MOOC's are Life Enhancing!

MOOC's (Massive Open Online Courses) are incredible. As Wikipedia explains it:

"A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs). MOOCs are a recent development in distance education."

Some of the best Universities in the world are putting courses onto MOOC's. I'm now positively addicted to doing MOOC's. My favorite MOOC Portal is Coursera. It has hundreds and hundreds of amazing courses, from incredible Universities and facilitated by some of the top Researchers and Professors in their respective fields. I've now done courses from places like Duke University, with lectures and lessons delivered by people such as Prof. Dan Arieley. I absolutely love it! It's so life enhancing. I get to sit in the comfort of my own home, and tune into and turn onto learnings that I could never have a few years ago. And they are all open and free. What's even better is that you get a Certificate (providing you complete the course and meet the required standards for the course) that you can use with your resume. How cool is that!

So if you haven't already discovered MOOC's, then now is the time! Jump on over to Coursera, and take a look at the feast of courses provided. Sign up for some. Then enjoy involving yourself in the learning tribe for that course. Take your knowledge to new levels.

As I've pointed out in earlier blog posts, learning is important and life enhancing. If you'd like to know the distinctions I made on this, take a look at:

• We are what we know!
• Intelligencing

Continue to enhance your life by involving yourself in ongoing learning. By learning you stimulate neural-plasticity, you grow new neurons and new connections in your brains. You make yourself more intelligent and bring greater knowledge and wisdom to your world. And that is truly life enhancing and generative!

life and learning enhancing wishes

Grant

Your thoughts leave traces...

"New research shows that spontaneous waves of neuronal activity in the brain bear the imprints of earlier events for at least 24 hours after the experience has taken place."

Prof. Rafi Malach

This is profound! The implications of this new research are quite life changing and life enhancing. Let me explain.

I just came across this amazing new research in an article in Science News entitled: 'Past Brain Activation Revealed in Scans: Brain Activity Patterns Preserve Traces of Previous Cognitive Activity' and knew I had to read about it and share it. In the experiment, Prof. Rafi Malach and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute Neurobiology Department had volunteers undertake a training exercise that would strongly activate a well-defined network of nerve cells in the frontal lobes. To test whether the connections created in the brain during this exercise would leave their traces in the patterns formed by the resting brain waves, the researchers performed fMRI scans on the subjects before the exercise, immediately afterward, and 24 hours later.

Their findings, which appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that the activation of the specific areas in the cortex did indeed remodel the resting brain wave patterns. Surprisingly, the new patterns not only remained the next day, they were significantly strengthened. These observations fit in with the classic learning principles proposed by Donald Hebb in the mid-20th century, in which the co-activation of two linked nerve cells leads to long term strengthening of their link, while activity that is not coordinated weakens this link. The fMRI images of the resting brain waves showed that brain areas that were activated together during the training sessions exhibited an increase in their functional link a day after the training, while those areas that were deactivated by the training showed a weakened functional connectivity.

Think about this, we know that the brain exhibits neural-plasticity, the ability to grow new connections, new neurons, new dendrites, new synapses, and to strengthen the functional plasticity of existing connections. We know that the process of thinking changes the structure of the brain. And now this new research shows in part how this is occurring. When you think thoughts, when  you activate neural circuits, the activation and the pattern of activation continues to fire and run even 24 hours after the initial activation. Your thoughts echo and linger in the physical structures and circuits of your brain long after you've stopped consciously attending to them. And these thoughts and thinking patterns change the structure of your brain.

The implications of this, are as I said above, profound. This means that thoughts aren't mere thoughts, not fleeting ideas or notions that once come and gone are actually gone. Thoughts leave traces that can be viewed with an fMRI up to 24 hours later. Thoughts are like stones that leave ripples on the pond of your mind. They create ongoing propensities and priming of the neural circuits. So you need to be the guardian of the thoughts and neural activation occurring in your brain. Make sure you think thoughts and hold ideas that serve you. Make sure you are throwing into your pond, the sorts of stones that will create ripples that add value to your life. The ripples eventually become new brain structures. And this causes your brain to evolve new structures and patterns that lead to propensities for thinking and feeling in certain ways.

You become what you focus on. Your thoughts and feelings leave traces. You are either enhancing your life with your thoughts or doing the opposite. So make certain to focus on positivity, on love, on the Highest Expressions of Compassion, Creativity and Courage. And you can be certain that this propensity of neural networks to continue to activate neural circuit patterns is NOT just happening in the head brain. It will also be happening in the heart and gut brains too! You are the gardener of your multiple brains, you are the one who plants the seeds of thinking, feeling and activation in your head, heart and gut brains. You can choose to focus on those ways of mBraining (of using your multiple brains to do cool stuff) that bring your human spirit alive, and as you do now, you'll have been finding that this way of being and doing continues to leave traces and echoes for way longer than just 24 hours.

You can evolve your brains and your world! And that is truly truly life enhancing.

with positive joy and smiles

Grant

Mastering Accelerating Change

"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.”

