teachers featured in the award–winning film, ‘What the
Bleep Do We Know?’ He has also just published a new book ‘Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind ’, which gives remarkable in–depth coverage of how the brain works and how a person can change their brain by, literally, changing their mind. His work is contributing to a whole new way of seeing who and what human beings are, and what is possible for us as we move into the future.
After seeing Dr. Dispenza speak, and being charmed by his lively way of presenting the scientific concepts that underlie intentional actions, I asked him if he would be interested in being interviewed for Feminenza Magazine, to speak about his work, the discoveries he had made and specifically about some of the ideas in his new book ‘Evolve Your Brain.’ As we began our conversation, one of the first questions I asked had to do with hope...LL:You mention in your book that your explorations have led you to be very hopeful about human beings. This is inspiring to read. Can you open this up more? JD: When we live in emotionally afflicted or destructive states, there’s always a gap between the way things appear and the way things really are, that is, who we present ourselves to be and who we really are. As we begin to make changes in ourselves and give ourselves permission to go beyond our limitations, this gap tends to narrow. When who we truly are becomes more equal to the way we appear, this transparency allows us to do some amazing things. So I’m hopeful about this. When people break the veneer or façade of the image they present of themselves, there is a natural propensity towards generosity and wanting to affect the world positively, to bring about change, to contribute, to change the course of destiny. People who are truly inspired to get beyond their self–involvement because they’ve overcome certain things or they’ve fulfilled all their personal dreams, their next question is, how can I help to begin to contribute to the world, to help humanity, that is our natural state of being. LL: In ‘Evolve Your Brain’, you write about the possibility of changing the ‘self,’ that this is something that can be regularly re–wired. It sounds like you are saying that when we do this, we come into a more humanitarian or kind way of being. JD: Yes, I believe the personality or identity we have is changeable. Psychology says that by the time we are 35 or so, our personality is a ‘sealed deal’, which means we have a certain amount of automatic programs or scripts that we’ve memorized for use in any circumstance. In other words, we don’t have to learn anything new or even do anything differently because it might bump us out of our normal chemical continuity–you know, the regular comforts, predictable feelings, convenient beliefs or our routine habits that govern our very destiny. What we’re beginning to learn, from a neuro–scientific standpoint, is that the brain is not as hardwired as we once thought and that we are changed by every thought we have, by every experience we embrace, the things we do, our secret fantasies, our dreams, our hopes, etc. All those thought processes are literally perfecting, shaping and molding the brain. If we accept the idea that our thoughts have something to do with our destiny and with our future, why is it that we keep thinking the same thoughts every day? Why is it that we keep feeling the same feelings? And also, why is it that we have voices and chatter in our head that tend to talk us out of our own potential? The truth is that we are what we think, on a neurological level. We are what we do, on a neurological level. And that ultimately creates the habit of our self. To change then is to break the habit of being our [prior] self! We spend the majority of our life allowing the environment–the factors from our external world–to cause what we think and who we are. All the external stimuli–the people, things, and circumstances in our lives–activate different circuits in our brains. We begin to think and act equal to the environment. In other words, our environment causes us to think, and if it’s true that what we think creates our future, then this means that we only keep choosing and creating equal to what is familiar to us. To change then is to think and act differently in the same environment. To change is to think greater than how we feel. To change is to begin to execute new thoughts and force the brain to fire in new ways, to break the patterns and ways that the brain typically fires, so that new thoughts and new actions produce a new reality and a new life for people. LL: Do you see your book as a manual for brain training that begins to set up the steps for these kinds of changes? JD: Evolve Your Brain provides some sound pieces of evidence that point the way toward seeing that the brain is extremely changeable, and so are we! The difficulty is that we have to begin to address why we have trouble changing or why we keep falling back into the old habits. I wrote the book to help create the distinction between the two states of mind we live in–that is, states of survival or states of creation. When we live in survival, there are only a few things important to us. All of our attention is on the body, the environment, and time. When chemicals are released because we perceive a threat or we have a circumstance, real or imagined, that triggers that primitive nervous system, and that turns on the chemicals of stress, we begin to act like a hyper–animal in a survival situation. However, in the other state of mind, called creation, there is flourishing, expansion, growth, repair, and regeneration. When we live in a state of creation, there is no body, environment, or time. As a matter of fact, in a true state of creation, we completely forget about ourselves! We forget about our associations to our environment, our memories, and our habitual feelings. When we begin to learn how the brain works in this state of creation, we see that the brain can track changes, and begin to map those changes, and begin to create new neural networks that allow us to begin to evolve