Just before the New Year I was reading an article about a former missionary who'd gone to Hong Kong to expand his business. It was a Forbes magazine article and it really hit me that it was a pretty good article. He said that he was ADD and that he'd been stuck in a rut for the last 10 years of his life and needed to get out of it. He knew he could do better because he'd proven it to himself on his mission just how much he could accomplish when he stuck his mind to it. I'd been feeling that I was stuck in a rut and would like to improve myself, and I'd just recently found out that I might be dyslexic. This guy mentioned in his article that he depended on books like "Getting Things Done" and the "Power of Habit" to help him keep on track with his ADD. I'd read "Getting Things Done" and thought that it was a great book so I decided that I should read "The Power of Habit" since he'd recommended it. I was hoping that I could get some ideas from it and maybe start accomplishing a little more in my life.
If I have one gift in life it is that I have a love for learning, and in all my learning I try to get understanding about the gospel. I would like to think that I have a gift of being able to teach the things that I learn to others. I'm trying to share my ideas in writing more with this blog. To go along with that gift of learning I feel that I'm sometimes led to books, or topics where the spirit seems to whisper to me: "Buy this book it'll be a good one." That may be just the way I justify spending all the money I spend on books, but I really believe it happens and when I does I usually learn things, about the gospel generally and myself sometimes.
That's what happened when I read this article about this book. Then when I was looking at "The Power of Habit" I came across the book "The Willpower Instinct" and I felt I had to read that book as well. Then felt that I should read "Emotional Intelligence" and "Emotional Intelligence" and then I saw a Great Courses lecture series called the "The Spiritual Brain" and I felt I should get that as well. After I read the first two of these books it reminded me of "Feeling Good" which is a all time life changing book for me.
I started with "The Power of Habit" and it was pretty good in laying the ground work there's been a lot of study on the brain with new imaging techniques. Where people used to try and figure out what was going on in the head, they can now actually see. Well they can see where blood flow is, or electrical activity and they assume from that that that is where the activity is taking place. Three things I remember especially from this book is that: 1) Marketers use the power of habit to market to you. 2) Organizations have habits 3) That the brain can imprint habits without the conscious part of the brain helping.
Number three was especially fascinating. A man got some type of encephalitis that destroyed the part of his brain that consciously learns things. His wife was told that he needed exercise and that he could never leave the house alone because he wouldn't be able to find his way back. Well she took hime for a walk every day on the same path so that she could meet both of those conditions. One day the man left the house by his self and the wife freaked out, but the man came back on his own. Scientists who were interested in him would go on the walk with this guy and he would have no idea why he was turning on certain street, or where his house was when he was only a few houses away, but he would walk into the house sit in his chair and watch the history channel. His brain had created a habit he could follow although he no conscious memory of it. He could do the same thing with making himself breakfast. He would get up go to the kitchen and mage himself eggs and bacon, but he couldn't tell you where the kitchen was. The brain was building habits that could fire but he didn't consciously know what he was doing.
One key thing that I took away from this book, besides the interesting things I mentioned, is that their seem to be key habits that if someone will do they also start doing other things in their life as well. The classic example they give is that when someone starts exercising everyday as a habit it will start spilling over into other parts of their life. They might start saving more, or eating less or other things that they've wanted to do. He also says that you should examine your habits to see why you're doing something. He then gave an example about how he would always get up in the afternoon and go to the cafe at his work to get a cookie and then talk with coworkers. When he started to examine why he was doing this he found that he mainly was doing it as an excuse to talk to coworkers, so he started just visiting with coworkers instead. Something like that. However, he never tells you how to do this, what a key habit would be, or how to examine your emotions.
The second book, "The Willpower Instinct" was by far the most interesting, and some of the information in it was in the first as well I'm sure. The author of this book says that it's taken from a class that she gives as a extension course at Stanford University. When she first offered it she was worried that no one would show up, but they had to move the class 4 times that first semester until they were in the largest lecture hall at Stanford. I don't know how big that is, but I'm sure it's pretty big. She said that the way to use the book is to try and implement one chapter a week the way they do at Stanford. She said that you could obviously read it through at once to get an overall flavor, but that you should go back and do one chapter a week. So that's what I did.
