Dr. Joe Dispenza: STOP Living by the Same FEELINGS Every Single DAY!

Every time you learn something new, you make a new connection in your brain. Learning is making new synaptic connections. Remembering is maintaining or sustaining those connections. So if you've learned anything this weekend and you can remember it or repeat it, you've formulated a new circuit in your brain. So the person who lives every single day in suffering or every single day in victimization or every single day in anger or frustration, that means they've made no new experiences that allow them to upscale their feelings. So the brain then, in the midst of an experience, literally molds and shapes itself and upscales the hardware. Now, if we're living by the same feelings and same emotions every single day, and feelings then are the markers from the past, if we're feeling every single day and we believe that our thoughts have anything to do with our future, if we're feeling every day, what are we creating more of? Same past.

Dr. Joe Dispenza is a leading expert in the world of neuroscience and epigenetics. His transformational journey began after a brutal cycling accident when doctors told him that he would never walk again. He has since gone on to write several New York Times bestselling books, become one of the highest paid speakers in the world, and inspire millions of people globally with his story. In this exclusive speech from the Celebrate Your Life stage, Joe Dispenza explains how to rewire your brain, synchronize your mind and body, and change the negative circumstances in your life. Special thanks to Liz Dawn for partnering with us to release this exclusive content on our YouTube channel. Enjoy.

We talked a lot about this idea of mind, quantum physics, and how the environment, according to quantum physics, is the extension of your mind. And that by changing your mind, literally creating new synaptic connections, rewiring your brain, new patterns and new sequences and new combinations, that if the environment is an extension of mind and we're able to create a new mind, something different should show up in our world. Would you agree? There should be some measurable feedback, measurable feedback in our life, because reality for the most part is our life. And so if we want to change the circumstances in our life or the conditions in our life, we literally have to change our mind first. How many people accept that as a possibility? So, you know, this whole idea of mind and quantum physics and mind and matter being separate things, it started back in the 1700s with Descartes. You know who Descartes was? Pretty slick character. You know, he was very interested in doing his own scientific research, but he didn't want to have the auspices of the church working against him, because he knew what happened to Bruno and Galileo. The moment those guys made a prediction that was different than the church doctrines, they were tortured. So Descartes knew that, and he said, look, I've got to create an important intellectual distinction here. See, everything out here in the world that's big, and planets, and objects, we can pretty much say that the universe is like a machine. It functions in very predictable ways, and because it's so predictable, I want to study that. And I want to advance my understandings, but I don't really want to study the mind because it's too unpredictable. And you know what? We'll leave that up to the church. And so he created this idea called Cartesian dualism, and what it really means is that matter and mind are separate things. Now, if we accept that mind and matter are separate things, well, then the church was only concerned with mind. They were always mind, never matter. And science was always matter, never mind, and the two were never to be mixed. And the reason that he did that was because he wanted to study cadavers, and he wanted to get the cadavers from the church, and the only way he could do that was to keep the church happy. So 100 years later, after his epiphany at— by a fountain, Newton comes along, and Newton says, "Look, I can prove everything that Descartes said. There's force and mass and acceleration, there's constants in the universe, and I can mathematically prove everything that Descartes predicted. And so Newton kind of sealed the deal with Newtonian physics, and because of Newton, we can shoot a rocket to the moon, and we could figure out just about everything in the universe in terms of big stuff. 100 years later, who comes along? Einstein, right? And Einstein says this: E=mc². And what that means is that for the first time, matter and energy are related. And, you know, Einstein, when he was 12 years old, asked himself this question: "If I ride my bike at the speed of light and I turn my headlights on, will they go on?" And he thought about that question every single day of his life. He would lay on his back on a boat and float way out in the middle of this lake, and he would try to create a model of understanding about relativity. Well, 10 years later, he's working as a third-rate clerk in a Swiss patent office, and as he's working as a clerk, all of a sudden he has these incredible visions. Visions that are so abstract and so unusual that he's got to go back to school to study the mathematics to be able to explain the visions that he's seeing. And when he published his papers on relativity, do you know the most amazing thing that rocked the scientific community? There were no footnotes. He didn't say, "Oh, this guy said this and this guy said that, so I'm gonna say this." He just said, "This is the way it is." Now, where did he get that information, by the way? Because the quantum field is loaded with information. So then when Einstein began to make that connection between matter and energy, he started doing experiments on electrons and subatomic particles, and he wanted to see if, if you gave an electron a lot of juice and it released energy, that it would fall towards the center of the atom just like an apple falling from the tree. It should behave in a very predictable and consistent way. But it didn't. What happened was the, the electron gained energy, then it lost energy, then it gained energy, then it lost energy. And instead of looking like an apple falling from a tree or a ball rolling down the hill, it was more like a ball rolling down steps. And so all of a sudden he realized that the very tiny world of subatomic particles was not behaving like the very large world. So this whole idea of quantum physics was born from that moment because they began to study electrons, and they began to look for subatomic particles. And lo and behold, every time they made an observation or a measurement, every time they looked for an electron, it appeared exactly where they expected it to, you know, to appear. Now that broke the tradition of Newtonian physics, because now the observer had to be in every single scientific equation. Now this tidy world of matter and mind, which was so divided, all of a sudden began to merge. In other words, mind had to be in every single scientific experiment when it came to quantum physics. The observer then, the mind then, has an effect on matter, on the subatomic world. So most quantum physicists, when you talk to them and you say the observer has an effect on the subatomic world, an observer has an effect on the nature of reality, they'll tell you that that's true, but only works for the very tiny. It doesn't work for the very large. The observer then does have an effect on the nature of reality, but only for those tiny particles and not on big things that have to do with your life. And I always ask quantum physicists, well, maybe we're just poor observers. Maybe we can make the mind work better, and if we can make the mind work better, we should have more control in our observation. How many people can understand that? So how many people think you can make the mind work better? You think that's possible? So there was an experiment done a couple years ago, and it was published in the Proceedings of Neuroscience in 2004. And there was a guy named Dr. Davidson. And Davidson was very interested in seeing if we could change the mind and change the brain. So what he did was he said, "What type of people have really good focus concentration?" So he gets on the phone and he calls the Dalai Lama. And he says, "Listen, send me your, you know, 8 baddest dudes. Send them down to the laboratory." and I want to measure their mind. And so, at the Keck Laboratory in Wisconsin, it's an amazing laboratory because it has some of the most advanced brain imaging instruments in the world right now. So, at the same time, he grabs a group of people, normal everyday people, and he asks them if they're willing to learn how to meditate. You know, meditate, focus on a single-minded thought. Focus on a single-minded thought without letting your mind wander to anything else. Like compassion, or loving-kindness, or divinity. So he tells the monks, "Okay, we're gonna hook you up to 256 electrodes, we're gonna paste them to your skull, and we're gonna ask you to be your normal monk self. Then we're gonna ask you to close your eyes and focus on loving-kindness." The moment those monks close their eyes and they begin to focus, there is an amazing shift in the brain. And part of the brain called the frontal lobe turns on like they've never recorded in human history. Now, the frontal