Neurobiologist Explains How Your Thoughts Define You: Creating Small Habits Can Change Your Life

Photo – Dan Tuffs / Alamy/ Profimedia

What you think defines you. A phrase often seen in self-development books has a cover in neurobiology, I learned by listening to Dr. Rahul Jandial, a neurosurgeon and neurobiologist, associate professor at City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles. Present in Bucharest, at the Human is the New Normal conference, organized by Societatea Omului Sănătos. the doctor described how recurring thoughts, whether positive or negative, can shape the brain, making it difficult to break certain mental structures. And he described how we can create small good habits that can change our lives in the long run.

100 billion neurons, each with 10,000 connections, are found in the human brain, and the amount of electricity they generate could light a dim light bulb, explains Dr Rahul Jandial. “Those 100 billion neurons, with 10,000 tentacles each, swing at each other. Neurons are long cells, not like the small plates in the liver or the cells of the heart. When one neuron sends an electrical current and the other neuron waits, they don’t touch. They are like lovers who are about to kiss but don’t. It sprays chemicals, dopamine, serotonin. If you take antidepressants, they work in that cleft. So if we have 100 billion neurons, with 10,000 tentacles each, reaching towards each other but never touching, and in each synapse there are millions and millions of chemicals being modulated, we get this infinite system of complex”, explained the neuroscientist. According to him, the thought generates a process of activity-dependent myelination, of depositing an insulating layer around the nerve cells for a better transmission of the electrical impulse.

“A thought of a certain kind will create more of those thoughts enveloping that neuron. If we were to take a microscope, it looks like a hot dog, it looks like insulation on a wire. It is a physical structure called myelin. That’s why you’re told to eat salmon, which has Omega 3. That insulation is made of Omega 3 fats, good fats. So having the same thoughts, good or bad is a continuous feed circuit. Thus, traumatic events and thoughts can actually deposit insulation in neurons, making it difficult to break them out. So the mind comes from the brain, but your thoughts can go back and shape the brain they came from. It’s amazing, isn’t it?” points out Rahul Jandial.

This way of functioning of the brain, which keeps us captive in useless patterns, on the other hand helps us to be able to make positive changes in our lives by creating good habits.

“New habits are hard to form, but once you form them, they’re easier. It’s like going down a mountain with a certain path where skiers go, at first to take another path, it will take some effort. But if you create a new route, a positive habit, the work you do in the beginning will not have to be sustained until the end. Creating new habits, with the bandwidth and willpower we have, one at a time, incrementally adding habits, I think is a very powerful thing. Seven changes, all on New Year’s Day: I’m going to exercise, I’m going to do this, I’m going to be Brad Pitt in Los Angeles… That’s not going to happen. But a change every few months and a little bit of myelination in those neurons that control that change or that thought, I think it can happen,” explains Rahul Jandial.

2023-11-29 06:02:40
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