Trends in Evolutionary Thinking

Senseless hatred and political ineptitude causes of Venezuela’s debacle

Posted on by Gina Vidal

There is no religious or economic war, there are no tanks on the streets, nobody is fighting against them and yet Venezuelans are engulfed in the worst crisis in their nation’s modern history.

When did everything start? With the polarisation of Venezuela at the hands of Commander Hugo Chavez Frias. In 1999, Chavez began a campaign of hatred and antagonism against the country’s middle and upper classes using the official government channel to fuel, during endless speeches, people’s social resentment.

Chavez’s political amateurism was noticeable from the very beginning of his mandate. His remarkable lack of political knowledge and his inability to bring the country together to work towards a better future was a common denominator throughout his time in Miraflores.

Chavez governed with his guts and this was reflected in every public appearance where he spoke for hours and took the opportunity to address any critic in an emotional manner, dismantling any argument against his government in a non-traditional and usually inflammatory way.

It seemed as if Chavez took his presidency as a personal vendetta and within a year of his mandate Venezuelans started to feel offended and aggravated by their Presidente. The tone of his political discourse never changed during his 13 years in power. On the contrary. Polarisation took over the daily lives of Venezuelans, dragging with it the country’s wealth and the people’s wellbeing.

Chavez attacked every productive industry in the country and in no time many businesses fled towards more stable markets taking with them their investment and leaving behind highly qualified workers and professionals.

His relationship with Cuba came to make matters worse. Fidel Castro quickly recognised Chavez’s evident political ignorance and he immediately found a way to become his mentor. Cuba took every advantage it could from its relationship with the Venezuelan president and, in exchange; a democratic country was getting economic and political advice from a regime that had lived in the dark for decades.

The results cannot surprise anybody.

It was easy for Chavez to ignore people’s rights and manage the country as he wished when there was plenty of money to waste. He ignored human rights, misused the country’s resources, dismissed economists readings and warnings, all the while covered in a mythical aura fed by a voracious populism.

Hugo Chavez was a master of division, blatantly applying the age old divide and conquer strategy. Without any doubt, he excelled at this. However, Chavez went beyond basic political rule and destroyed the unicity and idiosyncrasy of the nation, creating a snowball reaction that is about to reach its end.

The demise of Hugo Chavez Frias did not bring any hope to a country already in crisis. His final and most damaging political decision was to leave in power, Nicolas Maduro. Chavez could use his undeniable charisma to hide or veil his lack of political knowledge, but Maduro can not make use of this ruse to cover up his.

A country with enormous natural resources, youth, highly qualified professionals and workers, and an enviable geographical location is enduring its deepest and fearfullest crisis. To survive it, all Venezuelans need to leave behind the hatred planted by Chavez and maintained by Maduro and reconcile themselves as a nation.

A penny for my thoughts? What about a pound

Posted on by Gina Vidal

I highly doubt that I am the only one who wonders how our thoughts can create a “physical” reality and provoke significant changes in our lives. Millions of people around the world believe in the practice of mindfulness meditation to improve their quality of life. However, the physical explanation of how the process occurs is nothing short of astonishing.

According to quantum physics, everything flows, nothing is stable or permanent, and our reality is forming continuously by our individual and collective thoughts. These thoughts are shaped by our interpretation of reality as perceived through our senses and our internal map which, itself, is formed by the collection of our life’s personal experiences.
“Our thoughts are linked to this invisible energy and they determine what the energy forms. Your thoughts shift the universe on a particle-by-particle basis to create your physical life.“

Is it just me or has this knowledge not been disseminated as much as it should have been? If we can change our reality by changing our way of thinking and exposing ourselves to different experiences, everybody who wants or needs to improve their lives at some level should have access to this information. But, despite recent advances, it has not quite reached society’s collective consciousness, has it? Not in a brainwashing manner, of course, that is always a risk, but in a physical way. 

Indeed, we don’t hear people talking about how it has been proven that our emotions, perception, and feelings result in different electromagnetic frequencies which are responsible for changing the state of an atom and subsequently altering our reality. “Studies have shown that positive emotions and operating from a place of peace within oneself can lead to a very different experience for the person emitting those emotions and for those around them.“

Personally, I think that schools should get involved in teaching children how to understand and manage their thoughts. Youngsters should be provided with this kind of tool and this knowledge. And we should start by explaining to them what their body are made of:

“Nine systems comprise the human body including Circulatory, Digestive, Endocrine, Muscular, Nervous, Reproductive, Respiratory, Skeletal, and Urinary. Then breaking down to what are those made up of? Tissues and organs. What are tissues and organs made of? Cells. What are cells made of? Molecules. What are molecules made of? Atoms. What are atoms made of? Sub-atomic particles. What are subatomic particles made of? Energy!”

