Bonjour,

Last Monday I wrote about my progress for finding a guiding purpose in life. If you read it you might remember that I said I’m trying to establish a framework which will provide me with the scaffolding for understanding myself. I wanted to take a moment just to explain what it is that I’m talking about. Perhaps you’ll find it useful.

With any construction, be it a house, a web-page or some IKEA furniture you will be required to have a basic understanding of the tools at your disposal. You’ll have to understand the blueprint, which pieces fit together and which do not. A hammer may work in some instances, but we also require more delicate tools.

To make this a little bit less abstract. My mind is a collection of tools that I have at my disposal. I can choose to use my logical reasoning for solving problems or perhaps my analytical perspective. Sometimes I will have to be rational, other times I might be required to be irrational. Had this been an IKEA furniture piece I would have had a carefully written blueprint for how everything fits together, when I should do what and when to achieve my goal of putting that damned thing together.

The body

Life unfortunately does not come with a blueprint, no matter how much some people would try and have us believe the opposite. Buy this for happiness, and acquire this for a great relationship and on it goes. Even though life does not come with a manual, there are certain things I can do to deepen the understanding of myself. In our ever going quest for knowledge we have begun to understand the composition of the mind. I would even dare to say that we have a pretty darn good idea of the components of our bodies and minds.

Unfortunately we’ve got a long road ahead of us in understanding how all the pieces fit together and affect each other. This is something we definitely do not yet know. Even the most basic and fundamental things such as nutrition, we can’t say with absolute certainty how it affects us, how something is metabolised and absorbed by our bodies. I’m not saying that we’re clueless, but if we were certain I’m confident that we wouldn’t have health problems, diets, pills and so forth.

My framework. I should talk about my framework. Right, so. I’m not entirely sure yet what it means exactly, but I’ll try and describe it. What I’m trying to establish is what our basic core components are and how they fit together. The building blocks that we’ve been built with. It’s ambitious and perhaps futile, but I love it. The seeking, the trying and mystique surrounding it. A basic component is something that I consider, hmm, a unit. For example an emotion, joy. How does this affect our cognition? What parts should be combined in order to achieve the maximum and most efficient results? When should they be applied?

I’m hoping that through a deeper understanding of these components I can improve the chances of understanding myself. How I react to input, experiences and even how I will use the outcome of these events in the future. One might argue that I’m leaving nothing to the supernatural, or metaphysical. I guess that would be a correct assessment. But I choose to begin here, because it will be much easier to relate to. Metaphysics is much more theoretical and difficult to work with because you have only your thoughts and imagination as guidance. It quickly gets complicated and it’s why I’ve decided to focus a little bit more on the tangible world.

I do have every intention of eventually venturing into other dimensions and see what truths they might hold. Even in String Theory they leave room for more dimensions than those observable. To say that we would someone be excluded from them would be foolish. Astral projection, out-of-body experiences might all be related to this, but currently I need to stick with one thing and work my way from there.

I realise as I wrote this that it hasn’t become exactly clear what I mean with framework, but hopefully it will become more clear over time.

Again, thanks for taking your time to read and if you’ve got anything to share, by all means, do!

/ Christoffer

PS: If you happen to read my post yesterday (Tuesday). No need to worry, I’m fine. I might have some slight bi-polar disorder or something :-) I’m still confused, conflicted, but my anger has subsided. Frustration is still there, but not so much of myself, but the lacking of interest from fellow humans. People have succumbed to media, consumerism and no thoughts as to how it affects the future. That I find frustrating.

Hello fellow peeps of the Internets!

I continue to avoid writing the follow up brain article, but not because I don’t want to, but because I feel there is so much else to share. Anyway. I thought it was about time I wrote down a few words on my progress so far. While I’ve only been “officially” on this journey for a mere two weeks, I feel things have already changed. It’s funny really. While I have not yet found my guiding purpose, I’ve managed to boost other areas of my life somehow. Not quite sure where that came from. Regardless, the result is that I’ve introduced a few (in my opinion) significant changes to my life which I hope will only improve my situation.

1. Rising early
2. Exercise

The rising early part has so far exceeded my expectations. I decided to try it because people have been raving about early mornings for quite a while, I’m sure you’ve heard about them. I wasn’t sure whether this was because it was cool to be an early riser or whether it actually was good. I thought creativity at night was my way of life, but honestly, now I’d say it’s the opposite.

For two weeks I’ve been getting up around 5 am in the morning, immediately going for a 30-40 minute walk around our peninsula where we live. After coming back I do about 10 minutes of yoga to stretch and welcome the day. The combination of these two changes have significantly altered the course of my day. I no longer rise because I have work waiting, but because I’ve got fun things to do such as writing and learning.

These two, arguably, simple changes have had quite the impact on me, and this is in only two weeks. I’m more alert and have more mental clarity, even though my energy levels do dip every now and then. I believe this not to be related to the new routines, but rather me not having good enough discipline to actually eat before I get tired, but only when my stomach has turned in-side-out. That’s another thing on my “agenda” for change. To start preparing and planning my meals a bit better. Luckily I’ve got an attentive and caring girlfriend that really wants me to be the best and she has a keen sense of when I should eat. Good that someone does!

