The three brains that allow us to go from thinking to doing to being - Joe Dispenza at TEDxTacoma

Joe Dispenza, D.C. has taught thousands of people how to reprogram their thinking through scientifically proven neuro-physiologic principles. His approach, taught in a very simple method, creates a bridge between true human potential and the latest scientific theories of neuroplasticity. As an author of several scientific articles on the close relationship between the brain and the body, Dispenza ties information together to explain the roles these functions play in physical health and disease.

Good afternoon.

We have three brains that allows us to go from

thinking to doing to being.

Each brain is it's own individual bio-computer

with it's own anatomy and own circuitry,

it's own physiology and chemistry --

They even have their own history as well as

their own sense of time and space.

The first brain -- the neocortex -- it's the newest brain in evolution.

It's that walnut-shape structure that sits on the outside

with all of it's folds and valleys and yellow there.

It's the newest, the most evolved and highly specialized in human beings.

Right under the neocortex it's called the limbic brain,

the chemical brain, the emotional brain or the mammalian brain.

It's about the size of a lemon and it's responsible

for regulating internal chemical order.

Right in the back of the brain stem neuron, in red,

it's called the cerebellum, the reptilian brain,

it's the oldest brain in evolution,

it's the seat of the subconscious mind.

Your brain is made up of about a hundred billion neurons.

If you took a hundred billion sheets of paper and stacked them

on top of each other, it would be five thousand miles high.

That's the distance from Los Angeles to London.

Nerve cells posses the unique ability to store and

communicate information between each other.

So your neocortex, your thinking brain,

is the seat of your conscious awareness.

You’re listening to me right now with your neocortex

and what the neocortex loves to do is to gather information.

And every time you learn something new you make a new

synaptic connection in your thinking brain, that's what learning is.

Learning is forging new connections.

and every time you learn something new your brain physically changes.

So, you read a book on how to ride a bicycle,

you read a book on how to build the doghouse,

you read a book on how to dance the salsa,

how to cook French cuisine,

how to become successful, how to be a better parent.

And your brain literally up-scales it's hardware

to reflect the new level of mind.

The principle in neuroscience is this: nerve cells that

fire together wire together.

And as you begin to learn new information you biologically

wire that information into your cerebral architecture.

So, if learning is making new synaptic connections

then remembering is maintaining and sustaining those connections.

And just like any relationship, the more you communicate

the more bounded you become, and neurons are exactly the same way.

Once these neurons begin to fire and wire together

they actually form networks -- what neuroscientists called neural-networks.

Neural-networks are just gangs of neurons that are fired and wired together

to form a community of neuro-synaptic connections.

It can be related to an idea, a concept,

to memory, experience, a skill, a behaviour or an action.

But, these networks actually have an electro-chemical component.

And if you want to see mind in action,

watch this. That's a thought, right there -- Again.

You generate more electrical impulses in your brain in one day

than all the cell-phones on the planet put together.

The neuroscientific definition of mind is,

"Mind is the brain in action, mind is the brain at work,

mind is what the brain does."

And because we have a hundred billion neurons

seamlessly pieced together, we can make the brain fire

in different sequences, different patterns and different combinations.

And whenever we make the brain work differently

we are changing our mind.

So, once you've understood something intellectually, theoretically --

Once you've understood something philosophically,

if you take what you intellectually learned in your thinking brain

and you apply it, you personalize it, you demonstrate it,

it means you gonna have to modify your behaviour in some way.

And if you change your actions and you do something differently

you are gonna have a new experience.

When you're in the midst of an experience everything you're seeing,

and smelling, and tasting, and feeling and hearing,

all of your five senses are gathering this vital information

from the environment.

And as you begin to process all this information,

and it's rushing back to your brain, jungles of neurons

begin to organize themselves into patterns.

The moment those neurons string into place

the brain releases a chemical, and that chemical

is called a feeling or an emotion.

So experience then enriches the circuitry in your brain neurologically

but then it produces a chemical that's released in the second brain,

called the limbic brain or the emotional brain.

So, you can remember your first kiss,

you can remember graduating from college,

you can remember the birth of your first child,

you can remember finishing a marathon,

you can remember catching a fish off the coast of Mexico

and taking it home and cooking it

and drinking some really good wine that tastes good

and feeling the ocean breeze on your face and seeing the sunset.

