Super Brain (22 page)

In effect, intuition fits the bill for anyone seeking a sixth sense. A sense is basic, a primal way to take in the surrounding world by looking, listening, and touching. More important, you “feel” your way through life, following hunches, knowing what’s good for you and what isn’t, where you should aim your career and avoid a dead end, who will love you for decades and who is only a passing fancy. Highly successful people, when asked how they reached the top, tend to agree on two things: they were very lucky, and they wound up in the right place at the right time. Few can explain what it takes to be in the right place at the right time. But if we value intuition as a real skill, highly successful people are probably the best at feeling their way through life.

Seeing the future is intuitive, too, and we are all designed for it. There is no need to call the ability paranormal. In one experiment, subjects were shown a fast series of photos, some of which were horrendous depictions of fatal auto crashes or bloody carnage in war. The subjects were monitored for signs of stress response, such as faster heart rate, rising blood pressure, and sweaty palms. As soon as a horrifying image was presented, it inevitably triggered the stress response. Then a strange thing occurred. Their bodies began to indicate stress just
before
a shocking image was displayed. Even though the photos were shown at random, these people reacted in anticipation of being shocked; they didn’t react in anticipation of innocuous images. This means that their bodies were predicting the future, or to be more precise, their brains were, since only the brain can trigger the stress response.

We aren’t promoting one phase of the brain over another. But it’s crucial not to deny a phase out of stubborn skepticism or intellectual bias. Controlled studies are meant to be objective proof of the kind that the intellect will accept, so it’s unfair for hundreds of studies in
cognitive psychology to prove that intuition is real, while our social attitude toward intuition is largely doubtful and even negative. Are you intuitive? Your intuition tells you that you are.

As with any phase of the brain, intuition can go out of balance.

If you are too trusting of your intuitive hunches, you fail to see reason when it counts. This leads to impulsive decisions and irrational behavior.

If you ignore your intuition, you lose the ability to feel out situations. This leads to blind decision making that depends too much on rationalizing your actions, even when they are obviously wrong.

ESSENTIAL POINTS: YOUR INTUITIVE BRAIN

Intuition can be trusted.

“Feeling” your way through life brings good results.

Snap judgments are accurate because intuition doesn’t need processing by the higher brain.

Reason is slower than intuition, but we often use it to justify intuition, because we have been taught that reason is superior.

The intuitive brain has no limits that are foreseeable—everything depends on what the mind wants the brain to do.

Putting It All Together

Having taken apart the fourfold brain, what do we get once it is put back together? A superb tool for reality making, which has infinite possibilities. The best way to achieve health, happiness, and success is by balancing all four phases of your brain. Your brain goes out of balance when you favor one part over another. Notice how easy it is to identify with one phase of the brain, which encourages it to dominate. If you say, “I’m sad all the time,” you are identifying
with the emotional brain. If you say, “I’ve always been smart,” you are identifying with the intellectual brain. In the same way, you can be dominated by the instinctive brain when you are obeying unconscious urges or the intuitive brain when you follow hunches, gamble, and take risks. With enough repetition, the favored regions of the brain gain an advantage; the unfavored regions start to atrophy.

But your true identity isn’t found in any of these separate regions. You are the summation of them all, as the mind controls them. The shorthand for the brain’s controller is
I
, the self.
I
can forget its role and fall prey to moods, beliefs, drives, and so on. When this happens, your brain is using you, not out of spite or in order to grab power. You have trained it to use you. It’s hard to really absorb that every thought is an instruction, but it is. If you stop in front of an Impressionist painting, the brilliant colors and airy mood are instantly appealing. None of the raw data being processed by the visual cortex is training the brain. (You mastered the basic skill of focusing your eyes on a specific spot without wavering in the first months of life.) But as soon as you think,
I love this Monet cathedral
, you are instructing your brain—in other words, training it—and not in a simple way.

At the instant you think
I like X
, whether it is Monet, a banana split, or the person you will marry one day, your brain goes into holistic mode.

It remembers what you like.

It registers pleasure.

It remembers where the pleasure came from.

It makes a note to repeat the same pleasure in the future.

It adds a unique memory to your memory bank.

It compares the new memory to all previous ones.

It sends chemical reactions of pleasure to every cell in your body.

This is actually only a brief sketch of what it means for your brain to kick into holistic mode. It would be tiring to describe every detail, but at the very least you know what museum you are standing in, how people are moving around the room, and whether you feel tired or not, along with the usual unconscious things like feeling hungry or wondering if your feet are hurting from walking too much.

Putting it all together is the human mind’s single greatest achievement. It is what we do, yet by no means can we explain how it is done. Experience is infinitely richer than explanations. Our aim is to expand the brain’s holistic mode. Deep down we all know that it is better to love all the paintings in a museum, not just a select few. Each painter has a unique vision, and when you appreciate the art, you have opened yourself to the vision. Even deeper down we know that it is better to love all people than to love just the few who are closest to us. But to expand the brain’s emotional centers is threatening. We typically identify with people who are most like us (in race, status, education, politics, etc.) and feel alienated by those who are most unlike us.

As you grow older, your tendency is to narrow your likes and dislikes, which means that you are denying your brain its ability to be holistic. An interesting experiment in social psychology took ten people from Boulder, Colorado, a very liberal town politically, and ten people from Colorado Springs, which is traditionally very conservative. One of the problems with present-day America is its divisive politics, and there’s a demographic reason behind it. In the past people who had opposite political views lived together, and therefore a candidate running for office might win by five or six percentage points.

