I committed to doing everything I could to put compassion on the scientific map.
Most people still don’t think of qualities like happiness as being a skill, that can be enhanced through training.
Our brain is continuously being shaped – we can take more responsibility for our own brain by cultivating positive influences.
I think the messiness and embodied nature of modern life just produces an enhanced signal for our attention.
Resilience is the maintenance of high levels of positive affect and well-being in the face of adversity. It is not that resilient individuals never experience negative affect, but rather that the negative affect does not persist.
Mindfulness – moment to moment non-judgemental attention and awareness.
I wouldn’t consider myself a Buddhist or a card-carrying zealot at all. My first commitment is as a scientist to uncover the truth about all this.
We have no idea how the subjective quality of consciousness emerges from the physical stuff of the brain.
Spatial working memory is impaired by stress.
Happiness and well-being are actually best regarded as skills.
The best way I can mentor and lead those around me is to embody these qualities myself.
We can change the brain by changing the mind.
The key to a healthy life is having a healthy mind.
In short, the brain has the power to recruit healthy neurons to perform the function of the damaged ones. Neuroplasticity enables the brain to reassign jobs.
As a result, nature has endowed the human brain with a malleability and flexibility that lets it adapt to the demands of the world it finds itself in. The brain is neither immutable nor static but continuously remodeled by the lives we lead.
But the scientists had the other half of their group of volunteers only imagine playing the notes; they did not actually touch the ivories. Then the researchers measured whether the motor cortex had noticed. It had. The region that controls the fingers of the right hand had expanded in the virtual pianists just as it had in the volunteers who had actually played the piano. Thinking, and thinking alone, had increased the amount of space the motor cortex devoted to a specific function.
Yet we had fingered the prefrontal cortex. This region was considered the seat of human reason, the locus of forethought and wisdom and rationality and other cognitive functions that distinguish us from “lower” animals. But we were saying it rules our emotions, too – and that the barricade that psychology had erected between reason and emotion has no basis in fact.
This study, which we published in 2007, provided strong evidence that the brain’s attention systems can be trained. Like any form of workout, from weight lifting to cycling to learning a second language, it causes an enduring change in the system that is engaged. In this case, that change is the ability to maintain laser-sharp concentration with less and less activity in the brain’s attention circuit.
It is rare that the human mind can determine the truths of nature, or even of ourselves, by intuition or casual observation. That.
Happiness can be trained because the very structure of our brain can be modified.