Future and the Time to Come

I’ve done quite a bit of reading these past two weeks, more than I ever have done before in such a short amount of time. One might think I’ve read about personal development and other self-help resources, but I’ve gone completely geeky here. I’m trying to understand the composition of our brain, cognitive abilities etcetera. I felt it would be the intelligent thing to do. I guess my intention with that is to try and establish some sort of framework which I can use to develop my own purposes and goals at the same time as I satisfy my logical and analytical self which needs “proof” for everything.

Currently I’m doing research on primary emotions, and how they relate to our cognitive systems. I’m actually planning on writing a longer article about what I call, “Primal Abilities – A Framework for Personal Development”. This will, I hope, become my foundation from where I launch into a deeper understanding of myself. In order to not waste time analysing things that I cannot change I need to learn what parts of me are genetically coded. Also understanding the function of the mind will make it easier to avoid trapping myself into self doubt thinking there is something that I can’t change.

I know much of this knowledge already exists out there on teh Interwebz, but the problem is not finding it, it’s correlating it and intelligently extracting meaning and what is relevant to what I’m trying to achieve. I admire the mission of Google, but now if only someone could create a service to make all this available information useful. How about a contextual based search engine? Feed it some text, and have it provide you with pages that have the same type of content. I.e. it can make deductions from a particular set of information and provide new information that is similar to what you provided in the first place. That would be neat.

Oh, I almost forgot. While on my way to work the other day I realised that I’m very much a philosopher, a scientific philosopher. I would love to read, write and just spend all my waken hours devouring knowledge and attempt to provide my take on it all. That would be fantastic. I should also admit that I do wish that writing this blog could hopefully someday provide me with some sort of platform to launch me into this “ideal” path of life. But one thing at a time. Tomorrow is a new day, waiting to happen and bring me new challenges and wisdom. Wonder what I will learn tomorrow. It’s exciting.

/ Christoffer

You have no idea how silly I feel right now, so let me tell you. I’m completely ecstatic about writing this blog-post. If you read my previous post, I think I might just have found what gets my juices flowing. The combination of science, philosophy and psychology seems to be a perfect fit. Even though it’s only been a week since I began writing this blog it already feels like this is what I’m supposed to do.

Brain, stem and spinal cord (by Erica Scoggins/deviantArt)

While I do have a tendency to get overly excited about projects, writing this blog is hopefully an exception. The reason? It will require me to constantly research new topics, read even more books and just do what I really, really enjoy; understand stuff. Today I’d like to start with something I feel is somewhat (he he) relevant to my mission of gaining a deeper understanding of all that surrounds us, the human brain.

In regards to personal development much of what we’re trying to do is recondition ourselves which might mean to change a habit we’re not happy with. In order to reach the best result I think that having a basic understanding of how the brain function can greatly help in improving ones chances of achieving these goals. In a series of post I will go through basic building blocks of our wonderful and mysterious (so far) brain and how it relates to emotions, memory and other human traits.

From there and onwards I’m not quite sure what I’ll write about, but I will likely try and connect the various parts to how we can effectively and efficiently make strides in our personal development. I will study recent discoveries in neuroscience, and keeping up with developments in psychology and then share it with you and how i think we could make use of this new knowledge.

If you have a specific question you want to ask, please do and I’d be happy to research and attempt to give my answer to it.

History of the Head

While man have been aware of his head for many thousands of years, it would appear as if the Greek were the first to consider the brain the centre for regulating bodily functions and house our intellect. Pretty much every organ of the human body have been considered the source for various emotions and philosophers have for long considered the brain of minor importance. It’s true! Aristotles had this to say:

The brain is an organ of minor importance, perhaps necessary to cool the blood” (De Motu Animalum).

Such were the beliefs amongst philosophers, but in early medicine (Greek) the brain was considered of much higher importance than philosophers would have it be.

Hippocrates the Greek physician, considered by many ‘the father of medicine’, had this to say about our brain:

Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. And by this, in an especial manner, we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear, and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet, and what unsavoury; some we discriminate by habit, and some we perceive by their utility.

Our more recent understanding of the brain took shape around the end of the 18th century when Galvani showed that electricity exist as a force within our body. Unfortunately he did not have the necessary technology to measure the currents, but this was later confirmed by Du-Bois Reymond around mid 1850.

Let us now fast forward to the present time, where things actually start to get interesting. Am I boring you yet? :-)

Present

Through the help of neuroscience we’ve made huge leaps in our understanding of the human brain. One the most basic foundational units of the brain is a neuron, and there are plenty of them, around 100 billion (10^11). These are your brain messengers. They will transport messages (electrical current) between each other which will turn into a hand wave, fart or storing of a new memory. These associations between neurons form what we call neural networks. These neural networks, or associations between neurons, are part determined by genetics but mostly through learning. Associations are not static, but can be dynamically rewired should a neuron be damaged.

The reason of why these associations look the way they do, we just don’t know. Neuroscience has only scratched the surface of the complexity of the brain. Different parts of the brain process different types of signals. Then in an intricate pattern these logically separate networks are interconnected with each other to form one massive and dynamically generated neural network.