Put another way, quantum physics should be taught at primary school level. How about that? It sounds grand but it should be our legacy to the new generations. The children will grow knowing something great… that they are energy, and they can create their own (and probably better) reality!

So, people, let’s drop the old adage “a penny for your thoughts“, they are way more valuable than that!

Can’t get rid of that chronic cold? Maybe some kindness could help

Posted on by Gina Vidal

By practising mindfulness meditation our sense of kindness increases and in return we can be the recipient of many health benefits

In my last post I wrote about how we can train our brain to do, or better said, to learn pretty much whatever we want, at any age in our lives. I also promised to explain how mindfulness can be used to increase our sense of wellbeing, both mentally and physically.

To get a good handle on this, a great place to start is Mindfulness, a practical guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. Although this is not the only book about the subject, it is, in my opinion, the best resource on this subject in that it explains the underpinning concepts with great clarity.

When I started looking into this, I was after an understanding of how meditating can provide us with all the goodness that is so widely advertised. Fundamentally, I needed to grasp the mechanics of the process and to get a scientific explanation of how our brain is impacted by dedicating a few minutes a day to meditation.

Firstly, let me outline some of the most beneficial results of mindfulness according to Williams and Penman before explaining how these have been proven by different scientists around the globe.

First of all, Williams and Penman clarify, for those who may have some apprehension, that meditation is not a religion but a simple method of “mental training”. It does not take a lot of time to master but persistence is vital. It is uncomplicated and it is about helping you to see things with more lucidity, ultimately helping you to make wiser decisions.

“Mindfulness meditation is so beautifully simple that it can be used by the rest of us to reveal our innate joie de vivre“, the authors reveal.

Scientifically Proven

The book identifies many positive effects achieved through mindfulness but as I was seeking to understand how deep meditation actually alters the structure of our brain, I will focus this post on the scientific explanation of the benefits of deep meditation.

According to Williams and Penman, it is possible to actually see the positive changes

occurring in the brain during mindfulness meditation. By using brain imaging, you can watch as “critical networks in the brain become activated, almost as if they were glowing and humming with renewed life”.

This realization is fairly recent, though. For many years, it was assumed that everybody had an emotional thermostat and some people were more inclined to happiness than others. “This emotional set point was presumed to be encoded in our genes or became set in stone during childhood. To put it bluntly, some people were born happy and others were not”.

This misconception was debunked several years ago by Richard Davison of the University of Wisconsin and Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. They found out that mindfulness training helps people to “escape the gravitational pull of their emotional set-point”.

According to both researchers, we may have the extraordinary possibility of altering on a permanent basis our “level of happiness for the better”.

This discovery has its foundation in Dr. Davison’s work on indexing (measuring) a person’s happiness by observing the electrical performance on different areas of their brain. This was done by placing sensors on people scalps to measure that activity or by using an fMRI brain scanner.

This procedure allowed Davison to find that when people are emotionally upset the right prefrontal cortex lights up more than the similar part of the brain on the left. Also, when people are in a positive mood, the left prefrontal cortex lights up more than the right.

After several experiments, Davidson and Kabat-Zinn concluded that “it was clear not only that mindfulness boosted their (people involved in the experiment) overall happiness (and reduced stress levels) but that this is reflected in the way their brain actually works”.

But it was Doctor Sarah Lazar, from the Massachusetts General Hospital, who found that as people continue practising mindfulness meditation over a period of years, these positive changes modify the physical structure of the brain itself!

This change in the brain’s circuitry is most pronounced in a part of the organ’s surface called insula, “which controls many of the features as we regard as central to our humanity”.

Lazar explains how becoming more empathetic towards others by increasing our sense of compassion and true loving-kindness, is a win-win situation.

“Empathy and feeling genuine compassion and loving-kindness towards yourself and others have hugely beneficial effects on health and well-being”.

