Super Brain

Everyone stands in awe of the brain. Your brain not only interprets the world, it creates it.

Everything you see, hear, touch, taste, and smell would have none of those qualities without the brain. Whatever you experience today—your morning coffee, the love you feel for your family, a brilliant idea at work—has been specifically customized solely for you.

Stop giving away your power. Most people are more than happy to give away their power by degrees, till it’s gradually lost when they don’t notice it. Why? Because being powerless seems like an easy way to be popular, accepted, and protected.

Examine why it’s “good” to be a victim. You can make the suffering you endure into a kind of virtue, as all martyrs do. It’s good to be a martyr when you serve a higher spiritual purpose or a religious belief, but most people sacrifice themselves on the altar of worthless causes.

Develop a mature self. To be mature is a choice; to reach adulthood is an achievement regardless of how old you happen to be.

Align yourself with the flow of evolution, or personal growth. We all desire more and better things for ourselves. If those more and better things are good for your growth, then you’re guiding your own evolution.

Healing is as natural as breathing, and therefore the key to healing is a lifestyle that optimizes what the body is already doing.

Most powerful CEOs tend to be quiet, organized people who have learned the secret of shaping situations toward goals they want to achieve.

People who feel powerless have trained themselves by absorbing negative experiences.

Neurons are neutral about messages of success or failure.

The mistake we make is to limit these skills. You are asking very little of your brain when you stop asking it to perfect new skills every day.

Knowledge is not rooted in facts; it is rooted in curiosity.

No brain was ever inspired, but when you are, you trigger a cascade of reactions that light up the brain, while the incurious brain is basically asleep.

One inspired teacher can alter a student for life by instilling curiosity

There is evidence that we may prevent symptoms of senility and brain aging by remaining socially engaged and intellectually curious during our entire lifetime.

Like a bright pupil, you must remain open to the things you don’t know, being receptive rather than close-minded.

There’s no owner’s manual for the brain, but it needs nourishment, repair, and proper management all the same.

The proper nourishment for the brain is mental as well as physical: smoking can expose your brain to danger. Anger and fear, stress and depression also are a kind of misuse.

A new study has shown that routine daily stress shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision making, correcting errors, and assessing situations.

The super brain credo bridges two worlds, biology and experience. Biology is great at explaining physical processes, but it is totally inadequate at telling us about the meaning and purpose of our subjective experience.

The minute you say, “My memory isn’t what it used to be,” you are actually training your brain to live up to your diminished expectations. Low expectations mean low results.

One of the unique things about the human brain is that it can do only what it thinks it can do.

The first rule of super brain is that your brain is always eavesdropping on your thoughts. As it listens, it learns.

You won’t know what your brain can do until you test its limits and push beyond them.

When neurons and synapses are lost owing to injury, the neighboring neurons compensate for the loss and try to reestablish missing connections, which effectively rebuilds the damaged neural network.

When bits of the cerebral cortex were removed, the brain would sprout new projections, form new synapses to take advantage of other senses, using the cues that remained, however tiny.

Researchers showed that the total number of nerve cells in your brain at age twenty does not significantly change when you reach seventy.

If the day ever comes when you regret your choice, you can retire to a humble, grateful, and wise human, meditate upon compassion, and shape the brain’s circuitry in a new, higher direction. The choice is always there.

Pay attention to the things you will need to remember later. Most memory lapses are actually learning lapses.

If a memory doesn’t come immediately, don’t brush it off as lost. Be patient and take the extra seconds for the brain’s retrieval system to work.

Expect to keep your memory intact. Resist lower expectations from people who rationalize memory loss as “normal.”

Focus on things or people you associate with the lost memory and you will likely recall it. All memories are associated with other earlier ones. This is the basis of learning.

The outcome of your life depends on how you deal with its darkest moments. Will they be turning points or setbacks?

Wisdom can be an incentive to conquer the difficulties, transforming frustration and defeat into turning points and breakthroughs.

Whether you struggle due to the recession, a controlling spouse, or the anonymity of routine work, it’s crucial to find your power, all the more so when the world’s wisdom traditions keep repeating, age after age, that infinite power is hidden inside every individual.

Being your own placebo is the same as freeing up the healing system through messages from the brain. All healing is, in the end, self-healing.

All healing is, in the end, self-healing. Physicians aid the body’s intricate healing system, but actual healing takes place in an unknown way.