The Brain – Amazing New Facts Discovered!

Today I completed another chapter of my upcoming book on Mental Resilience and the subject for this chapter is confidence. It brought back memories of how insecure I was as a young boy and the difficulties and challenges I faced.

An intervention by Harry Dunne a sales director at Metro Radio where I was working as a sales executive 30 years ago changed my life. He gave me a formula for confidence which I applied and I have never looked back. I now speak in front of hundreds of people and thoroughly enjoy the experience. I now have the privilege of sharing this with my coaching clients and workshop attendees and it’s wonderful to see people change in front of my eyes.

The reason this formula works so well is that our minds are amazing creations and our thinking processes can have dramatic impact on our bodies and lives. What we believe can be real to us but it may not be real – challenging those beliefs can have impressive results.

The mind is an amazing thing and each year scientists are discovering new and amazing things about this miracle of nature. The following information describes the amazing facts about the brain and maybe indicates how our thinking processes and belief systems can affect our bodies so much.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have spent the past few years engineering a new imaging model, which they call array tomography, in conjunction with novel computational software, to stitch together image slices into a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, penetrated and navigated.

They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study:

A typical, healthy brain houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

These synapses are, of course, so tiny (less than a thousandth of a millimetre in diameter) that humans haven’t been able to see with great clarity what exactly they do and how, beyond knowing that their numbers vary over time. That is until now.

One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.

Smith adds that this gives us a glimpse into brain tissue at a level of detail never before attained: “The entire anatomical context of the synapses is preserved. You know right where each one is, and what kind it is.”

Wow – amazing stuff isn’t it! I’m fascinated by the mind and now it can be developed to improve our lives. It’s no surprise that the mind can have such a dramatic effect on us. Someone once said that ‘we can just about choose how happy we want to be’ and this is something I work on with my clients. You can choose how you respond to everything which hits you on a daily basis, within reason and with some practice.

The mind is like the rudder on an ocean liner it’s very small but it controls where the vessel goes. In the same way the mind controls where our lives go and where we end up in life.

John