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Hacking Your Brain to Improve Your Life

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The thing about your brain is that it is a complex machine that can be hacked.  Once hacked, your brain can be programmed.  With the body having so many “self-healing” capabilities you would think that the brain would have virus protection for malware built into the immune system. Here are a few examples of how easy it is to hack your brain.

There are health benefits to experiencing laughter.  If you don’t laugh often, hack the brain to experience the benefits by faking your laughter.  Research shows that the benefits from real and fake laughter are similar.   Just as studies show the positive effects of smiling occur whether the smile is fake or real, faked laughter also provides the benefits mentioned above. The body can’t distinguish between ‘fake’ laughter that you just start doing on purpose and ‘real’ laughter that comes from true humor (Scott, 2018). 

  • Physical love is a cool experience, but the brain can be hacked to respond in the same way as if experiencing physical love by playing music.  In fact, music has a direct pathway into the pleasure centers of the brain, according to a 2011 study from McGill University, stimulating the same dopamine areas normally activated during sex (Chamberlin, 2016).
  • If you want someone to say yes, hack their brain and make it hard for them to say no.  If you like hamburgers, you may see that McDonald’s yellow arches and then dopamine goes inside your brain and you want a hamburger and you don’t know why you want it,” she tells Safer.  This may explain why there are so many obese people who cannot just say no to food, says Volkow (CBSNews, 2012).
  • Want to think differently? Train your brain to think positive. Lie to your brain and ignore the negative lies that your brain tells to you. Sometimes the brain will analyze a situation and return a negative outcome, tell you no when the answer should be possibly or yes. You can question the outcome and send a positive response back to your brain for reevaluating.
  • If you have a static-prosthetic limb and want to upgrade to a prosthetic limb that is controlled by your Brain you can upgrade. Brain hacks are helping the disabled more and more every day. 
  • Have you ever wished that you could pick your habits? Hack your brain to develop the habit you want. This hack is not immediate.
  • Want to forget the world? Hypnosis is an oldie but goodie brain hack that has been around for years.
  • Not a hack, but good brain care. Need a program that focuses on improving brain efficiency? Take the time to rest, read, meditate, and challenge your brain.

Do I sound like a Mad Scientist talking about brain hacks?  If this is what you are saying, I have one word for you, marketing.  I am sharing the American Marketing Association’s definition for marking: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”  I prefer the definition provided by this guy in a movie I saw when I was younger.  I don’t remember the guy’s name, but I remember his line.  He said that marketing is something that you use to get people to buy things that they don’t want with money that they don’t have. As I looked for the original quote on the web, I discovered that Dave Ramsey has a similar saying.  Marketing is probably the most used brain-hack of all.  Expand the marketing concept to politics and business.  There is no doubt that politicians and big business are using catch words and phrases as psychokinetic backdoors to hack into our brains to program our opinions and behaviors.  Some politicians are better hackers than others.  Can you feel the emotion and pride stir in you as they talk?   That feeling is because they added the Marketing Twist. One of the greatest traits of a good leader is to get people to do things that they don’t want to do while at the same time convincing the people that it is their decision to do it.  Sounds familiar?   I’ll leave to you to see my point about businesses hacking into our brains for profit. 

Maybe the brain hack analogy is too much.  Lets return to the beginning argument that the brain can be programmed.  There are some really cool things that you can do if you know how to hack the brain.  Not hacking the brain on Tim Tulley’s level, but doing some things intentionally on a Bergado level. The general consensus is that we still know little about the human brain.  But we are learning more each day. Until we get to the point that we can down information directly to our brains, take care of yours. Embrace the brain hacks that are good for you. Beware of brain hackers trying to use scientific research to benefit from hacking your brain. Be your own thinker.

Other Brain Hack Topics:

References

CBSNews. (2012, April 27). Hooked: Why it’s not so easy to “just say no”. Retrieved from CBSNews: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hooked-why-its-not-so-easy-to-just-say-no/

Chamberlin, K. (2016). This Scientific Study Could Rock Your Sexual World in the Best Possible Way. Retrieved from Reader’s Digest: https://www.rd.com/health/wellness/sex-trace-like-state/

Scott, E. (2018, November 5). The Health Benefits of Laughter. Retrieved from Verywell Minded: https://www.verywellmind.com/the-stress-management-and-health-benefits-of-laughter-3145084

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