lobe is the executive of the brain. It is the part of the brain that separates us from every other species on the planet. It makes up 40% of your entire brain. The next closest species, like gibbons and primates, 17 to 14%. Dogs, 7%. You cat lovers, 3.5%. That's it. Now, if your cat is smarter than you, So now check this out. He tells these guys to focus on one thought, and the frontal lobe turns on. And when it turns on, it creates a coordination in the brain to such a degree that it starts releasing what's called gamma waves. Now, gamma waves in the brain are waves that are totally synchronous. They're coherent. They're smooth and continuous, like a laser. And when we produce gamma waves in the brain, it's when neurons are all dancing to the same beat. They're all in synchrony, and they can hold hands and connect a lot easier. Now, when we're in normal thinking, our brain is in beta waves, right? That's erratic patterns. When you close your eyes and roll them back, you move into alpha. Which is a light meditative state. You go into theta, that's slower brain waves, less activity in the thinking brain, until ultimately you reach delta, which is deep sleep. So this gamma wave was a synchronous wave that they had never measured before so highly. So they tell the control group, "Okay, focus on loving-kindness, focus on compassion." And guess what happens to those people? They're producing the same brain waves with their eyes open as if their eyes were closed. You know, they're thinking, "I gotta pick up my daughter from ballet, I don't know what loving-kindness is, those monks look funny, they smell." "Am I now funny too? How long am I going to do this for? My back hurts, I'm tired, my throat is dry." You know, all those things. And they had no frontal lobe activity that came close to the measurement of the Buddhist monks. And so the scientists said, "You know, getting the brain and the mind to work better is a skill, just like golf or tennis. The more you do it, the better you get at it." And you can change the brain and the mind. And this idea of observing a single-minded thought creates coherence and order in the brain. And the control group had no focused concentration, and their brain was uncoordinated. It was firing erratically. So they said, "OK, let's do another experiment here, and let's see how well these monks do." So then, you know what the startle reflex is? If I walked up behind you and I shot a gun behind you, everybody would do the same thing. It's a reflex. Your hands would go above your head, your shoulders would shrug, and you'd make a grimace, you know, a facial grimace. And everybody does it. It's called the startle reflex. It's a universal trait, and it's pretty much hardwired in the nervous system. So they tell the Buddhist monks, okay, 'Can we just check to see what your startle reflex is like?' Monks agree. They walk up behind the monk and they say, 'We're going to shoot a gun off somewhere in the next 5 minutes.' And so they walk behind the monk, they shoot the gun off, they're expecting a startle reflex, and he goes like this. That's it. So then they say, 'Okay, instead of focusing on a single-minded thought, We want you to focus on an open-minded thought. Spread your consciousness as big as you can get. They walk up behind him, they shoot the gun again, and instead of his arms and facial expression changing, his shoulders go like this. That's it. Now, that was monumental in neuroscience because for the first time it showed that the higher brain centers were controlling the lower brain centers. Now, for the most part, we live by allowing the lower brain centers to control the higher brain centers. In other words, do your thoughts control your emotions, or do your emotions control your thoughts? Now, when I read the articles in the Proceedings of Neuroscience, I sat down and I said, "Okay, let's think about this." You know, with the advent of functional scans like this, functional brain scans, when you do a functional brain scan, you're measuring the brain in action. You're measuring the brain at work. And when you measure the brain at work, you're studying this thing called mind. Mind is what the brain does. So I read the article and I say this, okay. So the brain is the organ where there's the greatest number of neurons hooked together. And when you have the greatest number of neurons, you have the greatest intelligence, the greatest ability to learn, the greatest ability to modify your behavior and remember. Okay, so that's what the brain is. It's an organ for intelligence. And mind is the brain in action, right? Mind is what the brain does. So I thought, so who's changing the brain and the mind? The brain can't change the brain, right? 'Cause it's just an organ. And without life, it's no different than a kidney or a liver. It's just an organ. And a mind can't change the brain because mind is the product of the brain. So who's changing the brain and the mind? And it's that nasty 13-letter word called consciousness. You and me. The immaterial aspect of self that's operating this machine to produce mind. And when we're truly conscious, and we're truly aware, and when we pay attention to a single-minded idea, that's when we have control over the brain and the mind. But how much of our day are we truly conscious? Because for the most part, we live allowing the environment, different stimuli in our world, the people and the events and the circumstances in our life, to activate different circuits in our brain. And we react by thinking equal to our environment. And as long as we act and react equal to our environment, can anything new ever happen? Are we just creating more of the same? So then to change then, as we discussed yesterday, is to think and act greater than your environment. To change is to be greater than your environment. To change is actually to think greater than how you feel. Now, most people want to change, but in a matter of moments, the moment they begin to change, the first thing that happens is it starts to get a little uncomfortable. And the moment it gets uncomfortable, everybody runs back to that familiar feeling. And they say, "That was close. I'd much rather be like this. I'd much rather suffer. At least it's familiar." So neuroscience used to say that the brain was hardwired. Meaning you're born with a certain amount of circuits and connections, and you're gonna turn out like your parents. End of the story. And up until just 20 years ago, they finally said we lied. They said we made a mistake, that there are certainly hardwired areas of the brain that if that area is broken or damaged, it's hard to repair. But in fact, we have so many areas that are pliable and moldable and changeable throughout adult life. The whole idea that you're born with a certain amount of neurons and that's the end of the story is even a lie now. That not only does the brain upgrade its connections every time we learn an experience, but in fact, when we experience new things in new environments, the brain grows new neurons. So all that tequila you drank a few years ago? Still hope for you. Now, when the sperm and the egg come together and they make contact, there's an immediate exchange of genetic information. 23 chromosomes from the male donor, 23 chromosomes from the female egg, and there's an amazing cross-linking of genetic information to create a new human being. Makes sense, right? And that new human being, the moment the sperm and the egg connect, the cells begin to divide, and the genetics then are going— contributing to this new individual. Well, right around the first month of life, these special cells start to form called neurons, and we make about 8,000 neurons per minute in our first month of life. By the time we reach the second trimester, right around the fifth and sixth month, we begin to make about 250,000 neurons per second. And as we continue to grow in fetal development from the last trimester all the way till the time we're 2 years old, These neurons begin to specialize, they begin to branch out, and neurons look like little oak trees, and they have branches that reach out and touch and connect with other neurons, both these finger-like projections. And every place where one neuron connects with another neuron, that's a memory, that's a thought. So if you think about it then, we're making 2 million synaptic connections per second. All the way to the time we're 2 years old. And we're beginning to understand that the brain is busy downloading important information from generations gone by. It's coming preloaded with patterns and synaptic connections that give rise to the personality of the individual. Now, we have 2 types of genetics, and I'm telling you this because I want you to understand how easy it is to change. We have what's called long-term genetic traits. They're Darwinian traits. Brain looks the same from individual to individual. Would you agree that there's same folds and valleys, the same different organelles in there? And if you took two brains and set them side by side, you wouldn't be able to tell them apart, who belongs to who. It's like we have a hand, everybody has the same shape, right? But now, how we're wired and how the brain makes those circuits and connections then gives us our individuality. So we're all wired differently. Would you agree? And if the brain is coming preloaded with synaptic connections, it's pretty much an