The best news is that you can see and enjoy the benefits of mindful meditation after only a few weeks of daily practice. According to professor Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after only nine weeks of training meditation focusing on loving-kindness for the self and others, meditators developed an increased sense of purpose and had fewer feelings of isolation, along with decreased symptoms of illness as diverse as headaches, chest pain, congestion, and weakness.

If sitting for a few minutes, by ourselves, in a relaxed manner and in a comfortable setting can provide us with such a great benefits, what are we waiting for? Let’s cut a few minutes of TV a day and improve our lives. There is an array of wonderful sensations awaiting us.

In my next post I will explore the “weight” of our thoughts: A penny for my thoughts? How about a pound?

These are some useful links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEyaQ_iTBcs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQfKpPpOxBM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPlG_w40qOE

Be the “personal trainer”of your own brain!

Posted on by Gina Vidal

Brain cartoon

Our brain is trainable

Since an early age I was strongly against determinism.
I simply didn’t accept anybody telling me that things had to be done certain ways, at certain times and so on without making my own assessment first.
For instance, there were constant reminders that I had to have babies before I turned 30 or my chances of being a mother were going to be very slim or even non-existent or that after a “certain age” we would all become fat, regardless of our eating habits.
Although I understand that infertility may increase with age, I don’t think that our lives need to be driven by this fact, nor that we should just let our bodies go because that is the “way it is”. In reality, we do have a choice.
What fascinates me the most in this context is how we may be denying ourselves opportunities by believing in a set of determined facts – as determined, of course, by someone else’s experience. One of these opportunities is the chance to learn and acquire a set of new skills or abilities, including learning a new language, for example, at any age of our lives.
Curious about this process, and convinced that we can set our minds to do whatever we want, I began researching and following all sorts of think tanks that address the trends, investigations, advances and innovation in all areas of knowledge in our world, especially as they relate to discoveries about our brain.
This is how I came across a fascinating video of Ruby Wax. I need to confess here, because there is no point in lying to you or to myself, I didn’t know who she was at the outset. However, after watching her video about brain plasticity on the Big Think website I went straight to research everything I could find about her and her fascinating work.
Wax talks about how she adopted a proactive behaviour towards her depression and decided to investigate how to tackle it by understanding the functioning of her own brain. She explains that “depression is a sickness of the brain. When your lungs, liver, kidneys, etc., get sick you get sympathy. When your brain gets sick, they tell you to perk up”.
Wax did not simply read about our most complex organ, she took a Master in Neuroscience at Oxford University to get to the bottom of it!
So why have I veered into brain plasticity if I started talking about determinism? Simply because Wax says something deeply enlightening: Our brain can be rewired. And it keeps changing because it is dependent on experience.
“You are the architect of your own brain. You have the ability to rewire yourself, just by changing the way you think, by practising mindfulness”, says Wax.
So, if there are any doubts about the uselessness of preconceived ideas and determinism, there shouldn’t be. We have the knowledge now to fly as high as we are willing to try.
Inspired, I followed Wax’s initiative (not to the point of taking a Master at Oxford) and carried out my own research about this business of brain plasticity. Although there is tons of information about it, I would point to the research of Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco who in 2004 revealed during a TED conference that the “…brain retains its ability to alter itself well into adulthood — suggesting that brains with injuries or disease might be able to recover function, even later in life…”
Basically, Merzenich sustains that the brain is constructed to change and possesses an incredible power: an ability to actively rewire itself! Indeed, Merzenich researches ways to harness the brain’s plasticity to improve our skills and recover lost function.
One experiment shows how after a monkey repeatedly was taught how to use a spoon properly, its brain showed some physical growth in the area used to master the spoon skill. This represents a change on hundreds of billions of neurones in the brain.
“This is constructed by physical change and the level of construction is massive”, explained Merzenich. So, our brain is adaptable and flexible and allows us to learn until the last days of our lives.
So, back to determinism. Remember the old (very old indeed!) expression you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? We can leave that one where it belongs, in the book of archaic and antievolutionary thinking. The truth is that we can become the “personal trainers” of our own brain and help it to not only get into shape but to actually learn many “new tricks”. And we can continue to do that until the last days of our lives.
In my next blog I will write about mindfulness as a tool to rewire our brain. Hasta la próxima!

 

Interesting links:

http://www.ted.com/read/ted-studies/neuroscience

hhtp://www.ted.com/talks/paola_antonelli_previews_design_and_the_elastic_mind