Since World War II, however, there has been a decisive shift. Liberals have moved to towns where other liberals live, and conservatives to towns where other conservatives live. As a result, elections are now grossly one-sided, and candidates typically win by large
margins. The Boulder–Colorado Springs experiment wanted to test if this can be changed. Sitting in their own groups, the ten subjects from each town discussed politics and rated themselves on how they felt on each issue. For example, when it came to abortion or gay marriage, they marked their position from one to ten depending on how extremely they stood for or against.

At this point one person from Boulder sat in on the Colorado Springs group and one person from Colorado Springs sat in on the Boulder group. Each was allowed to argue for his stance, pleading for liberalism or conservatism to people who leaned the other way. After an hour, the groups again rated themselves on hot-button issues. Did hearing from the other side soften their opinions? You might think so, but in fact the opposite happened. After hearing from a liberal, the conservatives became
more
conservative on the issues than they had been before. Likewise, the liberal group became more liberal.

Assessing these findings can lead to discouragement. One would like to think that being exposed to other viewpoints opens the mind. But some neuroscientists conclude from such findings that us-versus-them thinking is wired into the brain. We define ourselves by opposition; we need enemies in order to survive, since by having enemies early humans sharpened their skills at self-defense and warfare.

We are strongly opposed to such interpretations. They ignore a basic fact, that the mind can overcome the wired-in pattern of the brain. In the case of the Boulder–Colorado Springs experiment, there’s a huge difference between listening with a closed mind to an opposite opinion and deciding that you
want
to understand it.

A funny-sad story comes from a friend of Deepak’s who was born in the South. His small North Carolina town had a department store named Bernstein’s, which was Jewish. It had other families, not Jewish, who were also named Bernstein. “The non-Jewish ones pronounced their name Bern-stine, while the department store
was Bern-steen,” Deepak was told. Why? His friend shrugged. “That was the only way anybody knew who to be prejudiced against. To tell the truth, nobody in my family had actually ever met anyone who was Jewish.”

We refuse to believe that the tendency to discriminate comes from hardwiring. If you examine its physical design, the brain is a highly integrated organ in which various regions and their resident nerve cells are constantly communicating with each other. To a biologist, all traits, including the brain’s ability to communicate among billions of neurons, can be reduced to two main goals: survival of the species and survival of the individual. But present-day human beings don’t accept mere survival. If we did, there would be no charity for the poor, hospitals for the sick, and care for the disabled.

Preserving everyone’s life, not simply the alpha types who can get the most food and mating rights, lifted us above Darwinian evolution. We share food; we can marry without having children. In short, we are evolving as a choice, not as nature’s necessity. The brain is moving in a more holistic direction.

Our favorite phrase for this trend is “survival of the wisest.” If you choose to, you can evolve through conscious choices.

WHERE THE BRAIN IS GROWING
HOW TO BECOME PART OF
THE NEXT EVOLUTIONARY LEAP

Don’t promote conflict in any area of your life.

Make peace when you can. When you can’t, walk away.

Value compassion.

Choose empathy over blame or derision.

Try not to always feel that you are right.

Make a friend who is the opposite of you.

Be generous of spirit.

Wean yourself off materialism in favor of inner fulfillment.

Perform one act of service every day—there is always something you can give.

Show genuine concern when someone else is in trouble. Don’t ignore signs of unhappiness.

Oppose us-versus-them thinking.

If you are in business, practice capitalism with a conscience, giving ethical concerns as much weight as profits.

These are not merely ideals. Dr. Jonas Salk, who gained world fame for the cure of polio, was also a visionary and philanthropist. He developed the concept of the “metabiological world,” a world that has gone beyond biology. Such a world depends upon human beings in our role as reality makers: everything we do, say, and think goes beyond biology. But what is the purpose of everything we do, say, and think? For Salk, we have a single overriding purpose: to unfold our full potential. Only the holistic brain can get us there. On its own, science, being intellectual, excludes the subjective world of feelings, instincts, and intuitions. To most physicists, the universe has no purpose; it’s a vast machine whose working parts exist to be figured out. But if you use your whole brain, the universe certainly does have a purpose, to foster life and the experiences that life brings. When your own experiences become richer, the universe gets better at serving its purpose. That’s the reason why the brain began to evolve in the first place.

SUPER BRAIN SOLUTIONS
FINDING YOUR POWER

If everyone has the power to make reality, why do countless people live in dissatisfaction? Reality making should lead to a reality you actually want, not the one you find yourself in. But that can’t happen until you find your power. As with everything else, personal power must go through the brain. A powerful person is the combination of many traits, each of them trained into the brain:

WHAT’S IN PERSONAL POWER?

Self-confidence

Good decision making

Trust in gut feelings

Optimistic outlook

Influence over others

High self-esteem

Ability to turn desires into actions

Ability to overcome obstacles

Whenever someone feels powerless to change a situation, whatever it may be, one or more of these elements is missing. You may imagine that powerful people are born with an extra dash of confidence and charisma. But the most powerful CEOs tend to be quiet, organized people who have learned the secret of shaping situations toward goals they want to achieve. Each started at a point not very different from anybody else. The difference has to do with feedback. They internalized every small success and reinforced the next opportunity. They trained the brain by absorbing experience and pushing the bar higher.