artifact from generations gone by. And so then we're getting all this knowledge and information, both long-term and short-term. And the short-term genetic traits that we inherit— now check this out— we inherit from our parents. And what we inherit from our parents is what they've mastered. So if your mother is a master at suffering, and you ask her, "How you doing today, Mom?" and she can demonstrate suffering and make it look easy and natural and second nature, there's a good possibility that one offspring will have that temperament. And if your father was a master at anger and all you had to do was give him one trigger, in a matter of seconds he could turn on the demonstration of anger and do it so well that it's second nature to him, there's a good possibility that one child will have that temperament. Am I making sense? By the same means, if your father was a mathematician and had great logic, there's a good possibility that someone may inherit that. And if your mother was an artist or a musician, that you would come preloaded with certain synaptic connections in place in your brain because that's what she could physically demonstrate and mentally rehearse very naturally. So that's only 50% of who we are, though. Neuroscience has finally said that doesn't make up you entirely, that you're given a certain amount of synaptic connections, but we still can learn from the environment. So this dance between genetics and the environment is this smooth little continuous 50-50 exchange. So there's only two ways that we begin to make our own synaptic connections in our own circuits. The first way is by learning knowledge, learning information. You know, every time you learn something new, you make a new connection in your brain. Learning is making new synaptic connections. Remembering is maintaining or sustaining those connections. So if you've learned anything this weekend and you can remember it or repeat it, you've formulated a new circuit in your brain. So did you evolve your brain? So if I gave you a book on how to ride a bicycle and you read all the information, you know, how to change the tire, how to change the chain, how to shift, what this mystical thing called balance is, and you knew how to repair the bike and knew what to do, and then I gave you a test 2 weeks later and I said, "I'm going to test you on everything," and you learned and memorized all that information, when I asked you the questions in that test, you would have to force your brain to fire in a certain way so that you would get the image of the answer. Would you agree? And that's because you've memorized it, and when I ask the question, it triggers the memory to see if it's stored in there. And if it's stored, you can give me the correct answer. Is that right? That's called semantics. It's called semantic memory. It's called philosophy. It's called knowledge. It's called facts, text, whatever you want to call it. But it's intellectual information. Now, the second way we make connections, which is the more profound way, is through experience. Now, in the midst of an experience, When we're in a new experience, everything we're seeing and smelling and tasting and feeling and hearing, all of our 5 senses are sending volumes of information back to the brain, and it's causing gangs of neurons to hook up. And when they hook up, they release a chemical. So all this information is traveling back to your brain in the midst of an experience, feeling and smelling and tasting, and the brain is recording, and all those neurons are firing all at once. And when they fire, they release a chemical. And that chemical is called a feeling. And you can remember an experience better because you can remember how it feels. Would you agree? So we can remember long-term memories because there's a feeling associated with it. Now, feelings and emotions are the end product of experience. And you're living by the same feeling every single day. What does that tell you? You're not having any new experiences. Would you agree? So the person who lives every single day in suffering, or every single day in victimization, or every single day in anger or frustration, that means they've made no new experiences that allow them to upscale their feelings. Would you agree? And so they did this experiment where they took these volunteer rats and they separated them into 3 different categories. In the first category, the rats were in a standard rat cage: food, water, wood chips, and running wheel. The second group of rats were in what's called the deprived environment: food and water, nothing else. Last group of rats, they were in what was called the enriched environment. And in the enriched environment, there were toys and swings and mirrors and levers to press on, combs to walk under, and other siblings. And it was a spa, pretty much, for rats. And so these rats were having new experiences, would you agree, from their environment? And at the end of 3 months, they asked the rats if they wanted to donate their brains to science, and of course they all agreed. And when they checked out the brains of the rats, the rats had 15% more neurons than the other rats. They had denser brains. They had more neurotransmitters in their brain. They had more of that Miracle-Gro called neural growth factor, which causes enhanced connections in their brain. Their offspring lived longer, and they had less body fat. So the brain then, in the midst of an experience, literally molds and shapes itself and upscales the hardware. Now, if we're living by the same feelings and same emotions every single day, and feelings then are the markers from the past, if we're feeling every single day and we believe that our thoughts have anything to do with our future, if we're feeling every day, what are we creating more of? The same, the past. Now, did I ever say that feelings were bad? No, feelings are the end product of an experience. But if we live by the same feeling every day, it means we're having no new experience. So then when we get on the bicycle, and we ride the bicycle, and we skin our knee and fall off, we get back on the bike then, we pedal uphill and we feel the pain in our legs, get to the top of the hill, start to pedal downhill and the pain goes away and the wind blows in our face and the tears are running off the side of our face, and we pedal so fast that the chain comes off. We get off the bike and we put the chain back on, and then we wipe our nose and we get grease on our face and we smell the grease. Get back on the bike, we start to pedal, and we go through a puddle and the water runs up our back. Would you agree then that we're creating a neurological network that has to do with riding a bike? Because now the experience is being recorded through different feelings that we're picking up through our senses. So the enrichment then of how the brain works in experience is what really allows us to move from our limited states to our unlimited states. So the question is, how many new experiences have you had lately? And think about this: if I handed you a bicycle, pushed it in front of you, and you've never seen a bicycle before in your life, and I said, "Get on this thing and ride it," how would your day go? Pretty rough day. Yeah, downhill. But if I gave you the book on how to ride a bike and then I gave you the Lance Armstrong video and then I gave you the 10 dos and the 10 don'ts and then I asked you over to my house and I showed you, you know, how to do it, would you agree then all that knowledge would prepare you for the experience? So you would agree then that knowledge is the precursor to an experience, right? And the more knowledge we gain and the more we apply that knowledge to modify our behavior, we're gonna set ourselves up for a new experience. Would you agree? And that new experience then is gonna have a new emotion. So most people then live in that philosophical realm where they gain knowledge but never apply it. They sit in the armchair and they talk about what it would be like to be in the game, but they never hop in the game. So if we're learning knowledge and we're not doing anything with it, If you're not applying what you've learned this weekend and all the different speakers that you've heard, then you remain in that philosophical realm void of experience. Would you agree? Now, there's two laws of the brain that I want to talk about. I call them laws of the brain. The first law is called the law of association. Law of association is how we learn. If I said to you a neuron looks like an oak tree, the moment I said a neuron looks like an oak tree, what did your brain do? Pictured an oak tree. And if I said, well, it's a leafless oak tree, you know, in winter, and it's got these finger-like projections that are like branches, and then those branches form larger branches, and there's a trunk, and if you pull the trunk out of the ground, there's roots. That's what a neuron looks like, but it's not big like an oak tree, it's really tiny. But it's not stiff like an oak tree either, it's like cooked spaghetti. So the moment I was talking to you about what a neuron was, I was using the machinery in your brain, and you were turning on different circuits. And the moment I got your brain turned on and it was associating with ideas, I could make a new connection called neuron. And if I'd said to you, "What's a neuron?" you'd say, "Those little kind of spaghetti-like oak