our thoughts and actions. So I wrote the book to try to create the distinction between living in survival–what it does to our brain and our body–and living in this intangible state of creation, which means that we‘ve created something in our brain, and we've practiced it so many times that it’s already mapped in the brain and it's already happened enough times in the brain, that it is now allowing us to have an effect on our future. LL: It sounds like two universes living closely side–by–side, with the step between them being bigger or smaller, depending on the person's awareness of the distinction. JD: Sure, and my interest and study in spontaneous remissions is one of the things that prompted me to write the book because I’ve witnessed some pretty amazing health changes in people who began to break the habit of being themselves and instead began to mentally rehearse new states of being, and then become able to demonstrate consistently what they’ve mentally rehearsed, and to set themselves up for new experiences. LL: Your description in the opening chapter of the book, regarding the self–healing process you went through after massively injuring your spine in the triathlon bike accident, was astounding. I found it deeply inspiring. JD: This event forced me to ask some important questions I probably wouldn't have asked if I’d continued on the timeline my life was on at that point. When you are young and have everything you want, you’re living life in a euphoric state and all of sudden that’s taken away from you… I had to actually ask myself if I was willing to trust in the phenomenon and trust in the process, and I think that's when I began to see that not only is it a philosophical concept, it is also a very real thing that people can begin to do. LL: It is probably clear to most people that our bodies need healing of one kind or another. Do you also see the human race, and world situation, as needing healing? JD: [laughs] Yes, quantum physics says the environment is the extension of our mind. I think the first stage in making measurable changes in our own environment is to make measurable changes within our selves and within our personal lives. Once we can clean up some of those afflictive emotions that exist within us, we’ll be amazed at what type of affects we can have in leading changes in the world as the first step. You can't have a complete aversion to war, or to the problem of oil, or to some of the ways of capitalism, if you have hatred within yourself or embrace the same emotions that are the reasons for the global conditions that exist. Not only do we have to begin to think differently, we also have to demonstrate it. As I’ve described in the last chapter of the book, you have to be able to apply it, to do exactly the things that are equal to what you've thought, so that you can create a new state of being. I believe that for the most part we all have good intentions and want to see changes in the world, yet we have to begin to make those changes within ourselves first if we are ever going to lead people to greater outcomes in their lives. LL: In thinking about the larger issues, and what might be called for from the human race as a whole, do you think that a handful of individuals–working effectively on themselves and from this platform looking to help others–can affect change in a larger way? Do you think it’s going to take some kind of critical mass? JD: I think there’ll be a real significant intellectual and social division, to do with the momentum and the inertia and with how things are moving in our present time. Consumerism, capitalism, comfort and convenience–all these states allow us to be subdued into thinking that we have free will when we really don’t. This causes the human brain to become somewhat lazy and to take things at face value. We have to come to a point where comfort doesn't matter, and consumerism doesn't matter. We have to come to a point where we believe in morals and ethics and principles, and we’re willing to be uncomfortable and uncompromising to our principles and beliefs, so much so that we’re beyond reproach, so that no thing or circumstance would cause us to fall back into dependence on any of those circumstances. That takes human will, and that takes being a charismatic leader and having an idea in your mind and living as if that idea has already manifested, living as if that idea is already existing. If you live as if that idea already exists, then you can’t compromise because that idea is true and real to you. Then, not only do you begin to get the power of the universe behind you because now your thoughts and actions are congruent–the end result of that is we have true leadership. There are many people in history who have been this–Martin Luther King, Gandhi, William Wallace–they all believed in an idea in their minds and lived as if this already existed. I believe that is the beauty behind personal change, and it takes a good amount of effort to do that. LL: Could you say something about the research mentioned in your book to do with Buddhist monks and their meditational practices? JD: The concept of mind has been so elusive for most people. The idea that mind is unchangeable and that the brain cannot change as well; this idea of consciousness seems to be so mystical for most people. My interest has been in being able to define the brain, the mind, and consciousness in such a way that shows that people can begin to take control of themselves and their lives. Experiments that were done at the University of Wisconsin by Dr. Davidson clearly show that we can make those types of changes and we can measure mind. With the advent of functional brain scans that allow us to see a brain in action, to see a brain at work or recording thought processes over a period of time, we began to break from conventional methods. Dr. Davidson wanted to see if we could change our thoughts, ultimately change our minds, and if we could make the brain and mind work better. So he had these monks focus on a single–minded thought, like compassion or loving kindness or divinity. He asked another group of people