And we could say that you were altered from that experience.

The problem is, you can't remember

what you had for dinner the night before.

That's because routine lulls the brain to sleep.

So, a great example of this then is that most Americans

can remember exactly where they were in 9/11.

You can tell me who you were with, what time of day it was

and what you were doing.

And we could say then, when you were in the midst of that moment,

or that experience, everything you were seeing and hearing

changed your internal, chemical state

and the moment you felt altered in some way internally

your brain perked up and you paid attention

to however or whatever caused it.

And that event, in and of itself, is called the memory.

Let's say you read the book called,

"From forgiveness to compassion to unconditional love."

And this book had inspired you so much so

that you decided to read it twice.

And as you begin to review this information in your mind

and contemplate on it and self-reflect,

you begin to cause those neurons to form into networks,

to reflect the new level of mind --

You find yourself in the shower thinking about it.

You are driving to work contemplating these concepts.

You begin to talk to your friends about what you learned,

and you're beginning to develop long-term relationships in those neurons.

All of the sudden your are moving around your office and you are saying,

"You know, you need to be more compassionate, you know?" Wow --

And to someone else, you say, "You need to forgive."

Everybody is impressed with your knowledge.

They're knocking on your office door and they're asking you

to administer to them and you're resolving everybody's problems.

Things are going really well.

All of a sudden you're driving home from work,

you get a call on your cell-phone and it's your spouse.

And your spouse tells you that they forgot to mention in the morning

that it's your mother-in-law's birthday.

And you pull over on the side of the road, and you think,

"I hate my mother-in-law.

She hurt my feelings ten years ago.

She tells the same stories over and over again."

And you begin to remember that you had some pretty

stressful moments that branded you emotionally

from your past with your mother-in-law.

Now, stress is when your body is knocked off homeostasis,

stress is when your body knocked out of balance.

When you see a lion you begin to turn on a primitive nervous system.

But it doesn’t even have to be a lion,

you could see your mother-in-law and it produces

the same exact effect.

Now let's go one step further. It doesn’t even have

to be the physical appearance of your mother-in-law.

You can begin to think about certain things and auto-suggest

and you can turn on the stress response just by thought alone.

Your body is your unconscious mind,

it does not know the difference between

the actual experience in reality that produces the emotion

and the emotion that you fabricate by thought alone --

to the body, it believes it's in that experience.

So the moment the limbic brain begins to make blend

of neuropeptides, it begins to signal the hormonal centers

and you get a rush energy to prepare you for this event

real or imagined. The moment that happens you've become altered

in some way -- fight or flight, the nervous system causes your pupils to dilate,

your mouth gets a little dry,

all of a sudden your heart rate begins to change,

your respiratory rate changes,

blood is being sent to your extremities

and now you're prepared to either

do battle with your mother-in-law

or never go to the dinner

to stay and fight or to run.

What was once highly adaptive, all of a sudden,

is now maladaptive.

Because when we turn on the stress response

and we can't turn it off, now we're headed for disease.

So, then you're sitting on the side of the road

and then you think,"Oh, I read the book on compassion. Damn!"

The moment you begin to think about

what you have to do

something very natural happens --

You begin to think about

what you were thinking about.

You begin to pay attention to how you are reacting.

You begin to notice how are you feeling.

And that concept in neuroscience is called meta-cognition.

We can observe who we're being and because

we can observe who we're being it means we could

modify our behaviors to do a better job in life.

So, now the frontal lobe is the seat of your awareness.

It's the home of the "You" and the "Me" and as you begin

to think about who you now longer wanna be,

the frontal lobe acts like a volume control

and it begins to lower the volume

in the circuits in your brain that are connected to the old-self.

And as it begins to silence those circuits that are connected

to the old level of mind, that level of mind no longer fires

and you're observing it instead of participating in it.

And as you begin to silence those circuits, nerve cells

that no longer fire together, no longer wire together,

and you begin to biologically break down the circuits

in your brain that are connected to the old self

and to the old mind.

Now, as you are sitting on the side of the road, you think,

"What piece of knowledge could I apply in this situation

from what I learned in the book?"

And as you begin to plan your actions

and you begin to think about a new way of being,

and you begin to put yourself into the equation,

your brain naturally begins to fire in new sequences

and new patterns and new combinations.