General Eric Shinseki

[The following post is excerpted from my upcoming book 'Avoiding the Enemies to Happiness']

The world is changing, and changing at a massive and accelerating rate. More information, more stimulus, new ways of doing things, faster ways of doing things in an ongoing race that touches us in every way. Technological change is driving business change, societal change, environmental change and even personal change. It can be a struggle to just keep up.

To understand how massive this change is and how it’s accelerating at an ever growing rate, to get a graphic sense of just how fast the change is accelerating, you need to see a few graphs. Let’s start by looking at the amount of invention in the world. Technological invention drives change in our lives. New ways of doing things change the way we work, the way we live and just about every aspect of our lives.

Below is a graph of the number of patents filed in the United States per year. You can see that the graph starts relatively flat, with a small rate of growth over the last 100 years. Indeed, the amount of invention over the last couple of thousand years has been relatively small compared to recent growth. But look what happens from about 1980 onwards. The graph starts to rise and rise at a sharper and sharper rate.

[Source: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (http://www.uspto.gov)]

The shape of this graph is known as an exponential curve. This shape comes about due to a process of growth in which the size increases by a fixed multiple over time. For example, in computing there is a law known as ‘Moore’s Law’, coined by Gordon Moore, one of the inventors of the Microprocessor. Moore’s Law predicts that the power of computing will double approximately every 2 years. To get a sense of this, imagine that we start off with 1 unit of computing power. In 2 years time this will have doubled to 2 units. In a further 2 years, we will have 4 units of computing power. Two years later this will double to 8 units, then 16 units, 32 units, 64 units and so on. You can see from this that at first things appear to be growing slowly, but as the size increases, the doublings really start to make a powerful difference. This is the power of exponential growth. Once you reach the turning point, the graph just takes off and explodes upwards.

Importantly, it turns out that exponential growth – that is massively accelerating growth and change – is not just happening in the price/performance of computing. As you’ve seen from the previous graph, the number of patents for inventions is changing at an exponential rate and it’s now at the near vertical rate of growth. This accelerating rate of invention is in part what is driving Moore’s Law in the area of electronics and computing. And these massive changes in computing have lead to the growth and uptake of the internet. Let’s take a look at what its growth looks like.

[Source: Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. (http://www.isc.org/)]

You can see from this graph that it’s the same sort of curve and that the rate of growth of the internet is now in the near vertical part of the curve. So what does this mean? It means that the rate at which the internet is growing and changing is massively accelerating. More change and quicker change. Incredible.

The rate of invention development is also feeding other diverse areas such as:

• Genetic Engineering: Number of genes mapped per year
• Medical Technology: Resolution of brain scanning devices
• Industry: Manufacturing productivity rates
• Economics: World Economic Growth in GDP.

When graphed, these all show exponential growth and are now in the near vertical parts of their growth curves. Science Philosophers have been examining these trends and have shown that these growth curves are all due to an underlying accelerating growth in world knowledge. If we take each unit of knowledge in the world, whether you consider it to be an invention, an idea, a book or a web page and we graph the number of these over time, we find… yes you guessed it, an exponential curve.

You can clearly see that the world is now at a point where the exponential change is producing massively accelerating growth. We are on the steep point of the curve and it’s only going to get bigger and steeper from here. You see, the limits now are not going to be human limits. We are creating intelligent automated systems that are designed to create and generate ideas and knowledge themselves. For example, we now have millions of web pages created each day by ‘know-bots’ (knowledge robots) – automated systems that crawl the web and synthesize, integrate and generate new web pages. Add in Moore’s Law to this and you’ll see that these bots are going to get faster and more powerful and more plentiful.

So what does this mean to you?

Well, as one interesting YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmwwrGV_aiE) created by Dr. Scott McLeod and Karl Fisch puts it: “Shift happens”.

Yes, your world is going to continue to change in massively accelerating ways. Society is changing and changing massively. Work is going to change immensely. Economics is going to change in accelerating ways. The way you live and connect is going to continue and continue to change... massively! You’ll have to keep up. If you don’t you’ll get run over. In order to stay economically viable, you’ll have to continue to learn and adapt. Or like the dinosaur you’ll become extinct. There’s no ignoring it. There’s no escaping it.

This massively accelerating change means there will always be ‘too much, too soon’ in our lives. Unless you become a change master and learn to ride the wave of change, your happiness will suffer. The stress and overwhelm of ‘too much, too soon’ are enemies to happiness. The good news is that there are skills, attitudes and strategies you can use to increase your resilience and embrace change so that it enhances your life. If you fight change, it will literally kill you. The stress of massive change can impact your mental, emotional and importantly your physical health.

"Worry and stress affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system, and profoundly affects heart action.”

Charles W. Mayo, M.D.

There are ways of learning to embrace change, to be comfortable with it, to value it in your heart, to not feel threatened by it at a gut level. You can learn to bring wisdom to how you embrace change and to evolve with it. The neural networks of your head, heart and gut brains (see www.mbraining.com for more info about this) have neural-plasticity. You can literally learn to evolve more complexity and more adaptive ways of processing change. And this is what my upcoming book 'Avoiding the Enemies to Happiness' teaches the behavioral skills and competencies of. So stay tuned for when it hits the Amazon book shelves soon. And in the mean time, if you haven't already, grab a copy of my book 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff', co-authored with my colleague Marvin Oka, and learn the skills of connecting with and utilizing the intuitive intelligences of your heart and gut brains.

