Brain Power: Improve Your Mind as You Age ~ A Talk with authors Michael J. Gelb and Kelly Howell

Who are your role models for aging? What are your expectations and attitudes about the progress of your mind as you get older? Do you expect your memory to be better or worse in ten or twenty years? How about your sex life? What are your fears, concerns, and worries about getting older? Are you hoping that someone will develop the mental equivalent of Viagra?

In the last thirty years, the scientific evidence supporting the notion that your mind can improve through the years has become overwhelming. Clearly, the question is no longer whether your mind can improve with age but, rather, how you can optimize your mental powers as you get older.

This book presents practical, evidence-based wisdom to help you answer this question. You’ll learn new skills to increase memory, intelligence, creativity, and concentration. And you’ll cultivate greater confidence and healthy optimism as you discover how to improve your mind as you age.

Michael Gelb

Is it really possible to improve your mind as you age? Doesn’t memory deteriorate as we grow older?

Yes, it’s possible to improve your mind as you age. Memory can, of course, deteriorate as we grow older, if we neglect it. The good news is that there are simple practices that the average person can do to prevent deterioration and actually improve with age. Brain Power is a guide to these simple practices.

You share that the paradigm has shifted in relation to age and the mind. Please explain.

Most of us were raised with faulty ideas about our mental capacity — such as the notion that IQ is fixed at age five, that brain cells degrade yearly after age thirty, and that memory and learning ability inevitably decline with age. These notions, based on the scientific understanding that was prevalent in the 1950s, are myths — dangerous myths that can stifle our ability to flourish in the second half of life.

Just as Copernicus overturned the myth that the earth was at the center of the universe, so contemporary neuroscience has revolutionized our understanding of the potential to improve mental functioning as we age. We now know that mental abilities, including memory, are designed to improve throughout life. Neuroscientists call this neuroplasticity.

The brain is not, as was once thought, a compartmentalized, hardwired, static machine whose parts eventually wear out. Instead, it is a highly adaptable and dynamic organ, capable of generating new neurons and improving as we get older. People of average intelligence can, with appropriate training, raise their IQ, enhance their memory, and sharpen their intelligence throughout life.

What role does optimism play in longevity? Do cultural and environmental stimuli influence brain function?

According to a long-term study by Dr. Becca Levy people with an optimistic attitude toward aging outlive those with a pessimistic attitude by an average of more than 7 years. It’s easier to be an optimist when you know that the brain is designed to improve with use!

Our brain function is influenced by cultural, environmental and, of course, genetic factors. And, we can, by cultivating a positive, intelligent attitude toward aging, make the most of our genetic, cultural and environmental circumstances.

What are the most powerful techniques to improve memory as we age?

Maintaining a positive attitude about your memory
is the first step. When people believe that their memory is fading, they don’t bother trying to concentrate on registering new information, thus fulfilling their negative expectation. All memory techniques (aka mnemonics) are based on strengthening associations, so focus on connecting new information to something you already know. I also strongly recommend “Mind Mapping” (developed by Tony Buzan, author of the foreword to Brain Power) a technique for strengthening memory and creativity simultaneously.

What are the worst mental habits to eliminate immediately?

The worst mental habits are those that create and reinforce patterns of anxiety, fear and stress. That’s why, in addition to the chapter on how to cultivate freedom from stress, this book comes with a free download of the remarkable Brain Sync audio program that effortlessly guides you to experience brain wave states associated with deep rest and relaxation.

What are the most detrimental phrases to eliminate from internal and external conversations?

The way you speak can reinforce or transform negative attitudes and stereotypes about aging. Be wary of conversations that focus on commiseration (literally “to be miserable together”). If you find yourself indulging in discussions that focus on how “things ain’t what they used to be,” shift to an emphasis on gratitude and appreciation.

Here are ten phrases to eliminate:
• I’m having a senior moment.
• I’m not what I used to be.
• I’m too old.
• I can’t remember anything anymore.
• My memory is going.
• Getting older stinks.
• Everything was easier when I was younger.
• I’m over the hill.
• My best days are behind me.
• Things keep getting worse as I get older.