who had never meditated before to do the same, and they practiced for about a week, learning single–minded focus. He hooked their brains up to 250 electrodes that measured brain wave activity. He asked the monks to focus on that single–minded thought. In a matter of seconds, the moment they went from being their normal identity to focusing on a single–minded thought, their brains had significant, measurable changes. The part of the brain called the frontal lobe began to turn on and light up to an extent that was remarkable to the scientists. Now when they asked the control group to focus on a single–minded thought like compassion or loving kindness–they weren’t able to sustain their attention or their focus anywhere near what the monks were doing. Now the monks had 40,000 hours plus of focused meditation and probably 40 to 50 years of practice. What this experiment showed was that we can not only make our brains work better, but maybe it's a skill, like golf or tennis, and the more we practice it, the more we can coordinate the brain and begin to have it work in more functional ways. The brain scans showed that the waves that were created by the monks were causing synchrony or harmony in the brain; that particular state is what causes nerve cells to ‘gang up’ and to wire in new ways. When I read the article about this experiment, I thought not only does it show that we can change the brain and the mind, but we have to bring in this idea called ‘consciousness’ now because the brain is the organ that actually processes thought, where intellect and memory exist–it's the central processing unit of the body, it controls all other systems. And the mind is the brain in action, the brain at work. So the question is, who‘s changing the brain and the mind? It’s that uncomfortable 13 letter word called ‘consciousness’, that immaterial aspect of ourselves that begins to manipulate the substructures of the brain to produce mind. Only when we are conscious and only when we are aware and only when we pay attention and we are present, that's the state in which we eliminate the environment and all the stimuli and begin to make changes in the brain at a more permanent level. And you don't have to be a monk to do it! LL: Are you saying that at certain moments we are able to open ourselves to some kind of higher energy–whatever we might call it–that pervades everything? Is this a spiritual notion that you are talking about? Can you say more about what you mean by consciousness? JD: Consciousness is that immaterial aspect of self that has eluded most philosophers and scientists… for as long as people have been looking for it! What the experiment may show is that the brain is the organ that processes thought and, as such, is just an organ like a liver or a kidney. If mind is the brain in action–what the brain does–then the mind can’t change the mind because the mind is the product of the brain, the product of the brain in action. By deduction, the only thing that’s left is that immaterial self that then separates itself from the hardwired programs within the brain to begin to control how the brain works, and to begin to produce different levels of mind. So there IS an immaterial, spiritual aspect about it. We begin to use that part of the brain called the frontal lobe that is the most recent development in our neurological framework. It’s the largest part of the brain and most people never really use it to its full potential. LL: So if I realized the need in myself for more self–confidence and I wanted to actively open myself to this kind of essence or quality, can you suggest practically what I might do, what I might try to envision? How would I pull various aspects together to get my frontal lobe to focus on this particular quality? JD: That’s a great question! Well, if you think about it, the only difference between a person who has confidence and one who doesn’t is that one person’s brain is wired for it and the other one’s isn't. They've applied a certain amount of knowledge and philosophy to have the experience, the feeling of being confident. And remember, feelings and emotions are the end–product of an experience. When we're in the midst of an experience, when we are seeing, smelling, feeling, tasting, and touching, all of our five senses are recording information from the environment and are sending it through five different pathways back to the brain, causing neurons to gang up, fire and string together. When they do that, they release a chemical and that chemical is a feeling. That’s why we can remember experiences better because we can remember how they feel. So a person who actually is confident has applied a certain amount of knowledge, and modified their behaviour to have an experience that produces the feeling of confidence. They learned how to think, act and be confident. Now the person who doesn’t have confidence hasn’t had the experience yet that produces that feeling. So if we were to begin to look at how to wire the brain to do that, we'd have to ask ourselves some very important questions… like what would it be like to be confident? What would I have to change about myself to be a confident person? Who do I know in my life who is confident and what are their qualities and characteristics? When I’m not confident, what do I do and how do I act? Who in history do I admire that was a confident person or is a confident person? When we begin to ask ourselves these questions, the frontal lobe turns on and it begins to force the brain to look for solutions. It begins to use the amassed information, either philosophically from things we've learned knowledge–wise or through certain experiences that we’ve had when we've felt that or observed it in others. It begins to force the brain to produce a new state of mind, to fire in a new way, in new combinations, in new sequences, in new patterns. As we begin to think about this, we’re forcing the brain to begin to develop new circuits and new connections. We’re creating a new level of mind. If mind is the brain in action and we’re thinking new thoughts in new ways, we’re producing a new