Buy a copy of mBraining from Amazon

life enhancing wishes

Grant

Sweet Dreams - The Messages in our Dreams

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

"When you find a dream inside your heart, don't let it go. For dreams are the tiny seeds from which beautiful tomorrows grow."

In my blog post on 'Life Enhancing Dreams' I talked about how we direct our life through our dreams, desires and outcomes, explored the difference between dreams and outcomes and described how to integrate the head, heart and gut (enteric) brains to help you begin to create the life you dream about. In today's post however...

"Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions." 

"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you."

I want to explore dreams and dreaming from a different perspective. I want to describe and share evidence and ideas about dreams as messages from our multiple brains; dreams as deeply intuitive communications from our heart and gut brains. But first a true and chilling story...

Dreams that saved a life!

In early 2011, Oprah Winfrey decided she wanted to run an issue of her magazine solely devoted to the power of intuition and how to tap into gut instincts. Her magazine editors and researchers began searching for true and verifiable stories about people whose lives had been saved by hunches and messages from their deep intuition. What they found are some amazing stories, and these are detailed in the August 2011 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, but the one that really stands out is the experience of Trisha Coburn.

Trisha was 46 years of age and living a successful, healthy life, when one night she had an intense and disturbing dream that ultimately saved her life. In the dream she was standing at a barbed-wire fence and a group of frail and scary people on the other side were trying to tell her something in a language she couldn’t comprehend. For the next couple of weeks she had the same dream recurringly, and each time the number of people in the dream increased and looked more and more desperate. The dreams were so disturbing she would wake up crying. She knew something was wrong.

So Trisha called her doctor and scheduled a full physical workup. But the results came back negative and her doctor was convinced Trisha was healthy and over-reacting. Still the dream came back, this time with 100 people, all wailing, screaming and pleading in their strange language. A few days after that, the same dream occurred one last time, but in this dream the fence was empty, there was no one there.

This was so disturbing to Trisha she went immediately to her doctor again and asked him what he thought was the deepest place in the human body. After he told her it was the colon, she demanded a colonoscopy. Even though her doctor was against it because she had no symptoms and no family history of colon cancer, Trisha insisted.

And fortunately for Trisha, she listened to the messages from her dreams. During the colonoscopy the gastroenterologist found aggressive and fast moving cancer throughout her colon. Her life was saved. A message from her gut brain that all was not well, communicated via dreams, allowed her to find the cancer and have it removed before it killed her. The surgeon later told her if she’d waited another two months, the prognosis would have been grim.

What a chilling and powerful story about the power of dreams for tapping into your deep gut wisdom!

The gut dreaming...

Every night, as you sleep, your head brain goes through periods of what is known as REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. REM sleep is a normal stage of sleep, occurs approximately every 90 minutes on average, and is associated with the act of dreaming. It’s believed by many neuroscientists and sleep researchers to be an integral part of the learning process and plays a major role in the integration of memory, experience and knowledge. A recent study at the University of California, using brain scans, showed that during REM sleep, memories are being reactivated, put in perspective and integrated. It was demonstrated that REM sleep acts like a form of overnight balm, soothing the emotional experiences of the previous day.

Fascinatingly, the gut brain also goes through a process akin to REM sleep, only in the gut this is known as RGM (Rapid Gut Movement) sleep. Approximately every 90 minutes, while you sleep, the gut goes through periods of RGM. It is suggested by some researchers that this is a time when the gut and head are communicating and integrating the knowledge and experiences of the day. It has also been noted by researchers that people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and other inflammatory bowel disorders suffer from poor sleep patterns, experience abnormal amounts of REM and RGM sleep periods and report more intense and prolific dreaming compared to control subjects.

Based on these insights, it is likely therefore that dreams are important ways in which the gut brain communicates to the head brain and allows intuitions and ‘gut wisdom’ to surface into consciousness. As the esoteric wisdom traditions maintain, your dreams contain messages from your gut and heart. For example, in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) it is suggested the gut communicates about its state through dreams and when it’s infected with intestinal parasites the dreams have specificity about what sort of parasite exists in the gut. Ancient Taoist TCM texts say that, “When one has small intestinal parasites, one will dream of crowds; when one has long intestinal parasites, one will dream of fights and mutual destruction.”

Messages from the heart...

Now here are some more amazing and somewhat 'spooky' pieces of evidence about messages received from dreams. These however, are about dream messages from the heart and what is most fascinating is the level of specificity that must be contained in heart brain memories for the messages to contain such incredible details. I hope you find them as intriguing as I did when I first read them.

As described in my book 'mBraining', after a heart and lung transplant operation, dancer Claire Sylvia discovered that her new organs were not the only thing she inherited. As detailed in her fascinating biography ‘A Change of Heart’, one night, five months after her operation, Claire woke from a vivid and entrancing dream. In her dream, she met a man named Tim L. and formed a strong bond with him. As the dream unfolded, it became time for Tim to leave, and just before he did, Claire and Tim kissed and during the kiss, Claire inhaled Tim into her and awoke, knowing that she and Tim would be together forever.