There are so many brain boosting supplements on the market, if you were only to take a few, which ones are the most essential?

A high quality multivitamin/mineral supplement is the most important daily brain-booster along with fish oil and Acetyl-L-carnitine (ALC).

What’s True, and Not, About Stress (Part 3) ~ Deepak Chopra

In two earlier posts (which I hope you will go back and read) we found that stress is a complicated matter that intertwines body and mind. Mechanical stress is simple. If you put pressure on a car engine or airplane wing long enough, it will weaken and eventually break down. But human beings are set up differently. The more we use our muscles, for example, the stronger they become, and if we fail to use the heart or brain enough, they atrophy. The damage caused by stress requires a deeper look than any mechanistic model can provide.

I proposed that the world’s wisdom traditions fill the gap. This doesn’t mean that ancient views of karma, although they have a lot to say about how stress works, should be adopted wholesale. Spirituality evolves along with everything else, and it’s up to us to find our own path. In the ancient world most people were ground down by excessive physical demands, and their lives brought primal suffering in the form of starvation, exposure to the elements, lack of basic sanitation and so on. By comparison, the stress we face today is different but not milder, since every life still contains pain, suffering, anxiety, doubt, insecurity and the other woes that were confronted by the great spiritual guides of the past. At the very least, spirituality contends that human existence is meant to be free of such suffering.

Karmic impressions (vasanas in Sanskrit) are basically the same as stress. Something sticks to us — a memory, a fear, a trauma — and keeps coming back in repetitive ways. Long-term depression and anxiety are repetitive; so are stress disorders, addictions and obsessive-compulsive behavior. The reason that modern therapies have not solved these maladies is that they don’t easily fit a medical model. No one is infected with an addiction; there is no vaccine or surgery for depression. Attempts are made to squeeze stress-related symptoms into a manageable scheme so that a patient can be handed the right pill after a fifteen-minute consultation. I won’t discount that some relief is offered, but for the most part drug therapy only masks the symptom without touching the cause of distress.

How do we get stress to stop sticking to us? How do we erase karmic impressions? How can we let go of past pain? These are profound questions, and they give ordinary people a strong reason to look into spirituality (and into therapies where the medical model has merged with the findings of wisdom). Personally, I don’t find that the kind of spiritual answers involved in prayer, faith, patience, hope and reliance on God work very well, much less those beliefs that deem suffering to be spiritually valuable for its own sake. Far more workable, I think, is the kind of spirituality that focuses directly on consciousness. Meditation, mindfulness, self-reflection, focused intention, energy work, hands-on healing and yoga all have their part to play. Karma or stress — call it what you will — is rooted in consciousness. We know this because karma and stress are unique with each person, forming patterns that no two people exactly duplicate.

If there is a state of consciousness that frees us from stress and the repetitive behavior that keeps us bound to the past, it should be a first priority to seek such a state. In the Indian tradition suffering is born of duality; healing is the end result of attaining unity. Duality comes down to the divided self, caught up in desires, thoughts, drives and impulses that form a confused and conflicting inner landscape. Unity is a self that is intact, clear, without contradictory impulses and present in the moment. Unity consciousness may be much more than this — it could be a state of grace that brings a person into intimacy with God — but without the basics, higher consciousness does us no good, in terms of freeing us from distress.

I’ve laid out a worldview rather than going into details, even though people always want how-to advice. The reason for being so general is that accepting a new worldview is the most important thing you can do. What is more basic than the decision to leave the battlefield rather than continuing to fight? Internal conflict is the problem, and doing more of the same, warring against yourself, judging against your bad impulses, suffering over your mistakes, projecting blame on others, finding that your highest expectations keep falling short — these are all forms of inner conflict. If you keep repeating them, you will persist in duality and the suffering it brings.

I almost never refer readers to my own writings, but two books, “How to Know God” and “The Book of Secrets,” lay out the big picture of how higher consciousness works, while a practical manual, “Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul,” gives the details.

Here, in three posts, I’ve tried to show that stress is, in fact, a spiritual issue. Materialism with its mechanistic explanations and conventional medicine are not complete enough to solve this huge problem, and in many ways they point in the wrong direction. It takes a shift in consciousness to end suffering. Such a shift is possible. The way to accomplish it is known and has been laid out in the world’s wisdom traditions. With that knowledge in hand, we can direct our lives in an evolutionary direction that was all but unknown a few decades ago. The solution to stress is inside each of us, waiting to be discovered.

Deepak Chopra – What’s True, and Not, About Stress (Part Two)

In my first post I began to talk about the spiritual side of stress. It’s such an unusual approach that it might be good to review stress more conventionally first. Stress is made complicated because both mind and body are involved. The so-called stress response is a temporary event with physical markers, such as a rise in certain hormones.

Once the event that caused the response is over, the stress itself isn’t gone. Soldiers come home from battle with post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, a lingering memory bringing back their stress even more powerfully and repeatedly than when it was first felt. Closer to home, sitting in a traffic snarl while commuting to and from work can create a low-level kind of stress that is constant and nagging.

In other words, physical signs aren’t enough to explain what stress is doing to us every day. You can’t simply “lower your stress” by avoiding pressured situations. A completely easy life, without pressure of any kind (if such a hypothetical life existed), needs only one deeply disturbing event, such as the death of a baby, to be scarred for years and change the course of a person’s existence. At the opposite extreme, stress can act like high blood pressure, which damages the body through a slight increase in stress on the cell walls, seemingly innocuous at first glance. The cell performs all of its functions without seeming distressed, and yet years later, a huge array of problems can arise.

So where does that leave us? Is life meant to be stressful by its very nature, full of events that send us into the stress response no matter what we do? Modern medical research has arrived at many partial answers that go part way to a complete answer. For example, three factors make stress more severe: repetition, unpredictability and lack of control.

These markers are observed in a classic experiment with laboratory mice in which a mouse is placed on a pad that delivers a mild electrical shock, not enough to hurt it but simply to startle. If these small shocks are measured individually, the stress they cause is not significant. However, if the shocks come randomly and the mouse cannot escape them, something remarkable happens. The overloaded stress response in the mouse causes severe damage in a short period of time, leading to illness and a quick death.

Humans are more complex than mice, and even though repetition will break down anyone’s resistance to stress (given enough time at the front lines under artillery bombardment, all soldiers suffer shell shock, for example), we are affected more severely if stresses arrive unpredictably and in a way that is out of our control. This helps explain why a child coming from a situation of abuse, with an unpredictable alcoholic parent, for example, can be feel the harm of this experience for life. When you can find no escape, and bad things happen out of the blue, stress takes a heavy toll.

So where does spirituality help us in this tangle of confusing facts?

In the Indian tradition there’s a term for events that make an impression: karma. Literally the word means “action” in Sanskrit, but karmas are actions that change us, for good or ill, by leaving a memory that causes action to change in the future. For the moment we won’t talk about the Law of Karma, which says that actions are balanced in the cosmos between good and evil, or as the New Testament states it, “as you sow so shall you reap.” Here, I’m only concerned with the stressful side of karma, by which certain life events make a deep impression while others don’t.

At first glance karma is far more complicated that stress. There’s the whole mystery of how a good action is rewarded by the universe and a bad action punished. There’s the personal side of karma, where two people go through the same event — a car crash, winning the lottery, getting married — but wind up with completely different results. This tangle of riddles and complexity cannot simply be wished away. Nor is it adequate to lump everything under the same simple rubric like the stress response. The ancient seers of India, the Vedic rishis, embraced the entire issue, but so did Jesus, Buddha, and other great spiritual guides.

Their diagnosis was surprisingly similar to the one accepted by stress researchers: Life delivers stress in very complicated ways and is inescapable. Memory stores deep impressions, and the body responds to these memories as strongly as it does to the original stressor. We can easily insert “karma” in the slots where the word “stress” appears. But here the world’s wisdom traditions sharply diverge from modern medicine by saying flatly that suffering is inescapable as long as karma exists.

In Buddhism and Vedanta there are no half measures. A person isn’t asked to increase the good experiences in his life and reduce the bad ones. The entire pursuit of pleasure is considered unworkable. This is bad news for anyone who tries to use stress reduction, yet I am not suggesting that embracing stress or increasing the pressure in your life is advisable. It was assumed in the Bible, the Vedas, and other scriptures that we all try to lead good moral lives by following the rules of decent behavior. Yet, this basic moral existence isn’t the same as solving karma, or stress, once and for all.

After offering such a dire diagnosis, the astonishing thing about the ancient spiritual teachings is that they offer a complete solution. They suggest that the world of karma, even though it surrounds us and ensnares us at every moment, is not fully real. Beyond it lies actual reality, which is reached by cultivating the subtler side of the human nervous system.

I’ve found it helpful to divide awareness into two kinds of attention: first attention and second attention. First attention keeps us attuned to the affairs of everyday life; second attention keeps us attuned to higher reality. If you remain fixated on first attention, karma and stress are unavoidable. Your focus will be tied to changes in the external world and your inner response to the ups and downs of existence.

Second attention, however, is rooted in the changeless, and thus it protects you from the impressions made by stress and karma. This isn’t the same as zoning out. In modern terminology, second attention is like being centered instead of scattered, calm instead of restless, at peace instead of agitated. Yet, these are secondary to the deeper realization that you are not what you seem to be. You seem to be a body and mind tossed about by the winds of change. In reality, you are a soul undergoing physical experiences for the purpose of evolving until you fully know who you are.

I realize that this conclusion seems like folly, hokum or nonsense to committed materialists; it fits into the skeptical scheme of those who ridicule all things spiritual. But this isn’t an issue that can be settled by arguing over it. Each person must go through the process of experiencing second attention and finding out personally if higher reality exists. The proof lies in many areas, but the most crucial is the area we’ve been discussing. If stress ceases to create illness, damage, anxiety and pressure, if impressions no longer haunt us, if memory loosens its grip, then we can say that the world’s wisdom traditions had something valid to say.

In the next post I’ll cover the practical side of shifting into second attention as the true solution to stress and therefore the solution to the baffling riddle of karma.

What’s True, and Not, About Stress ~ Deepak Chopra

This is one of those posts where it’s tempting to add “keep reading” to the title. Stress is the gray little monster in the corner that keeps out of sight. Everyone promises themselves to reduce the stress in their lives, yet “I’m stressed out” is said every day, and the pressures of modern life mount. Banks undergo stress tests, as do our hearts when the doctor wants to test for cardiac disease. What more is there to say about a subject that has become so well worn?

Actually, it’s worthwhile to go back and revisit the basic facts about stress, and then look at the deeper, more mysterious issues that are involved, some of which lead us into unexpected territory. The term stress was coined by the Hungarian researcher Hans Selye, who injected irritating substances into mice and discovered, to his surprise, that all of them produced the same symptoms (swelling of the adrenal cortex, atrophy of the thymus gland, gastric and duodenal ulcers). Selye observed that sick patients with various illnesses exhibited much the same symptoms.

It was due to Selye’s medical approach that stress is seen as a physical response rooted in the endocrine system. In fact, the term “stress hormones” is still applied, and blood levels of cortisol are a key indicator of someone being under stress. In the grand scheme, stress hormones were incredibly useful ways to explain such diverse things as battle fatigue, the fight-or-flight response, and the death of salmon after they swim upstream to spawn. People were taught to think of stress as being the equivalent of pressure being put on the body, which then gets stressed out.

In this scheme, more pressure equals more stress, less pressure equals less stress. Therefore, it must be good to live with less pressure. However, the picture isn’t nearly so simple. Selye recognized two types of stress. The first, which he called distress, occurs from bad events like being in battle or losing your job. The second, which he called eustress, occurs from happy events, such as a surprise birthday party or going on vacation — the latter is considered one of everyday life’s biggest stressors, even though the purpose of a vacation is supposedly to relax. The body reacts the same to eustress and distress so far as raising its levels of stress hormones, and this poses a dilemma.

Human beings are not jellyfish, passively floating through a uniform medium like the ocean. We live in a constantly changing environment, to which the body responds by going out of balance and then back into balance. Its natural set point is balanced, and the complex way that this balance is maintained — known as homeostasis — crosses all boundaries. A physical event can throw the body out of balance, but so can a mental event. Thus, being afraid that you might lose your job is just as stressful as actually losing it.

If everything is potentially a stress, and if the body is so well adapted to restoring balance, then the concept of stress becomes vague and perhaps useless. There are people who claim to thrive on pressure. Is this possible, or are they ignoring signs of stress that will catch up with them one day? Is running a marathon, which puts enormous stress on the body physically, a hidden health risk despite the satisfaction gained by the runner? A hundred similar questions can be asked, and the medical answer, though very complex and detailed, amounts to a shrug of the shoulders. To understand stress completely, one would have to understand the whole of life, it seems.

What if we step outside the medical model, or better yet, incorporate it into a larger perspective? That is what the world’s wisdom traditions have done, without using our modern terminology. Contrary to popular belief, which would label spirituality as other-worldly, the purpose of wisdom is to adapt better to this world. The same issues that lead to stress in the modern world — how to be happy, how to calm the restless mind, how to escape nervous anxiety and so on — confronted human beings at the time of Buddha and Christ. So let’s step back and rethink stress in spiritual terms first, rather than setting the soul aside as something to pay attention to much further down the road.

Here, I must speak very generally. In spirituality of every kind, the non-physical domain contains our source. We are the products of consciousness, whether you call it the mind of God or universal Brahman. This consciousness was responsible for creating the body and mind we experience every day. The good life therefore depends upon the following:

1. Being at peace with yourself.

2. Connecting to your source in consciousness.

3. Growing in self-awareness.

4. Feeling loved and worthy.

5. Experiencing the presence of God or the soul.

People struggle simply to attain the first thing on this list and yet much more is implied by the other items. An entire worldview is based on which allegiance you hold, to the physical first and foremost or to the spiritual first and foremost. This isn’t an intellectual or emotional decision made according to various beliefs, it is a conception of reality itself. In our time, which is dominated by materialism, stress is the enemy that impairs health. In the spiritual worldview, stress is the distraction that keeps you from knowing God or the soul.

The two sound radically different, and they are. But again speaking in vast generalities, the body is crucial in both cases. Homeostasis, the body’s ability to balance itself, has both a gross level and a subtle level. The gross level is needed for physical survival. When you run a mile and raise your blood pressure and heart rate, it’s vital for these to come back down again or you will die. The subtle level of homeostasis is far more mystifying. But we might say that true balance is a state of clear, calm self-awareness in which you return to the higher self. Thus, a moment of excitement that throws your awareness out of balance, whether for pleasure or pain, shouldn’t be sustained, because if you lose the connection with your soul your true self, life will be harmed.

Stress, it turns out, does spiritual damage before it does physical damage. Selye didn’t talk in those terms, naturally, but quickly upon the spread of his research findings in the 60s and 70s, it was widely reported that meditation reduces stress. That’s not a casual observation. Meditation’s ability to reduce blood pressure, for example, is secondary to the fact that the whole person is being rebalanced, not just the body. Yet the body is crucial in the process. No more profound finding has emerged in modern spirituality. One famous guru was asked what was necessary in order to reach enlightenment, and he replied, “Relax.”

Behind this simple and seemingly frivolous answer lies a wealth of knowledge about health, wisdom, well-being and the purpose of life. In the next post I’d like to explore those avenues. Stress will be our constant companion, the little gray monster trying to be overlooked, until we root out its effects as deeply as possible.