Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain's Power to Adapt Can Change Your Life

[Thor]

It's like I'm in meta-cognition mode all the time. The mental awareness of what I'm saying, thinking, feeling is always on - busy analysing, comparing, trying to figure things out, etc. While this can have definite benefits in some situations, I often experience it as preventing me from just being present with whatever I'm doing or a barrier between myself and other people. For instance if I'm hanging out with a friend it's can be hard for me to connect to the person because the Awareness Wedge is simply to big, to use the term used in the book.

I am going to quote from the book 2 points that might help:

Any time we reflect upon our thinking processes and knowledge, we are metacognizing. Indeed, most of us do this all day long, though the way we do so generally lacks direction and tends to swerve into fields of endless rumination. To get the most from metacognition, we have to train ourselves to focus its power and forge the discipline necessary to stay focused despite distractions.

If it is considered a tool it must be used in the right way, at the right moments.
And this quote links with this one:

Mindhacker authors Ron and Marty Hale-Evans use the term semantic pause and divide the ability by duration and depth. They use the term tactical pause to describe a low-level and immediate stop, and the term contemplative pause to describe a high-level detachment that allows for greater depth of deliberation before acting. The ability is also sometimes referred to as a cognitive pause, which highlights the fact that we enact the ability in our conscious mind space. It's a type of antithetical thinking that causes a flashing red cognitive stop sign to keep us from taking another step.

Even though you have the book already and read these parts(I guess), I would recommend thinking about what they mean and how they can useful. Just my opinion.

Thanks a lot for your comment, edgitarra.

You're right, I had read the quotes you provided and I recall that while I was reading them I thought that it made sense and was almost obvious. What was less obvious was to take them in and understand how they can be applied to me in my own life. . It's amazing how the mind can create a mental barrier to self application as when you're not aware (and even if you try to be...).

I'm sure that there'll be examples in the rest of the book as to how apply those tools.

 

[H-KQGE]

Here's an article from David DiSalvo's site, the focus is on oxytocin & its role in dishonesty - for the perceived benefit of a group that one may feel obliged to.

http://www.daviddisalvo.org/the-daily-brain/2014/5/18/could-cooperation-and-corruption-originate-with-the-same-hor.html

Could Cooperation and Corruption Originate with the Same Hormone?

Date Sunday, May 18, 2014 at 09:07PM

We humans contend with quite a few wicked flip sides in our personal and interpersonal lives. Gratitude can transform into resentment. Concern can morph into apathy. Love can quickly become hate. New research digs deeper into a similar neurobiological duality that can, and frequently does, run rampant in groups: the Jekyll and Hyde of cooperation and corruption.

Researchers hypothesized that oxytocin—the same hormone that previous studies have linked to collaboration and altruism—can predispose us to acting dishonestly if we think doing so will benefit our group of choice. A “group” in this case means anyone to whom we feel some sense of obligation, be it family, coworkers, peers, political cronies or our Friday night craft beer buddies.

In our day-to-day lives, oxytocin is thought to play a big role in how closely bonded we feel to our group. It isn’t just the “cuddle hormone” (often discussed in studies about love and affection) but also the group-cohesion hormone.

To test the hypothesis, the research team gave one group of healthy male participants a dose of oxytocin via nasal spray and another group a placebo nasal spray (neither the participants nor the researchers knew which participants received which spray). The participants were then asked to toss a coin multiple times and make predictions on whether they’d flip heads or tails, and then self-report on the results. How well they did, they were told, would win or lose money for their fellow group members. How they reported—honestly or dishonestly—was kept anonymous, assuring the participants that how they chose to respond wouldn’t reflect back on them personally.

We might guess that participants would lie more often about the results only if they, individually, could benefit – but instead participants given oxytocin lied significantly more about the coin flip than the placebo group only if doing so gained money for their fellow group members. And they lied for the group even if they thought that the favor wouldn't be reciprocated.

To find out how participants would react if they thought they’d benefit individually, the researchers put another group through the same testing conditions but told participants that the results of their predictions would only win or lose them money, with no group benefit or loss attached. The results showed that oxytocin did not influence participants to lie any more than those in the placebo group.

In other words, oxytocin promoted lying for group but not individual benefit.

The study has a few limitations, the most obvious of which is that it used only male participants. Whether or not oxytocin would influence females toward group dishonesty is impossible to tell from these results.

But, at least for men, it seems that higher levels of oxytocin potently affect decisions to lie for the group’s benefit. This may help explain the “you go, I go, we all go” nature of fraternal groups. And the results highlight the role of group bonding in forging hard-to-crack corruption. Last year's hit movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, a true tale about a group of corrupt stock brokers making an obscene amount of ill-gotten money, and lying to ensure that no one got caught (at least for a while), comes to mind as a vivid illustration.