This dream was so vivid, unusual and exhilarating that on awakening, Claire felt as if she’d finally integrated her new heart and lungs within her. She says she woke up knowing that Tim L. was her donor and that parts of his spirit and personality were now within her. This deep sense of knowing started her on a quest to find out who her donor really was and after months and months of frustrated research and searching she finally made contact with his family. And the kicker to the story… the donor’s real name was Tim LaSalle.

What an amazing story! Definitely worth reading. It’s also backed up by medical research that shows that severed vagus nerves can, after several months, reconnect and re-innervate the cardiac nervous system of the new heart. Obviously, in Claire’s case, her new heart connected strongly and was able to send messages in her dreams to help her accept and integrate her new heart brain.

Finally, here’s another heart chilling and incredible story from the literature on personality changes after heart transplants. In this example, an eight year old girl received the heart of a ten year old girl, but sometime after the transplant, the young recipient began to have vivid nightmares about an attacker and a girl being murdered. Concerned about her young daughter, the mother took her to a psychiatrist who became convinced that with nightmares so detailed and real they appeared to be genuine memories. The psychiatrist recommended they contact the police, and presciently, it turned out the ten year old donor had been murdered.

According to the literature, the recipient’s violent reoccurring dreams were so vivid and accurate, and she was able to describe the events of the horrible encounter and the murderer with such detail, police were able to apprehend and convict the killer. An incredible story that makes you wonder just how much intelligence and specificity the heart brain and its memories have.

Dreams as communications...

So it would seem that dreams can serve as messages from our multiple brains, that dreams can sometimes be deeply intuitive communications from our heart and gut brains to our head brains. This is probably why we say things like 'Sweet Dreams' when we wish someone to have a good night's sleep. What the neurolinguistics of this common saying indicates is that we are future pacing the gut brain to do a gustatory experience of  'sweetness' (taste is a key sensory modality utilized by the enteric nervous system - we have taste buds not just on our tongues, but spread throughout our GastroIntestinal system) and thereby send positive messages in our dreams rather than messages of fear and anxiety that can lead to nightmares.

As you know from my last post on the Prime Functions of the multiple brains, the gut brain is responsible for monitoring safety and threats, both external physical threats and internal ‘semantic’ or psychological threats. So if, before sleeping you put yourself into a hyped up vigilant state, if you ruminate over perceived injustices, or focus on upcoming fearful events, you’ll find that your gut brain will kick into threat monitoring mode and your brains won’t be able to do deep high quality sleeping. You obviously also shouldn’t eat rich and complex meals just before sleeping. Anything that disturbs or distracts the gut brain from calm sleeping can detract from how restful and ‘sweet’ your sleep and dreams can be.

Instead, as you lay in bed, just before drifting off to sleep, do Balanced Breathing and fill you heart with peace, love and compassion. Then breathe these up into your head and down to your gut. Fill all your brains with calm, peaceful love. Talk kindly and lovingly to your brains and ask them to do high quality and integrative sleeping. Directionalize your brains respectfully and then filled with warm feelings of safety, love and peace, gently drift off into a refreshing night of health-filled sleep. And pay attention to your dreams, especially the vivid and memorable ones. They are likely to be important messages from your multiple brains and you ignore them at your peril. Indeed, listening to the messages from your dreams just may save your life...

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Learn more...

If you'd like to learn more about how to communicate with and integrate your head, heart and gut brains, grab a copy of  'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff'. In it you'll find simple and powerful techniques for tapping into your intuition and using sleep and the wisdom of your heart and gut brains for integrated decision making.

smiles and appreciation,

Grant

Using the mBIT Prime Functions of the Head, Heart and Gut Brains

If you follow this blog you'll know that over the last 2 years I've been productively busy researching and developing a new field of personal development called mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) and time-binding the models and distinctions from this field into a new book titled 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff'.

The Prime Functions of the Head, Heart and Gut Brains

One of the key insights from mBIT is that each of your brains (head, heart and gut brains) has its own 'Prime Functions'. Each brain has a fundamentally different form of intelligence; they utilize different language, have different goals and operate under different criteria. In other words, your head, heart and gut have different ways of processing the world, of communicating, operating and addressing their own concerns and domains of expertise.


mBrain Prime Functions

Heart Brain Prime Functions

·        Emoting

·        Relational Affect

·        Values

Gut Brain Prime Functions

·        Mobilization

·        Self-Preservation

·        Core Identity

Head Brain Prime Functions

·        Cognitive Perception

·        Thinking

·        Making Meaning

About the head brain…
 

In many ways the prime functions of the head brain are obvious, they involve the mental cognitive functions of logical thinking and include the processes of reasoning, perception and how we make meaning. Thought processes involve mental imagery, language expression, abstraction and symbol manipulation. The main job of the head is to intellectually make sense of the world and to provide executive control.

About the heart brain…

The heart is the seat of love and desires, goals, dreams and values. When you are connected to something you feel it and value it in your heart. When you hear that someone ‘wears their heart on their sleeve’ you intuitively know that this does NOT mean that they are too logical. Instead, this is saying that they show their emotions, desires and intentions too obviously and readily. 

