Royane Real
Some Parts of the Brain Improve with Age
By : Simon Evans
Introductory comments
By Royane Real
Author of “How You Can Be Smarter - Use Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better and Be More Creative"
You might wonder why this article about improving the brain is in the section on self improvement. The reason is because this article actually does deal with how the brain can learn to be more positive, and how the brain can overcome a person’s earlier negative programming.
Many parents try to raise their children with a constant diet of criticism in the hope this will remove their children’s faults. Instead, too much criticism can lead to a complete lack of self esteem and self confidence as a person grows up.
Many of us who lacked self confidence when we were young, find that as we grow older and have more experiences, our self esteem improves. In some cases, we are able to overcome the negative opinions we used to have about ourselves.
What is the reason that so many people who start out doubting themselves, later become more self confident?
One reason is that when we are younger, we are so influenced by the opinions and teachings of our parents. When we are young and our parents criticize us, we believe it must be true. We are also tremendously influenced by the opinions of our peers, those who see us everyday and who have the power to make us feel accepted or rejected based on their opinion.
Most of us go through a phase in our life when it is very important to be accepted. Part of this desire to be accepted by others is that we are very influenced by whether those around us have good opinions of us or bad opinions of us. We often end up being very controlled in our behavior because we want those around us to have a good opinion about us.
We try to eliminate the behaviors that got us criticized and we tend to emphasize the behavior that got us praised.
Why do we behave this way? This is one of the very interesting topics that psychologists are trying to figure out.
In a way, it’s good that we behave this way, because it keeps society more or less marching on the same path. There are punishments for deviating from the path that we are told to follow and there are rewards for following that path. The younger we are, the more easily we are controlled by the positive and negative opinions of others.
However, as we grow older, many of us start to break out of our earlier state of hypnosis. We may start to question more of what we have been taught. We may start to reject many of the negative things that have been said about us to control our behavior. We may start to make some deeper decisions about what we believe. As we do this, we find that our inner self confidence improves. We decide what programming from the outside we will accept, and what programming we will reject. We start to define ourselves.
This is part of the journey we make to becoming adults and becoming individuals.
The following article by author Simon Evans discusses the way that our brain actually changes as we grow up. He discusses the way these changes can make us accept more positive messages about ourselves. As we do so, our self esteem improves.
( The above introductory comments were written by Royane Real, author of the book “How You Can Be Smarter - Use Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better and Be More Creative” Download it today and learn more ways to get the maximum use of your brainpower. It’s available at http://www.lulu.com/real )
Some Parts of the Brain Improve with Age
By : Simon Evans
One of my recent articles gave a statistic from the sports psychology world stating that it requires about 5 positive comments to overcome 1 negative comment when coaching young players. This means that negative comments carry a lot more weight in the mind of a child than do positive comments.
Most people lack real confidence.
But this extends far beyond young athletes to most of the population. Most people dwell on criticism or a bad experience far more than they think about praise or positive experiences. This all comes back to the beliefs that you have implanted in your brain throughout your life.
If you continually tell yourself that you are no good at something then your brain will pay a lot more attention to the evidence to support that viewpoint than it will to evidence that contradicts it. Your brain is always trying to uphold your beliefs.
Since most people have limiting beliefs, they are more focused on negative feedback than positive feedback and that's how the whole 5 to 1 (positive to negative) ratio gets established - 1 negative piece of feedback is as powerful as 5 positive pieces.
Seeing the sunny side of life
I ran across a couple of papers this week in Psychological Science and The Journal of Neuroscience showing how brain activity that controls this, changes as we get older. Our brain circuits that filter your positive and negative experiences actually rewire as you age.
When we are younger, our brains allow negative information and bad experiences to go straight to our automatic responses. We don't think about them too much or evaluate them before we allow them to affect us. On the other hand, positive feedback and good experiences get some extra processing by the 'higher functioning' part of our brains before we allow them to effect us. The positive stuff has to pass through a filter before we believe it but the negative stuff doesn't.
As we age this begins to reverse. Our filters of the negative stuff get stronger and our filters of the positive stuff get weaker. We allow positive stuff to affect us more easily (in a good way) and screen out some of the negative stuff. We don't spend so much time dwelling on criticism and accept more praise.
This is just an average description of the whole population. Of course, there are people that are good at filtering out the negative stuff early in their life and others that never get good at it. There are people that take complements and praise very well at a young age and others that never learn how to accept it.
Speeding up the process
So the question becomes, can we do anything to accelerate the process? Can we 'train our brains' to become better at accepting positive stuff and better at filtering out negative stuff without having to wait until we get to our elder years?
I believe that you can. There are certainly things that you can do directly to pay more attention to feedback that will boost your confidence and dismiss other experiences that tend to bring you down. There are also many indirect things that you can do to support the health and maintenance of your brain.
This comes back to performance concepts that I've discussed before. Your brain is in a constant state of remodeling itself. It is up to you whether the new updates you make on a daily, weekly and yearly basis will be the same as the old ones, or improved.
You can ensure that your new updates are physically stronger with the basic nutrition, sleep and physical and mental exercise needs - or not. You can also ensure that your new updates perform better by working on your ability to think for yourself and replacing some of your limiting beliefs with empowering ones.
Over time, this will strengthen your filters to deal with all your negative experiences and allow more of the positive experiences to get through. Science shows us (as discussed above) that our brain circuits have a natural tendency to improve on this front as we get older, but the speed at which you do it and the final levels that you reach are up to you.
Focus on the good feedback and your health, and the brain circuits that control your positive beliefs will literally get stronger and faster. This will increase your confidence and your ability to control your own life.
Copyright (c) 2007 The Brain Code LLC
About the Author:
Master Brain Fitness techniques for you and your family. Your Brain Fitness holds is the key to unlock your maximum potential. Dr. Simon Evans puts together the right ingredients in right amount to create the recipe for success. Visit http://www.BrainFitForLife.com for FREE Brain Fitness resources.
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