Ilchi Lee

Challenge yourself to develop your mind and spirit, fulfillment and growth will follow

Abraham Lincoln, in a time of depression, once said, “I would just as soon die, but I’ve done nothing yet to make anyone remember that I have lived.”

Truth is, many of us have a yearning to make an impact. We want our hard work, determination and talent to be quantified by something larger than ourselves. We want to make a difference, in our community, in the world and, ultimately, within ourselves.

This desire is not accidental. It is rooted in our brains. We are, in fact, wired for charity.

In a study published by Science in June 2007, “Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations,” researchers at the University of Oregon, observing brain activity via fMRI, found that responses to donating money triggered activity in the same areas of the brain traditionally stimulated by food, sex, sweets, shelter and social connection.

Ilchi Lee, originator of Brain Education System Training (BEST) and author of Principles of Brain Management and the forthcoming In Full Bloom: A Brain Education Guide for Successful Aging, believes this connection satisfies one life’s most core values—to find true, lasting happiness. Lee even suggests that this lasting happiness is attainable, but it first requires you to “Seek Fulfillment.”

From Ilchi Lee (Excerpted from Principles of Brain Management)

On a piece of paper, write down a list of the values and attributes that are most desperately needed in the world. To what extent are you currently helping to provide these to the world? Is there more you can do to help provide these?

Use meditation to do your job better

If you want to improve on-the-job performance, take a deep breath—literally. Studies of workplace efficiency have long shown that stress is the leading cause of worker burnout, lack of innovation, lost productivity and aggression.

Or, in the words of well-respected author and lifetime librarian, Frederick Saunders: “Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea.”

If you want to lower your stress at work, the best way to do it is to incorporate meditation techniques. Meditation is the practice of calming your mind through insight and reflection. To help you do this, here are some basic exercises and behaviors to practice.

Breathe –Close your eyes and sit with your back straight. Then breathe through your nostrils, concentrating only on the sensation of your breath entering and exiting your nose.

Sweep away distraction – Place your hands where your head and neck meet. Then, in a quick motion, slide your hands up your head and over your hair. Complete the motion with a flicking of your fingers. It’s like dusting away your worries.

Crunch numbers – Count down from 10...or 100. It’s a great way to ward off distraction and relax the mind.

As you try relaxing your mind, you might be overwhelmed by how busy it actually is. This is normal and part of heightened self awareness. Keep at it, and don’t get discouraged. The more you practice meditating and relaxing, the easier it will be to let go of stress. The less stress you carry, the more “you” you’ll have to give to your work and the more effective and happy you’ll be in your job.

The truth about “Mommy Brain Drain”

The phenomenon is popularly known as “Mommy Brain Drain” and, like most myths and urban legends, there’s a little bit of truth in the lie.

First, the truth. Pregnancy changes the brain…for the better.

According to Katherine Ellison, author of The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter (Perseus Books Group, 2006), “There are changes in the brain (during pregnancy and early motherhood)—concrete, measurable changes” that make women better at managing stress, multitasking, and managing relationships with people. Some research even supports the idea that pregnancy and child rearing create new brain cells.

Many mothers, struggling to remember their husband’s name and find their car keys, might argue that these changes to the brain yield a new yet unimproved mommy brain. And here lies the half-truth. Women often do experience decreased brain activity during pregnancy and motherhood. But pregnancy and motherhood are not the cause. Stress and exhaustion are.

So the best advice for new mothers is this. Get rest, and get help. If you do, you just might find “Mommy Brain Gain” to be empowering.

Meditation is about more than peace of mind, it grows your mind

Meditation has long been recognized as one of the most effective means of managing stress and cultivating a quiet mind. For some practitioners, it is a path to transcendence, an enlightened state-of-being and self-realization.

However, one thing it was never credited for was physically growing the brain…until recently.

In a study conducted by Harvard Medical School psychologist Sara Lazar and her team of researchers, the brain scans of 20 experienced meditators, meditating, were compared to the scans of 15 nonmeditators, relaxing. The result: people who meditate grow larger brains. More specifically, they experience a thickening of the cerebral cortex.

According to Lazar, meditation promotes neuroplasticity in regions of the brain that are responsible for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being. "These findings are consistent with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of jugglers,” Lazar said. “In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice.”

Not only can the brain change, it changes in the part of the brain that normally thins as people age. So if you’re looking for the fountain of youth, the best place to find it may be in the quiet of your mind. Chances are, that’s the one place explorer Ponce de Leon never looked.

How unconscious decisions can derail your resolutions

If you’re like most Americans, 2008 is coming with some strings attached. Perhaps it’s a commitment to lose weight or to stop procrastinating. Maybe you’ve made a conscious decision to be a better you.

Chances are, you’ve already slipped. That Hershey Kiss you tossed into your mouth, you probably didn’t think twice about it until it was too late. Surfing the Internet, checking e-mail and gossiping when you got to work…your intentions were better; you meant to dive right into a project.

The problem is, we rarely think about what we’re doing.

“Most of what we do every minute of every day is unconscious,” says neuroscientist Paul Whelan. “Life would be chaos if everything were on the forefront of our consciousness.”