trees that are really tiny." Right? So the way we learn is we learn by association. We need to use what's in our brain and turn it on so that we can associate and build bigger models and bigger understandings. We have to use what's familiar to understand unfamiliar things. You guys got it? If I said receptor sites on the outside of the cell look like craters on the moon, but they're not like craters, they're more like flowers, like sitting on a lily pad in a lake. And on the inside of the flower is like a kaleidoscope, and it can mold and change. And when this chemical comes in, it fits into that exact pattern on the very inside of the flower. Like a key fitting into a lock. And when it fits in perfectly, it jiggles the cell and it sends a signal all the way to the DNA, and that DNA unzips like a zipper. I used everything in your brain for you to understand receptor sites, right? And so we used what was familiar, and I turned on different areas of your brain, and once it's all turned on, you add this new circuit called receptor sites. Now, I own 15 computers. Can you believe that? And I know nothing about them. And I have them all networked and all that stuff, you know. And when my computer started breaking down, I would call up my computer guy and I'd say— his name's Kirk— I'd say, "Captain Kirk, we have a problem on the deck." And he'd come to my office or come to my house and whatever, and he'd be in there and he'd come out and I'd say, "Kirk, what happened?" He'd say, "Oh, it's the eeh, er, eh, ah," you know, say all this stuff. And of course, the only thing I would say to him is what? Did you fix it? Yeah, yeah, it's fixed. Okay. But now that I have all these computers and stuff, I can't do that, right? Because I've got to learn. So the moment he says it's that this drive and that's not working with that and I had to do that, I always say the same thing. What? Talk to me like it's the brain here now. So that's the hardware? So we're talking about like the neurons and circuits here? Okay, and what's that? Oh, that's like the frontal lobe. Oh, that's the hippocampus. Okay, I understand now. So I make them talk to me in my language. Do you understand? Because if I don't have the machinery to process it, it goes where? Over my head, because I'm not making any new circuits and connections. So we learn by association. You got it? We remember by repetition. The second law of the brain is called the law of repetition. So if you do something over and over again, over and over again, over and over again, neurons begin to fire like this. And they keep doing it till they reach this moment where they release this chemical. And this chemical is like the Miracle-Gro of neurons. And this chemical then causes the neurons to develop a long-term relationship. And if we do something repeatedly, you would have to agree, the more we do it, the more natural and second nature and easy and familiar and routine and common, subconscious, unconscious it gets. Would you agree with that? So we learn by association and we remember by repetition. Now, when we take the law of association, learning new things, and the law of repetition, repeating them over and over again. Now, you can learn a skill, an action, you can memorize things, but it takes repetition and association to form what's called neurological networks. Now, neural nets are just gangs of neurons that have fired and wired together because you've learned something and repeated it enough times till it became automatic, till it became second nature. And we have, by the way, Hundreds of thousands of automatic neural nets that the brain functions with. And neuroscience and psychology says by the time you're 35, personality is complete. Which, what they mean is, you got enough automatic programs to handle any situation in your life, and you can turn it on, and you can make it look natural and easy, and nothing is gonna stop you from continuing in this habit of living. So I want to show you a couple pictures now. Of some of this information. I'm gonna go pretty quickly here because I want you guys to learn all this in such a short amount of time. Now, yesterday we covered a lot of material and we talked a lot about this thing called mental rehearsal. How many people remember mental rehearsal yesterday? You know what mental rehearsal is? You can change your brain just by thinking about it. If you take a group of people who have never played the piano and you have them practice scales and chords with one hand, and they learn the scales and chords and they physically demonstrate it, After a period of time, they grow new circuits in their brain. Does that make sense? You learn something, you apply it, you repeat it, you pay attention, you grow new circuits. You take a second group of people and you say, "OK, learn these scales and chords, but instead of actually physically playing the piano, I want you to mentally rehearse. I want you to remember playing it, these scales and chords." Do you know they'll grow the same amount of circuits as the people who physically demonstrated it? So the question is, what do we physically demonstrate all day long, and what do we mentally rehearse? Because that's who we are on a neurological level. How do you think and how you act forms your neurological circuits. It forms your personality. So check this out here now. So there's memory systems in place in the brain that allow us, by the way, to really upscale our hardware. Now don't panic, these are new words, okay? We have two types of memory systems. The first memory system is called declarative memory. And declarative memories— are you ready?— are just memories that you can declare. How hard is that, right? Now check it out. There's only two types of declarative memories. There's facts, like knowledge, and there's experiences. Didn't we say knowledge and experience upscales the brain? So facts is called semantic memories, and it takes place in the first brain called the neocortex. That's the thinking brain. When you learn something new, you're forming synaptic connections intellectually in the neocortex, in the thinking brain. Now if you apply what you learn, you personalize it, you demonstrate it, You take that information, you modify your behavior, and you set yourself up for a new experience. That new experience then has new emotions. Would you agree? And now we're including two brains. Now we have the thinking brain and the feeling brain. Now you have two brains working together. You have thought and emotion producing what's called doing in the, in the physical reality. You have to do something in order to produce a new emotion. Now it's not enough to experience an event once. You can't think that your mother's gonna call you on the phone, and the phone rings and it's her, and then you hang a shingle on your door and say you're psychic. Can't do that, right? You have to be able to repeat the experience over and over again, whatever it is. Now, if we repeat experiences over and over again, over and over again, we create a second type of memory system called non-declarative memories. Now, non-declarative memories have everything to do with skills and habits and behavior and priming and emotional reactions. Conditionings and associative memory. In other words, you've done it so many times that you don't have to think about it anymore. In other words, you've conditioned the body through the experience of new emotions that the body has become the mind. A habit is when the body has become the mind. So can you get in the habit of suffering and make it non-declarative memory? Could it be automatic? Can you get in the habit of creating a whole other set of neurochemistry being in joy? Hello? And so— Wow, you guys are sharp today. So here's what non-declarative memories are. How many people here can't— at some time in their life couldn't remember a phone number, picked up the receiver, and then let their hands dial the number? You know what? You've dialed that number enough times that your body was the mind and it knew better than your brain. Did you know that? And the body was the mind in that moment. Now, we have all these habits of being in which the body has become the mind. Now, when we go from thinking to doing to being, we actually include all 3 brain systems. And when we're living in the state of a new habit or a new behavior, when we're literally being it, it takes no effort at all. It's second nature. So how do we go from that? Some people say, "I want to be happy. I declare that I want to be healthy. I declare that I want to be in love with myself." But they've conditioned their body for 20 years of suffering. So it only takes one thought from their environment and the next thing they know, they're sitting on the couch with the remote control eating bonbons and they have no idea how it happened. It's because they were living with a whole different set of conditioning.

My name is Liz Dawn, and I'm with Celebrate Your Life Events. And the presentation that you've been listening to was recorded live at one of our Celebrate Your Life conferences. And this program was created exclusively for Evan's audience, and I'm super thrilled to share this information with you. So come check us out, take a look at all of our retreats and programs and conferences that we have to offer. Click the link below, and hopefully I'll see you in person. All right, now let's get back to the presentation.