The study was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I've been reading his work on & off for a while & I didn't even make the connection to the book of this thread.( didn't take in his name for some reason) When I did, I forgot to post...

There are links at the bottom of the article to Twitter & he's got a new YouTube channel too, including "the awareness wedge" (cognitive pause) video. It's still "raw" & only 6 uploads currently. I think it's fair to say that the tone of it all is as described by previous comments on this thread, which is "light" or "easy." Should provide help for some I think, since far too many can't be bothered to read anymore.

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Could be handy to link to this channel from any YouTube channel that contains the usual tit-for-tat comments on... well anything science related. In this case cognition etc.

Fwiw

 

[luc]

I finished the book a week ago or so. Thanks to all the very insightful and helpful comments so far!

My overall impression is that the book is very good, but I agree with Aragorn that the author makes it all "sound too simple". The book sometimes has this tone that I didn't like, kind of "well, got a problem? I gonna show you some brain-gymnastics and everything will be great!"... I also agree that the aspect of "healing the past" is missing.

Yeah. This sounds like something that we should put on our reading list. As others read it, please give some feedback as to whether it is important enough to do that. It might be a good introduction to "The Work."

I think the book is a very good primer in the "Modern science says Gurdjieff was right!" domain, so in that sense, it is well worth the read and could enrich the reading list. Also, I think everyone will find a few techniques and aspects described in the book the he or she can immediately use in a productive way. However, I think it should be read together with ISOTM - maybe it's just me, but Gurdjieffs work (as explained in ISOTM) has a much greater seriousness and "urge", which was/is very important to me to really grasp the hopeless situation we find ourselves in without engaging in serious Work. I don't know if this is a rule, but I think especially the first steps in the Work involve a big sacrifice and require a lot of willpower - and I'm not sure whether diSalvo's book can be motivating enough to take these first serious steps.

I'd like to share one thing that "stuck" with me from the book, and that I use almost everyday now:

One of the most basic metacognitive tools we have at our disposal is our ability to pause before taking the next action in a sequence of actions. This ability has been described in a variety of ways in the psychological literature. Mindhacker authors Ron and Marty Hale-Evans use the term "semantic pause" and divide the ability by duration and depth. They use the term "tactical pause" to describe a "low-level" and immediate stop, and the term "contemplative pause" to describe a "high-level" detachment that allows for greater depth of deliberation before acting. The ability is also sometimes referred to as a "cognitive pause," which highlights the fact that we enact the ability in our conscious mind space. It's a type of antithetical thinking that causes a flashing red cognitive stop sign to keep us from taking another step.
...
To quote the Hale-Evanses, it "forces awareness into a situation to either wake us up or calm and clarify."

So what I got out of this is the following: Whenever I have a negative thought loop, I immediately picture a huge stop sign in my mind. If this doesn't help, I picture a huge stop sign mounted to the ground with springs, that forcefully "pops up" and leaves the negative thoughts outside. It works really well! What I find interesting is that this doesn't seem to suppress the emotions, but rather "kicks out" the immediate cause of the emotions - the thought loops - while letting me still feel the emotion. This way, I can separate thought-loop and emotion and can focus on the emotion - oftentimes realizing that it has nothing to do with the negative thought-loop, which was just a trigger. That way, I avoid energy-draining thought-loops and stupid actions based on them while being able to explore my emotions more in-depth, as in "what is really going on there?". I find this procedure to be really powerful and it also helps me to control "thought trains" during EE sessions. Fwiw.

 

[Psalehesost]

I think the book is a very good primer in the "Modern science says Gurdjieff was right!" domain, so in that sense, it is well worth the read and could enrich the reading list. Also, I think everyone will find a few techniques and aspects described in the book the he or she can immediately use in a productive way. However, I think it should be read together with ISOTM - maybe it's just me, but Gurdjieffs work (as explained in ISOTM) has a much greater seriousness and "urge", which was/is very important to me to really grasp the hopeless situation we find ourselves in without engaging in serious Work. I don't know if this is a rule, but I think especially the first steps in the Work involve a big sacrifice and require a lot of willpower - and I'm not sure whether diSalvo's book can be motivating enough to take these first serious steps.

This matches our idea for the upcoming update of the recommended books list: Brain Changer will appear in two places. It will be added to the top of the Neuroscience section, and it will get a second (italicized) listing under Fourth Way, where it will appear after The Wave, ISOTM, and Life Is Religion (which was also added).

I'll quote the footnote-to-be here, since I think it gives good context for the reading of this book:

4.1. Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain's Power to Adapt Can Change Your Life
Brain Changer (thread) is about how we can reshape our brains and change ourselves and our lives for the better. At the root is metacognition and neuroplasticity: metacognition is thinking about thinking, which can be done deliberately, rather than (as is usually the case) simply being pulled along by a flood of mental energy; and neuroplasticity is the ability of our brains to change over time - and they change according to what they do. So in influencing our own internal and external behavior to be more constructive, in the longer term we accumulate the resulting changes to our brains, and to our selves.

