Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to...

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform ... | Sharon Begley | A Look at the Future

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Train Your Mind, C...

	Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform ... Sharon Begley Ballantine Books, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 70 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

stunning

Train your Mind, Change your Brain is a fascinating look at new discoveries in neuroplasticity and their relation to Buddhist practice. Probably the most salient thing with which I came away from this book is the sense of man's self-determinacy and ability to improve himself. In the age-old debate between heredity and environment, the book highlights new discoveries weighing in heavily on the side of environment. Victor Frankl would be proud.

While the information given is often in relation specifically to Buddhist meditation practice, there is very little material here that is not directly applicable to the contemplative tradition of any religion. For that matter, most of what is presented here does not posit religious beliefs at all - for instance, how exploitation of neuroplasticity can correct dyslexia, help people recover use of paralyzed limbs after strokes, etc.; and how continued research into neuroplasticity may help reverse the mental/neural effects of aging.

Begley writes in a very accessible way - the book was quite readable even for a layman like me. It does help to have a basic knowledge of the principles of Buddhism before starting with this book - I'd recommend reading The Art of Happiness by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler as background.

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A Look at the Future

This book traces the history of scientists looking at the plasticity of the brain. Until recently, psychologist, neurologist and psychiatrist all were of the opinion that the brain was hard wired. That is what you were born with is what you went through life with.

Recent experiments, which are well documented in the book, shows that is simply not the truth. The brain is very plastic. It is capable of being molded. That the way we think has an influence on molding our brain.

As to the age old question of heredity versus environment, the studies clearly show that our enviironment can change your brains. There were some very interesting experiements were lab mice were interchanged between secure loving mothers and neglectful mothers. The results were startling. The pups were more influenced by environment than DNA.

The book also traces the history of the Mind Life Conference, a collobrative effort between the Dalai Lama and modern neuroscientist. It is very informative what the Tibetian monks have known, seemingly on an intuitative basis and what western scientist are now learning on a scientific basis.

This books is not a how to manual in any sense. It does not tell you how to train the mind. Its benefit is in opening the mind to the possibilities that exist in training the mind and therefore changing the brain.

In one sense it is a glance at the future. We have long known and been concerned with exercising the body. We have spent hours upon hours learning different skills. But by and large we have neglected emotional training. This is where things will be going. There is so much emotional pain in the world and this offers a real insight into the ways to deal with it. All the current practices try to get the emotional unhealthly back to zero. In the future we will be trying to get people to a higher state of happiness. This will be the way to go.

It is clear that the Tibetian monks are certainly better off emotionally. But this is a a very high price of long years of medition. The person who discovers an effective method for the benefits of medition without the extreme devotion of time will certainly give the world a great gift.

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Good, important popular science, but too verbose.

This is not a self help book, but popular science of the best kind, carefully, objectively describing the scientific concepts and research which support the idea that at any age your brain can be modified for the good. In particular stroke victims can achieve physical recovery by "rewiring" the brain so that movement is controlled by neurons adjacent to those destroyed, or even directly by the pre-motor cortex (usually used only to plan movement) or by the comparable areas in the other side of the brain, so that, e.g., both left arm and right arm might be controlled from the left side of the brain. The research described pertains primarily to scientific understanding, but also to practical results.

The book goes well beyond rehabilitating stroke victims. Your pre-frontal cortex, which is important to the emotions you experience, might potentially be modified so that not only may the ill be helped, but the "normal; e.g., normal people's "happiness point" might be elevated, they could be become more secure and compassionate (psychology tells us the two go together), etc.. This and other discoveries fit well with Buddhist views. As it happens, the Dali Lama is very interested in Western science, and has encouraged some of the research described. Begley is interested in him and Buddhism, so that this is a complementary focus of the book.

Much as I liked Begley when she was science writer of the Wall Street Journal, and much as I learned from her book and was influenced by it, I did not enjoy it as much as I should have. I found it unnecessarily verbose. It is true that for a long time neuroscientists strongly resisted the idea that the brain could be rewired, but I don't think the lay person intuitively finds the idea hard to accept, at least as it pertains to motor control. Yet Begley writes as if she has to keep hammering the idea home, and also spends too much time in describing some of the animal experiments: for example, a few pages could almost be completely summarized by saying that if you keep the auditory nerve of one ear, in a ferret baby, from reaching the cortex , the visual nerve of one eye will attach to the auditory part of the cortex, and light on that eye will be interpreted as sound (ferret is trained to react very specifically to sound).

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Train your brain, change your mind?

Sharon Begley has a tale to tell, comprised in part "history of science" narrative, part recounting of research, and small part (implicit) comparative religion. Her subject is neuroplasticity of the brain. Conventional wisdom held that we were born with a finite number of brain cells and hardwired connections, and when they were gone, that's it. She weaves together the research of different scientists as they discovered that we can indeed grow new brain cells and connections between them, we can train parts of the brain to take on new tasks, and we can even train our minds to change our brains to change our attitudes. Binding the narrative together is the 2004 Mind and Life Conference at Dharamsala, where scientists engaged the Dalai Lama and a host of Tibetan Buddhist monks with their research findings and explored connections in Buddhist thought.

This is by no means a self-help book, although I am finding it helpful. As a personal safety skills trainer, I am always looking for ways to enhance my clients' learning experiences. I am particularly interested in how people can train to better work through fear, post-traumatic stress, and ready recall of safety skills under stressful circumstances. While Begley is not handing over a set of drills to do in seminars, as I read this book I was coming up with ways to make exercises more effective, and why. That's worthwhile for me.

(I'm giving this book 4 rather than 5 stars only because I felt the writing could have been more concise.)

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