Your Plastic Brain
Harnessing the brain’s plasticity, or ability to change, you can use your mind to change your brain’s hardwired neuronal connections by making good on your meta-intentions.
Metaphysics. Metastatic. Metaverse. Metaphor. Metabolic. Metatarsal. What’s ‘meta’?
You could think of it as ‘above’ or ‘after’ or ‘outside of’. Metaphysics is an attempt to garner knowledge about things that physics can’t explain, things like the nature of identity, truth, personhood, value.
A meta-intention is an attitudinal stance, a decision say, about how you want to act in particular instances. For example, say I know that every time someone cuts me off on the freeway, I get mad and my blood pressure goes up, I can form a resolve, a meta-intention, to react differently going forward. Instead of getting amped up when someone cuts me off, I can choose to smile and take ten deep breaths thereby focusing on my own wellbeing. Every time I stick to the plan instead of flipping the offending driver off, I succeed in following through on my meta-intention. Not only do I make good on my resolve, I also get a dopamine hit, a chemical gift from my brain’s built-in reward center, part of the limbic system.
I can’t say that I always, or even mostly, follow through on my meta-intentions. And I have lots of them, you could call them strategies for ameliorating negative behavioral tendencies. I might have a general resolve to drink a glass of water for every glass of wine I drink at a dinner party, but it’s doubtful that I do most of the time. Mild hangovers notwithstanding, mostly this doesn’t have an adverse impact on my life but when it comes to rumination, that’s a whole other realm.
I’m naturally a ruminator which means it has taken me quite some effort to best my tendencies and (mostly) focus on the positive. And despite being skeptical of anything New Agey or pop psychology-ish, I’m fessing up to using affirmations as a way to rewire my brain’s habitual workings. In short, when I notice my habitual, well-worn negative thoughts on repeat, I stop and counter the negative with a positive statement. Little by little, I’m rewiring my brain by using my executive decision-making capacities and ( most of the time) following through on my decision to accentuate the positive. To be clear, I’m not bypassing negativity, I’m choosing to empower positive thoughts.
Meta-intentionality and decision-making takes place in the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain responsible for long-term planning and goal setting. These executive functions direct our behaviour and have far-reaching consequences. Much of our behaviour is governed by the limbic and reptilian areas of the brain (mammalian brain) which control emotions, memory, maintaining homeostasis and basic survival.
Although we talk about the ‘rational,’ ‘emotional,’ and ‘reptilian’ brains, it’s a mistake to think of them as isolated independently operating systems. They all influence each other and micro changes in the brain have attendant neurophysiological, biochemical, motor, and psychological effects.
Since the brain requires so much energy to run (20% of your body’s total calorie consumption), it creates neural pathways to make many behaviours and thought patterns habitual, and even automatic, in order to reduce energy consumption. A neural pathway is created when two neurons fire in response to stimuli and forge an electro-chemical connection.
Neurons that fire together, wire together and the connections between neurons in different parts of the brain get stronger and thicker each time the neural pathway is activated, which explains why reactions become hard-wired. For example, think of a lemon and notice which parts of your tongue immediately react. That tingling along the sides and towards the back is because your brain has made an automatic connection between sourness and those areas of your tongue.
Now think of something that makes you anxious or frightened and noticed what happens in your body. That’s easy for me, all I have to do is hear the the word ‘R-T’ (rhymes with cat) and I tense up. Even reading about them makes me anxious and my reaction upon seeing one is a mixture of fear and disgust. This hardwiring is a result of a terrifying experience as a child.
‘Long-term potentiation’ (LTP) is the term given to the strengthening of connections between neurons. The stronger the connection, the more difficult it becomes to break thought and behavioral patterns. Cue me screaming on seeing a R-T in the street or even on TV.
Fortunately rodent sightings are not too frequent but, just like you, I have lots of thinking and behavioural propensities that might be best ameliorated. The good news is that the interface between my brain’s hardware and my mental capacities is malleable. Yours too! Harnessing the brain’s plasticity, or ability to change, you can use your mind to change your brain’s hardwired neuronal connections by making good on your meta-intentions. Every time you do, you get rewarded in the form of a dopamine hit.
Long-term depression’ (LDP) is the process whereby the brain unlearns associations and disconnects neurons. I have been trying this in relation to R-Ts. Every now and then, whilst sitting on our outdoor patio, I see a R-T in a tree, or on the roof of the building next door. Even though they are smaller and different colored than those gargantuan ones you see on the New York subway, they seem almost benign by comparison, my system still goes into freak out mode. Slowly I’m gaining control over my reactivity and my nervous system by telling myself that it can’t hurt me, that it’s just a creature trying to survive like any other. Every time I do this, I’m using by brain’s inherent plasticity to down regulate my nervous system and become more sovereign in my being.
For those of you who could care less about those four-legged annoyances, this may sound like small change but for me it’s huge and it has taken massive amounts of work. And my ability to become more empowered around what was one of my biggest fears in life (seeing or being close to a R-T) has knock on effects. If I can get a grip on my conditioning and rewire my automatic tendencies in this regard, I can do it in other places too. For context, this fear was a full-blown phobia of mine to the extent that said creatures would show up in my dreams at times when I was extremely stressed or worried about something.
Rewiring your brain is a practice. I like to think of it as an empowerment strategy. It’s not easy but most worthwhile things aren’t. We do them anyway. Being happy also takes practice, happy people accentuate the positive without denying that things aren’t always perfect, or easy, or even controllable. Reframing helps. The trick is to choose where you place your attention. Yoga practitioners know this. We use our breath as an anchor for awareness. Over and over, distraction by distraction, random thought by random thought, we shift attention to the movement of breath in body and gain some freedom from the trappings of the mind. However momentarily.
Having a meta-intention to be happy is having a desire about the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live. It doesn’t mean being happy all the time. It means cultivating resilience so that you can thrive even when thing are great, or how you want them to be. Reframing situations and circumstance helps, as does choosing how you want to play the deck you’ve been handed and knowing you can shift your behavioral tendencies. But knowing is a poor substitute for action and doing the work is crucial. Virtuosity arises from practice.
High quality relationships and feeling like your life has both meaning and purpose predict happiness levels. I venture that feeling empowered does too. By changing your mental tapes and choosing new thoughts and beliefs, you can use the brain’s inherent architecture and formal capacities to recreate yourself. Doing so makes your life a creative project, an empowerment strategy in action. What’s not to like about this?