The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery: Connecting Neuroscience and FaithSample

Recent discoveries in neuroscience make it clear that you don’t need to remain stuck. Your brain is undergoing structural changes every second of your life, and you can direct most of those changes by changing how you think.

The problem is that if you do not learn to direct those changes purposefully, they will still happen. And in most cases, passive processes simply direct the brain to continue operating in the same way. Default often leads to decline, building the perception that things can never change. The result of this passive perpetuation of sameness is that we begin to believe, This is just how I am.

You are already undergoing self–brain surgery with every thought you think, whether or not you are aware of or consciously directing it.Every second of your life your brain is making new connections, or synapses, between neurons—a process called neuroplasticity. Unlike the surgery I perform in a hospital, you cannot opt out of this process.

Your brain has been making new neurons and breaking and recreating synapses between them even while you’ve been reading these paragraphs. That fact from neuroscience leads to a startling and life-changing reality: Neuroplasticity does not require your consent, but it can (and should) come under your control.

Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist wrote that, “Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them, the disposition we hold in relation to them.”1 We now know that we can direct our minds to take charge of a stunningly large percentage of the structural changes our brains make. This gives our thoughts tremendous power to improve our own lives, the lives of those around us, and even those who come after us; but how we wield the power to choose what we think about determines whether we make such improvements or not.

The good news is that you’re not a hopeless patient anymore; you are an empowered self–brain surgeon. It’s time to make the compassionate mental shift from patient to doctor and take control of your brain, body, and life by learning that your mind gives you top-down control over everything you previously thought was beyond your ability to change. In fact, every decision is a choice for either the status quo or for change.

So without shame or stress, just admit to yourself that you can either continue making choices that have led to your current circumstances, or you can make other decisions, from an empowered perspective, that will lead to a different outcome (or, even if the situation doesn’t change, your role in it and feelings about it can).

Notes

1. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2019), 4.