Neurohacking Tutorial 4

Interpreting your Functional Analysis and Designing Your Personal Plan

Updated: July 2009

Before doing this tutorial you should have done a Functional Analysis. During this tutorial we’re going to interpret your analysis and show you what it tells you about your brain. We’ll give you a little more background information first of all and later show you how to work out your personal strategy for NH using your results. We're also going to look at the second golden rule in depth.

If you did an automatic analysis you will be able to skip the calculation parts of this tutorial (although you may be interested in finding out how your results are calculated). Keep your assessment sheet or results handy to check against their interpretation, as you will need this information for your personal plan.

Follow the Right Habit

When you interpret your analysis you'll know a lot more about how your brain networks are performing. Figuring out what you have already developed in the past helps you to draw your own 'map' for developing additional skills and abilities (your personal strategy). During this tutorial you'll also learn more about what human beings are really capable of and how much our behavior is affected by what we are surrounded by and what we take into ourselves.

Your personal strategy can be designed with all this in mind, but there is one thing it must always include, whoever you are, whatever results you get and whatever your strategy is: it will change nothing at all if you don't actually practice it!

“sooner or later you're going to realize just as I did that there's a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path.”

(Morpheus, “The Matrix”)

When you're starting out on a journey, it's good to know where you are starting from now and where you are going. The optimal path always leads towards entelechy, and that means we don't waste time trying to suppress or give up old habits; we focus on developing the new ones that will replace them. That's knowing the path. The new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves when we practice take over the old habits' pathways and put us on the path to entelechy -realizing our full potential. That's walking the path.

The first step -actually trying some of this stuff- is not as important as the series of steps coming after it. If you only try stuff out once or twice, you're not going to improve your brain. The whole part about habit is it needs repetition in order to take over those pathways. It's like you need a certain amount of 'flying time' before the genome switches on your warp speed license, okay? Staying on the path is more difficult that stepping onto it in the first place. You have to want to improve and be determined not to turn aside when anxiety strikes. Anxiety will throw you doubt, fear, disbelief, self hatred, confusion, and you will not be conned. Neurohacking is not for wimps. We're starship Captains, and we'll just take evasive maneuvers and keep flying.

“On your side” in Walking the Path is the Empowering Habit of Focusing on Solutions, Not on Problems

These are your 'evasive maneuvers'. If you practice the behaviors that are known solutions, the problems will naturally be solved. But to do so, you have to turn your attention towards walking the path rather than just knowing the path. You have to have the personal experience of doing the practice. This is most crucially true of anxiety reduction and input control.

It's no use knowing how to jack your brain into the database of the genome matrix and access greater abilities if you never press “load”.

Sometimes we have been searching for so long for ways to solve problems that it has become a habit to approach every new thing we learn as a problem-solving exercise, so let us say that from here on in we have to develop the habit of applying solutions instead of behaving as though we are continuing to look for them.

When we only use the same processes in the brain for a long time, the brain shuts down other nets and other kinds of thought, preserving only those modes of thought that have been used and seemed most valuable during our last decade or so of experience in life. These are the 'habitual pathways', and there's no need to change them, because if we use them for the new habits they will change their own connections and rebalance our brain.

This is where developing new habits comes in. These habits are the “right things” the brain should be doing. The practice is the most important part when you want to learn something new or develop a new habit, because knowing the theory about how the brain can be balanced doesn't balance the brain. Learning what the new habits are and why they work is knowing the path. Practicing the new habits is walking the path. You need both.

Working Against You in Walking the Path is Trying to Run Before You Can Walk

You shouldn't go too far too fast. Too much strange new stuff all at once is harder for the brain to adjust to. So be fussy at first -do your anxiety reduction practice and begin input control. When you start to work on the first network that needs adjustment, try each exercise and/or hack just once. Then choose only the two or three that you like the most, and practise those as directed. If you get bored with any of them, choose a different one for a change. Once you can do them really well, try some others. There will be new ones in each tutorial, so you will have an increasing variety to choose from.

If you feel an aversion to some exercise before trying it, ask yourself why you are judging an experience before you've had it. Is there a good reason (like, “I can't do the balance exercise because I have no legs”) or is anxiety trying to control your freedom of experience? If so, slow down and do some anxiety reduction until you realize that it's no big deal to try something once, and remember that we're here to try out new experiences; that's what walking the path IS, dude.

Whenever we initiate a change of habits, even a positive one, we activate the neurochemicals for learning. If anxiety is high, Cortisol will rise and the unconscious mind will oppose or run from whatever we're trying to do. Steady, small steps in habit-changing don't set off anxiety, but rather keep us in the alert attentive mode where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.

So regularity and moderation are the keys to fast learning and productive change. If too much is new, the challenge is so far beyond our current experience as to be overwhelming. If not enough is new, boredom or disinterest prevent practice. It's that entelechy zone in the middle we need —activities that at first feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar but still interesting and effective are those during which true change occurs. In this zone you will experience small but continuous improvements, and then (when practice becomes habitual) sudden changes of awareness followed by larger improvements. This is the natural way the brain learns.

After the initial confusion of confronting the new, the mind begins organizing the new input, ultimately creating new synaptic connections as the process is repeated enough. But if, during creation of that new habit, anxiety steps in and protests against taking the unfamiliar path, you get stuck before you've started and keep trying to start your practice but flunk out over and over again. This too is a habit! And like any other it burns its own neural pathways and favors them over all others. Always keep your eye on anxiety levels and take on only as much 'new' stuff as you feel comfortable with but interested by.

It is also best of new habits are sufficiently similar to the old to be more like a variation than a totally new experience. You are probably either left- or right-handed, and if you try to write with the other hand it may feel extremely awkward, even though you already know how to write. Your brain has made familiar, habitual pathways, and this shows up in scanning.

When an FA is done in hospitals, MRIs are usually taken and correlations established. Most 'normal' brains show some hemispheric dominance (just as most people are not ambidextrous). It's useful to check for your hemispheric dominance because it isn't always established by handedness. If someone has particular skills related more to networks on the left than on the right or vice versa, this will influence dominance too. Hemispheric dominance will naturally tend to affect your analysis results and your personal strategy because if you have a strong dominant network it may be susceptible to wronguse, so it's important to know what it's doing, plus this will alter the way in which you should wire some mind machines, if you use them.

Hemispheric dominance isn't always related to handedness, but it is related to vision. You will almost certainly have a dominant eye on the opposite side to your dominant hemisphere. We know this because in recent years scientists have used neuroimaging techniques and single-cell recording techniques to identify neural events responsible for the perceptual dominance of a given image, and for the associated hemispheric dominance. Since most of us don't have a brain scanner, here are two low-tech methods of checking the same thing:

DO IT NOW

Checking For Hemispheric Dominance Without an MRI

Method 1: Look through a paper tube at a white wall with your right eye and hold your left hand in front of your left eye a couple of inches away. After a few seconds, it may appear as though a white hole appears in your hand, then disappears, then reappears.

If no white hole appears at all, you probably have left eye (and right hemisphere) dominance.

If the hole appears and remains, you probably have right eye (and left hemisphere) dominance.

Method 2: Make two cardboard tubes, each with a circle of tracing paper taped onto the ends bearing a different design (simple shapes like a square and a star will suffice). Place the open ends of the tubes over each eye with eyes closed, turn towards the light and look through the tubes. You should see one of the shapes first, and whichever you see, that eyeball (and the OPPOSITE brain hemisphere) is dominant.

Make a note in your Captain's log if you detect strong hemispheric dominance.