"Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain"

I've just finished a great book titled "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain" by Sharon Begley about neuroplasticity (the brain's ability to change physically) and its intersection with Buddhist meditation. The major message fits with recent research into talent, that practice and training can improve things previously thought to be unchangeable. There is less and less that is determined at birth. In particular, these passages deal with changing one's ability to focus, feel compassion, calmness and base-line happiness:

"Virtually all of biomedical science focuses on getting people up to the zeroth level and nothing more. As long as someone can attain nonsickness, that is deemed sufficient. As Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace put it, 'Western scientists have an underlying assumption that normal is absolutely as good as it gets and that the exceptional is only for saints, that it is something that cannot be cultivated. We in the modern West have grown accustomed to the assumption that the 'normal' mind, in the sense of one free from clinical mental illness, is a healthy one. But a 'normal mind' is still subject to many types of mental distress, including anxiety, frustration, restlessness, boredom, and resentment.'"

"There is a tremendous lacuna in our worldview, where training is seen as important for strength, for physical agility, for athletic ability, for musical ability -- for everything except emotions. The Buddhists say these are skills, too, and are trainable like any others."

Psychology in just the past 20 years is now developing what's generally referred to as "Positive Psychology" or the study of people who are above average in mental health. The best analogy to what we are talking about here is the difference between a person who is of average body weight, blood pressure, and overall physical fitness to a top Olympic level athlete. Psychology was previously occupied only with getting the unhealthy person to the normal level, and now there is a reality that through mental training we can get go up from normal, perhaps even to the Olympic level of emotions!

"As researchers probe the power of meditation and other techniques to alter the brain and allow it to function at the highest levels, we are therefore poised at the brink of "above-the-line" science -- of studying people whose powers of attention are far above the norm, whose wellsprings of compassion dwarf those of most people, who have successfully set their happiness baseline at a point that most mortals achieve only transiently before tumbling down to something comfortably above depression but far from what may be possible. What we learn from them may provide the key to raising everyone -- or at least everyone who chooses to engage in necessary mental training -- to that level. Neuroplasticity will provide the key to realizing positive mental and emotional functioning. The effects of mental training, as shown in the brains of accomplished Buddhist meditators, suggest what humans can achieve."

I started writing those little handouts on Mental Training (see below for an example) and giving them to my swimmers years ago. My focus then was on thought habits that directly connect to physical performance. Now I feel I need to broaden my approach to include training which improves overall emotional strength. Neuroscience has shown that even cognition is closely intertwined with neurons that deal with emotion, so nothing is truly "unemotional," and nothing is untrainable!