The book is easily read, and brings together a great many things in one place, though all of them are covered quite briefly. It has three parts, one theoretical, one practical, and one recommending further material (both books and movies). The main difficulty in reading the book is gaining a deeper understanding of what is written, and so becoming able to put it into effective practice; it all makes sense on the surface, but requires reflection and further knowledge to really make it click.

There are strong parallels between certain discoveries of modern psychological and brain sciences and Fourth Way ideas. (See #8, 'Fourth Way'.) This book not only makes for a great example, but taken together with The Wave (#8.1), In Search of the Miraculous (#8.2), and other books such as the 'Narcissism "Big Five"' (#2), it can serve as an introduction to The Work. These other books place the information in Brain Changer within a wider context, and also give an understanding of the underlying issues one may have and have to face.

Brain Changer also goes very well with the books of the 'Cognitive and Social Science' (#3) section, e.g. Strangers to Ourselves (#3.1) and DiSalvo's other recommended book What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite (#3.5). These make clearer our mechanical nature, how we don't know ourselves, and some of the things we can do about it.

A thread about the movies recommended in Brain Changer can be found here.

The author, David DiSalvo, was inteviewed in SOTT Talk Radio Show #61. The interview, though brief, covers things related both to this book and to DiSalvo's other recommended book, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite (#3.5).

 

[luc]

This matches our idea for the upcoming update of the recommended books list: Brain Changer will appear in two places. It will be added to the top of the Neuroscience section, and it will get a second (italicized) listing under Fourth Way, where it will appear after The Wave, ISOTM, and Life Is Religion (which was also added).

I'll quote the footnote-to-be here, since I think it gives good context for the reading of this book:

Thanks Psalehesost, that quote makes a lot of sense to me.

 

[Altair]

I just realized, that the thing that I missed most in this book was insights on how these different feedback loops and other "faulty" automatic behavioral responses develop. What are the possible causes? Because I believe that in order to heal and really change, we need to understand the processes that are involved in e.g. our upbringing. The previously recommended books on psychology, like The Narcissistic Family, deals with more details regarding this aspect.

And I think this is one of the reasons the author made the whole changing thing sound too easy - he only focused on the 'here and now'. I think that if we don't understand our past and how our woundings have come to be, we are probably going to pass all sorts of "weird behavior" to the next generation, and any "change" we accomplish will not be lasting.

I think that on the low-level there are complex adaptive neural networks behind feedback loops. For example, if we have chronical stress as input it fires some neurons over and over again which makes some neural networks in our brain stronger and more sensitive in the course of time. And if we constantly respond in the same way to stress (Phase 4: action) it creates a feedback loop and makes it stronger with each our (re)action. Another example is brainwashing through the media: if we constantly get false data (Phase 1: evidence) it creates distorted feedback loops (i.e. false belief systems).
So I think that if we study adaptive neural networks we can more understand how feedback loops develop.

My 2 cents :)

 

[Mari]

This book has been sitting for quite a while, and so I thought to finally pick it up and I´ve read it alongside with a book that we´re currently reading in a reading workshop, William B. Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life. And I was surprised to see how much similarity there is between the book and stoic principles.

The book describes how the brain works and how to change your thinking patterns and how to break thought loops, while Stoicism gives a depth and gives the framework on why should you do that to live a good life. The author actually quotes Marcus Aurelius as well.
He doesn´t say that people should be more Stoic, his term is that people should be "Ego-Symmetric":

THE EGO-SYMMETRIC PERSONALITY IS ABLE TO DETACH FROM NEGATIVE AND ERRONEOUS INFORMATION THAT, IF INDULGED, WOULD UNDERMINE THE SELF’S ABILITY TO ACHIEVE ITS GOALS. BEING EGO-SYMMETRIC IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING “COLD” AND UNEMOTIONAL— INSTEAD, IT’S ABOUT BEING IN BETTER CONTROL OF HOW NEGATIVITY AFFECTS OUR ABILITY TO ADAPT AND THRIVE.

David DiSalvo. David DiSalvo - Brain Changer_ How Harnessing Your Brain's Power to Adapt Can Change Your Life (2013, BenBella Books) - libgen.li (Kindle Locations 1143-1145). Kindle Edition.

Sounds a lot like Stoicism!

The book explores the brain mechanisms of doubt, belief, thinking errors, many "I"s, etc, and I think it useful read especially for people who wants to know the actual mechanisms behind brain´s processing, but also gives tips and tricks on how to do better the work on oneself. Similar to the book of the same author What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, which is also a very good read as a prequel to Brain Changer.