The Mesilas Yesharim said this in one line: אחרי המעשים נמשכים הלבבות.
“The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great cable and binds us irrevocably, thought and act.”
Realize that your brain eagerly awaits your every command, ready to carry out anything you ask of it. All it requires is a small amount of fuel: the oxygen in your blood and a little glucose. In terms of its intricacy and power, the brain defies even our greatest modern computer technology. It is capable of processing up to 30 billion bits of information per second and it boasts the equivalent of 6,000 miles of wiring and cabling. Typically the human nervous system contains about 28 billion neurons (nerve cells designed to conduct impulses). Without neurons, our nervous systems would be unable to interpret the information we receive through our sense organs, unable to convey it to the brain and unable to carry out instructions from the brain as to what to do. Each of these neurons is a tiny, self-contained computer capable of processing about one million bits of information. These neurons act independently, but they also communicate with other neurons through an amazing network of 100,000 miles of nerve fibers.
The power of your brain to process information is staggering, especially when you consider that a computer—even the fastest computer—can make connections only one at a time. By contrast, a reaction in one neuron can spread to hundreds of thousands of others in a span of less than 20 milliseconds. To give you perspective, that’s about ten times less than it takes for your eye to blink. A neuron takes a million times longer to send a signal than a typical computer switch, yet the brain can recognize a familiar face in less than a second—a feat beyond the ability of the most powerful computers. The brain achieves this speed because, unlike the step-by-step computer, its billions of neurons can all attack a problem simultaneously.
מה רבו מעשיך השםםםםםםםם!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So with all this immense power at our disposal, why can’t we get
ourselves to feel happy consistently? Why can’t we change a behavior
like smoking or drinking, overeating or procrastinating? Why can’t we
immediately shake off depression, break through our frustration, and
feel joyous every day of our lives? We can! Each of us has at our
disposal the most incredible computer on the planet, but unfortunately
no one gave us an owner’s manual. Most of us have no idea how our brains
really work, so we attempt to think our way into a change when, in
reality, our behavior is rooted in our nervous systems in the form of
physical connections— neural connections—or what I call
neuro-associations.
NEURO-SCIENCE: YOUR TICKET TO LASTING CHANGE
Great breakthroughs in our ability to understand the human mind are now available because of a marriage between two widely different fields: neuro-biology (the study of how the brain works) and computer science. The integration of these sciences has created the discipline of neuro-science. Neuro-scientists study how neuro-associations occur and have discovered that neurons are constantly sending electro-chemical messages back and forth across neural pathways, not unlike traffic on a busy thoroughfare. This communication is happening all at once, each idea or memory moving along its own path while literally billions of other impulses are traveling in individual directions. This arrangement enables us to hopscotch mentally from memories of the piney smell of an evergreen forest after a rain, to the haunting melody of a favorite Broadway musical, to painstakingly detailed plans of an evening with a loved one, to the exquisite size and texture of a newborn baby’s thumb. Not only does this complex system allow us to enjoy the beauty of our world, it also helps us to survive in it. Each time we experience a significant amount of pain or pleasure, our brains search for the cause and record it in our nervous systems to enable us to make better decisions about what to do in the future. For example, without a neuro-association in your brain to remind you that sticking your hand into an open flame would burn you, you could conceivably make this mistake again and again until your hand is severely burned. Thus, neuro-associations quickly provide our brains with the signals that help us to re-access our memories and safely maneuver us through our lives.
When we do something for the first time, we create a physical connection, a thin neural strand that allows us to re-access that emotion or behavior again in the future. Think of it this way: each time we repeat the behavior, the connection strengthens. We add another strand to our neural connection. With enough repetitions and emotional intensity, we can add many strands simultaneously, increasing the tensile strength of this emotional or behavioral pattern until eventually we have a “trunk line” to this behavior or feeling. This is when we find ourselves compelled to feel these feelings or behave in this way consistently. In other words, this connection becomes what I’ve already labeled a neural “super-highway” that will take us down an automatic and consistent route of behavior. This neuro-association is a biological reality—it’s physical. Again, this is why thinking our way into a change is usually ineffective; our neuro-associations are a survival tool and they are secured in our nervous systems as physical connections rather than as intangible “memories.” Michael Merzenich of the University of Cali- fornia, San Francisco, has scientifically proven that the more we indulge in any
pattern of behavior, the stronger that pattern becomes. Merzenich mapped the specific areas in a monkey’s brain that were activated when a certain finger in the monkey’s hand was touched. He then trained one monkey to use this finger predominantly in order to earn its food. When Merzenich remapped the touch-activated areas in the monkey’s brain, he found that the area responding to the signals from that finger’s additional use had expanded in size nearly 600 percent! Now the monkey continued the behavior even when he was no longer rewarded because the neural pathway was so strongly established. An illustration of this in human behavior might be that of a person who no longer enjoys smoking but still feels a compulsion to do so. Why would this be the case? This person is physically “wired” to smoke. This explains why you may have found it difficult to create a change in your emotional patterns or behaviors in the past. You didn’t merely “have a habit”—you had created a network of strong neuro-associations within your nervous system. We unconsciously develop these neuro-associations by allowing ourselves to indulge in emotions or behaviors on a consistent basis. Each time you indulge in the emotion of anger or the behavior of yelling at a loved one, you reinforce the neural connection and increase the likelihood that you’ll do it again. The good news is this: research has also shown that when the monkey was forced to stop using this finger, the area of the brain where these neural connections were made actually began to shrink in size, and therefore the neuro-association weakened. This is good news for those who want to change their habits!
If you’ll just stop indulging in a particular behavior or emotion long enough, if you just interrupt your pattern of using the old pathway for a long enough period of time, the neural connection will weaken and atrophy. Thus the disempowering emotional pattern or behavior disappears with it. We should remember this also means that if you don’t use your passion it’s going to dwindle. Remember: courage, unused, diminishes. Commitment, unexercised, wanes. Love, unshared, dissipates.
If you and I want to change our behavior, there is only one effective way to do it: we must link unbearable and immediate sensations of pain to our old behavior, and incredible and immediate sensations of pleasure to a new one. Think about it this way: all of us, through the experience of life, have learned certain patterns of thinking and behaving to get ourselves out of pain and into pleasure. We all experience emotions like boredom or frustration or anger or feeling overwhelmed, and develop strategies for ending these feelings. Some people use shopping; some use food; some use sex; some use drugs; some use alcohol; some use yelling at their kids. They know, consciously or unconsciously, that this neural pathway will relieve their pain and take them to some level of pleasure in the moment.
