Power Up Your Brain (7 page)
Read Power Up Your Brain Online
Authors: David Perlmutter M. D.,Alberto Villoldo Ph.d.
Tags: #Health & Fitness, #General, #ebook, #book
The neocortex processes signals in a holistic fashion, interpreting environmental sights and sounds into coherent messages. Through the neocortex, we recognize the value of all people and set aside any thoughts about how they could be useful to us or what we might be able to get from them, either legally or illegally. The neocortex reminds us to call friends for no reason other than to say hello and wish them well and not only when we need to ask a favor.
It is in these higher cortical areas that selfless love, reasoning, and logic take place. This brain allows us to create new ideas and entertain notions such as democracy as well as to understand mathematics, write poetry, compose music and art, dream of freedom, and envision the future.
Our two older neurocomputers, the R-brain and the limbic system, think primarily in terms of distance to the kill, how far back to the village of origin, the friendly confines of the childhood home, and personal space. They recognize spatial boundaries associated with relationships, the blood family, clan territory, ethnic neighborhoods, and national borders. With these anchors firmly embedded in memory, the primordial brains can easily identify what is “my area” and what is “their land.” These brains believe that good fences make good neighbors and perceive “those people over there” to be “others” and “not our kind.” They associate people with places, which is helpful knowledge to ensure survival but limiting to the concept of a global community. Consider how easily you can forget someone’s name but remember the face. That situation stems from your primitive brain’s ability to draw upon memory and emotion in order to discern between “the bad guys on the other side of the tracks” and “the good guys who are like us.”
In contrast, the neocortex, associated with the higher executive functions, is able to think in terms of time and not only of space. It can store food for the winter, plan an irrigation canal for the dry season, and anticipate where the herd might go for the spring. It will mark the turning of seasons and have an inclination for mathematics and music. This brain is able to plan and recognize future actions and consequences, to choose between good and bad, right and wrong, and to suppress socially incorrect behaviors and responses. The neocortex can restrain the Four F’s of the limbic brain and is involved in meditative and transcendental experiences.
Perhaps it is the neocortex’s ability to comprehend our limited time on earth that generates a fear of death and keeps many of us from exploring its potentials. The limbic brain understands that death happens in the same primal way that children know that kittens and grandparents die. But the limbic brain does not realize that death will happen to
us
and somehow imagines that we are immune from it. This, coupled with the fact that the developing brain is more prone to risk-taking behavior, is why some teenagers act as though the laws of gravity and centrifugal force do not apply to them as they speed with a carload of friends along a winding mountain road after drinking too much
If you have not awakened your neocortical gifts in your youth, they will tend to remain dormant until much later in life, only to awaken reluctantly. By the age of 40, most of us have grown to accept that we may not have a second chance at youth. Perhaps this is why, for instance, Orthodox rabbis traditionally warned against the study of mystical texts until age 40, when maturity was more likely to be accompanied by wisdom. Likewise, life insurance salespeople know it is nearly impossible to sell a policy to anyone who does not yet recognize that their time will run out and that every moment is precious; until that stage of practical enlightenment, which happens around age 40, these persons are convinced that death will not happen to them.
Advanced Neocortical Thinking
Synesthesia, which is the ability to blend senses, is one of the many faculties of the neocortex. Artists and musicians possess this quality, which enables them to see a V of flying geese at a distance, imagine the sound of their flapping wings, then set that aural and visual composition to music or canvas. Even in common language, we sometimes use synesthetic or cross-sensory descriptors to create juxtapositional idioms, such as a “bitter wind” or a “loud color.”
Daniel Tammet, an English savant, is one person who expresses synesthetic capability literally to the nth degree. Tammet can, for example, recite the mathematical constant pi from memory to 22,514 decimal places and divide 97 by 13 with complete accuracy to over 100 decimal places. In his best-selling book
Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
, Tammet describes how he thinks.
He says that when he performs a mathematical calculation, such as multiplying 37 to the power of 4, which he can do faster than you can press the numbers on a calculator, the answer comes to him in a rich, kaleidoscopic confluence of colors, textures, shapes, hues, and feelings.
Tammet was diagnosed as having high-functioning autism. He developed his extraordinary capabilities after a series of epileptic seizures during childhood that may have rewired his brain, allowing him to tap into a limited range—a deep but narrow slice— of his neocortical capabilities. Daniel’s experience is not unlike that of sages in the high Andes who claim that extraordinary telepathic and clairvoyant skills appeared shortly after they were struck by lightning or after a strenuous vision quest of fasting and praying for numerous days.
Daniel Tammet’s gifts are not limited to mathematics. He also has the ability to learn a new language within a short period of time. For a television special, he mastered the complex and difficult Icelandic language—which contains, for example, 12 words for each of the numbers one, two, three, and four, depending on the context, and a strict adherence to gender agreement between nouns and adjectives—in less than a week. This enabled him to conduct a live interview on Icelandic television in the native language, a task that he performed flawlessly.
Some investigators argue that such great gifts come at a great price; they say that nearly 50 percent of all savants are also autistic. This has led Wisconsin psychiatrist and investigator Darold Treffert to suggest that savant syndrome is caused by damage to the left brain hemisphere, particularly the frontal areas, which causes the right hemisphere to overcompensate.
2
This is said by Dr. Treffert to be accompanied by a shift from high-level frontal lobe memory and processing to low-level procedural memory, which allows persons like Daniel Tammet to master numbers and languages with such ease.
