Evolution Revolution: Brain and Attention

(This is the preface to a book on neuroplastic workouts — how to use your workouts as an opportunity for maximum neuroplastic updates.)

Preface

There’s a revolution happening on the cutting edge of human evolution — we are learning how to use our brains.

Now we know that our brains can change themselves — very quickly. One key resource, focused attention, rewrites, rewires, reconditions our brains. How we use our attention determines our reality, our experience, our success, our happiness and our future.

You might think the limit on how quickly we can update our brains is how fast the brain itself can change. That is not the limit. The brain can adapt and update billions of connections in minutes, even seconds.

Think of your brain as a swiftly flowing river. Looking at the river, there are standing waves and ripples that seem permanent, because the banks and rocks underneath shape the water.

Imagine that the shape of the river water is how reality appears to your consciousness, through your brain. When the shape doesn’t change, you might assume it is hard to change, or assume the ripples are a solid and permanent reality.

Your focused attention can update the shape of your reality — how the world, inside and out, really seems to be. This “seeming”, this “reality”, is a collection of adaptations, patterns, responses to your life, your environment. The rocks and banks of the river. Habits.

What we call “reality” in the normal everyday sense, is a mystery filtered through a set of adaptations. The filtered product is presented to your consciousness like a theatrical production, full of exaggerations and omissions — but good enough to get along in a mediocre sort of way.

Some of these adaptations are beneficial. Some used to be beneficial. Some are outright bad, dangerous and harmful. Without waking up to the nature of these adaptations as mere habituation of past decision and experience (even extending very far back into human evolution), we will remain at their mercy — imagined victims of our own past choices.

In your consciousness, you have the possibility of discovering that you have a choice. Most people never become aware of this choice.

You may accept the presentation of the brain at face value, and live your life according to your default adaptations.

Or, you may choose to apply your consciousness, your attention, back onto your adaptations — the theatre rather than the play — and begin to write your script according to your true potential. You may become the theatrical director of your own life, your own reality.

The “hard” part of change comes from the discipline of wrestling your attention, mastering the force of neural plasticity, becoming responsible for the use, focus, and intensity of your attention. The only reason change is hard is because you believe it is hard — strange but true. Choosing where you put your attention is effortless, if you allow it to be.

Your discovery of the possibility of this choice, and then your actual exercise of choice to become your own director, is the beginning of conscious evolution. You discover and exercise your power to build chosen adaptations, and to prune negative adaptations.

You no longer accept the automatic role handed you by Central Random Casting as truth.

Like any power, the power of becoming your own director has limitations — even severe limitations.

But the limitations of becoming the director of your own life so far exceed the experience of unconsciously submitting your volition to your default character, that this power may be thought of as infinite, should you be standing in this moment as taking your default adaptations for truth.

This book is a contribution to your choice to become your own director.