One of the first things that the first two chapters teach if meditation and breathing practice. From my short experience with trying yoga I could see that both of these were simplified yoga practices without the religious aspects to them. In the meditation portion she said that people who practiced it after as little as 11 hours of practices imaging or their brain showed that the portions of the brain that control our willpower had become "thicker" meaning more connections had been made in those portions of the brain. This is pretty much the same thing that the professor in the "Spiritual Brain" had found and they'd had their participants do a meditation practice that was similar.
For years I've thought that the eastern religions with their knowledge and understanding of the spirit and body connection probably had a lot to teach the west. However, I never really understood what it was getting at and why it was important. This gives a great reason, and it might be a little different than the reason they teach the meditation practice, but all religions say that you should meditate, at least all the ones I know about.
Anyway as I've said I've tried the meditation and breathing practices and haven't really done them in a while, however I've started again and I find them very beneficial when I know what I'm doing them for, and they fit in my spiritual practices. I don't really want to try and have a nirvana experience by doing something that I consider in many ways a waste of time everyday. However, when she talked about controlling your breathing to help with relaxation and that you should shoot for 3-6 breaths a minute I thought that might be hard, but after doing it for a couple time the second week, because it's part of the second chapter, I found that I was able to do 3 breaths a minute already. So maybe somethings stuck with me after all.
Also, books talk about how the mind is wired with the amygdala, a part of the mind that is supposed to be very ancient. The amygdala controls the emotional part of the brain, and it starts to fire before your conscious part of the brain even gets the signals. It's also the part of the brain that seems to imprint emotional memory. Emotions turn out to be very important. There is a story about a man who had something happen so that his amygdala was damaged and he felt no emotion. Far from being a Spock or Data he couldn't make decisions any more because he couldn't feel that anything was important to do. Turns out that emotions are an important way to run our lives. Our prophets have always taught that one way the Lord, talks to us is through emotions and I think this shows that they're right.
One other thing that I found super interesting is in the 5th chapter which I re-read this week and that is the power of dopamine. The first indication of this was back in the '50s when some scientists were doing a test on some rats and had stuck an electrode into the rats brain. I turned out that when the rat was allowed to push a switch that would excite the electrode it would do it until it fell from exhaustion. When the made the rat run over an electrified field that would burn it's feet to push the switch they would do so until they could run anymore. The scientists thought they had found the reward center of the brain, but what they'd found was the anticipation portion of the brain, the place were dopamine was secreted. When they destroyed that part of the brain in the rats and then gave them sugar they would get the same dopey look on their face (that the authors words, she's very funny) they still got the reward, but now you couldn't get them to do anything to earn the reward because there was no dopamine.
Apparently the brain send out dopamine when it thinks you should be taking action to do something. So if there's some tasty food around the brain starts telling you to crave it so that you'll go get the food. Apparently when getting tasty fattening food was scarce it was a good thing that your brain would put you in the mood for doing what it took to get it. You became a risk taking machine. But it might not be so good when tasty fattening food is all around you. She also said that when you saw a pornographic image the same thing happened your brain floods with dopamine. She said it probably happened because in the past you usually saw something like that only when you had a chance to spread your genes not on a daily bases. However, they've shown that showing people sexy images does flood the brain making it a risk taking machine which will cause them to spend more money for example. Obviously something that advertisers have figured out. When I was reading about some of the information that Bro. Christopherson talked about in his talk at the Priesthood Session in Oct 2012 one of the things that I found was that young men can get addicted to pornography or video games but it was the same addiction and addiction to arousal, or dopamine.
One interesting thing that this book talks about that there are 3 types of willpower. The "I will," the "I won't," and the "I want." She says that sometimes we can change an "I won't" to an "I will" challenge or an "I want". I'd never really thought about it that way before. It seems like I've always concentrated on the "I won't" part.
