By Robert Ringer

Cognitive science is the study of the brain mechanisms responsible for an individual’s thoughts, moods, decisions, and actions. Cognition refers to everything that takes place in an individual’s brain that helps him understand the world around him. To accomplish such an understanding involves such mental processes as concentration, memory, conceptualization, creativity, and emotions.

In his book The New Brain, Dr. Richard Restak uses the term “plasticity of the new brain” to refer to the capacity of the brain to transform itself. This is an incredibly exciting notion, and one that has endless positive ramifications.

Until recently, it was generally believed that the brain’s plasticity peaked out at young adulthood, if not earlier. But researchers now believe the brain is subject to transformation throughout life, which is why Restak appropriately refers to it as a “lifetime work in progress.”

Now that I’ve become a born-again behavioral modificationist, this makes perfect sense to me. When I was a Freudian laymanologist, I assumed that genetics and childhood experiences set everything in stone. It wasn’t until the headmaster at my son’s school told me that he had based his entire career on his belief in behavioral modification that I allowed myself to consider its merits.

That, in turn, led to my reading Reality Therapy, which I wrote about in a previous two-part article. The essence of that book is that no matter what happened to you in your childhood, no amount of rehashing the past can ever change it. On the other hand, by focusing on being a responsible adult today, you can change the way you feel about yourself, and about life, in the present.

Thus, whether you want to learn a foreign language, how to play tennis, or the techniques for writing good ad copy, you first have to make changes in your brain. And the key to making such changes is repetition, which I have written about many times in the past.

Repetition makes repeated impressions on your brain, but there’s a catch: If the repetitions are wrong (e.g., swinging a golf club incorrectly), you are not going to excel at the skill you have targeted. From whence comes the worn-out but true observation that only an insane person would continue to repeat the same thing over and over again and expect to achieve different results.

Which brings yet another question to the fore: If you continue to get negative results, should you invoke persistence … or is it more sane just to give up and move on to something else? The answer is that you definitely should be persistent, but, based on what you have learned through your experiences, you should try a different methodology.

Restak’s main point is that regardless of how much of success is due to genetics and how much is due to practice, the level of success one achieves is based on the plasticity of the brain. My take on this can be summed up in what I call the “C” Student/”A” Student Theory, which something that seems self-evident to me: In a majority of cases, a student with “C” intelligence who is willing to put forth the required effort can achieve “A” results.

I know this from firsthand experience, because I went from a 0.8 average in college to a 4.0 after a stint in the army. My military experience was so unpleasant that it made an indelible impression on my brain, which in turn caused me to become highly motivated to get good grades.

In other words, my brain’s plasticity made it possible for me to transform my view of the world. It was a cerebral transformation that opened my eyes to the reality that there is more to life than girls, booze, and playing poker. Once I redirected my energy from such trivial pursuits to studying every waking moment that I wasn’t in class, I was able to achieve “A’s” – even in such difficult subjects as physics and organic chemistry.

The plasticity of the brain is why you can accomplish great things without being born with superior intelligence or natural talent. And Dr. Restak maintains that a transformation of the brain can be achieved by sheer determination.

Fair enough, but that begs the question: What if your brain isn’t wired to be determined? We’ll take a look at the answer to that question in Part II of this article.

I received a large number of e-mails in response to my two articles on the impossible dream, and many of the comments prompted me to go into the subject a bit further. Primarily, I want to emphasize that when you’re in a seemingly impossible situation, one of the most important but least understood tools you can employ to turn things around is detachment.

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Let’s start today by considering three options you would have had if, like Viktor Frankl in the 1940s, you had found yourself in a Nazi concentration camp.

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A reader recently sent me an e-mail in which he lamented about his “impossible situation.” I guess it’s all in the eyes of the beholder, because to me it appeared that his was an impossible situation with a lot of possibilities.

So what, exactly, is an “impossible situation?” More specifically, what does “impossible” really mean? Is it impossible to make a mountain move simply by having faith? That’s quite a challenge. If anyone could do it, it would probably be that Star Wars guy, Yoda. But I don’t know of anyone outside of Hollywood who’s mastered such extraordinary mind power.

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I ended Part I of this article by pointing out that trees are reborn each spring, live to the fullest in the summer, enter the twilight of their lives in the fall … then, finally, they seemingly die. But, in truth, the trees merely hibernate. It’s more like recycling than death — part of the circle of life.

Death is but an illusion. And not just for trees in the winter. When a human being dies, he, too, is recycled. Not one atom of his body is lost. The atoms are simply rearranged when the soul moves on. How are they rearranged? It’s not our job to figure that out. The Conscious Universal Power Source has it covered. As Deepak Chopra put it in his book Life After Death:

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When I was much younger, I thought of myself as the man in Neil Diamond’s song “Crunchy Granola Suite”: “And like a man with a tiger outside his gate, he not only couldn’t relax but he couldn’t relate.” Happily, my tiger doesn’t come around nearly as much anymore. I’m still pretty much of a recluse, but I am no longer alone. I have the trees … the wind … the sky … to keep me company. Life provides challenges — and life goes on.

Throughout much of my life, I paid little attention to the miracles that surrounded me. I was too busy thinking about business and money … too busy being annoyed by annoying people. Nature and I were perfect strangers. The tiger was always there … relentlessly pacing back and forth outside my gate. I concentrated on him so much that I had no time to think about the real world – the world that matters.

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By Robert Ringer

Amidst all the insanity and meaningless chatter that overwhelms us each day, every so often the Conscious Universal Power Source cuts us a break and hooks us up to nature’s Sanity-Support System. We have little control over when the blessed intervention will take place, how often it will occur, or what its components may be. Read the rest of this entry »