Brain plasticity + Source !

A renowned scientist in 1960 said that brains degenerate from an early age and that brain cells cannot repair or regrow or reproduce for the rest  of your life. A downhill run from age 16.
Because of hs reputation no one questioned this "great man". He mentally crippled generations of other scientists  who never thought to question 'his eminence'.

Naturally, common people agreed with the white coated priesthood.

The scientist was completely wrong.

Modern research shows that brain mass can increase with learning. Modern  technology allows new brain circuits to be counted and quantified.
Brain Maps.
That the brain dedicates areas to certain functions is proven but the areas can move and merge and even be completely relocated elsewhere following injury. How?
Even just by talk therapy, psychoanalysis, scanners show that people can learn to break faulty disabling associations and replace them with healthier more desirable associations between different parts of the brain. Scanners before and after psychoanalysis, reveal permanent changes, in which different areas of the brain map, light up with  the same mental activities.
Interesingly, short  term memories seem to be transformed into long term by  genetic changes in certain cells.
Meaning, you are not a prisoner of your genes, or your upbringing. Not an animal, bred. 

Guess who else does similar  healing operations via this wonderful brain plasticity?
Why, Source of course.

Just like a psychonalyst, Source can present repeatedly a faulty thought habit from childhood flooding the brain with bliss compounds as a better thought sequence is provided.This with repetitions can rewire a bad thought habit into a much better one that becomes permanent. And presto the healing is done. In Lay Gnosis this never really stops. It's done all day, anytime, as you go about your daily activities. Free of charge.  

The latest discoveries in our amazing brain plasticity are summarised by a Doctor's book

The Brain that changes itself. By Dr Norman Doidge. MD.
  

 

 

 


 

The Brain that Changes itself          rear cover review

An astonishing new scientific discovery is overthrowing  the centuries-old notion that the adult human brain is fixed and unchanging. It is, instead, able to change its own structure and function even into old age.
Psychiatrist and researcher Norman Doidge MD travelled around the US to meet  the brilliant scientists, championing neuroplasticity, and the people whose lives they have transformed-people whose mental limitations or brain damage were previously seen as unalterable, and whose conditions had been dismissed as hopeless.
We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole ; a woman labelled retarded who cured her deficits with brain exercises and now cures those of others ; blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured ; IQs raised; ageing brains rejuvenated; stroke patients recovering their faculties; children with cerebral palsy learning to move gracefully ; entrenched depression and anxiety disappearing ; and lifelong character traits changed.
Doidge takes us onto terrain that might seem fantastic. We learn  that our thoughts can switch our genes on and off,. altering our brain anatomy. We learn  how people of average intelligence, can ,with brain exercises,  improve their congnition and perception , develop muscular strength, or learn to play a musical instrument --- simply by imagining so.
Using personal stories from the heart of this neuro plasticity revolution, Dr Doidge says has written an immensely moving , inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential. And now YOU can add SOURCE

A few excerpts from  the brain plasticity book that may extend your paradigm. Liberate you a little. Free you from society's programming.

Example  We share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. Human genome project enabled the spotting of what makes us different to Chimps. One human gene we did not inherit from chimps determines how many neurons- nerve cells-brain cells - we will make. In the embryo, all our neurons start from a single cell which diivides then makes two, then four and so on. A regulatory gene determines when that division process will cease.That process continues until the average human has 100 billion brain cells. It stops earlier in chimps so their brain is one third the size of ours. Chimp brains are plastic also, but the sheer quantitative difference between theirs and ours leads to an exponentially greater number of interactions between them, because each neuron can be connected to thousands of others.
If we didn't inherit this brain size gene acending from apes, where did it come from?  Question  Are we really ascended from apes via evolution?

Brain physical structures are actually rewired by everyday activities. brain scans of taxi drivers show that the more years a cabbie spends navigating London streets , the larger the volume of his hippocampus.Even leisure activities change our brains physically. Meditators and meditation teachers have a thicker insula, apart of the cortex activated by paying close attention.

