That walnut-shaped mass we call the brain is hiding a couple of important secrets that allow you to transform into a superhuman, once you become aware of them. Unfortunately, while we were in school, our teachers couldn’t explain any of these to us because, back then, nobody knew.
Now, things are different. Neuroscience is digging its way deeper into the human brain and what they have already found will blow you off the chair.
You’ll realize how every — mentally healthy — human being is perfectly capable of becoming a piano virtuoso, a spaceship pilot or even highly accurate in predicting future events. Simply put, there are no limits to what you or anyone else around you can accomplish.
Laws of attraction and intention – the origins
One of our colleagues here at Ballz told us this fascinating personal story.
When he was just a little boy, he was struggling with these terrible nightmares that kept waking him up frequently.
The dream would always start the same way
Planet Earth would suddenly appear at a distance. A small dot in a darkness of space.
As the dream was progressing, the Earth would start increasing in size as if he was flying towards it.
All that time he would hear silent voices. Men, women, children, old, young, dozens of them. It would start with only a few but with every following second, more would join. He couldn’t understand the words they were saying. It was just an unbearable noise. The mixture of different voices.
The intensity of the voices — the sound amplitude — would increase as he’d be getting closer and closer to Earth. He was sure that he saw faces of dozens of people with the planet Earth in the background. They appeared as a bunch of floating heads with the fade facial images.
At one point, he would actually see the rough terrain but could also taste its roughness in his mouth! In other words, he could “sense” the roughness of the terrain in his mouth. Like the sight and the taste switched the roles.
He would then fly over the ground seeing terrain more similar to the Moon than the one on Earth and all that time he could taste the roughness of the land in his mouth while the voices would become practically unbearable.
Once everything would reach the critical level, he would wake up all sweaty and with the increased heartbeat rate.
As he grew older, he learned how to intentionally provoke that dream even during the daytime just to see how far he can push it. But still, it was simply impossible to bear that dream for more than 10 minutes. It felt like his head would explode if he continues for only a few more seconds.
Then, one day, when he was a little over 14 years of age, he came to the school and noticed this poster placed on the wall near the main staircase.
They were inviting boys to join police academy high school. 4 years of training and tutoring while living inside the large premises, detached from the family for the most of the time.
It was more of a military type of the academy where boys were taught how to handle different weapons, explosives, mines, artillery and warfare tactics and strategies, along with the regular law enforcement education.
Something clicked and he decided to join the force, even though he had a habit of getting in trouble and ending up chased around by the cops, even in that early age.
His friends and family, mother, in particular, were shocked, to say the least. However, he remained determined and in September that same year, he became a cadet.
The dream he had continued for years to come.
But then, after years of fighting with the voices of strange and unknown people and the “taste of roughness,” during 3 weeks of Summer 2000, he became a member of a special forensic investigation team assembled by Hague Tribunal. Their duty was to locate and excavate bodies buried in unidentified graves – casualties of the major war conflict that was raging for almost 5 years.
All in all, they have found 362 bodies. Men, women, children, old, young…
He didn’t realize it immediately, but the dream had vanished – for good. The very last time he had it was few months before the excavation.
His brain helped him to rationalize everything through the process known as backward rationalization:
- Voices that slowly transform into an unbearable noise became the voices of the deceased.
- “The taste” of the surface, now seemed more as a taste of the dirt.
- Planet Earth as a land and burial ground…
Everything fit right in.
In the next 18 years (up until now), he hasn’t been able to provoke that dream even once, no matter how hard did he try. It was gone forever.
Shortly after that Summer of 2000, he resigned and left the force for good, just to seek for a new purpose.
That’s what we like to call “following your heart no matter where it takes you and fulfilling your purpose.”
But would he still make a good cop as he used to be if he decides to rejoin the force after all those years? And how the hell did he predicted such a horrible scenario?
As you will see, it’s the perfect combination of a couple amazing abilities the human brain has.
“Great instincts”
There’s nothing paranormal in this ability. It’s just the matter of experience, that’s all.
There are two main thinking processes going on in your brain. One is slow, the other is fast. That fast one is also known as the instinctive.
The important question is:
What enables some people to get it right every time in less than a second?
We can only know what we have experienced.
That “knowledge” is getting stored in a form of small memory blocks all around the brain.
Contrary to previous belief, there’s no unique storage unit inside our brains for memories.
What happens is that when you are facing something unknown, your brain will first initiate the fast thinking process. The brain will work at the rates we can’t even calculate to go through all those tiny memory blocks and extract those most relevant. All, just to reach the decision (fight-or-flight response) or come up with the solution (answer to a question).
Given the level of experience, that “solution” may be accurate or entirely wrong.
However, the impression is so overwhelming that even after you realize how wrong your response was, you are still having a hard time believing it (disbelieving yourself).
All that time, the slow thinking is running in the background until finally, after some time, you get the clear picture of how wrong you were.
To see what we are talking about here, try to answer “The Ball and The Bat” question accurately.
What’s the underlying relevance of this discovery?
More information you soak in, better your working memory is.
In other words, the accumulation enables your brain to run more precise calculations, in less time, which will radically improve the accuracy and speed of your fast (“instinctive”) responses.
It also explains why sometimes you get it wrong.
Either you lack the experience or you failed to allow enough time to pass for your logical, slow thinking to come up with the right answer.
For instance, the professional Black Jack or Poker players are automatically “counting the cards.” They got so used to the environment and saw so many different scenarios that as the cards are leaving the deck, their brains are constantly updating the status, making them more accurate in predictions as the game progresses.
The underlying difference between you and the pro is that the pro is focused on the game just like you are focused on your professional skills. His brain simply contains more memory blocks of cards and connected situations than yours.