So then, if you learn something new, the people that I studied that had spontaneous remissions from diseases, they started to think differently. They began to mentally rehearse a new state of mind. They started to think about being someone else. They reinvented themselves every single day, and then they got up and they didn't allow themselves to fall back into their old self. They actually got up and they physically demonstrated who they mentally rehearsed. And then it wasn't enough to just do it once. They did it over and over again until they created a new habit of being. And from this new habit of being, then, they were able to do and think equal to who they were being. Now, change is so difficult for most people because they live in this realm right here. They live in the thinking realm without ever getting out and moving from thinking to doing. Moving from thinking to doing is like herding cats for most people. They don't want to do it. They'd rather sit on the couch and intellectualize about it. But we have to actually apply what we learn or personalize it so that we can have a new experience. You guys get it? Now, this is why Alzheimer's patients, by the way, they can't remember their wife or their husband or where they grew up, but if you give them a pair of knitting needles or an accordion, They can play like, or sew like nothing. Because the body here has become the mind, and it's implicit. So can we then create a state of suffering by thinking and doing, thinking and doing enough times that we create a state of being? Could you then intellectually then think by thinking and doing, thinking and doing, learning new information, applying it, having a new experience, creating joy enough times that now joy is the new state of being? The new habit? Is it the same thing? Okay. I just wanted to make sure you guys knew that. Okay, now check this out. So here's the brain. This yellow part is the thinking brain, that's your neocortex. This middle part here is the midbrain, that's your doing brain, that's the feeling brain. And this red brain back here is the being brain. When we are totally changed, the mind and the body are working together. When we are in flux or we cannot change, the mind is doing one thing and the body's been conditioned to do something else. Does that make sense? So change is to have all three of these brains working together. Now, this concept in neuroscience called neuroplasticity, it's our brain's ability to change its synaptic wiring by learning information and recording experiences and to maintain a modified state of being. Plasticity allows us to evolve our actions or modify our behavior so that we do a better job in life. Neuro-rigidity—that's a word I made up, by the way— is using our brain's prewired synaptic connections, our memories, without it making any new connections, never learning from experience. Rigidity is to process the same thoughts and perform the same actions and expect a different result. And we do it all the time. Neuroplasticity is upgrading or evolving the brain's hardware and software through a conscious interaction with the environment so that new systems can adapt to new demands. Rigidity is using the same hardware and software by unconsciously processing the same thoughts through different interactions in the environment. Plasticity is learning new things, creating new experiences, making new memories, making the brain fire in new sequences and new patterns and new combinations. Rigidity is living life from past memories without learning new things and having new experiences. It's keeping the brain firing in the same pattern. That's the box of the brain. We talk about thinking inside the box. It's the most commonly fired, naturally wired set of neurons that you think every single day and act by every day. So to think outside the box is to force the brain to work in new patterns. Does that make sense? So a neuron, or a nerve cell, a brain cell, is the simplest functional unit of the nervous system. They possess the unique ability to store and communicate information between each other. So this is a neuron. We have 100 billion neurons in our brain. If you took one sheet of paper, you set it on the ground, and you stacked 100 billion sheets of paper on top of it, it would be 5,000 miles high. That's the distance from Los Angeles to London. The average number of connections in the yellow part of the brain is about 40,000 connections per neuron, but they're not two-dimensional, they're actually three-dimensional like this. They have a backside to them. About 100,000 neurons fit in a grain of sand. If you took a scoop of the brain the size of a pea and you stretched out those neurons end to end, 2 miles long. So learning is making new synaptic connections. Now, if you learned anything new today, this is what happened. I kind of understand what he's saying. He's kind of talking fast, but I'll pay attention. Ah. If you learned one thing today, your brain is that plastic. It did that. Check it out. I'm happy, I'm happy. Yeah, I'm happy now. Look, this is change. Unhooking from one set of neural nets and connecting to a whole other set. This is real time, by the way. This is the aha phenomenon. One whole neural net connecting with another neural net. Neurons want to make circuits and connections. They want to do that. It just happens to be us that stop it. They disconnect, absolutely. We're going to talk about that. So remembering, you would agree, is maintaining or sustaining synaptic connections? Yes? So once they've developed a long-term relationship, that's what they look like. That's hardwired. Insist on being unhappy, that's what it looks like. It stays just like that. Long-term relationship. They've fired and wired together. Now, there's two ways you make synaptic connections. We talked about this. One is learning facts, knowledge, information, philosophy. It's called semantic memories. The second way is called episodic memories, having new experiences, novel experiences, embracing new events in life. So this idea that nerve cells that fire together wire together It's called Hebbian learning. The more you fire thoughts in your brain in the same patterns, the more you wire yourself to your thoughts. So your brain is a reflection of the mind, right? And the mind is a reflection of the brain. So we said we learn by association. We use the brain's stored information to learn new information. We build new circuits by using existing circuits, using what is familiar to understand what is unfamiliar, using old memories to form new memories. Using knowns to understand unknowns, using existing synaptic connections to make new synaptic connections. Now, if you decided that you wanted to be a compassionate person— I'm just making this up— would you agree then the more knowledge you learned about compassion, the more raw materials you would have to build the neural net? Would you agree? So reading a book about Mother Teresa wouldn't be a bad idea. Studying Buddhist texts about compassion wouldn't be a bad idea either, right? And you would use that then by association to begin to reinvent a new self. And by thinking about it and repeating it over and over again and contemplating it, the act of contemplation, you are building new circuits in your brain, and you're forcing the brain to fire in new sequences and new patterns and new combinations. Would you agree? And then if you thought about it enough and rehearsed it enough, just like the piano players, are you growing new circuits? Then when you got up and you actually physically demonstrated compassion, Would you have a new experience? Would that new experience have a new emotion? Would you understand what compassion is because you felt what compassion felt like? But if you wanted to hardwire it, would it be enough to do it once? Would you have to repeat the experience several times until you train the body and condition the body to be the mind? Now you're being in the state of compassion, your mind and body are working together. Now if your mind and body are working together, that means that nothing from your environment could move you from that state of compassion, because it is now neurochemically within you. So the person who insists on suffering, and no one can move them from it— you can't take them out and take them for a drink, you can't go out and watch a movie, you can't try to cheer them up— they're clear that they've mastered suffering, and nothing from their environment's gonna move them from it. Would you say they've mastered it? Would you say that the environment isn't pushing them past that? So then, can you then be in a state of compassion or in a state of joy where nothing moves you from that state of joy? You insist on it, and nothing in the environment should push you away from that state of joy because it's hardwired within you. You are being that implicitly because it's a non-declarative memory. And now when mind and body are working together, we have the power of the universe behind us. When mind and body are working together, the heart is open. And those great people in history Martin Luther King, Gandhi, William Wallace, Queen Elizabeth, all those guys, they knew that it wasn't just enough to have a dream and not live it. They had to act as if the dream was already happening. And they did not care what happened to their body. They did not care about the circumstances in the world. They didn't care about how long it took. You know what? They believed in thought. More than they believed