Lets bring it back down to earth for a moment. What if doing our higher level stuff, our meditations and healings are not hitting the spot down here, where we need it to, then maybe we need to bring that higher level understanding down here to help us retrain our biology, where we get to do the physical rewiring but with the higher level mental capacities of understanding. Now we know WHY.... we need to know HOW....Its time to Evolve the Brain.

http://drjoedispenza.com/index.php?page_id=Evolve-Your-Brain

Evolve Your Brain

By Dr. Joe Dispenza

9. What is neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity is our natural ability to change how the brain's neurons are connected and organized into circuits, which we call its synaptic wiring. Every time we learn something new or have a novel experience, the brain makes new synaptic connections to form new neural patterns of networks - and this happens at any age. When we utilize new circuits in new ways, we rewire the brain to fire in new sequences. From a neurological level, then, we are changed moment to moment by the thoughts we think, the information we learn, the events we experience, the reactions we have, the feelings we create, the memories we process, and even the dreams we embrace. All of these alter the way the brain works, producing new states of mind that are recorded in our brain.

Neuroplasticity is an innate, universal genetic feature in humans. It affords us the privilege to learn from experiences in our environment, so that we may change our actions and modify our behavior, our thought processes, and our personality to produce outcomes that are more desirable. Merely to learn intellectual information is not enough; we must apply wheat we learn to create a different experience. If we could not synaptically rewire our brain, we could not change in response to our experiences. Without the ability to change, we could not evolve, and we would be at the mercy of our genetic predispositions. How neuro-plastic our brain is depends on our ability to change our perception of the world around us, to change our mind, to change our self.

10. What is mental rehearsal and how can we use it to change?

Mental rehearsal allows us to change our brain - to create a new level of mind - without doing anything physical other than thinking. It involves mentally seeing and experiencing our "self" demonstrating or practicing a skill, habit or state of being of our own choosing. Through mental rehearsal, we can employ the advanced faculties of our frontal lobe to make significant changes in our life.

Several studies have shown that the brain does not know the difference between what it is thinking internally and what it is experiencing in its external environment. In one experiment, two groups of non-pianists were asked to learn one-handed piano exercises and to practice two hours a day for five days - with one important difference. Once group physically practiced their exercises, while the other mentally rehearsed the same exercises without using their fingers. At the end of the five days, brain scans showed that both groups grew the same amount of new brain circuits. How is that possible?

We know that when we think the same thoughts or perform the same actions over and over, we repeatedly stimulate specific networks of neurons in particular areas of our brain. As a result, we build stronger, more enriched connections between these groups of nerve cells. This concept in neuroscience is called Hebbian learning. The idea is simple: Nerve cells that fire together, wire together.

According to functional brain scans in this particular experiment, the subjects that mentally rehearsed were so inwardly focused that their brain did not know the difference between the internal and the external world. Thus, they were activating their brain in the same way as if they were actually playing the piano. In fact, their brain circuits strengthened and developed in the same area of the brain as the group that physically practiced.

11. You say in the book that thinking isn't enough to change our mind, and that change is a process of thinking, doing, and then being. Can you explain how this works?

The change we want to make has to go beyond thinking and even doing - we need to go all the way to being. If I want to truly be a pianist, I will start by acquiring knowledge, which involves thinking. Then I can start to gain experience through mental rehearsal, which again involves thinking. I also have to involve the body in the act of doing - physically demonstrating what I've intellectually learned - by playing the piano. But that isn't going far enough. Imagine a concert pianist who does her best work in practice sessions, but struggles during a concert. Or to bring this a little closer to home, imagine a spouse who is the model of understanding on the drive home from work, but devolves into an impatient pouter as soon as he or she comes through the door.

If I want to attain the state of being a pianist, my evolved understanding and my skills must become so hardwired and mapped into my brain that I no longer have to consciously think about playing, because my subconscious mind now handles that skill. Now that I am being a pianist, any thought I have about playing, or desire to express my feelings through music, will automatically turn my body on to carry out the task of playing the piano. We talk at length in Evolve Your Brain about how we use different kinds of memory, activating different parts of the brain, to make conscious thoughts, subconscious thoughts. We also learn that to master any particular ability also takes possessing a great deal of knowledge about a subject, receiving expert instruction in that area, and having plenty of experiences to provide us with feedback.

We all go from thinking to doing to being, every time we learn a skill so well that we can do it automatically. Driving is a great example. The beauty of this process is that we can use it to attain any state of being we choose, from being more patient with our children to being healthy to being a happy person.

12. What is evolution and how can we evolve our brain?

We evolve as a species and as individuals. In fact, our own personal evolution also advances the human species. Most of us learned in school that evolution is the slow, linear process by which species survive changes in their environment through adaptation over generations, developing specialized anatomy and physiology that help the to perpetuate their species. Our human brain evolved in a linear fashion up to about 250,000 years ago, when (for reasons that remain a mystery) a sudden, explosive period of growth gave us a neocortex much larger and denser than that of any other species. This so-called new brain is the seat of our conscious awareness; it houses our capacity to learn and to reason, and our free will to create. Simply put, our neocortex, especially the frontal lobe, affords us the potential to transcend the gradual process of evolution and move into rapid, nonlinear evolution. Because we can learn from knowledge and our experiences - above all, from our mistakes – and since we have several specialized forms of memory by which we can remember what we learn, we can immediately modify our thoughts and behavior. Unlike other species, then, we can create a completely new range of experiences in just one lifetime. We may then pass on what we learned to our offspring and to other members of our species.

In terms of the brain, evolution means learning, making new synaptic connections, maintaining them, and applying what we learned so we have a new experience, which then is encoded in the brain. What Evolve Your Brain presents is a process that can cause the brain to make a quantum leap, by overcoming certain neural circuits that we've been given genetically, and by encoding new experiences and information. When we evolve out of the primitive states of survival hardwired in our brain, fire new thoughts (which make new chemicals), and modify our behavior (to create a whole new experience, thus bringing new chemistry that affects our cells), now we are on the path of evolution.

We all have certain habits and propensities that we've either inherited genetically, or that we've been conditioned to by our environment. Personal evolution requires us to break the habit of being ourselves and to become greater than our environment. We break out of our routines and habitual emotional reactions and behaviors by learning new knowledge and having novel experiences. In the early stages of learning, we are faced with novelty. Next follow moments during which we review and internalize the new stimuli, as we begin to make it familiar or known. By the end of every learning process, the newly acquired information is known and familiar; if we have learned a behavior or a task, it may now be routine, even automatic. Our ability to process unknown to known, unfamiliar to familiar, novel to routine is the route to our individual evolution.