If you say something is heartfelt, you aren’t saying it’s intellectually concise. And when you look at the language patterns of the heart, they express notions of love, connection, kindness and their converse. The prime functions of the heart intelligence involve salience, affection and relational issues such as a deep sense of moral rightness as compared to rule based ethics.

About the gut brain…

Due to its evolutionary history, the gut brain is responsible at a core level for determining what will be assimilated into self and excreted from self. It must determine what is required to maintain health and wellness in the system and decide whether molecules ingested into the stomach will be absorbed or excreted. Indeed, research has shown that more than 80 percent of our immune cells are located in the gut, and the enteric brain is intimately involved in managing immune function.

The prime functions of the gut are around protection, self-preservation, core identity and motility. Back when evolution was at the stage of complexity of sea cucumbers and worms, organisms only had a neural processing system of an enteric brain. This intelligence was used to detect threats and food in the environment and move away from danger and towards food. The gut brain maintains boundary detection and mobilization. In humans it is expressed as motivation, gutsy courage and a gut-felt desire to take action (or not).

Using the Prime Functions as life enhancing diagnostic tools

One of the most powerful and useful things you can do to gain more personal control in your life is use the mBIT Prime Functions as life enhancing diagnostic tools. Using the Prime Functions as a set of filters you can begin to track and change which of your multiple brains are operating in any given situation or context. Of course, all your brains and neural networks are operating all of the time, however, focus and control moves throughout your brains and knowing which brain is the prime controller at any point in time can really provide leverage for change.

Let me share an example from my own personal experience to make sense of this... I had been expecting an overdue delivery of the very first printing of my mBraining book, and contacted the courier to find out why the delivery was late and when I could finally expect to receive my books. I eventually managed to speak to a customer service representative of the global courier company used to deliver the books and was informed that due to various organizational issues, they would not be able to deliver the books to me for another 4 weeks. I got off the phone and found myself feeling both angry and incredibly turmoiled. The book was important to me and I had various commitments and timeframes that relied on having stock of the book on hand.

As I sat there fuming over the crap service of this big-named courier company, that promised swift and efficient service on their website and advertising, I realised that feeling angry and upset wouldn't help me or help resolve the situation. I stopped focusing on the issue for a second, and instead did an inventory through my body and noted where and how I was feeling and representing the issue. I noted that I felt anger in my heart region, tension in my forehead and shoulders, but most strongly and overwhelmingly, I felt the issue deep and viscerally in my gut. This told me immediately that I was representing the issue at a gut level and that it was a gut prime function that was driving my response. The gut is responsible for core identity and threat detection. I was obviously treating the book and the missing delivery as if this was a part of 'me' that was under threat. The gut brain was then communicating the message of threat to the heart and head leading to angering and repetitive negative cognitions and ultimately tension around the head and face region.

As soon as I realized that I was representing the book as if it was part of me, I was now immediately at choice. Did I really want to see the book as 'me', was it really part of my core identity, or was it just something I valued highly as a process and an artefact of the production of my creative abilities? Naturally, the book is not 'me', it's just something I produced. And as soon as I acknowledged that, and breathed the message of that from my heart, into my head, and down to my gut, everything shifted. I belly laughed, with a big smile of inner realization on my face. The anger in my heart dissolved immediately. And I was able to get a much more useful perspective on the situation. With a light-hearted attitude, I was then able to track down someone within the courier company who really wanted to help and delightfully my books were delivered within the week. Problem solved and done in a compassionate and creative way. By using the Prime Functions as a diagnostic tool and thereby realizing I was treating the book as 'me' I enabled a wiser choice in how I responded to the exigencies of life and that truly is life enhancing.

So I trust that from the above example you get a sense and idea of how to use the Prime Functions as filters and diagnostic tools. Start to notice where and how in your body you are representing and reacting to each situation. Are you fundamentally processing the situation with your heart? Your head? Your gut? And what prime function(s) are thereby being expressed by the neural network that has prime control? Once you've gained meta-awareness of how you are processing and creating your awareness and reality, you can then use the mBIT Foundational Sequence and Highest Expressions techniques explained fully in the mBraining book to produce a more generative and wiser response. 

So start now to notice how you are mBraining your life, which of your brains is operating in which sequence with the others, which is in control, which can provide the leverage point for change, and what prime functions are operating as you respond to and create your world.

with appreciation and smiles,

Grant

I give a shit! -- Scatalogical Marking and the Enteric Brain

“The world is not a problem; the problem is your unawareness”

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

I trust and hope that you find today's blog post fascinating, edifying and entertaining in equal measure :-) and I also hope you aren't easily offended by swearing or scatalogical language, as it's going to form the basis for what we are exploring here today...

Scatalogical Marking

In ethology (the study of animal behavior), scatalogical marking is the act that animals undertake to mark out or define their physical or spatial boundaries -- the space they consider to be 'theirs', that they own. To do this they 'scat' around their boundary by depositing their shit or by urinating. This marks out their territory and sends a clear olfactory message to other animals or rivals of their own species.

In mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) terms, scatalogical marking is an obvious manifestation of the prime functions of the gut brain. The gut (or enteric) brain is deeply involved in protection, threat monitoring and control, in spatial motility and in maintaining core self. In a sense, the spatial territory that an animal controls is like an extended part of itself and is crucial to both its foraging/food control and its threat/safety control. So the gut brain naturally uses the parts of the anatomy it controls (the bowels and bladder) to deposit strong messages about its domain. Notice also that the gut brain is strongly linked to the senses of taste and smell, so it's part of the language of the gut brain to speak and communicate with strongly smelling substances, and all animals (including humans) are attuned to this. [BTW, if you haven't already, grab a copy of my new book 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff', and you'll learn all about the prime functions and core competencies of the head, heart and gut brains and how they communicate and how you can align and integrate them for wisdom and success.]

Who gives a shit?

Now this is all very interesting, but really, who gives a shit? (so to speak) -- What has this got to do with you and with enhancing your life???

Well, as we evolved higher functions and more complex brains, our gut brain not only became responsible for physical territory maintenance, it was also co-opted for 'semantic' territory maintenace. With our complex head brains and advanced language centers and frontal lobes, we have evolved to be semantic and meaning binding creatures. We live and create our lives and sense of self through the processes of abstraction, symbol manipulation and linguistic meaning. We construct our complex world views through language, beliefs, values and the semantics of identity. And all of this forms our 'semantic territory'. So guess what... when someone transgresses your semantic boundaries, when they 'shit' all over your values or beliefs, when they act like 'turds' or 'assholes' and threaten the meaning you are making in your life, it typically 'pisses' you off and gives you the 'shits'. Indeed, if they piss you off enough, you are likely to haul off and beat the 'shit' out of them, either physically, emotionally or intellectually.

Now isn't that fascinating. Our common parlance reflects the scatalogical marking we do within our semantic territory. And this is a direct example of cognitive linguistics, of how the metaphors we use in our every day language are deeply embodied and reflect our underlying unconscious processes.

The reason I share this with you is to begin to attune your mind and ears to mBIT Predicate Tracking -- to noticing and listening for words that indicate heart, gut or head processing and the prime functions of each of those neural networks. Knowing which brain is functioning within any element of human behavior puts you at choice and control for leveraging generative change. And that is certainly life enhancing!

I give a shit!

Courtesy of my good friend and colleague, exquisite cartoonist, corporate speaker and organizational leadership guru, Colin James, I'd like to share the following cartoon that Colin drew for this blog post.

It highlights the idea that each of us has things that we give a shit about, and that we metaphorically mark our semantic boundaries with respect to. And based on this idea, here's a little exercise that I'd like you to play with...

So I'd like you to take a moment, and think about something that you 'really don't give a shit about', something that you could care less about, that really doesn't affect you in any meaningful way. For me its football and other organized sports. I really don't give a shit about them at all. If football was outlawed tomorrow, I wouldn't lose a jot of sleep over it. Wouldn't care less. It's neither a value for me, nor part of my identity. Once you've thought of something you don't give a shit about, I'd like you to get a sense of how that feels within your body, what your visceral experience of it is, in your heart, chest, gut, torso etc.

Now moving on with the exercise... I'd like you to think of something you value, something that's important to you, you care about, but is not part of your identity. In other words, something that you like, but if you weren't able to get it anymore, or if you lost it, then it wouldn't particularly rain on your parade. For me its my drive day car. I like it, I value it, but you know, if something happened to it and I had to replace it, I wouldn't be bothered. A car is a car. No probs. So take a moment, reflect and come up with something you value but that isn't vitally important to you. Once you've done that, notice your felt sense around it. Where do you feel and represent this within your body? For most people, it will be in your heart region. Notice this.

Now, think about and focus on something you really give a shit about, something that is vital to your sense of self. Something that defines you. For me, an example would be my motorbike. As I've written about in this blog, I believe motorbikes are Life Enhancing Devices (LEDs). So for me, my bike is like an extension of my self. I love it. It's linked to my core values. So think of your equivalent, and as you bring it fully to consciousness, notice where in your body you feel and represent the meaning of this. For most people this will be felt viscerally in the gut. You may also feel some heart response due to the values and desire for this person/place/thing/process. But the core feeling will be in the gut.

When you experience something as core to self, the gut kicks in. Your enteric brain has a prime function around core selfing and protection of core self. The ability to notice this and become mindful and aware of where and how you are representing things is key to being able to shift and control your life. I'll speak more about this in upcoming blog posts, and of course, the mBraining book teaches you cool techniques for powerfully utilizing this. But for now I really wanted to bring to your attention the notion that semantics and meaning are embodied and that various functions and aspects of these are processed preferentially and differently in each of your brains.

You can begin now to notice over the coming days, where in your body you are feeling and processing each experience and work out whether you are representing something as core self or just as a value. Notice what figuratively (and sometimes literally) gives you the shits, pisses you off or impacts you viscerally. Notice what stinks in your life (so to speak) or conversely smells sweet. And start listening for scatalogical marking in the conversations around you and in your own internal dialog. Mindfulness is life enhancing, as is choice and control. And control starts with awareness!

“Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.”