Anyway this book has much more information on how to implement willpower in your life, and how it works. I've really enjoyed this book and the insights it gives.
"Emotional Intelligence" was not that great of a book. I got the 10th anniversary edition of it. It gave some interesting information and ideas. Basically it says that Emotional Intelligence or EQ is more important to your success than IQ or your personal outlook. He says that research has shown that your IQ is pretty much set for life at birth, and that people seem to have a personal set point in the way they look at things. Some people are just more outgoing and some are just more timid. These traits appear in children at about 8 months and are pretty much set for life. However, you can change your EQ and it can make a great difference in your life. However, he doesn't really say how to do this other than some ideas on how to raise kids. It's sad the way some kids are raised.
"Emotional Intelligence 2.0" is totally different. It give you 4 basic areas that you can work on in your EQ and then give 63 different ideas to work on. Many of these ideas I've read about in other books but not explaining why they were important or how they were going to help. This book lays out a little more refined plan with explanation. It also says that you should just work on a few ideas at a time and then move on. Trying to change to much at once is overwhelming. In fact all the books say the same thing about only changing small things at first, although "Power of Habit" doesn't really tell you what to change, just that if you get a key habit it will change your whole life. I guess "Willpower Instinct" doesn't say what to change, just that you should only take on one challenge at a time.
Finally I listened to the "Spiritual Brain." It covered a lot of these areas but in a different way. The first part of the lectures, I think, where basically saying that religion does effect your brain in positive ways and here are the positive things that it does for you. He also knows that his research is very going to be controversial and he spent a long time talking about how he took questions that people were going to raise about his research were going to bring up. I found it amazing. At one point he talked about research that shows that Mormon males live longer and healthier lives as evidence that living a religious life is good. He said that at one of his presentations that a minister stood up and said that he thought that what he was doing wasn't very good because people are going to start to try to be religious for the physical benefits not for the theological ones. He said that that's not what he's doing and he doesn't think it would work anyway that people are only religious for the same reasons they've always been, but that here's more information about why it works. I think he's right and I like to hear stuff like that.
That was the first half of the lectures the second half I think was more about neruotheology which is a new field of study and he's written a book about it. In this section he tries to explain why the brain would believe the theological things that it might believe and why. I didn't find this section as interesting as the first section, and it may have been because I really wasn't prepared for it. I'm going to have to listen to it again. One interesting thing is that he talks about mystical experiences, and I found this interesting. He tries to lump Joseph Smith in with other mystics, but I now really see what Author Henry King and Hugh Nibley mean when they say that Joseph's account is the exact opposite of a mystical experience. He just went into a forest and tells exactly what happened, noting ineffable at all about what happened. In fact that seems to be the most amazing thing about the accounts of all prophets visions. The things that happens may seem bizarre in the telling but they're tellable. None of this I was light and dark at the same time, or I could touch everything at once. However, as the professor says many people of different religions have these experiences and all of them, after they have them say that they're life changing. Also, at least to me they seem to be remarkably similar no matter what religion the person having them is. However, it seems like most people have to work to attain these visions through some sort of meditation technique, that also seem remarkably similar.
This is what I found unattractive about the Buddhist meditations. I didn't want to spend all the time emptying my mind of everything, so that I could achieve some state of nirvana, that I don't think is important. However, this seems to be an experience that many religions have and from the descriptions it seems to be an experience that's very important to the people that have them. I'd say they're important, but I'd like to know why. The prophets teach us that we should ponder on things that we want to understand better, and many people have talked about how they have sudden enlightenment but it's on topics that are of concern to them. Some prophets have talked about how they've had visions opened up to them, like Nephi and Joseph F. Smith, but these are indescribable accounts of lights and feelings etc. It something that I'm going to have to ponder about, and I'm going to look more into neurotheology.
For me it's been an enlightening few weeks. I know that these ideas are going to be helpful to me and they're very exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment