It was his groundbreaking book, “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One,” that first introduced us to the brilliance of neuroscientist and author – Dr. Joe Dispenza.
As a renowned lecturer and educator, Dr. Joe Dispenza believes that you can achieve anything once you learn how to rewire your brain and recondition your body to make lasting changes.
If you’re a hypnotist, this notion won’t be news to you.
But if you’re still in your early stages of your hypnosis career, or would like to discover the proven science behind “rewiring your brain” – be sure to check out his above TED Talk on neuroplasticity.
In short… your brain contains about 100 billion neurons that store information and communicate with each other.
Whenever you learn something new, your neurons communicate, making a new synaptic connection in your neocortex.
That’s what learning is: making new connections in your neocortex, your thinking brain.
As Dr. Joe Dispenza puts it:
“Neurons that fire together, wire together.”
This means: whenever you learn something new, your brain physically changes.
But that’s not the only amazing thing your brain can do…
>>Related article: Interview With A Hypnotist: Neuroscientist & Success Coach, Ramon David, Reveals The Neurological Processes During Transformational Change Work
Cool Brain Facts From Dr. Joe Dispenza
Did you know that your brain generates more electricity in a single day than all the cell phones on earth?
Or that when you experience something, you take in information through your 5 senses, which causes your neurons to organize themselves into patterns? This then triggers an emotion that enhances the experience, making it easier to remember.
Which is why you can remember your first kiss or where you were on 9/11, but perhaps not what you had for dinner the night before last.
Dr. Joe Dispenza also talks about how stress happens when your body is out of balance, and how it can be triggered by a physical object or event, or just by the thought of that object or event.
Which means: your unconscious can’t tell the difference between the memorized emotion of an event – and the event itself. So when you think about an event and this triggers an emotion – you mentally and physically experience it as if it were happening again.
This is great if you happen to be reliving positive events all the time – but given the human propensity to recall negative events and emotions, it means many people are physically and emotionally “stuck” in the negative happenings of the past.
Not only does this make your head a rather unhappy place to be, it also means you’re continually shaping – rewiring – your brain and your body as a result of these negative emotions.
But the good news is, when you replace one thought, idea or behavior with another, and persist with it, and keep your attention on it, eventually the new thought, idea or behavior will drown out the old one.
Do it enough times and it becomes automatic. It becomes a habit, something easy, something that feels natural. It becomes a skill.
And that’s what neuroplasticity really means.
If you want to learn more about the works of Dr. Joe Dispenza and other great researchers, check out our article 5 Must-Know Researchers & Their Pioneering Studies That Prove Why Hypnosis Works & How It’s Used To Heal.
Now that you know some amazing facts about how you can make use of your thoughts to essentially make a better version of yourself, we thought it would be good to get Igor’s thoughts on this fascinating topic too.
Let’s hear it from our resident master hypnotist.
Cool Brain Facts From Igor Ledochowski
Essentially, our brains control the way our lives work:
How happy we are, how tough we are, how kind we are, how skilled we are, and so on.
The main structure of your brain gets set, gets formed by the age of around 25. Up until 25, the brain is building.
After the age of 25, we used to think that the brain just slowly starts to fall apart until by the time you’re an old age, that’s it. There’s no hope for us. But that’s not true, as it turns out.
Since the early 2000s or so, this idea of neuroplasticity has come about.
All of these things have been challenged in the last 20 years or so and very, very successfully. We’ve got the evidence to back it up now.
So what does neuroplasticity mean?
It means that the brain can change itself. You can think of the neurons and the synap system inside the brain and a little bit like streets inside a city.
The more you use it, the bigger that road becomes.
That becomes very interesting, very important. Why?
Let’s take an idea of aging and losing functions as you age. The age, just like the muscles in the body, the brain starts to deteriorate.
You can have a 75-year-old bodybuilder who is physically strong. You can have a brain builder at 75 year old who is mentally strong.
What does it take to achieve this?
Very simple– by doing exercises. A bodybuilder trains his or her body, a brain builder trained his or her brain.
This is a very exciting period in time to be alive, because we can see now that we can alter the brain to eradicate conditions like OCD, depression, anxiety, age-related decline or the brain. Brain injuries themselves can be reversed.
In the last 20 or 30 years or so, science has finally caught up with them, and have validated it.
If you take brain scans of a meditator, monks who really focus on happiness and concepts like this, you will see that areas of the brain related to happiness, related to focus, and similar things, are massively expanded. They are like bodybuilders of the mind.
The kind of work you do with your body will change how your body looks and which parts of your body get stronger. The same rule is true for your brain. The way you use your brain will train it to become stronger in some ways and develop certain skills or attributes.
There are four key principles– two inner and two outer.
Time And Repetition
The two outer principles are time and repetition. Exactly like with the body, the more you repeat an activity, the better you get at it. If it’s lifting a heavy weight, you get stronger to lift heavier weights.
If it’s a skill like golf, well, you get better at that skill like golf. In terms of the mind, on the other hand, time and repetition work the same way. You’ve got to do mental repeatedly over a period of time, and just like the body, those activities will reshape how your brain operates in better ways.
This brings us to the two inequalities, and that is attention and the quality of attention.
Attention And The Quality of Attention
Let’s look at the idea of brain games versus brain training.
Brain-training games make you good at those kinds of tasks. In other words, crossword puzzles can help you maybe improve your vocabulary or your use of vocabulary, but it doesn’t help you in pretty much anything else.
Well, they might do crossword puzzles as a way of regaining some of the lost vocabulary, rebuilding the parts of the brain that were missing that.
But those things themselves won’t make you happier. It wouldn’t help you focus more, more than maybe a little bit of terms of the crossword puzzles.
They won’t help you expand it towards happiness, focus, and all the kind of qualities that makes life really worth living. For that, you need brain training.
Meditation is a classic example of this.
One meditation called open monitoring, you may notice mindfulness, allows you to settle into your senses so your mind doesn’t constantly distracted by the past, the future, fears, concerns, and so on, you’re just here in the present enjoying yourself. It’s a wonderful place to be.
But that’s only one kind of mind training or brain training. Other types will help you develop resiliency, emotional strength to be able to bounce back from problems.
Here are some non-brain-oriented exercises you can do that’ll actually improve your brain, as well.
Four Key Things To Improving Your Brain
Here are the four key things to improving your brain without actually doing some kind of mind training directly:
Physical Exercise
Physical exercise is linked straight to the brain. Your brain gets healthier the healthier your body becomes.
Actually, fasting is good for you. Fasting can give you a wonderful brain boost. Incorporating that into your lifestyle, including a good diet, is going to help you a lot.
Good And Healthy Sleep
Regular good sleep is fundamentally important for the brain. Research shows the brain can actually start growing new brain cells if you have the right quality of sleep.
Novelty
The more new unusual experiences you expose yourself to, the more you stimulate the brain, the more your brain will grow.
Those are things you can do on your own, but if you want to train your brain directly with mind training exercises that build the qualities of your mind in a way that’s going to enhance your life and everything that you do, then coming back and find a little bit more about our mind training program.
You have the power to physically change the makeup of your own brain and lead the kind of life you want to lead.
What’s more: as a hypnotist, you have the beautiful, unbelievable skill to help others do the same.
What an incredible gift to give to the world – wouldn’t you agree?