When you observe the professional Poker players, you can clearly see how they get that first impression of what to do next but they are also allowing some time to pass by for their logic to kick in and confirm the result. Only then, they decide to go in or bail out.
What separates those who are making millions from those who are making dimes or losing more than they can handle is focus.
“Foresight”
Do you find Nostradamus to be some kind of a superhuman? The man got things right with the incredible accuracy decades and even centuries in advance. He was able to predict future event on a much bigger scale than our cop friend.
How did he do it?
While our environment may appear random, there are clear patterns. Some we see, some we don’t.
For instance, due to our relatively short lifetime, we don’t really know how the climate on this planet behaves. Some theories claim that Earth is one icy and cold sphere for the most of the time and that we are now in that short warm period when it melts down entirely just to freeze again.
Perhaps, in 1,000 or 10,000 years from now, after we accumulate enough of historical data, we will be able to foresee some radical shift decades in advance.
But when it comes to human behavior, we know nothing else but to follow the patterns.
And when you are aware of those patterns, you can predict events that are due to happen in 10 days or 200 years from now.
Even if you are not consciously aware of them, your brain certainly is because the moment those cells started splitting up in your mother’s uterus, you became aware of those patterns thanks to the cellular memory.
Your own DNA contains over 4,5 million years of historical data about the patterns of human behavior and the behavior of our environment.
And that’s more than enough for your brain to predict the possible outcome if your wife happens to find out how you bumped ugly with that waitress the other night. Same, it allows you to predict short- or long-term future.
In reality, we do know what the weather was like one Sunday morning, in June 10,356 BC.
It’s just the matter of focus. Because what you focus on expands.
And that’s what makes some people masters in one particular area.
But, can you replicate their mastery and become the God of that same subject?
“Skills”
Mirror neurons and neuroplasticity. These two features of our brains are making all the difference.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of your brain to physically change after being exposed to the event.
That change manifests in three ways:
- The actual physical expansion of the volume of one or more parts of the brain matter.
- Creation of additional neuronal connections within a single cerebral hemisphere.
- Creation of additional neuronal connections between brain’s two hemispheres.
Thus, consciousness is the sum of all events that happened until one point in time, where each of those events created a memory block, a new connection or the new tissue.
How’s that in any way significant to you?
Mirror neurons. A type of neurons in the neuronal network that allows you to experience other people’s action as your own.
For instance, you’ll feel the overwhelming influence of dopamine and serotonin every time your team scores or wins. You’ll inevitably and immediately become sexually aroused if you happen to see two people having sex. You’ll feel the effect of exactly the same chemical compounds as your son during his graduation ceremony.
All thanks to mirror neurons.
It’s a neat ability of a complex living organism to learn from those with more experience in order to improve the adaptation to the environment within which that organism exists.
Simply put, if you are observing someone playing piano for a long period of time, you will be able to replicate at least some of his moves. But if he actively tutors you, your brain will keep adding new neuronal connections between your left and your right cerebral hemisphere and you’ll keep improving piano skills. When there’s enough of those connections, you will transform into a virtuoso.
And that’s something each and every one of us can accomplish if we find it attractive enough. Some folks play instruments, others fly planes.
It’s just the matter of attraction and focus.
But what if something happens. Some trauma. Perhaps a stroke that disables a particular locomotive function.
“Self-repairing”
When doctors exhausted every medical option they had to find the cause of a young boy’s blindness on his left eye, they turned their attention to the boy’s past.
It turned out that his mother was treating the infection of his left eye with chamomile patches for about 2 weeks while he was just a small baby.
When doctors asked the mother to accurately describe the process, they realized what caused the blindness.
The boy had a patch over his left eye at all times during the healing period. Consequently, his young brain got under the impression that he doesn’t need that eye for survival so it permanently shut down the function to preserve the resources.
When it happens in that sensitive age of brain’s development, the process is irreversible. What was originally well-connected and supplied with all necessary resources, became a relic without any real function.
However, when a grown man suffers a stroke and ends up paralyzed, it’s possible to restore the function of his limb to some extent with the simple method.
If, for instance, the left arm lost all of its functions, you simply immobilize the right one for a couple of hours each day. Eventually, the brain will start adding neuronal connections and the left arm will resume some of its functions.
Now, these are extreme cases of damages and restoration process.
What happens when you don’t use a certain skill for a longer period? Say, speech?
Some Chinese production facilities that employ young women are notorious for one particular rule: employees are not allowed to speak during the shift that lasts 12 hours minimum.
The job is so exhausting that young women just drop down in their beds after their shift ends. And even though they are situated in crowded rooms, near the production facility, they don’t have any energy in their bodies left to spend an hour talking to each other.
When scientists tested the most primitive functions of the long-time employees, they were stunned by the fact that 100% of them lost their ability to speak even the simplest sentence. It was a dire trouble for them to recall the words let alone to recall the correct grammar rules. All just because their brains assumed that the ability to speak in their new environment is unnecessary and therefore there is no further need to keep allocating precious resources for that particular function.
Imagine what happens to those non-vital functions and skills you once learned but aren’t using them for years now.
Would our colleague make a good cop again? Sure, but only after re-adjusting to the environment. It would take some time to restore the previous efficiency of all those environment-specific actions and responses.
If he would become passionate about it, he may even emerge more skillful that he originally was because there’s always a way to further improve in some specific area.
Therefore, it’s beyond important to keep practicing and further improving in order to entice your brain to keep adding neuronal connections and if necessary, even to increase the volume of a part of your brain. Like it’s the case with London taxi drivers whose brains scans show a significant increase in the size of one particular segment of their brains responsible for navigation.
Everyone can become superhuman. But in order for that to happen, one must: A) want it, and B) be focused on it! The brain will do the rest.