And whenever you make your brain work differently

you are changing your mind, because mind is the brain in action.

And as the brain begins to fire in new ways

and you produce a new level of mind,

nerve cells that fire together, wire together.

And you begin to install the neurological hardware

ahead of the actual experience. And now you have

circuits in place to use when you get into that dinner.

So now, as you ask yourself what is compassion,

and you begin to remember all these different things

that you learned in the book, the frontal lobe,

like a great symphony leader, begins to synchronize these circuits.

And when it begins to produce a certain level of coherence,

a certain level of mind, your brain

naturally creates a hologram, or an image, and that image

becomes the internal representation of what

you are gonna use when you walk into that dinner.

We would call that, "intention".

Now, there's a very unique shuffle that kind of goes on microscopically

between different circuits in your brain.

You're tring to fire this new thought called compassion.

But, remember, you fired and wired all these other circuits

based on the last ten years.

So, as you beginning to fire this new thought, all these

other thoughts are saying, "You hate your mother-in-law,

you don't wanna go to that dinner,

why don't you start tomorrow, this isn't a good time to do this."

(Laughter)

But if you persist with a certain amount of amplitude

and you put your attention behind that thought

sooner or later that thought will be the

strongest and loudest voice in your head.

The moment that becomes the loudest voice in your head

the brain has to seal that circuit more permanently.

So when the action potential is firing down the neuron

from the presynaptic cleft to the postsynaptic cleft

there's a glue that seals the circuit called neural growth factor.

And it travels in the opposite direction.

But there's only a certain amount of neural growth factor to go around.

So it starts to steal the glue from the neighboring circuits.

And when that happens there goes your memory of

your mother-in-law hurting your feelings ten years ago,

there goes the thought that you hate her,

there goes the impatience, there goes the intolerance --

and the only signal now that's traveling

to that neuron is called compassion.

Every place where one neuron connects with another neuron is a memory.

When this happens you begin to

biologically and neurologically prune away

the old memory of the old-self.

And this is the science of changing your mind.

If you wanna see what it looks like in real time --

Let's try that again --

You wanna see what it looks like in real time --

unhooking from the old-self, reconnecting to the new-self.

This can happen in moments.

Now -- get back on the road,

you make your U-turn, you're heading to the dinner,

you're reminding yourself who you no longer wanna be,

silencing those circuits in the brain.

You begin to think about who you do wanna be

based on the knowledge you've learned

and you're priming your brain ahead of the actual experience,

you walk into the dinner, you get your

behaviors to match your intentions,

you get your actions equal to your thoughts,

you get your mind and body working together,

and you do exactly what the book says.

The moment that happens,

all of a sudden, you feel compassion.

The moment your heart begins to open and you feel compassion

you are teaching your body emotionally to understand

what your mind intellectually understood.

You see, knowledge is for the mind but experience is for the body.

When we begin to experience compassion, now we are

embodying knowledge. The word is becoming flesh

and the limbic brain makes a new bunch of peptides

that signals the body, and you begin to literally

change your genetic expression because there's

new information coming to the genes.

And epigenetically we signal genes from the environment.

And you're changing the fabric of you because you're

instructing your body chemically to understand

what your mind has intellectually and philosophically understood.

But it's not enough to do it once.

You can't forgive your mother-in-law one time

and expect to be on the stained glass windows in church.

You've got to be able to repeat the experience,

you've got to be able to do it over and over again,

you have to do it so many times that

you no longer have to think about it.

And when you do it over and over again

you neuro-chemically condition the body to

memorize compassion as well as the conscious mind

and when that happens, when the mind and body are working together,

or the body knows as well as the mind,

you activate that third brain called the cerebellum --

the seat of your subconscious mind.

You've practiced it so many times that you know how,

but you don’t know how you know how.

It's automatic, it's second nature, it's easy,

it's a habit, it's a skill, it's an automatic behaviour.

And when you get to this level of memorizing an internal chemical order,

a level of innate -- now, it's so innate in you, that it's who you are.

When you get to that point, where no person, no thing

no experience can remove you from it,

because you have sustained this level of coherence,

now you're in a state of being.

And so the way we transform the world is we transform ourselves and

when we're in that state of being

we give people permission to do the same.

Thanks for listening.

(Applause)