BEFORE BEGINNING THESE TUTORIALS IT HELPS TO READ:

“Introduction to Tutorials”

INTAL

This program and the information and techniques in it are open source and can be used by anyone for anything with the following exceptions:

It is not to be sold or used for making financial profit in any way.

It is not to be used with intentions of coercion or any deliberate attempt to control others, including children.

Any person breaking these conditions will be denied access to the NHA community and all connected sites

Neurohacking Tutorial 1

The Golden Rules

Updated: Jul 2009

In this tutorial we’re going to explain the golden rules of neurohacking (NH), because neurohacking for health and development is what we're doing here. We’re also going to tell you the basics about your brain, your intelligence and how it works, because NH works with your biology; that’s what makes it so effective. We call this tutorial program “Intal” (for ‘Interactional’).

Follow the Right Habit

First, forget everything you think you know about intelligence. Clear your thoughts and begin in a calm, interested, playful state of mind.

We'll start with an overview:

The deliberate development of anything towards its optimal potential is called entelechy [pronounced en-tel-eh-key]. In Japan this is known as ‘Kaizen’. You may have heard of Kaizen in the context of business, but in fact it is applicable to all areas of life. Practising Entelechy (or Kaizen) is about deliberately interacting with nature (including your biology) for improvement in all areas of your life, it affects everything you come into contact with, and it works by creating the right conditions for healthy interaction and ‘emergence’ to take place.

Emergence is the natural process by which things use beneficial conditions to grow and develop and fulfill their potential. Life and intelligence move in this direction automatically when they’re healthy.

The opposite is movement towards deterioration, decay, and extinction. No growth or repair can take place when things are moving in this direction. Health fails, life deteriorates, and things begin to fall apart.

With simple common sense we can see the benefit of things developing their optimal potential for life, wellbeing and intelligence; including our personal selves, the planet, ecology, our culture, our relationships, our abilities, and humanity in general. And we find it’s really bad news when any of these things starts to fall apart and decay. Because we’re biological creatures, we know innately why decay means danger, and we also know that all things are inter-related.

Our bodies and minds move towards deterioration whenever we are sick or injured, but our immune and repair systems (evolved for our wellbeing) automatically notice and tweak us back towards entelechy, and we “get better”. In living things, our evolved biology always moves us naturally towards entelechy, growth and development unless something gets in the way.

This is also true of intelligence; it will always grow and develop and improve itself naturally unless something gets in the way. Our big problem, and the cause of all our current ills, is that a lot of things do get in the way and push us towards deterioration. For example, in many societies, deterioration of the mind with age is considered ‘normal’, but this is only so because so many people are making the habits that lead to deterioration a way of life.

This is no new trend. Throughout history, people have accidentally or unknowingly adopted bad habits of behavior that cause deterioration, decay and sickness, often because they knew no better, or because they followed the majority without thinking. We have seen plagues, famines, pollution and disasters that could have been avoided if people had known more about the nature of disease, our ecology and biology and adopted more beneficial habits.

During the last century we’ve learned a lot more about ecology and pollution and about hygiene and how disease spreads, but today we still see a lot of degradation in mental health, relationships, success and happiness and most people still don’t know enough to figure out why. We have begun to realize how much our lifestyles and attitudes have damaged our planet, how much they can damage our bodies and our physical health, but most people have not yet realized how much our lifestyles, environment and habits of behavior can affect our minds and the quality of our intelligence. Brain science is only just catching up with body science, because we have only recently had the tools to reveal how our minds work and what intelligence really is.

In developing and growing your intelligence, then, you are going to find out how various things affect your brain and mind. You will then be able to recognize things that will assist your success and move you towards entelechy, and things that will get in the way of your success and move you towards deterioration.

Things that are “on your side” is anything (including habits) that will help to develop your intelligence and keep your mind healthy. Working against you is anything that destroys or retards intelligence.

We now know that every single thing we do, say and think moves us (and our brain) in one of these directions or the other; towards development or decay. Successful neurohacking is the simple practice of knowing what these ‘beneficial’ or ‘harmful’ things are, and adapting ourselves and our environment in order to use the developmental ones and avoid the ones that cause deterioration. This is one of the first techniques you will learn, known as ‘Input control’. Input control uses a series of hacks and self-directed adaptations to help us stay in the entelechy zone, or 'green zone'.

The 'green zone' for the mind is a healthy balance between extremes:

You can probably think of individuals you know who have slipped outside the green zone in either (or both) directions, or you may have experienced this yourself. Our hacks and exercises are designed to keep you inside the green zone or to move you back into balance if you have slipped outside.

 

DO IT NOW

Go somewhere private to do this; it only takes a minute. Take a pen or pencil with you.

Put the blunt end of the pen between your front teeth as though it were a cigar. Do not allow your lips to touch the pen for one minute. Don’t worry if it makes you laugh; it is a bit of a strange feeling.

The reason we do this exercise in private is because the expression it causes you to pull looks rather strange, but are you aware of what else you’ve just done?

You’ve just hacked your brain! The facial expression you have to pull with a pen in your teeth without the lips touching uses muscles that send signals to your brain, to tell it that you’re ‘smiling’ for quite a long period of time (a minute is a long time, to the brain). Of course, you know consciously that you’re not really smiling, you’re doing some strange exercise with a pen. But for the unconscious part of the brain that reads muscular signals, it’s ‘close enough’, in other words this is a hack. You’re basically fooling the brain into thinking that something good is happening “out there” in your real life.

When the brain gets these signals from the muscles in your face, and concludes that something fun must be going on ‘out there’, it prepares your mind and body to interact with it. It releases chemicals into your bloodstream that increase your confidence, focus your attention and boost your immune system (just in case whatever is going on out there might be fun and exciting but also dangerous.)

These changes last only for a short while because this was a one-off exercise, and you haven't made a habit of it yet. When you get into habits of thought and behavior you can make permanent changes so that you don’t need to do weird exercises like this any more.

This is a simple example of input control. You controlled the ‘input’ to your brain by changing your facial expression for a short time.

We’re now going to take a look inside the brain so that you will know where its various bits are when we refer to them.