level of mind. Would you agree? LL: Yes, definitely! JD: Studies on mental rehearsal show that if you took, for instance, piano players and people who never played the piano and you set them side by side and asked them to practice scales and chords for two hours a day for five days and we took a brain scan of their brains before and after, at the end of five days they would all grow new circuits in their brains because they learned something new, they demonstrated it, they repeated it, and they paid attention. That’s how you grow new brain circuits. If you take another group of people and you ask them to mentally rehearse playing the scales and chords without ever touching the piano, they would grow the same circuits in their brain as if the person were actually physically demonstrating it. LL: That’s amazing. JD: When we’re truly focused, the brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s happening inside and what’s happening in the external worlds. In other words, we can change our brain just by thinking. So then the question is, what do we physically demonstrate all day long and what do we mentally rehearse? What we mentally rehearse and physically demonstrate is who we are on a neurological level. If we began to ask our selves the ‘what if&'146; questions, the ‘what would it be like’ questions, and sat down long enough to wait for an answer, and begin to concept ourselves–just like the piano players–we would begin to force the brain to fire in new combinations, new sequences and new patterns, and produce a new level of mind. If we did that every single day, and we spent 45 minutes to an hour rehearsing what it would be like to be a confident person, we would begin to cause those nerve circuits to become more hardwired. The principle in neuro–science is ‘nerves that fire together, wire together’ and so the more we think thoughts about being confident and embrace the idea of what it would be like, the more the brain begins to solidify those circuits. Now, it’s not enough to stop there. You have to get out and actually apply and personalize or demonstrate exactly what you just rehearsed. But if you did it first thing in the morning it should be easy because that ideal of yourself–of what you’ve just rehearsed–you've just warmed up the right brain circuits so that when you walk into your day, you are firing brain circuits of the new self instead of the old self. If you can actually demonstrate confidence because you've just rehearsed it, it should be easier because you have everything in place. Once you have the experience where you actually feel confident or do something which produces the feeling of confidence, now you’re beginning to create long term memories. But it's not enough to stop there either! You have to be able to repeat the experience, and that’s when we hardwire it. When we can repeat the experience and do it at will and make it look natural, 2nd nature, easy and familiar–now we’re changing memory systems in the brain. Now we’re taking what’s called ‘explicit’ memories and making them ‘implicit’ or making it a habit, making it a skill, making a conditioned response. That’s the point when the person now has wired herself to be the natural state of being called confidence. LL: So you are saying that by starting with the ideas, we end up actually creating confidence in our very matter, making it part of the material of ourselves! JD: Absolutely! On a cellular level, you change things–i.e., the state of not having confidence to the state of having it. LL: It sounds like you are saying we–re actually creating new templates for living. JD: Yes, the brain loves to replace old models with new models–that’s what it does very well. So if you don’t give it a new model, and you don’t begin to apply it and personalise and demonstrate it, you stay philosophical with it. You never have the experience. You stay separate from it. But we have to begin to modify our thoughts and behaviour to have the experience. Now, the experience sends a new signal to the cells because the brain chemistry is now producing peptides that are turning on the different chemicals in the body, so now the mind and the body are both having the experience. The knowledge that we learn, the philosophy we learn, is for the mind, and the experience is for the body. So when we have the mind and the body working together, we have the heart open, we have wisdom, we have the power of the universe behind us, because the union of mental rehearsal and physical rehearsal produces that state of being. We go from thinking to doing to being. LL: You write in your book about how when we begin a new thought, in a sense we are shutting out body, environment and time. Does it make sense to say that with the physical outplay, we bring it–the new thought–back into body, environment and time? JD: Yes, you got it! Now you are in a new state of being, and that new self has the ability to observe a future, to begin to have the flow of the universe behind him or her. That's when quantum physics works at its best. We can’t continue to be the same person. Einstein said, ‘You can’t resolve a problem with the same consciousness that created it!’ In other words, you can’t overcome any circumstance in your life with the same consciousness that’s created those circumstances. You’ve got to go to a new consciousness, a new state of being. Once that new state of being is natural, or second nature, and easy, then being confident is wired within us, and we have that flow going through us. And of course, then we can go beyond the limits of that which created the problem in the first place. LL: It’s really helpful to hear the mechanic of it sketched out in such an intricate and compelling way. At the end of your book, you are speculating about quantum physics, and how scientists are beginning to talk more about how the mind effects change at the quantum levels, yet there is still the belief that we don’t effect change in the big worlds. It sounds like you believe our views about this are going to change. JD: Descartes, Newton, and others said mind and matter were separate things. At