Cultural practices determine physical brain development.
Sea Gypsies are nomadic people off the west coast of Thailand.
They learn to swim before they walk.They live over half their lives in boats on the open sea.Their children dive down often thirty feet to pluck up food and have done so for centuries.They stay underwater twice as long as you and me. But what distinguishes these children is that they can see clearly at great depths, without goggles.Most humans cannot see clearly underwater.The Gypsy children learn to comtrol the size of their pupils, constricting them deliberately 22%. They override the "natural reflex" tendency for the pupils to contract underwater like yours and mine.

Neuronal (brain) stem cells were long overlooked  as science thought the brain was a mechanical machine that couldn't grow new parts. As late as 1965 Altman and Gopal discovered them at MIT in rat brains  and their work was disbelieved.
Elizabeth Gould was the first to discover them in primates.1990s
Next Eriksson and Gage found an ingenious way to stain brain cells with a marker, BrdU, that  gets taken into  brain cells  only at the moment they are created, and that lights up under a microscope. They injected terminally ill patients with the marker. When these patients died Eriksson and Gage found recently formed baby neurons in their hippocampi. Thus we learned form dying patients that living brain cells form in us until the very end of our lives. 

It has recently been discovered (2008) that early childhood trauma causes massive plastic change in the hippocampus, shrinking it, so that new, long term explicit memories cannot form.Animals removed form their mothers let out desperate cries, then enter a turned-off state, releasing a stress hormone called glucocorticoid which kills cells in the hippocampus so it cannot make the synaptic connections in neural networks that make learning and explicit long term memory possible. These early stresses predispose these motherless animals to stress related illnesses for the rest of their lives.When they undergo long separations, the gene to to initiate production of glucocorticoids gets turned on and stays on for extended periods. Trauma in infancy appears to lead to supersensitisation- a plastic alteration- of the brain cells that regulate glucocorticoids.
Recent research in humans shows adult survivors of childhood abuse show signs of glucorticoid supersensitivity lasting into adulthood. 

That the hippocampus shrinks is an important neuroplastic discovery.
Depression, high stress childhood trauma, all release glucocorticoids andl kill cells in the hippocampus leading to memory loss. The longer people are depressed the smaller their hippocampus gets. The hippocampus of depressed adults who suffered pre-pubertal childhood trauma is 18 % is smaller than that of depressed adults without childhood trauma, a downside of the plastic brain : we literally lose essential cortical real estate in response to illness.

If the stress is brief, this decrease in size is temporary. if it is too prolonged, the damage is permanent. As people recover from depression their memories return, and research suggest their hippocampi can grow back. In fact, the hippocampus is one of two brain areas where new neurons are created from our own stem cells as part of normal functioning. 

Anti depressant medications increase the number of stem cells that become new neurons in the hippocampus. Rats given Prozac for 3 weeks had a 70% increase in the number of cells in their hippocampi.It usually takes 2-3 weeks for antidepressants to work in humans- perhaps coincidentally the same amount of time it takes for newly born brain cells in the hippocampus to mature, extend their projections and connect with other brain cells.  So we may, without knowing it, have been helping people get out of depression by using medications that foster brain plasticity.Since people who improve in psychotherapy  also find their memories improve, it may be that it also stimulates neuronal growth in their hippocampi.

 One reason we can change our brains physically by imagining is that from a neuro scientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound.When people close their eyes and visualise a simple  object such as the letter 'a', the primay visual cortex lights up, just as if the subjects were actually looking at the letter 'a' Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualising can improve performance.

So Godlings, just imagine the potential of LAY GNOSIS , of  your own adoring internal therapist who can also act directly on your chemistry and your imagination with music and dreams and nudges, physical signals and direct voice,  24/7 to perfect your biochemical  tuning.......is there any limit?