This is a subtle point: unless we're deeply troubled we are attached to our sense of need, we remain attached in order to feel fulfilled. We struggle to find what we're attracted to -- maybe it's love or happiness -- and we do not aim to redefine what we're seeking.
The Sufi mystic Meher Baba's (1894-1969) simple admonition, "Don't worry, be happy!"[5] is unsatisfying to most of us looking for happiness because it tells us to give up the search. We may consider giving up old habits and bad attitudes, but we rarely consider changing our basic constructs.
This is only sensible: isn't our moral quality and our intellectual potential linked to our values and sensitivities? Tinkering with how we perceive the world in order to be happier sounds suspiciously like plastic surgery of the soul. What do our basic values and sensitivities consist of, anyway?
5 - Experience, Inclination, and Aptitude
Imagine our personality consisting of three parts:
Experience: Our experience is our history as stored in memory, it forms a basis for our interpretations and actions. Experience is what happens to us, and we try to shape our experience to suit our needs. The sum of our experience defines us, but we are not helpless.
The experience component of personality, or more precisely our recalled experience, refers to the emotional state triggered by stored memories. Memory of past events provides meaning for the present and the future. Beyond being the foundation of our thinking process, memory is the timber from which we build ideas.
Inclination: We have the freedom to interpret and to reinterpret our experiences. Though intellect, intuition, and free will we exercise control to preserve and enhance our situation. We've learned how to cope and generally prevail; with effort our skills improve.
Aptitude: We are born with, or are predisposed to develop certain skills. We take these things for granted: the quality of our memory, the coordination of our body, our sensitivity to sound and movement, our preference for structure or chaos.
Looked at in these terms our efforts at self-improvement focus on realigning our inclinations, and gaining a better understanding of our experiences. We focus on those areas where we have the greatest power to change. We endeavor to improve in those areas where we have aptitude, but we rarely attempt to develop new aptitudes.
It came as a great surprise to me -- and few people have yet to appreciate it -- that we can develop new aptitudes through the use of neurofeedback.
6 - Neurofeedback
"In my opinion, if any medication had demonstrated such a wide spectrum of efficacy (as neurofeedback therapy) it would be universally accepted and widely used." " "It is a field to be taken seriously by all." [6]
-- H. Duffy, M.D., Professor and Pediatric Neurologist at The Harvard Medical School
Neurofeedback is a set of tools that allow you to sense otherwise hidden aspects of how your brain functions. It is useful to think of neurofeedback as a kind of hearing. A person learns to speak because they hear how their breath, larynx, and mouth make sounds. People who are completely deaf cannot master speech. In a similar fashion, neurofeedback facilitates the modification of aspects of your self that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.
Figure I. Real-time display showing the power, in micro volts, at different frequencies, in hertz, of a rapid series of measurement of the electric field at the scalp. Here the power is greatest in the Alpha band, ranging from 8 to 12 cycles per second. Taken from BioExplorer software, published by CyberEvolution, Inc.
There is a hitch: some aspects of yourself, which neurofeedback allows you to see, are hard to recognize because they are not the object of our senses, but rather our senses themselves. Are sounds brighter than they used to be? Am I having an easier time organizing my thoughts? It's often hard to tell.