the quantum level, that’s not the case, mind and matter are merged. You can’t have a quantum experiment without having an observer present, which means the mind now is in the equation. When you talk to quantum physicists about mind affecting the nature of reality, they’ll tell you it works for some atomic particles, it works for some things, but it doesn't work for very large things. Well, maybe we're just poor observers! I suggest in the book a very simple idea–if we make our mind work better and produce a mind that’s separate from survival, and we live in these states of joy and confidence, and unconditional love, and freedom of expression and awe and wonder, then that’s a natural state of being. When we live in these states, and we’ve re–wired our brain, and we’ve practiced it enough so that now it’s within our very being, then we should see measurable changes in our life. As we change our mind, and as the environment is an extension of our mind, once we change our mind, we should look for some feedback, something different in our world as a result of the change in mind. That–s how it works. LL: As you speak, it leads me to wonder more about the purpose of human life. I know it’s a huge question but if we are meant to be processing life, changing, and evolving our brains in this way, I wonder what you see as our ultimate purpose? What, as far as you are concerned, is this evolution of consciousness for? JD: I see us all as elements of consciousness expressed in different ways, and our job is to have new experiences, to learn and apply that knowledge to have more new experiences. If, in the quantum field, there’s an infinite amount of experiences possible, then we should have an infinite amount of emotions that are a result of those experiences. If we continue learning and growing and evolving, we move from more primitive states of mind in survival to more heightened divine states of being. I think this just takes a certain amount of will and determination. So I see my life as a scientific experience–that every person and thing in my life is some extension of how I’m wired internally. If I want to make some changes in my life, the first place I make those changes is the wiring and neurochemistry within myself, and once that’s changed, then if my environment is an extension of my mind, if I’ve changed what’s wired within me, then the external world should begin to show me some feedback in the form of new circumstances and new opportunities that I’m now wired to experience. LL: At the end of your book you talk about the importance of love. Could you say something about how that fits into the equation? JD: [laughing] That is the equation. You know when you’ve overcome yourself; you’ve overcome some afflictive state of mind. When you’ve broken through some destructive emotional state, you now have a sense of love for yourself, because you now feel like you’ve made some purposeful movement in your life. I think one of the biggest things is people feel empty when it comes to that sense of love. If we have that sense of love through people in our lives, relationships, children and pets, and things we love to do–shopping, golf, whatever–we’re reliant on something external to us in order to feel that feeling. When we overcome our self and begin to demonstrate new states of mind, we begin to fall in love with our self… because the chemistry in our body begins to change as well. When we get good at this and that feeling becomes a consistent state, we are unaffected by the circumstances in our life and, because of that, are able to give and love and maintain a higher quality of life because it’s now consistent within us. Falling in love with yourself, falling in love with ideas, falling in love with ideals, dreams, and visions, and putting your energy into those dreams and visions–living as if it has already happened–when it manifests, when it shows up, when you’ve reached that particular end, you have a greater sense of self–not in the ego sense but in the egoless sense because you no longer have to be reliant on anything anymore. It’s within you. When we begin to reach out, to make headway, to see we’re making changes, we begin to move into a more balanced state. I believe that that balanced state, that centre, is really what love is. LL: That’s wonderful, and thank you for the time you’ve given for this interview. It’s been great talking with you. Is there anything else you'd like to bring in about the work you've been doing and what affect you hope it might have on people? JD: Perhaps simply to say that it’s not just about when we make these changes in our selves, it is also about how this affects other generations. We’re the leaders of today and if we begin to make measurable changes for ourselves, it affects our history. In this, we should never wait for science to give us permission to do the uncommon, to be leaders, to believe. We need to not make science another religion, but to be mavericks, to step outside of convention, to do the uncommon, to do great things. And then have science come and study us and say, ‘What was it that you just did, and let’s see you do it again?’ Then we will have hardwired some really important things for ourselves! LL: Excellent! Thank you, Joe, for all you’ve given, in your work, in your new book, and in this interview. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. About the author: Liz Lyell is a writer, lecturer, and speaker living in the USA. She has taught philosophy and religion for 20 years in various institutions in Seattle, WA., and also worked with a programme entitled ‘Philosophy for Children’, helping children to reflect on and reason about their life questions and concerns. Presently, she is director of Feminenza, Seattle, affiliated with Feminenza International which is working with women all over the world, offering educational and economic support; and with both genders, helping men and women work together in a world that needs a new kind of teamwork. She can be contacted at Elizabeth.Lyell@feminenza.org close window | |
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