” When people are inspired , they have more brain real-estate” – Says Julia Volkman of BrainBasics in this excellent article on boosting your learning ability through harnessing the power of inspiration. Indeed, this and other recent research all seem to point what we’ve known intuitively for a long time now – when we like and are stimulated by something – we learn better.
Lisa Wimberger , founder of The Institute of Neurosculpting, has taken our brain’s love of inspiration & novelty to a new level. In her novel brain-training visualisations, she boosts the brains’ learning capacity through introducing interesting & novel tasks which involve right and left brain collaboration. Instead of a more typical ‘let’s talk about what you’re feeling’ approach, she mixes it up a little. Asking someone to name (left brain) an emotion , whilst paying attention to the sensation ( right brain) it may be creating in the body and any colour/texture/visual object it evokes ( novelty) is an example of this. The result? A stimulated brain, with neural pathways that are open and ready to learn. Continue Reading →
A lot of the work that we do as therapists involves helping clients to become more comfortable with and aware of their ‘less-than-comfortable’ emotions – and indeed some of my articles before this one have addressed the importance of learning to become more open to negative feelings, instead of responding reflexively and shying away from them. In his article on “
It was once the long-held belief that the brain itself and it’s connective pathways were subject to little change after a certain point in a child’s development. This had implications for both therapists and also clients seeking personal transformation, because it suggested that the brain itself would biologically restrict the aspects and degrees of change a person would be able to undergo, especially as they got older. Viewed from this perspective, patterned responses to stress for example, conditioned in childhood, supported by wiring also laid down at the same time, would be very difficult to change in adulthood.