This explains why learned behaviors, particularly those we would like to unlearn, are so difficult to break. We simply act on cognitive impulse.

So this year, instead of getting down on yourself for reaching for the candy jar, make a mental note of your action and emotional response. By understanding that many of your decisions are automatic, that you are not failing to meet your resolution because of a lack of willpower, it’s easier to think about your goals long term and develop a short-term plan for making them happen.

To avoid making regrettable emotional decisions, look within

In 1994, neurologist Antonio Damasio wrote the bold and influential book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. The book challenged the popular opinion of “I think therefore I am,” which suggests that the mind functions as a distinct entity from the body.

Instead, Damasio argued, emotions and feelings are essential to reasoning.

Damasio writes: “If an emotion is a collection of changes in body state connected to particular mental images that have activated a specific brain system, the essence of feeling an emotion is the experience of such changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle.”

As Ilchi Lee, originator of Brain Education System Training (BEST) and author of Principles of Brain Management and the forthcoming In Full Bloom: A Brain Education Guide for Successful Aging, writes: “In actuality, nothing makes you happy or angry. The emotions all come from within you.”

By understanding that our brains are the root of our emotions, we can begin to stop externalizing—we can stop looking for answers and/or causes to our problems that we have no control over. It is a process Lee calls “Turning It Outside In.”

From Ilchi Lee (Excerpted from Principles of Brain Management)

Are there conditions in you life that your don’t like but that never seem to change no matter how hard you try to make them change? Quit trying to make them change. Instead, see how you can change yourself in relation to the problem. Yes, there are some truly intolerable situations that are genuinely beyond repair. In this worst-case scenario, you can resolve within yourself to leave the situation entirely. But most human problems are not so absolute. More than likely, even small changes that come from within you will completely transform your situation. They can change the way you communicate with others and help you reformulate your methods of coping with problems.

Recovered anorexics experience pleasure differently than nonanorexics

For years, society has blamed an entertainment industry that promotes thin as beautiful for triggering anorexic behaviors in young women. The cultural standards, many said, were just too overwhelming for developing girls.

Recent research shows that while cultural standards may still be a factor in triggering anorexic behavior, the key indicator may just lie in the brain—as an inherited difference in the way it reacts to pleasure and reward.

A study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that anorexia sufferer’s brains differ from nonsufferers in the region known as the anterior ventral striatum, which is connected to emotional response. Professor Walter Kaye, of the University of Pittsburgh, said: “In anorexia, this might impact on food enjoyment. For anorexics, then, perhaps it is difficult to appreciate immediate pleasure if it does not feel much different from a negative experience.”

According to the same study, former anorexics also had difficulty experiencing simple pleasures. This information leads researchers to believe that deep in the brain there are biological differences between anorexics and nonanorexics that don’t go away.

By studying the brains of former anorexics, researchers are finding ways to better understand why some young women, typically perfectionists and worriers, are more inclined to develop this disorder. It might not be that super thin cover girl after all.

Are you among the world’s smartest two percent?

The below riddle was supposedly written in the late 1800s by Albert Einstein, and it is claimed that 98 percent of the population cannot solve it.

While it’s hard to find documentation supporting either of these claims, it’s still a fun little puzzle.

Tip: Grab a paper and pencil. This will be difficult to work out in your head.

Here are the facts:

In a street there are five houses, painted five different colors.
In each house lives a person of a different nationality.
These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet.

The riddle is: Who owns the fish?

The hints:
1.The Brit lives in a red house. 

2.The Swede keeps dogs as pets. 

3.The Dane drinks tea. 

4.The green house is next to, and on the left of the White house. 

5.The owner of the green house drinks coffee. 

6.The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds. 

7.The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill. 

8.The man living in the center house drinks milk. 

9.The Norwegian lives in the first house. 

10.The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats. 

11.The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12.The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer. 

13.The German smokes Prince. 

14.The Norwegian lives next to the blue house. 

15.The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Scroll down to see the answer.

Answer: The German owns the fish.
Solution:

When it comes to stress, men and women cope differently

With apologies to John Gray, bestselling author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, you don’t have to look very far to discover the root cause of the differences between men and women.

In fact, a group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine conducted a study on 16 healthy males and 16 healthy females that suggests that gender differences, particularly around how men and women cope with stress, can be traced to the brain. To conduct the tests, the researchers administered functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans before, during and after undergoing a challenging arithmetic task. During the task, the researchers put stress on the subjects by asking for quicker responses and correcting wrong answers.

The findings showed that the fMRI results were different for each gender. The limbic system, a part of the brain primarily involved in emotion, was activated when the women were under stress. In contrast, the men showed an increase in cerebral blood flow in the right prefrontal cortex and a decrease in the left orbitofrontal cortex.

In laymen’s terms, women respond to stress by nurturing, what UCLA psychology professor Shelly E. Taylor terms “tending and befriending.” Men more commonly respond to stress by triggering their fight-or-flight mechanism; they either fight back or bottle up the stress and escape.

Perhaps John Gray wasn’t so far off after all. However, instead of men being from Mars and women Venus, it might be more accurate to say that men live in the Stone Age, women in the 21st century.