any connection to reality or not.