Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life

partner to be emotionally available and supportive in hardship. Your 
self - esteem is high, and you tend to be resilient, optimistic, intel-
lectually curious, and open to new ideas. When misunderstandings 
result in arguments, you can more easily resist feeling rejected or 
insulted. 
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If, however, you are among the approximately 20 percent who 
are anxious in their adult relationships and worry that their partners 
don ’ t really love them, you may feel unworthy, be clingy and prone 
to obsessive preoccupation, and become addicted to something. You 
may worry about abandonment and are prone to jealousy. 
If you ’ re among the approximately 25 percent of the adult popula-
tion with an avoidant attachment style, you may be uncomfortable 
in intimate relationships and have a hard time trusting a partner. 
You might not share your feelings and might not even be consciously 
aware of them. 
Indeed, if you had an insecure attachment experience as a child, 
you may tend to see the world and those around you with defensive-
ness and mistrust. It can be hard to maintain a sense of self - esteem, 
and you may be prone to pessimism. When those around you are 
imperfect and say or do things that are imperfect, it can be hard for 
you to forgive and move on. 
According to a very large analysis of the Adult Attachment 
Inventory studies, insecure attachment is correlated with anxiety and 
mood disorders later in life. If you fall into this category, pay extra 
attention to the information and suggestions in chapters 3 and 4 . 
In contrast, secure attachment is correlated with a lower incidence 
of psychiatric disorders than in the general population. 
Whether or not you were securely attached as a child, you can 
still rewire your brain to build a sense of security that will support 
positive relationships. It will require that you, like Marc, feed your 
brain by exposing yourself to social situations that might initially feel 
a little risky. He did it, and so can you. 
Challenging yourself to go beyond your comfort level is easier than it 
initially seems. In preparation for increasing your social relationships, 
you can imagine yourself communicating successfully with others. 
This will stimulate some of the same neurons that you ’ ll be using 
when you actually engage in social interactions. A technique called 
priming
has been used to get people to trust others when they have 
not trusted them in the past. For example, priming has been used suc-
cessfully with Arab and Jewish students in Israel. Positive images and 
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associations of a sense of security are primed in people before they 
interact with others who normally would have seemed unsafe. 
You can also use priming successfully if you are anxious or avoidant 
by disposition. Positive attachment images and associations can be 
primed even by using words such as
love, fortune, hug
, and
support.
By boosting thoughts of caregiving and positive attachment, you can 
increase your feelings of compassion and helping while feeling less 
distress and greater selfl essness. 
To reap the gains of social medicine, you ’ ll need to take risks like 
Marc and expand your sense of security in relationships. The greater 
your efforts, the greater your rewards. If you ’ re lonely, think of it this 
way: you have nothing to lose by putting yourself out there.
Mirror Neurons and Empathy 
Goal - directed behavior and planning for the future are functions of 
your pre - frontal cortex (PFC). It is no wonder that during evolution, 
the expansion of the PFC dramatically differentiated our species 
from other apes. Specifi c neurons in your PFC and in other parts of 
your brain are highly social. As I described in chapter 1 , mirror neu-
rons enhance your capacity for imitation and social learning. 
The early work on mirror neurons involved monkeys and focused 
on an area of the frontal lobe that is associated with expressive 
movements; in the human brain, this is called Broca ’ s area and is 
important in speaking. The discovery of mirror neurons in non-
human primates suggests that our ability to perceive and express 
through gestures is a link to our common ancestor. For our spe-
cies, the transition from phonetic gestural communication to actual 
words paralleled the expansion of the frontal lobes and the mirror 
neuron system. An illustration of the link between imitation and 
mirror neurons is that just listening to someone talk activates the 
listener ’ s tongue muscles. 
Mirror neurons therefore played a key role in the evolution of our 
species. As the social world of our evolutionary ancestors became 
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more complex and favored more sophisticated dimensions of social 
situations, a more complex brain developed that supported these 
social skills. The cortex developed rich layered feedback loops and 
enhanced powers to inhibit instinctual and automatic responses to 
social situations. The capacity for a balanced appraisal of the social 
context and the complexities of each situation had tremendous sur-
vival value, not only by controlling aggression but also by increasing 
the chances of reproductive success in complex social settings. 
During evolution the demands of communication were increased 
by population growth and resource competition. The mirror neurons 
were a complex system for communicating through hand gestures. 
The advantages of enhanced gestural communication, in turn, may 
have contributed to further social development through the imita-
tion of gestures. Mirror neurons may also have evolved through vocal 
communication and sounds that emerged as a sort of protolanguage, 
which gave a huge competitive advantage to our species over oth-
ers and vastly expanded the human potential for empathetic and 
intimate relationships. 
Mirror neurons bestow on you the capacity for many skills. You 
imitate the behavior of another person on the side of your body that 
is the mirror image of the other person ’ s body. That is, if someone 
were to move to strike you with his or her right hand, your impulse 
would be to block it with your left hand. This has adaptive value 
because it enables you to respond quickly to the threat of a physical 
attack. 
Neuroscientists increasingly refer to mirror neurons as an impor-
tant part of our ability to feel empathy for another. Mirror neurons 
have been found in frontal lobes, the back of the parietal lobes, the 
top of the temporal lobes, and the insula. Thus, the mirror neurons 
have a function that is far more complex than just imitation. 
In addition to yawning when you observe another person yawn-
ing, mirror neurons help you to read people ’ s intentions, get a feeling 
for what they are feeling, and empathize with them. Empathy is 
associated with the right