This Is How You Can RETRAIN Your MIND | This Doctor Will Leave You Speechless

400 years ago the metaphor for the brain from the philosopher Renee Dart was that it was like the nerves were like hollowed out uh plumbing and currents moved up and down the nerves and we still speak of currents but now electrical currents then the model changed as we developed electrical machines to you know something like a circuit board but no one could conceive of a non-h hardwired circuit board so we started to think of the brain as hardwired and now with a computer uh people tend in that Master analogy to think thought is something like the software and the brain is the hardware but what we really find if we just can speak about the brain on its own terms and not in terms of that metaphor is thought actually can change the physical structure of the so-called hardware and its function and once you realize that and dig into what the laws of that are some very interesting possibilities arise because I'm a doctor I started to look at what illnesses or conditions that you know people were suffering from could be changed and part of that was to help those people of course and part of it was to test the idea if it was really true you should be able to change some illnesses by the second book I'm looking at some pretty substantial SE severe neurological conditions and finding that they can sometimes be changed too not always but sometimes and sometimes radically so it's a test of the concept and at a certain point the scales fall from one's eyes and you realize we've got a lot of things about the brain quite wrong you know I talked about a girl who was born with half a brain and she's missing the left hemisphere which we use to process language and she you know you would think she would be in the ICU with tubes in and out of her but that's not the case her brain rewired itself and you know she can speak and she votes in elections and she has her favorite basketball team and so on now that means that the brain is not nearly as localized particularly the outer parts of the brain for sure as as we thought but even some of the deep parts of the brain so think about that what does that mean that you know thoughts and that are not localized to modules I think it's the most important change in our understanding of the brain in several hundred years everybody thought that the circuitry was formed and finalized in childhood that gave rise to a view of human development human potential that taught people that you're stuck with what you're born with in a kind of absolute way I mean one case after another in my second book people are told you know your child will never get better you will never get better and so on uh it's not possible you you know if you had a stroke when you were being born and you have seral policy that you know the Assumption was that's it if you tried to m main your brain as you got older that was seen as kind of a waste of time but even if we're not talking in medical terms your conception of what's possible let's say in the second half of life is radically altered when you understand that there's plasticity from Cradle to grave you can reinvent yourself in certain respects take on skills you never dreamed that you could take on throughout the course of your life that's a incredibly liberating thought and not only can you but if you don't challenge your brain it probably won't maintain itself so you know the brain just like the body requires some intensive work just for maintenance it's necessary to do that all the little lies that you tell yourself about yourself the limitations the belief systems that hold you back they hardwire and they become real so there's really two kinds of pain there's an acute pain which tells you that there's damage to part of the body and we don't welcome it but it actually is essential for our survival and some people who are born with a genetic uh tendency not to be able to feel pain well they tend to die very young cuz they'll hurt their foot they won't notice it and they'll die an infection chronic pain is damaged not only to the part of the body but to the the nervous part of the pain system itself so what happened with Michael mosit is he he was a psychiatrist turned pain physician and he had a number of mishaps or accidents one of them had to do with a kind of a skiing accident and so he wrecked his neck initially it hurt him just around the neck but the nerve kept getting pinched over and over again and so the brain got really good at registering that pain and what was initially a kind of just a strong thrust of pain lasting seconds as the brain got better at processing it the pain would last longer and it started to sprad from his neck to his head to his shoulders and soon his upper back and he was stuck with a chronic pain syndrome now he started reading about plasticity at this time and as a pain physician he tried everything for that chronic pain he so he tried all the medications which are problematic to say the least nerve blocks so injections into various nerves and a lot of complimentary things all the ones he knew about he was very openmed it and nothing touched it most of us think that there's probably a pain center in the brain that registers all of this pain but in fact there's about a dozen different centers in the brain and that's the first thing to know but what's interesting about them is they're they're distributed through the brain and they they in general are Dual Purpose centers so you may have noticed when you're in pain you might be irritable and have emotional regulation problems or you can't pay attention or you can't do higher math now there's reasons for all of this so one of the areas that um registers pain also registers emotion and what's happening there is the part when you have acute pain a small part of that area will light up when it becomes chronic about another 20% of that map will light up and it in literally invades the processing areas of emotion so it's not as good at processing emotion um plasticity is competitive within the brain the same thing can happen to the attention areas and two visual areas so what mosquit thought to do was every time I feel that pain I will visualize something it didn't matter what he visualized interestingly enough to see if I can take back that part of my visual map that is being hijacked by pain so he he visualized three actual brain SC stand one of the brain not in pain so the pain areas are not lit up one of the brain in acute pain and so you'd have about a dozen areas that had little pin Pricks of neuronal firing and then one of the brain in chronic pain and these pin Pricks become supernovas and he just imagined every time he felt any pain whatsoever kind of dialing it back from Supernova to pin prick to nothing he does this several weeks and he's always in pain so he's always doing it no result by the end of you know another week he notices he's you know got about 10 seconds free of pain this is after years of pain not even sure it was right by the end of several months you know he's got 15 20 minutes free of Pain by the end of a year of doing this every time it comes up he's off all his pain meds and he's he's completely painfree wow he's he's destroyed his IC pain syndrome in my first book I describ people working with obsessions and compulsions and it's a very similar thing they have recurring thoughts that just won't go away and they they they really have to know that you measure the success of that day by just thinking about how much effort you put into it not whether the obsession or compulsion went away or the chronic pain went away that day because you're creating like a new gearshift inside your brain that will that's built being built up from scratch so that you have conscious control over this to change it and and that takes a while the mindset should not be conceived of as simply whether you've got a reward today but you understand that to be a human being to have a brain is to be a creature that learns and a lot of learning is incremental and slow what Dr Norman de is talking about is that we often create Limited ations for ourselves that don't need to exist we create boundaries around our mind and think that we are incapable of breaking them down but that is just not true whether you want to overcome pain or replace bad habits with good habits that is all possible and it starts with retraining your mind and you can start today so comment down below just one simple task that you can do today to start retraining your mind