A Book by Sharon Begley with a Foreward by the Dali Lama

Begley writes about science for the Wall Street Journal, and this book came out in 2007.

Basically, it proves that thinking thoughts can change your physical brain.

Common sense dictates that this must be true, because there must be a physical basis for learning and memory. As we learn, we create new pathways in the brain. Now they’ve gotten to the point that they can actually map some of this, but when this book came out it was a big deal.

For a depressed person, the biggest deal of all is the concept that you can change your brain to the point that it is no longer depressed. Imagine if you had a handicap and suddenly there was a scientific basis to believe that you might be able to cure yourself of your handicap.

That you might be able to heal yourself in a way that everyone assumed was impossible.

This hope propelled me through the book in record time. It was enormously beneficial for me to read, because it gave me a physical concept for what I felt going on in my mind all the time.

I think that redox signaling molecules are the key to this — I have tried all sorts of drugs, but nothing, absolutely nothing has had the same impact that enhanced redox signaling has had.

And the reason seems ridiculously simple: The mind wants to heal, just like any other part of your body would want to heal. And it will heal, as much as it can, with what it has to work with.

The things I write about in this blog — my methods, and the degree to which they work — took me almost twenty years of really hard work, day after day, with no rest, to accomplish. So I personally have a great deal of experience working-out my brain.

But you know how you see some guys at the gym day after day, and no matter what they do, they have a gut? Or the woman whose diet simply can not be improved upon, but who is still chubby?

I had the same problem with my mind. There was just something fundamentally amiss, and I could not fix it completely.

Until I added to my body the thing that was lacking — redox signaling molecules. They help the cells heal, and they help the cells communicate. So now I have the extra energy I need to really profit from the exercise I have been doing all these years.

It is a perfect match, and it fits the thesis of this book exactly.

 

 

 

Filed under: 1e. Change Your Mind, Change Your Brain