Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves by Sharon Begley Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves
Book Review: Re-Wire the Brain to Get out of Depression Too
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist and I'm so glad that Sharon Begley wrote this book. I will recommend it to my fellow therapists as it has even broader application than my own book BRAINSWITCH OUT OF DEPRESSION which is more specific to depression. I've had great success training people to re-wire their brains to quickly get out of the pain of depression by using simple mind exercises to switch their neuronal activity from the feeling part of the brain (the subcortex) to the thinking part of the brain (the neocortex). So I can personally attest to the feasibility and practicality of what Begley writes about.
Book Review: RE-WIRING `HARDWIRED DOGMA' THE BRAIN CAN CHANGE- OUTSTANDING BOOK!
Summary: 5 Stars
I must quote from this book which is a pivotal contribution to humanity.
"Hardwired Dogma"
". . . As late as 1999, neurologists writing in the prestigious journal Science admitted, "We are still taught that the fully mature brain lacks the intrinsic mechanisms needed to replenish neurons and reestablish neuronal networks after acute injury or in response to the insidious loss of neurons seen in neurodegen- erative diseases."
"Neuroscientist Fred Gage, one of the researchers invited by the Dalai Lama to discuss the implications of neuroplasticity with him and other Buddhist scholars at the 2004 meeting, put the objections to the idea of a changing brain this way: "If the brain was changeable, then we would change. And if the brain made wrong changes, then we would change incorrectly. It was easier to believe there were no changes. That way, the individual would remain pretty much fixed."
"But the dogma is wrong. In the last years of the twentieth century, a few iconoclastic neuroscientists challenged the paradigm that the adult brain cannot change and made discovery after discovery that, to the contrary, it retains stunning powers of neuroplasticity. The brain can indeed be rewired. It can expand the area that is wired to move the fingers, forging new connections that underpin the dexterity of an accomplished violinist. It can activate long-dormant wires and run new cables like an electrician bringing an old house up to code, so that regions that once saw can instead feel or hear. It can quiet circuits that once crackled with the aberrant activity that characterizes depression and cut pathological connections that keep the brain in the oh-god-something-is-wrong state that marks obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The adult brain, in short, retains much of the plasticity of the developing brain, including the power to repair damaged regions, to grow new neurons, to rezone regions that performed one task and have them assume a new task, to change the circuitry that weaves neurons into the networks that allow us to remember, feel, suffer, think, imagine, and dream. Yes, the brain of a child is remarkably malleable. But contrary to Ram?n y Cajal and most neuroscientists since, the brain can change its physical structure and its wiring long into adulthood."
"A few findings suggest that brain changes can be generated by pure mental activity: merely thinking about playing the piano leads to a measurable, physical change in the brain's motor cortex, and thinking about thoughts in certain ways can restore mental health. By willfully treating invasive urges and compulsions as errant neurochemistry--rather than as truthful messages that something is amiss--patients with OCD have altered the activity of the brain region that generates the OCD thoughts, for instance.
By thinking differently about the thoughts that threaten to send them back into the abyss of despair, patients with depression have dialed up activity in one region of the brain and quieted it in another, reducing their risk of relapse. Something as seemingly insubstantial as a thought has the ability to act back on the very stuff of the brain, altering neuronal connections in a way that can lead to recovery from mental illness and perhaps to a greater capacity for empathy and compassion."
"The discovery that thinking something produces effects just as doing something does is a fascinating consonance with Buddhism," says Francisca Cho. "Buddhism challenges the traditional belief in an external, objective reality.
Instead, it teaches that our reality is created by our own projections; it is thinking that creates the external world beyond us. The neuroscience findings harmonize with this Buddhist teaching."
"Buddhist narratives have another consonance with the discoveries of neuroplasticity. They teach that by detaching ourselves from our thoughts, by observing our thinking dispassionately and with clarity, we have the ability to think thoughts that allow us to overcome afflictions such as being chronically angry. "You can undergo an emotional reeducation," Cho says. "By meditative exertion and other mental exercises, you can actively change your feelings, your attitudes, your mind-set."
"Indeed, Buddhism believes that the mind has a formidable power of self-transformation. When thoughts come to the untrained mind, they can run wild, triggering destructive emotions such as craving and hatred. But mental training, a core of Buddhist practice, allows us "to identify and to control emotions and mental events as they arise," says Matthieu Ricard. Meditation, the most highly developed form of mental training, "is about coming to a new perception of reality and of the nature of mind, about nurturing new qualities until they become integral parts of our being.
If we place all our hopes and fears in the outside world, we have quite a challenge, because our control of the outside world is weak, temporary, and even illusory. It is more within the scope of our faculties to change the way we translate the outside world into inner experience. We have a great deal of freedom in how we transform that experience, and that is the basis for mental training and transformation."
Although this is not a "Buddhist" book, I can genuinely personally attest from my study of Buddhism and the positive mind changes that I have experienced by incorporating "right mindfulness and loving compassion" which has significantly transformed what used to be depression, insecurity, and nervousness, into so much more inner peace. As a result, my brain (thinking) became more focused, and aligned with positive intention.
This is an OUTSTANDING book, and a deep, engaging read for anyone interested in positive transformation, and mind functioning at its peak. FANTASTIC in all regards!
Barbara Rose, Ph.D. author of If God Hears Me I Want an Answer! and Know Yourself
Book Review: A Remarkable Study of Neuroplasticity
Summary: 5 Stars
Although this book is based upon the Mind and Life Institute's 2004 Conference with the Dalai Lama, this is not a book about Buddhism, but rather a study of neuroplasticity; addressing the question of whether or not the brain is fixed or flexible in its structure and capabilities. For years, we have been taught that the development and enhancement of the brain stops at a very young age and that it is not possible to change it. Recent studies, however, have shown that the brain can be re-wired through various cognitive techniques. While some of this research deals with the impact of meditation on brain structures, there is also very interesting material concerning the ways in which the brain accomodates for various disabilities such as blindness or loss of hearing.
If you are interested in the latest developments for treating dyslexia and depression, or in ways to prevent mental deterioration brought about by aging, this is an excellent place to look. This book demonstrates that you can teach old dogs new tricks and that you can combat genetic determinism through cognitive methods, rather than psychotropic drugs (not something that the makers of Prozac want you to know). Although the subjects explored are complex, Ms. Begley does a great job of keeping the book interesting without oversimplification.