in anything else. And isn't that what it is about? Can you believe in thought more than you believe in the circumstances in your life? You know, when the bleep came out and all these— how do I say this— all these fundamentalist religious people were calling me and telling me I was gonna go to hell. And believe me, they did. And my staff are— they're a bunch of tough ladies, and they always, at the end of the day, they always give me the you know, the pad with everybody that calls and they'd say, "Oh my God, this lady's really angry. She's, you know, from this church and she wants to talk to you and I just tell her that you're unavailable." I said, "No, get her on the phone. Let's talk." So we call this lady up and she says, "You know, you're gonna go to hell. You're a sinner," and all this stuff. And I'd say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait. Wait, what is your definition of sin? I wanna make sure that I'm sinning." And she'd tell me that I was doing something to Jesus or I wasn't pleasing pleasing God, or something like that. And I say, you know what the literal word translation in Aramaic, sin, you know what it means? It means to miss the mark, to miss the bullseye, to have a bad attitude, to not have your thoughts and actions aligned. That's all it means. And so then she'd say, you know, well, it's blasphemy and you're gonna go to hell and all this stuff. And I'd say, I said to her, listen, where in the good book Where does it say that your thoughts and actions don't matter? Tell me. Just show me where. Isn't that what the book is about? And I said to her, and you know, I think the movie did a pretty good job in explaining what prayer is. 'Cause when every single person confronts a difficult circumstance in their life, what do they do? They close their eyes. They separate themselves from the environment and they insist on another outcome different than the circumstances in their life. They're asking and insisting on a greater change to happen for them, and they're intending on it, and they're holding on to that thought, and they're asking for supernatural intelligence to step in and to rearrange the mess that they created. Would you agree? And isn't thought then, isn't prayer then making thought more real than anything else. And you know, we're all wired to do it, and we all do it. And so faith then is believing that the only thing that is real is your thoughts. And when we can hold on to a thought independent of the circumstances in our life and no longer allow the environment to cause us to think, to think greater than the circumstances in our life, is greatness. And that's what we admired about all those people that led human beings to freedom, by the way. They believed in the reality that they couldn't experience with their senses but was alive in their mind, and they couldn't act any other way. They couldn't think one way and act a different way. They had to act as if it already was here. And when we have our mind and body working together, we lead with absolute conviction. We are beyond reproach. And that's when we have all 3 memory systems working in the brain. Would you agree? Okay. The law of repetition says when we repeat a thought, an action, a skill over and over again until it becomes easy, familiar, common, natural, automatic, routine, effortless, second nature, subconscious, unconscious. When we repeat something over and over again, those neurons begin to release a chemical. It's called neural growth factor. It's the chemical glue, or the Miracle-Gro, that makes new synaptic connections stick, become more enhanced and flourished. It's called neurotrophics. Now listen, if I took a bottle of wine, a 1996 Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, Silver Oak, and I set it down here, and I had a wine connoisseur sit with me, and they opened that bottle of wine and they drank that wine, do you think they could appreciate the subtleties in that wine? Would you agree that they learned some knowledge, they had enough experience, they paid attention and they repeated it, that they developed a neurological network for tasting wine? Now, I have the guy over here that drinks box of wine. Okay? Which isn't bad. I mean, you know, that's what he's into. And I give him that Alexander Valley Silver Oak. Do you think he's going to taste the same thing that the connoisseur tasted? So would you agree then he has more— the connoisseur has more enriched circuitry to be able to experience that wine? What about the piano tuner? How can they tune a piano just by listening? Would you agree that they learned something, they practiced it, they had enough experience that they developed an enriched neurological network? Would you agree? And they're now tuned in. How come a Braille reader can run his or her finger over a page and feel the lumps and read, where you can't come up with any bit of information? Because if you look at the neurons, the neural nets of a Braille reader that has to do with this finger or this finger, their whole reality, their whole mind is right here. Do you know that there's huge pieces of real estate that have been converted in more intricate circuits in that area because that's how nerve cells that fire together wire together, that those enriched connections became more refined and now their mind was actually greater to perceive the subtleties? Am I making sense? Well, not only do they become more hardwired, but they become more enriched and they become more connected. Now check this out. These are neurons that have been sprinkled with nerve growth factor. Look what they're doing. They're making connections. This is neurons with no nerve growth factor. Look at them. They're growing circles. They want to be social. And there's only two ways we make nerve growth factor in the brain. Only two ways: learning something new and repeating it, and having new experiences. And when we do that, that's what happens in the brain. We grow new circuits. So the law of association is how we learn, the law of repetition is how we remember. A neural network, or a neural net, are just gangs of neurons that have fired and wired together to form a community of neurosynaptic connections that are related to a concept, an idea, a thought process, a memory, a skill, a behavior, or an action. Neural nets are formed by combining the law of association along with the law of repetition to create a new level of mind. They are the automatic hardwired programs that we unconsciously and automatically use every single day. And how many do we have of those? You know, we have hundreds of thousands of them. So this is a neural net. This is what it looks like. See how they look like spaghetti? That's the stain that picks up the chemical aspect of neurons. And see how alive they are? Forget that, you know, stick model of neurons. They're spaghettis with cheese, a little cheese on the side. Look at this. This is the electrical component of neurons. Watch. Want to see a thought? That's a thought. Watch again. That's a thought. This is what it looks like inside your brain. You generate more electrical impulses in your brain in one day than all the cell phones on the planet put together. 400 billion times per second, your brain does that. The brain is a central processing unit where there are the greatest number of nerve cells, where the greatest number of neurons wire together. There's the greatest amount of intelligence and the highest ability to learn. And to store memory. Mind is the brain in action, it's the brain at work, it's a product of the brain activity, it's what the brain does when it's animated with life. Therefore, we can produce many different levels of mind. Would you agree? Learn something new, fire a new combination, is that a new mind? Yes? So if you repeat that same level of mind every single day, are you creating a new, more permanent set of circuits and connections? So if you decide to be happy every day, you mentally rehearse it, then physically rehearse it, and you were able to repeat that consistently, would you have a new mind? Yes. Okay. So plasticity, revisited, is to fire a series of many diverse neural nets in different combinations, sequences, and orders to produce a new level of mind, and to be able to repeat the same frame of mind at will, and to make it look natural and easy. Now, the frontal lobe is the seat of our free will. It's learning, intention, invention, attention, speculation, decision-making, behavior control, focus, concentration. It restrains our impulsive emotional reactions. The more emotional you are, the less activity you have in your frontal lobe. The more focused you are, the more activity you have in your frontal lobe and less activity in your emotional centers. So a person with ADD is someone who's living in survival. All of their attention is on their body, the environment, and time. Someone who doesn't have ADD, who has focused concentration, they have the ability to be so focused that the only thing that is real is thought. They can tune out the body, the environment, and time. It's the newest and most evolved part of the human brain and nervous system. It's the most neuroplastic part of the entire brain. It's what allows us to make thought more real than anything else. That's how come we're so different than any other species, because we can modify our behavior in one lifetime. It has connections to all other parts of the brain, and when it's in full operation, it quiets down all the other circuits in the brain so nothing else is being