Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life

Brain - Based Therapy: Adult
and
Brain - Based 
Therapy: Child
, were written for professionals to help them teach 
their patients to rewire their brains, and they were based on these 
new discoveries.
Rewire Your Brain
explains how this information can 
be used directly by you. This book tells you how you can make use of 
the new discoveries in neuroscience. I will defi ne and describe the 
following areas and explain how they can be relevant to your life: 
•
Neuroplasticity 
•
Neurogenesis 
•
Social systems, such as mirror neurons
•
Nutritional neuroscience 
The new discoveries in neuroscience shed light on how you can 
maximize your potential and minimize your vulnerabilities. I will 
describe how to apply these fi ndings to rewire your brain so that you 
can feel calm and positive. So much hinges on these two abilities: 
by learning to be calm and positive, you can improve your ability to 
focus, face challenges, reach your goals, and be happy. 
Learning to be calm means feeling less tense, less anxious, and 
less easily stressed. There are parts of your brain that, when not 
tamed, tend to overreact and add to needless tension, anxiety, and 
stress. In this book I ’ ll describe how to get those parts rewired. The 
bottom line is this: how you train yourself to think, feel, and behave 
on a regular basis will rewire your brain and allow you to be calm 
and focused. 
Thanks to the new discoveries in neuroscience, we know much 
more about how the brain works and how you can rewire the parts 
of the brain that are out of balance with the others, having become 
either overactivated or underactivated. I ’ ll describe how those spe-
cifi c parts of your brain tend to become overactivated and deregulated 
when you feel down in the dumps, lose your optimism, and look 
only at the dark side. Things don ’ t look as bright as they could 
look, and the glass is half empty when it could just as easily seem 
half full. I will describe how to activate the parts of your brain that 
c01.indd 2
c01.indd 2
1/29/10 10:09:17 AM
1/29/10 10:09:17 AM

---

F i r i n g t h e R i g h t C e l l s To g e t h e r
3
must be regulated and balanced so that you feel positive about your 
life and see the glass as (at least) half full. You ’ ll learn to calm down 
in the face of stress and boost your mood when you ’ re down. You ’ ll 
also learn to improve your memory, have better relationships, and 
get a good night ’ s sleep, all of which rewire your brain and thus 
enable you to be calmer and feel more positive.
Nurtured Nature 
In order to rewire your brain, the fi rst thing you should do is learn 
how the brain works. Your brain works in response to and in rela-
tion to the world around you. We have moved far away from the old 
debate on nature versus nurture; now we are able to “ nurture nature. ”
Since your brain is not hardwired but is really “ soft - wired, ” your expe-
rience plays a major role in how you nurture your nature. 
The brain weighs just three pounds, yet it ’ s one of the most 
advanced organs in the body. It has a hundred billion nerve cells, 
called
neurons
, and many more support cells. That ’ s equivalent to 
the number of stars in our galaxy. 
Let ’ s start with the brain ’ s architecture. The neurons are clus-
tered in the parts of the brain that have been called
modules
: the 
cortex (the outer layer, which has two hemispheres), the four lobes, 
and the subcortical (below the cortex) modules. 
There has been a lot of hype about the character of the two halves 
of the brain. “ Right - brain ” people were said to be more creative, even 
more spiritual than “ left - brain ” people. The left - brain people were 
described as more rigid and picky. That hype, born in the 1970s, still 
exists, but many people who were instrumental in starting this fad 
have long since abandoned it. The truth is that the two hemispheres 
work together in everything you do. The brain contains a band of 
fi bers called the