A Quote by Nicholas G. Carr
The brain likes to be efficient and so even as its strengthening the pathways you're exercising, it's pulling - it's weakening the connections in other ways between the cells that supported old ways of thinking or working or behaving, or whatever that you're not exercising so much.
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You can expand your awareness in many ways, and as you do, your brain will evolve. It will grow physically by developing new neural pathways, synaptic connections, and even new brain cells. Perhaps more importantly, it will evolve to mirror the expansion of your mind into new, creative areas.
The brain is really hard to see. The whole thing is very large - the human brain is several pounds in weight - but the connections between brain cells, known as synapses, are really tiny. They're nanoscale in dimension. So if you want to see how the cells of the brain are connected in networks, you have to see those connections, those synapses.
Neural science, which is the study of the brain, tells us that we have up to one billion brain cells with thousands of branches that communicate with each other much like a complex highway system. The more we attend to something, or the more we engage in certain behaviors, the more those particular cells communicate and the pathways between them deepen. This is how our values, our beliefs, and our motivations are actually formed.
The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.
The brain is a tissue. It is a complicated, intricately woven tissue, like nothing else we know of in the universe, but it is composed of cells, as any tissue is. They are, to be sure, highly specialized cells, but they function according to the laws that govern any other cells. Their electrical and chemical signals can be detected, recorded and interpreted and their chemicals can be identified; the connections that constitute the brain's woven feltwork can be mapped. In short, the brain can be studied, just as the kidney can.
Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function.
Exercise is a journey, not a destination. It must be continued for the rest of your life. We do not stop exercising because we grow old - we grow old because we stop exercising.
Oh, my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways, And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low, I'm at home and at ease on a track that I know not, And restless and lost on a road that I know.
There's a difference between over-training and over-exercising. Over-training can be you're trying to do something at high performance, but when you're over-exercising it just means that you don't have a life. And there are obviously people who go to that extreme.
A fixed habit is supported by old, well-worn pathways in the brain. When you make conscious choices to change a habit, you create new pathways. At the same time, you strengthen the decision-making function of the cerebral cortex while diminishing the grip of the lower, instinctual brain. So without judging your habit, whether it feels like a good one or a bad one, take time to break the routine, automatic response that habit imposes.
Exercising underwater also creates tremendous benefits by challenging your body in ways you can't on dry land.
Let's just keep asking ourselves this question: 'Is what I'm about to do strengthening the web of connections, or is it weakening it?'
Working is not instantly rewarding. It's a long process, and it's much easier to just feed whatever dopamine cycles exist in your brain in instant gratification ways. I get it; I do it.
No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see... all mankind exercising self-government, and capable of exercising it. But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable.
Exercising during the cold and flu season will help people stay in shape, and most likely fight off colds or reduce the number of days a person is ill. The cold season should not be an excuse for the average person to refrain from exercising - working out at the gym, a brisk walk in the park or a jog through the neighborhood.
Stress does not cause pain, but it can exacerbate it and make it worse. Much of chronic pain is 'remembered' pain. It's the constant firing of brain cells leading to a memory of pain that lasts, even though the bodily symptoms causing the pain are no longer there. The pain is residing because of the neurological connections in the brain itself.
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