Mind Sculpting

The Mind Can Change the Brain

From Lucid Nutrition:

The Quest For Happiness

Martin E. P. Seligman, author of the book, Authentic Happiness, has said that we all have a "set point" for happiness, just as we do for weight. He felt that although people can improve or hinder their well-being, they aren't likely to take long leaps in either direction from their set points.

On the contrary, scientists who continue to probe the limits of neuroplasticity, are finding that mind sculpting can occur even without input from the outside world. The brain can change as a result of the thoughts we think!

It was a fairly modest experiment, as these things go, with volunteers trooping into the lab at Harvard Medical School to learn and practice a little five-finger piano exercise. Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed the members of one group to play as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome's 60 beats per minute. Every day for five days, the volunteers practiced for two hours. Then they took a test.

At the end of each day's practice session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain, located in a strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear. The so-called transcranial- magnetic-stimulation (TMS) test allows scientists to infer the function of neurons just beneath the coil. In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much of the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practice, the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn. The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it.

But Pascual-Leone did not stop there.

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