Stephen R. Covey

with life enhancing appreciation and smiles,
Grant

mBraining - Compassion, Creativity and Courage

"In the 700 year old Soka Gakkai Buddhism teachings of Japan there is a mystic truth known as the ‘Buddha state’ or ‘Buddha wisdom’ that acts as a reservoir through which anyone can take control of their lives and fulfill their greatest dreams. According to these ancient spiritual beliefs, this state of wisdom involves a melding of Compassion, Creativity and Courage."

 mBraining, Grant Soosalu & Marvin Oka

The highest expressions: A powerful insight

Years ago, whilst researching esoteric wisdom practices, I came across a powerful insight from the Tibetan Bonpo tradition. It suggested that a person could be considered to have truly lived a wise and beneficial life if they’d mastered three core competencies: Compassion, Creativity and Courage.

"The heart is a sensory organ and acts as a sophisticated information encoding and processing center that enables it to learn, remember and make independent functional decisions."

Dr. Rollin McCraty

After deeply exploring the neuroscience behind the heart, gut and head brains, completing a huge body of behavioral modeling research and then factor analyzing the core competencies of the three brains, I was fascinated to notice that the Bon insight highlighted a key and generative competency from each brain:

• Heart brain – Compassion
• Gut brain – Courage
• Head brain – Creativity

As I continued the mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) research I discovered very similar advice from other spiritual and philosophical disciplines. Although slightly different words were used (e.g. kindness instead of compassion, bravery instead of courage, etc.), they all conveyed core competencies that were similar in their qualitative nature.

I therefore became even more curious and intrigued by these three Tibetan Bonpo core competencies and began to look for structures that could explain the consistency of these prescribed core competencies across so many different philosophies, practices and cultures. The question became: “From an mBIT perspective, what is so special about these competencies?”

I discovered three key qualities that make these competencies particularly generative. First, if you look them up in the Core Competencies Framework from Chapter 3 of my book 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff', you’ll notice they’re all highly coherent states. Second, in actual practice, these ‘virtues’ are neurologically integrative by their very nature. Each of these competencies requires the engagement of the other two neural networks in order for them to fully manifest in behavior. This is explained in more detail in the book. And third, the behavioral modeling research found that the interdependent and integrative nature of these three competencies enables the emergence of a higher order level of consciousness and way of being. In other words, they collectively enable and facilitate the Highest Expression of a deeper more integrated 'self'.

Subsequently, these three competencies became what we respectfully call the mBrains’ ‘Highest Expressions’, and I’d like to suggest that of all the competencies each brain evinces, these ‘three C’s’ (Creativity, Compassion and Courage) are the most generative and defining of them all. They’re certainly the most integrative to work with for attaining greater levels of wisdom and personal evolution. Indeed, from our behavioral modeling and action research work, we’ve found these three competencies, when aligned together are able to produce a synergistic magic that is incredible to experience.

"Courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin. Compassion without courage is not genuine. You may have a compassionate thought or impulse, but if you don’t do or say anything, it’s not real compassion."

Daisaku Ikeda

In upcoming blog posts, I'll explore each of these highest expressions in detail. But until then, may I highly suggest you grab a copy of the book and begin to explore these key competencies in your own life. How can you align more wisdom in your life through Compassion, Creativity and Courage? How can you amplify Compassion in your heart, your thoughts, your life and your actions? How can you creatively Create a life that is more brilliant, more enhanced and more generatively wise? And how can you motivate more gutsy Courage and action into your world?

What would your life look like if you lived through these highest expressions? And how life enhancing would it be for both yourself and the people you love?

life enhancing thoughts,

Grant

mBraining - Balancing your ANS

As you know... Over the last decade, the field of Neuroscience has discovered we have complex and functional brains in both our heart and gut. Called the cardiac and enteric brains respectively, scientific evidence is emerging that these neural networks exhibit intelligence and wisdom. In my book with co-author Marvin Oka, 'mBraining', I've described how to communicate with and harness this intuitive intelligence of your multiple brains, and in the post below, I'll share one of the ways you can begin to control what mode your brains are operating in.

The role of your Autonomic Nervous System

In order to do effective mBraining -- to work powerfully with your multiple brains (head, heart and gut brains) -- it helps to understand the role of your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and how it affects the quality of the way your brains function.

For example, your heart brain may be attempting to fulfill its prime functions in a particular situation by emotionally expressing either sadness or joy. These are two very different expressions that are based on the same prime function. What accounts for the difference? And what can we do to shift from a debilitating expression to a more empowering one? To answer these questions, we need to look to your ANS.

Your nervous system has two major divisions, the voluntary and the autonomic. The Voluntary System is mainly concerned with movement and sensation. The Autonomic Nervous System on the other hand is responsible for control of involuntary and visceral bodily functions. The functions it controls include:

•    Cardiovascular
•    Respiratory
•    Digestive
•    Urinary
•    Reproductive functions
•    The body’s response to stress

It’s called ‘autonomic’ because it is operates largely automatically and outside of conscious control. It’s divided into two separate branches — the sympathetic and parasympathetic. These two branches work in a delicately tuned, reciprocal and (usually) opposing fashion.