What we should get excited about is that these networks can be rearranged, which means there is nothing preventing anyone from achieving a particular goal or breaking a bad habit. These are only just associations between neurons and can be reprogrammed through creativity (not in the literal sense, or perhaps!).

I’ve decided to keep this post somewhat short, as to not overwhelm those that find details boring. But I do expect to dig much deeper into this as I go along. The next blogpost will cover the bigger basic building blocks such as thalamus, cerebellum and others. I hope you didn’t fall asleep while reading, see you soon!

/ Christoffer

The Brain (by Andrei Dorokhin/deviantArt)

The past week has been really interesting for me from in many regards. My new found motivation for deeper understanding of myself has made me introduce a significant amount of change to my routines and daily activities. I would like in part to credit Steve Pavlina for this. I spent around 5 hours on his blog devouring a good few of his articles and they all rang so true with me. Brilliantly written, clear, he inspired me.

About a week ago I decided to start this blog with the overall purpose of acquiring a better understanding of myself and my surroundings. One of my goals was to find a guiding purpose. Nothing big, just the meaning with life, mine in particular. While I’ve not yet found it I think I’ve made some progress. If you perhaps have read my previous blog post about Is there room for Science? you might have figured out that I will begin to take a somewhat more scientific approach to personal development.

I hope to provide a somewhat unique approach to personal development. Obviously it will still be from my perspective and I can’t promise that it will make any sense or even be valid but my intention however is to provide scientifically supported evidence for a given idea, or at least some background material that might support it. I hope to achieve a couple of things with this approach.

1. Provide a solid, scientifically verified (or somewhat supported) foundation for understanding our minds
2. Contribute something useful instead of adding more noise
3. Bridge science with philosophy and psychology
4. Make science cool :-)

Okay, so number 4 is obviously never going to happened, but who knows? Anyhow, let me explain one, two and three.

The first goal is my intention to distil the science behind the functioning of our minds and translate the sciency language into something we can use and apply to our daily lives.

The second goal is probably the one I feel most strongly about. There are so many personal development blogs out there and most of them simply reiterate what others have already said, many times before. I’ll probably do the same, but hopefully to a much lesser extent. And if I do, it will be from a different perspective. (I’m not obviously not saying all blogs are nonsense, but most of them are just out there contributing to the noise, and we really need less of that!)

The third goal is about not going all scientific, but rather attempt to find the synergies between philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. I feel this is an area not well covered in the personal development area and might be something I could contribute.

I feel it’s important to point out the fact that I’m not going all sciency geeky here. I’m an experimenter and believer in what I can see and do myself. I’ve tried many things that would definitely not be qualified as scientific, such as Out-of-Body experiences, lucid dreamig, and so forth. But I’m still very much interested in finding ways to bridge these “explorations” with rational, repeatable and scientific underpinnings.

I sincerely hope that you will join me on this journey through science, time, mind and explore what lies beyond. (and perhaps learn something on the way!)

I’ve known for a long time that science plays a huge part in my life. But it was only when I intentionally began to document this journey of mine that it became apparent how important it really is to me. Every time when I’m reading a book, or research a particular topic, my mind is constantly asking all sorts of “verification” questions. Has it been proven? Is it repeatable? Can we simulate it?

Lately I’ve been completely absorbed in anything related to our mind. The conscious, and the unconscious, how they relate, how our neural networks function and so forth. I’ve been especially intrigued by how our brain store and retrieve information, aka memories. One question that I’ve yet to answer is: What comes first, the electrical “firing” giving rise to a thought or the thought itself?

Logically one might say, the electrical impulse. But, how is that possible? How could the electrical impulse be fired before I’ve even thought about having the thought? Ha ha, I’m making myself confused. Do you see what I’m trying to get at though? What gives rise to the electrical impulse? How does it know where to travel? Which neurons to connect with? And why does it fire in the first place? Arguing that the impulse comes first would in some sense argue that we’ve no free will. Okay, perhaps a stretch considering that we’d still need to understand how each cognitive impression affects us, but still. If we fully understand the brain we should also be able to fully realize when a particular thought will be raised, no?

It’s mind-boggling. Perhaps because I’m not particularly educated on the topic, but it almost feels like a question similar to that of the universe. What comes outside the universe? Or what gave rise to the universe in the first place? It’s a kind of chicken and egg problem. All this reading about neural pathways, neurons, cations etc. spawned a thought about or cognitive abilities and in particular how we learn new things.

Here’s my written down thought, completely unedited and stupid :-)

When observing something a particular pattern will rise inside our brains which when observed long enough will become “static” and memorized. When we’re trying to recall something we are simply doing random “firing” in our brain to find the particular pattern which was created when we first observed that particular object.

I know, it’s not exactly an amazing thought but well, it gives a clue about how I function. I am constantly asking myself questions, attempting to answer them and understand everything I see around me. Hopefully this will help me in finding a guiding purpose. I do think I’ve learned something today that will give me an edge, mixing science and spirituality, finding where they converge and which questions cannot be answered by science, or spirituality.

… see you soon wonderful world.