The Brain

Like a computer with an Operating System, our brain is the learning center of our consciousness in the physical world we inhabit. During our childhood, it stores knowledge and memories that will allow us to survive and help us to experience our inner self in all the different kind of situations in our lives. However, even if this computer is self-sufficient during our childhood, it needs new data to function properly afterwards: our adult experiences must be used to give it new lines of code to enable it to evolve in phase with our understanding of the world and thus be a better instrument of communication between our consciousness, whose agenda is to live as many exhilarating experiences as possible, preferably positive ones, and our body, therefore, to be the perfect tool to build our happiness.

However, quite often we are unaware of the fact that we can change our way of thinking, that is to say to rewrite our lines of code ad infinitum to create updates for our brain, and remain more or less satisfied with the basic software implanted at our birth. This software is a survival one with learning modules that do not evolve. Once a learning is anchored, it lasts all our life if we do not modify it. It induces reflex emotions related to our early life experiences which, while relevant when we were one year old, are much less so when we are 40, and “beliefs/truths” taught to us by our referent adults without us having the tools to validate or invalidate them.

As my life progressed and each of my encounters  changed my vision of the world, I modified most of my lines of code. The moment when, after several months of therapy and after reading “Transform your life” by Louise L. Hay, I stopped living with a permanent fear screwed to my body thanks to the fact that I had finally understood that the universe’s main goal wasn’t to harm me and that no real danger awaited me around every corner, I’ve changed an essential line of code in my brain, involving subsequently the almost automatic change of many other less important ones.

However, this change did not happen overnight. Indeed, automatisms are tenacious because they are physically anchored in our neural connections and new connections must be physically created by our body in our brain to design other new paths. Nevertheless, the neural connections that we no longer use do not disappear from our brains. So, it is not because you change a line of code that your brain will transform it into a new reflex the next day. Additionally to that, our brain has encoded reflex emotions/behaviours for nearly every moment of our lives and programmed them into our survival module to automatically surface for every similar situation.
Therefore, the new lines of code take a long time before being able to emerge first and becoming reflexes. It is then up to us to bring them back to consciousness whenever we need them. Repetition is the key, it’s how our brain learns, by repeating actions, sentences, processes… It thus requires mental gymnastics and sustained attention in our daily lives for several weeks or months to imprint them as reflexes – studies have shown that it takes from 66 to 350 days to learn and embrace a new behaviour or way of thinking -, but it always pays off. As in every sport, the process is particularly tiring, the creation of new neural systems requiring a lot of energy from our body. Why do you think babies sleep so much?