The sympathetic system can be considered to be the ‘fight or flight’ system. It allows the body to function under stress and danger. The parasympathetic system is considered to be the ‘feeding and fornicating’ or 'rest and digest' arm. It controls the vegetative functions of feeding, breeding, rest and repose. The parasympathetic system also provides constant opposition to the sympathetic system to bring your total system into balance or homeostasis.

In times of danger or stress, the sympathetic system, which has a very fast onset and response, kicks in and gets you moving to handle or resolve the situation. The slower acting parasympathetic system begins to operate after the danger has passed, and brings you back to a normal state. Without the opposing function of the parasympathetic system your body would stay amped up, burning energy and fuel and eventually exhaust itself.

[BTW: an easy way to remember which of the two systems is which, is to remember that ‘para’ means beside or beyond, and therefore the parasympathetic system works beside or beyond the sympathetic to bring it back to alignment. So just remember, sympathetic does fight/flight and the parasympathetic kicks in beyond the stress to bring you back to normal.]

Why is this important?

The reason you want to know about the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems is because they innervate the heart, gut and head. There are major connections between the head brain hemispheres, the cardiac brain, the enteric brain and these sympathetic and parasympathetic arms of the ANS. And as the two ANS components work in opposing ways, the dominance of one or the other leads to very different modes of processing throughout our multiple brains.

In the gut, parasympathetic activity enhances intestinal peristaltic movement promoting nourishment during quiescence, whereas sympathetic activity inhibits such activity during times when physical exertion requires catabolic (energy) mobilization. Parasympathetic activity generally slows the heart, whereas sympathetic activity accelerates it.

You’ll notice here that a powerful functional principle of opponent processing is operating for autonomic control across your total system. Your brains can function in ways that are sympathetic dominant, parasympathetic dominant, or some combination of the two, but that each of these systems typically opposes the other.

So what?

The really interesting thing about these sympathetic and parasympathetic activation processes is that while they normally operate in opposition to each other, they don’t always have to. In certain circumstances they can operate in patterns where one, the other or both are dominant in chronic patterns. What you’ll also see shortly is that when your brains are operating in sympathetic or parasympathetic dominance, they have access to differing psychological qualities and core competencies.

Physiological coherence – balance between the systems

The diagram above summarizes the four modes that your system can operate in. In the top mode, when your two systems are in balance and harmony, when you are in a powerful state known as physiological coherence (more on this coming up in a future blog post), you are able to respond optimally to the world. This mode is connected with feelings of joy, happiness, peace and relaxation.

Sympathetic dominance

In the next mode, your sympathetic system is dominant. This is the stress and danger response and in this mode you have access to competencies that typically serve you to respond via fight and flight processes such as anger, aggression, defensiveness and avoidance. It can be linked to lifestyle patterns of stress, such as taking on too much work, or worrying excessively about things you can’t control.

Parasympathetic dominance

In the third mode, your parasympathetic system is dominant. As we’ve seen above, this is the mode that quietens and settles your neurophysiology. It’s normally designed to bring you back to homeostasis after a sympathetic dominant experience. However, in certain circumstances parasympathetic dominance can be chronically activated and lead to withdrawal, depression, despair and down regulation of all your vital functions. People in this state have essentially given up and are living with a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. Poor diet, toxic metals and chemicals in our food, water and air can lead to issues of parasympathetic dominance.

Parasympathetic over-dominance can also activate in acute stress situations as an overreaction to an intense sympathetic response, and lead to what is called parasympathetic rebound. This leads to the ‘freeze’ response and in really extreme cases can cause the heart to stop completely and result in death. This is what causes people to literally die of fright, fear and shock.

Mixed dominance

In some cases, a person can have both sympathetic and parasympathetic systems operating in high states of activation. When these are in relative balance, the snapshot that the person presents is somewhat similar to the first mode described above. However, with this mixed dominance mode, the system is in what’s called a ‘meta-stable state’ and can flip rapidly from one state to the other. The two systems are in effect maxed out and fighting one another. So the dominance can rapidly oscillate from one extreme to the other. Some researchers suggest this mode may be associated with bipolar disorder and involve rapid changes from a manic phase to deep depression. Certainly this mode is not a healthy one and is representative of diminished control in the system.

|| Cool Fact: The sympathetic and parasympathetic dominance of your ANS controls the operating modes of your three brains and influences the core competencies they evince.

So the mode in which your brains function is determined by the state of your ANS. For example, neuroscience research over the last decade has shown that the head brain's processing mode is influenced by sympathetic and parasympathetic dominance so that the left hemisphere is dominant when the nervous system is under parasympathetic control, and the right hemisphere is dominant when the sympathetic arm is in ascendance. And the two hemispheres, left and right, have very different ways of processing, thinking and responding to the world. When you shift dominance from one to the other you shift into a very different state of mind. Equally, the heart and gut brains respond and process very differently depending on ANS mode.

What you can learn from this

What you need to know is that Autonomic Mode is the controller of your state of being and the controller of the competencies and functions you are able to express. And the most generative and life enhancing mode is when the two arms of the ANS are in balance. There are simple and powerful techniques for bringing your ANS into balance, and that's what you'll learn in my new book 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff'. So if you haven't already, pop over to the CreateSpace eStore (or Amazon for the ebook version) and grab a copy.

with life enhancing appreciation,
Grant