Neuroplasticity or You Can Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

The field of neuroscience is truly exciting.  Because of incredible advances in the field of brain mapping, we now know that many of the "facts" that we thought were true about brain development and how we learn are no longer valid.  Because of the horrific number of brain injuries to our servicemen and women caused by IED's these past 10+ years, medicine has been forced to spend a tremendous amount of time and money developing the technology and protocols for effective treatment.  That has resulted in a new understanding about how we learn and how we can re-learn and possibly re-invent ourselves.

Knowledge:         
      Information or knowledge is what we begin to accumulate and process from the moment of birth.  As we learn new information, our brains begin laying down "tracts" or pathways so that we may start applying what we have learned and modify our learning/behavior to create new and more enriched....

Experience:
      Without experience, we would not be able to understand how to apply the accumulated information.  With experience, comes...

Emotion:  
      Emotions are the end product of experience.  How do we respond when our parents first tell us, "No," when we do something contrary to their approval?  Emotions are mitigated by powerful chemicals that are emitted in response to fear, anger, hate or love.  It is at this level that we can become easily damaged by our experiences.  For those who have experienced emotional/mental trauma, this is where they become, "stuck," no matter the age.  If damage occurs in childhood, the person stops being who he was, stops developing emotionally, continues developing physically and becomes what John Bradshaw terms, "a child adult."  In normal development, the result of our intentional actions should produce a new experience with a new emotion.

Understanding:  
      Consciously understanding how we created that new experience is fundamental to the processing of our emotions.  When we understand why and what we felt and how we created that new experience based on the memory of what we learned and did, we begin to embrace....

Wisdom:  
      Wisdom is the conscious understanding of how we can create any experience at will.  We don't have to think the way someone else taught us, but we have the ability to think for ourselves.  We can create what we want to be, what we want to see and what we want to happen.  Wisdom can also result from a negative experience.  We have the ability to understand what we did to produce that outcome, so that we don't keep repeating the action or event.  Again, emotions can interfere with our ability to identify our participation and responsibility for those undesirable experiences.  

Evolution:      
      Evolution is the wisdom that we have acquired from understanding the emotions we have created, based on what we have learned, processed, understood and experienced.

I underlined, "emotions," so we could see just how important they are to every step of our learning process that makes up who we are.  It simply doesn't work when someone tells us to, "get over it," when we are emotionally traumatized.  This is why, I believe, there are so many of our service people committing suicide everyday.  This is why we are stuck repeating the same nonproductive behavior, year after year.  This is why we are a nation that has become "hooked" on anti-psychotic medications.

The brain has the ability to re-pattern itself and heal.  As we become more familiar with how we learn, then we can begin to relearn and reprogram ourselves to change any unproductive or undesirable behavior.  I can recommend two tremendous books on this subject:

Spontaneous Happiness by Andrew Weil, MD and Evolve Your Brain by Joe Dispenza, DC.

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