processed but a single concept. It's the brain's symphony leader. It's the brain's volume control. It lowers the volume when you're truly focused. It lowers the volume to the sensory feedback from your body, the concept of sensory information from the environment, and this idea of time. In other words, when you're truly focused, there's no activity in the parts of the brain that have to do with time and space. We lose track of time and space. So when we're examining new outcomes or when we're thinking about modifying our behavior, the frontal lobe can access all the diverse neural networks and combine them in new ways, in different orders and sequences and combinations, to make a new level of mind. And create new possibilities. It's what coordinates how the rest of the brain works. It's what changes the mind, by the way. It reorganizes how we process the databank of stored knowledge and experiences, and it seamlessly pieces them together in a nonlinear way to make a new plan. Now, you know, who here knows what the word meditation means in Tibetan? Let's start with Tibetan. You know what it means? To meditate in Tibetan, the word means to become familiar with. Now think about this. You're geniuses, right? If you sat down and you became very familiar with your unconscious thoughts and actions, those automatic non-declarative states, if you spent an hour a day observing yourself, your thoughts and your actions, and you became familiar with those unconscious programs, would you be meditating? And then if you practiced and rehearsed a new way of being and you thought about it over and over again, over and over again, thought about a new way of being and you mentally rehearsed it over and over again until it became familiar, were you meditating? Yes? So the process of meditation is to become familiar with, to self-reflect or to contemplate, to ask these questions. These are frontal lobe questions. What would it be like? What would I have to change about myself? How would I have to be? What is my highest ideal of myself? What do I want? These are the type of questions that cause the brain to work in new ways. I wake up every single morning and I ask myself the same question: What is the greatest ideal I can be today? And when I ask myself that question, I begin to rehearse a new way of being. Now, if I get up and I'm still the same guy that sat down, it didn't work, right? I have to get up, and when I get up, I have to be that person because I created the state of mind that turned on the brain and the body so that I'm living as the greatest ideal of myself. So when we ask these questions, we're asking these frontal lobe questions, it causes the brain to work in new ways. Would you agree? That's meditation. So the mental rehearsal is remembering how to, or thinking about, or learning or memorizing, or planning or imagining a new skill to cognitively experience what it would be like. You have to continuously reproduce the same level of mind every single day. So here's the most important slide I want you to see. Nerve cells that fire no longer fire together, no longer wire together. So here you go. I call this the biology of change. This is you. You decide that today you're going to focus on health because you got a bad diagnosis. And so you want to focus and rehearse on being a healthy person. So this neuron right here, This blue one has to do with perfect health. And so you want to fire this thought to this neuron that's traveling to your body so you can send a new signal to your body. You guys with me? So you want to fire this thought. It's called health. But there's only one problem. You got all this chatter going on in your head at the same time. You're not healthy. You're sick. You're— don't even bother doing this. You're unworthy. Forget about it. The doctor told you you had this much time, and your father had this condition, and you never did anything anyway. But you're still trying to fire that new thought called health, right? Now we have this amazing thing called will, and if we're persistent and we insist over and over again, over and over again, over and over again, and we're working on making this the greatest voice in our head, the strongest voice in our head, and overcome all these other voices And we persist, even though all the other neural nets are firing at the same time. If we continuously fire the same thought repeatedly by will, by will alone, it becomes the strongest signal. And when it becomes the strongest signal, watch what happens. There you go. That's called health. Now, that is the strongest focus that's producing the strongest coherent message to this neuron now. It's greater than these other voices. Would you agree? Now, because there's only a certain amount of neurogrowth factor that goes around, neurogrowth factor is holding all these other circuits in place, but now this one is starting to wire because neurogrowth factor is beginning to make this circuit more complete. And as it becomes more complete, it steals the neurogrowth factor from these other circuits. So there goes your pain, there goes your memory of your father's condition, there goes what the doctor told you, there goes your unworthiness, and what's the only signal traveling to your body now? And that's how those people healed themselves of diseases. They changed their mind. So, you think you could do that? So here's my question: Would you agree that our senses and feelings should be the last to experience what the mind has created? Can we believe in a future that we can't see or experience with our senses, but already has happened enough times in our mind that it is now mapped in our brain? When we successfully apply this new paradigm, the brain is no longer a record of the past, but a map to the future. To live by this law is to live by the quantum law, and the quantum law is: the environment is an extension of your mind. I'll take a few questions. So, if you guys want to take off, you can. Someone asked me about strokes. I want you to know that the latest research is showing that people who have been paralyzed for 10 years, that are in their 70s, from a stroke, they're able to take paralyzed limbs and deparalyze them. And it only takes 3 things. You ready? Knowledge, instruction, and feedback. So they took this group of people and they said, "Listen, we want to tell you that you can rewire your brain." And you know what they said? "No, we can't. No, you can't. My doctor told me that this is permanent." And they said, "Yeah, yeah, we know. We're gonna give you some new knowledge. You can rewire it." And they said, "No, we don't think so." I said, "You're not gonna be in this control group. How about you? You think you can do it?" "Well, maybe. I'm open to it." "So look, here's what it looks like." And they talked to these people. They gave them a certain amount of knowledge. Would you agree that knowledge is the precursor to experience? Then they gave them the instruction. They sat them in front of a biofeedback machine and they said this. They hooked them up to a brain wave device that produced an image on the screen that had an audio feedback as well. And they said, "Think about moving your well arm and then begin to move it." And when they began to move their well arm, they saw this brainwave pattern on the big screen and it went like this: "Beee!" Like that. They said, "Keep doing it. Keep doing it. Keep moving your well arm. Just keep looking at the screen. Keep seeing that pattern." Then they said, "Okay, now just think about moving your well arm." So they began to just think about moving the well arm. They said, "Produce the same pattern like you were intending to move it and see if you can do the same pattern as if you moved it." So now they produced the same mind. Would you agree? The same mind of moving the arm and thinking about moving the arm became the same. Then they said, "Okay, we're going to put a mirror right down the middle here, and we want you to just move your well arm. We want you to look in the mirror." What was it looking like? It looked like they were moving their paralyzed arm. "Just keep doing it. Keep looking. Just keep looking." And then they said, "Okay, now what we want you to do is we want you to produce the same level of mind and think about moving this arm, but you have to produce the same pattern on the screen. Produce the same mind." So, first couple weeks, guess what? Nothing. And all of a sudden they got a little beep, and they went, "Oh my gosh. I got a little feedback. I just did something in there. I'm gonna do it again." Beep! So they walked to work every day, and the moment they were able to produce the same brainwave pattern, guess what happened? Moved their paralyzed arm. Now, why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because if a person with a paralyzed limb can insist on change, is there hope for you? In their 70s. By the way. So the brain learns by knowledge, instruction, and feedback. One of the leading rehabilitative medicine guys, Bach-Yurita, who works out of University of Wisconsin in Madison, his father had a stroke, and when his father came to visit him, he tied his well arm behind his back, and he had to do chores for 2 hours a day. This is what he did to his father. The neighbors were really worried, you know, because he couldn't pick up the broomstick, and he just made him keep doing it. And you know what? Had a normal arm in no time. So you send the signal to the muscle through the neural net, and all you have to do is keep increasing the