THE EVOLUTION
OF THE BRAIN
AND THE MIND
Thousands of years ago, our ancestors faced a neurological opportunity similar to the one we face today, an opportunity that facilitated an evolutionary leap forward. With the awakening of the neocortex, our forebears acquired a new brain structure that nature had wired for joy, creativity, and innovation.
To access that potential, our ancestors required specific nutrients to provide fuel to run their neurocomputer. Once they added brain-enriching foods to their diet, the faculties of certain individuals, the visionaries of their day, came online and began to create great works of art, devise written language, establish civilizations, and lay the foundations for our modern human experience.
During this time, ancestral shamans described Creation as a web of life in which we are all interconnected. This was a kind of Indra’s Net, which the mythology of ancient India describes as a web with an infinite number of intersecting strands and a precious jewel at the intersection of every strand. Each of the infinite number of jewels reflects every other jewel perfectly. Within this mythical net, all beings are interrelated, and all of our actions, no matter how slight, affect everyone else. Within this net, prophets converse with God and interpret His will, while mystics search for the elixir of immortality and alchemists attempt to transform lead into gold. These sages, mystics, and alchemists shared the same preoccupations as seers of today. They asked, as we do now: How can we live long and healthy lives, unaffected by debilitating illness and degenerative brain disease? How can we turn the dense
lead of human suffering
into the
gold of enlightened consciousness
?
In the scheme of history, the quest for metaphysical answers about the origin of life died when Charles Darwin published
The Origin of Species.
The popular understanding of the time was that life is a perennial struggle for survival, that humankind is governed by a harsh Law of the Jungle where only the fittest win.
But, fortunately, after centuries of scientists’ dismissal and ignoring of the ancient teachings, people in all walks of life are once again asking the mystic’s questions about the significance and potential of human consciousness. Could evolution have also been favoring the survival of the wisest?
WAYS OF FEAR, WAYS OF WISDOM
The history of human consciousness is marked by the battle between the older awareness,
the ways of fear
, and the newer awareness,
the ways of love
. When the newer awareness prevails, we discover a God of love and compassion, express religious freedom, and practice generosity. When the older awareness dominates, we tend to worship an angry god who scourges his enemies with plagues and who sends his chosen people on so-called holy wars to ensure his dominance. With the older brain, greed and intolerance prevail.
Lower awareness views everything, even nature’s beauty and bounty, as a commodity, valued only as a means to generate profit. Water, one of the essential elements of life, is seen not as a home of aquatic organisms and a natural means of transportation but as a liquid to be bottled and sold. Air, another essential element, is seen not as a vital substance indispensable for breath but as vacant space in which to emit industrial waste products. Soil is seen not as a necessity for growing food but as property to be owned, fenced, and contaminated with agricultural chemicals and industrial and domestic waste. Mountains are seen not for their majesty but as places to be stripped of minerals and ores. Forests are seen not as animal habitats and places for spiritual retreat but as potential planks and boards. Even space beyond the sky above is seen not just as an opportunity for galactic exploration but as a place to dump planetary trash and spy on our global neighbors.
Even human beings are viewed as a commodity when our thinking is fettered to the ways of fear. Children in developing nations, for example, are seen as labor pawns in sweatshops or, in developed countries, as future rank-and-file employees. Senior citizens, at least in Western societies, are not revered for their wisdom but warehoused in “old people’s homes” until death finally gets them out of the way. People of ages in between, according to Darwinian protocol, are often trained in warfare or programmed to “get even,” if not “get ahead,” even at the expense of other fellow humans. But perhaps the worst dismissal of human value occurs in the spinmeister term “collateral damage,” which would have us heartlessly gloss over the killing of innocent civilians who happen to be caught in a war zone.
And while the new, higher awareness offers us the ability to think on a sophisticated and grand scale—to see Earth from space and to comprehend that, as the health of the planet goes, so goes our own health and well-being—we find societies, whether developed or emerging, returning again and again to seemingly inevitable violence in order to resolve conflicts and impose values on others.
While arguments wage over global warming—whether it exists or not and, if so, who is to blame, and what is the cause and the cure—and whether or not the world is perched on the edge of ecological disaster, many individuals are beginning to realize that human society is also standing on the brink of an extraordinary leap in consciousness.
In the previous chapter, we carefully looked at the characteristics of the brain’s first three evolutionary stages: that is, the reptilian or R-brain, the limbic system, and the neocortex. Now, to understand this extraordinary leap and to better manifest the opportunity at hand, we need to look more closely at the development of the fourth brain—the prefrontal cortex.
THE PREFRONTAL CORTEX:
KEY TO ENLIGHTENMENT
In humans, the prefrontal cortex, located in the front of the brain, takes on critically important significance as our link to the future, our key to enlightenment, the answer to those ancient questions: How can we live long and healthy lives, unaffected by debilitating illness and degenerative brain disease? How can we turn the dense lead of human awareness into the gold of enlightened consciousness? How can we program the brain for life, health, and joy?
How will we evolve?
The prefrontal cortex is associated with the loftier brain functions such as reasoning, inventing the alphabet and music, discovering science, and engaging in creative thinking. Many of the functions of the prefrontal cortex remain a mystery, but we know that it is associated with personal initiative and the ability to project future scenarios, and it is quite likely the place where our individuality and sense of self developed.
