Neurons. They are at the center of you.

According to the University of Queensland Australia, "... their interactions define who we are as people."

I am not jumping in on the argument of whether or not we are just a bunch of living water balloons walking around driven solely by electrical impulses zipping along nerves and motivating sinew in response to environmental factors. No argument here about the essence of free will vs causal determinism. I guess you could think of this writing as sort of a Chilton or Haynes manual chapter for body owners.


I often think of myself a visitor to this place, our existence. Just as with anywhere else, one needs the right equipment to be able to function and understand the place they are. Anyone going into space could not function, or even survive without a suit designed to operate there. Anyone going to a movie isn't going to experience much without a projector running. That is my body here in this existence. I see my body as the mechanism that makes comprehending and functioning of my spirit here possible. The main jobs of our bodies are to facilitate experience and keep us alive. Who we are within that body is an entirely different, contextually overlapping and often contradicting matter I find fascinating in its infinite possibilities. Possibilities manifesting in journeys as unique as each individual.

Having been "brain function impaired" as the result of injury and sickness I can say from a first hand account that neuron connection organization plays a major function in how we perceive and feel about this existence around us. The evidence is everywhere. Color blind people, for example, have a different neuron configuration as those who see color. All our senses actually, are defined by neurons, 100 billion of them, with 100 trillion connections between them. Our ability to sense sound, touch, smell, taste and to see in general is all made possible by neurons. How we feel in response to these senses is also heavily influenced, if not entirely defined by neurons in our brains. Depressed people are often given drugs to affect neuron function so that they may experience the world differently. Companies have formed to help corporations effectively influence a targeted audience at the subconscious level using fMRI techniques to analyze advertising campaigns. The effectiveness of proposed strategies for influencing the decisions of customers is assessed by examining the neuron activity of a target demographic sampling. The resultant outcome is for targeted audiences as a whole to more likely make choices in favor of corporate desires. Desires influenced by approaches designed to stimulate agreeable responses at levels of awareness below waking consciousness.

What these influence strategy assessment companies are doing is an excellent lesson for us all. If these companies can effectively coerce segments of the population through peeks into our neuron driven psyche we then are supremely capable of managing our own life experiences. Those employing deep psyche coercion strategies are successfully doing so using a sliver of information about us in swathes of demographic groupings using big expensive equipment in periodic studies. We as individuals have access to everything that could be known about each of ourselves on an absolutely continuous basis. There is no reason any of us cannot do for ourselves what these researchers do to the masses, but only in our case it is not for superficial material gains as value defined by a society. Our work to understand ourselves and manage our decision making can be toward building a gratifying life built of goals defined from within each of us individually that match the character of who we are.

The researchers spend years learning skills that support assessing others that they may earn a share of the billions spent by companies to better influence their potential customer base of people that mean little, if anything more to them than numbers on paper. Does it not make sense that we as individuals would make whatever efforts necessary to understand aspects of ourselves that mean literally everything to us?

The good news is that once we commit to learning who we truly are as individuals and set goals meaningful to the persons we uncover, the tools and techniques of that quest can be effective instruments of change in our lives as well. No big expensive equipment necessary. We start life at birth with the fundamentals of an “anything is possible” collection of neurons. What we don’t need falls away like a sculptors rubble falls to the floor. It is in this way that children grow to be compatible to their environment. The environment in which they grow up and experience defines the neurons that last in resultant configurations. In extremely general terms, the neurons we are born with are "nature" and how they map together is "nurture" in the "nature vs nurture" argument of the psychological community.

Most all of this choosing of neurons and connecting them happens in our childhood. We do however; continue to grow new neurons through a process known as Neurogenesis and make knew connections through an umbrella process known as Neuroplasticity. What these two big words mean in plain language is that we can change. We can rewire our thinking, albeit at a pace slower than we initially develop. And in today's societies we must exercise that ability to change, or consciously structure our environment to minimize the need for change, if we are going to be happy in the current pace of humankind.

As some subtle personal neuro-change experience examples, I have evolved over my early years from a tomato-hating youth to a man that enjoys a tomato slice or two on a sandwich now and then. I also wouldn't even consider another sip of tea for decades after my first, initially finding it to be a horrible tasting beverage. Today I am an amateur tea aficionado that drinks several cups a day. Change adaptation can also be sudden. As I drove along a back road near my home years ago I was repulsed by the smell of nearby skunk-spray. Unlike other times I smelled skunk, this time I happened to recall a pleasant time in my youth. The two experiences became associated and I have actually enjoyed smelling skunk and feel fortunate to come upon the the animals aroma ever since.

This all comes down to one concept stated in passing at a workshop I attended. "Neurons that fire together wire together." At first I thought it was catchy phrase and not much more. Over time I have come to realize this simple statement is at the center of who we are and the quality of our lives. Our neurons are forever working to configure and function in a way that supports our experiences to keep us safe and alive. The way we live our lives, the stimuli to which we subject ourselves and the consistency of our experiences all come together to drive the formation of the neurons that define us.

If you want to change the way you feel, the way you think, the way you experience life; then you must change the inputs to your life, the events in your life, the stimuli of your life that drive the connections made in the biology of your brain.

Journey on ...