signal, and your brain will reorganize itself to meet the intention, as long as you get mind and body working together. Next question. Yes. What would be your suggestions if you have a child who has ADD or ADHD and you don't want to do the medicine route, so you want to actually stimulate the brain? So ADHD and ADD. Everybody has ADD. I just want to tell you that. We lose our attention span 6 to 10 times per minute. So how are we doing as observers? Not too good, would you agree? So everybody has a degree of chronic distractibility. And we get more and more distracted the more we immerse ourselves in stimulus in the environment. So think about this. If you take a kid and you put him in front of a video game, by the way, and this is how a lot of kids get ADD. And you tell them, "Look, we're gonna give you a dollar for every time we ring the bell, and if you can stop within 3 seconds, you know, you get to keep the money." And you know that they did this experiment with these kids, and you know that they all were so psyched, but when the video game started and they rang the bell, guess what happened? None of them stopped. Zero. You know what they all said? "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait." And they said, "Too late. Ding." "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait." They couldn't do it. And so would you agree that that's an addiction? Now, you know why it's an addiction? Because every time they blow something up, or they shoot somebody, or they conquer something, or they go to the next level, the brain releases dopamine and it releases epinephrine. So you feel good. So they associate feeling good and a change in brain chemistry with learning. So you put the kid in a social environment now where they have to learn in school, and learning should be a reward in itself, right? So the kid now has been conditioned to have a change in brain chemistry. And so now they're not getting a change in brain chemistry because there's no stimulus. So what do you think they do? They get in trouble. They act out. And when you act out, what happens? Get a rush of adrenaline. And that creates hyper-awareness. Turns on the sympathetic nervous system, fight-or-flight nervous system, so you're more aware. But the problem is, is that you need to do it again the next time. But next time you need a little bigger stimulus. You need to get in a little bit more trouble to wake the brain up. It's like the receptor sites become desensitized. It's like living with a spouse that always yells at you. After a while, they have to yell louder because you become desensitized. Well, the cells are the same way. They just need more juice. So with children, to teach children how to focus is to begin to do very simple things. The younger they are, the easier it is. Tell them stories. Read them stories. Make them lie in bed at night and read them a story where they pay attention and they imagine. That's being focused. Have your kids sit still with you and ask them tough questions. Have them— there's new biofeedback games and machines out there that have nothing to do with creating dopamine but can measure concentration levels. And because we said, just like the Buddhist monks, that if you pay attention and you do it enough times, you coordinate the brain and you make it work better. And so television and internet and all that stuff is is quick changes in attention span. And if you condition the mind to have quick changes in attention span, you create what? A short attention span. Does that make sense? It's called chronic distractibility. It's one of the things that happens to most adults. They get it from multitasking. And as you multitask and you're doing many, many things at once, you're shortening your attention span to finish one thing to get to the next. And the brain just reaches its limit, and then it starts shortening its attention span. And we all wind up having less attention. And what neuroscience is beginning to show is that when the frontal lobe is the boss and it's in control, we're more happy because there's a spot in the left frontal lobe called the happy spot. And when the frontal lobe's working right, that part of the brain lights up. People experience a great sense of joy. As a matter of fact, that Buddhist monk that they were shooting the gun off behind him and he wasn't reacting, He had such left frontal lobe activity that the neuroscientists said, "This has got to be the happiest guy in the world." I mean, he had such activity there. So, but when the frontal lobe is working properly, we're controlling and coordinating how the rest of the brain works. When the frontal lobe is no longer the boss, then all the erratic programs are going off all the time, and we're not learning anything new. So the way we live, by the way, when we live in emotionally afflictive states. When we live in destructive, addictive emotional states, what I'm learning is that there's always a gap between the way things appear and the way things really are. And the way things appear, or the way we present ourselves to the world, is different than who we are. And so what we need to do is this facade up here, this image of ourselves that we're projecting, We need the environment to remember who we think we are because we're running from who we really are. So we have people and things and circumstances and social events so that we can remember who we think we are as this identity. But who we really are is this person down here who's afraid or unsure or worried or anxious. But people run from that. They don't want to look at that. Well, what happens at a certain point in our life, especially in our midlife, None of this stuff brings us any more pleasure, you know. We reach a point where we can predict the outcome of everything and everyone. And you do one of two things. Either turn around and look at why you're unhappy. And when you do that, and you get really real, that's called a nervous breakdown. Because you're no longer agreeing to the facade of who you think you should be for everybody else. It's living for the world. You got it? Or if that— if you decide not to go down there— by the way, if you do go down there and you crash and everybody in your life is worried about you, the people up here, you know what they do, right? They send you to the doctor, they medicate you, and they go, "That was close. We almost lost you." And you go back to living this facade again, right? Now, that's one choice. But the other choice is, and what most people do, is now that there's— they can't get the rush from anybody or anything because they can predict the feelings already. They know every— how it's all gonna turn out. So they go to the next level. You know what the next level is? Drugs, alcohol, shopping, overeating, gambling, pornography, internet, television. Listen, if you're not getting it from the people and the things and the conditions in your life— you see, the brain naturally associates something external from it with some internal change. If I meet you and I like the way you make me feel, you externally from me are producing some internal change, and I'm gonna remember you because of how I feel. Am I making sense? So you have this feeling of emptiness, feeling of unworthiness, this feeling of insecurity, and none of this is taking care of itself any longer. So you go to alcohol, you go to drugs, because the moment you have that external thing that produces this internal change, it takes away what? That feeling. Right? And that, in a sense, is what ADD is. You're running from the feeling. You got it? But the problem is with these things is that you always gotta go to the next— you gotta take a little bit more drugs. You gotta shop a little bit more. You gotta buy a little bit more. You gotta gamble a little bit more because you gotta raise the threshold to take away that feeling again. Because when it's over, you come back to who? And when that happens and you start using greater external stimuli that change your internal state, What happens to the gap? Gets bigger. Now, the second book that I'm writing is called "The 10 Steps to Rewire Your Brain." It's a workbook where you simply go through the process of recognizing those limitations. And the second most important part of the whole thing is called admission, where you turn around and you look at this greater mind that's giving you life and you say, "I'm afraid. This is who I am. I'm living for everybody else. I'm hiding. I'm worried. This is what I'm hiding." And when you begin to say who you really are, what happens to that gap? And then we get to this point where we truly change, and who we are is who we appear to be. And that transparency is called joy. And that's the natural state of being. So people then, when they have attention deficit disorder or distractibility, they're looking for something out here, another person, another thing, or more wealth, or whatever they need so that they don't have to feel that feeling of what they're running from. Does that make sense? And we all have it. So that then leads to a greater sense of ADD. Okay? I gotta go. They're giving me the look over here.

To see another amazing Joe Dispenza talk, check out the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

When we're in the midst of change, or when we're in the midst of breaking through our own limitations, there's a voice that secretly always talks us out of our greatness. And we believe that that voice is absolutely correct. And one of the greatest moments in my life