Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain

Jan 21

Posted in Reviews

A little while ago I read Sharon Begley’s book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain – the title has an obvious relevance to my “Change Your Mind” course.

It’s about “neuroplasticity”, the phenomenon whereby not just the content but the structure of brains is subject to change, and is based around one of the Dalai Lama’s Word and Life Conferences on that topic.

Begley has a slightly annoying habit of comparing an idealized Buddhism favourably to a misconstrued Christianity, and an also slightly annoying habit of using flashy similes in an attempt to communicate to a popular audience – though it’s not anything like as annoying as the hearty stupid folksiness of a “For Dummies” book. But the research itself is fascinating, the experiments are well described and the implications carefully teased out. Basically, by concentrated attention we can change how our brains work, including making ourselves more compassionate and accepting towards others. This is definitely good news.

Since reading it, I’ve come to realize that a big part of what I’m doing in my hypnotherapy room is redirecting people’s attention. A lot of the power of habits, addictions and even some symptoms comes from their function in keeping our attention away from things that distress us. What I try to help people to do is pay attention to their lives as they are, and deal with the distress in a straightforward, adult way: acknowledging that it’s there and then letting it go. And by doing this through a recording or through practices such as engaging the relaxation response or the Welcoming Practice, they retrain their minds and so change their brains.

There’s a fascinating experiment described in the book which shows how powerfully we can be affected by what we pay attention to. The experimenters took a group of monkeys and set them all up with headphones and little devices that would tap them gently on the hand. They played a set of sounds and a set of taps, the same ones for all the monkeys, which changed from time to time, independently of each other. They divided the monkeys into two groups. One group got a juice reward for responding to a change in the sounds, but not to a change in the taps; the other group, vice versa. They then examined the monkeys’ brains. The monkeys who had been paying attention to the sounds (because they were rewarded for doing so) had more development of the parts of their brains that dealt with sound, while the tap-attending monkeys had more development of the parts of their brains relating to sensing with the fingers.

What are you paying attention to?