The brain, like the rest of the body, must be trained daily. And it is that, everything we do in our day to day, from eating, sleeping, reasoning or falling in love, goes through our brain control. Ana Ibaneza pioneer in the application of neuroscience technology to the training of the mind, teaches in her latest book how to develop the brain to influence our mind and our abilities.
“The mind and the control we have over it and its abilities make us live in one way or another, that we are able to achieve our goals, that we use our abilities,” he explains to this newspaper.
A chemical engineer by profession, and a former professional swimmer, she emphasizes that for her “the mind was always very important. At the time when I was training semi-professional swimming, I was very conscious with my physique, I could do a lot with physical training, but the difference was made by my mind”
Is the brain the great unknown?
In fact, I like to say that much more is unknown than what is known about the brain, and all of us who work in neuroscience know it.
Indeed, it is the great unknown, but one of the tasks and objectives that I have is that we stop seeing it as a black box with which we cannot do anything and that is so complex because effectively, as part of our organism, the same that we are capable of changing our muscles, if we train them properly, we can begin to train our brain and make specific changes and patterns that really change us.
Although we don’t know very well what is happening inside, we see that there are very concrete results when we do certain things.
Is making that change a complicated task?
Changing the brain is not very easy, but of course it is not impossible and it is not as difficult as it was thought.
I have been training brains for 16 years and what I see and it surprises me more and more is that the capacity for change we have is extraordinary and that when we make the right guidelines we really see quite rapid changes in our way of feeling and behaving. We can make a brain that is producing stress frequencies produce other types of frequencies. And in that change of functioning in one way or another, you begin to see that you manage to do different things. You concentrate in a different way, you lower your stress on a daily basis and that leads to you using much more of your brain capacity, and you even start to sleep better.
Can the brain be tricked into performing more?
If possible. There is a part of brain training that is related to high performance. It is one of the jobs that I do very actively.
And it is both high professional performance and high sports performance. Both seek to do something that is difficult for our brain to do naturally, which is to spend very little energy so that it can use more of that excess energy to do things that are above average.
So what do you do when you train for high performance? Well, teach the brain to go States that are called the brain flowwhich is like a state of cerebral flow in which what we achieve is that our brain automates specific actions, such as sports movements, so that the brain does not spend effort on this.
And if you are a perfectionist… Can the brain be our great enemy?
When a person is a perfectionist, they rarely feel satisfied with the work done. And this, from the cerebral point of view, is tremendously exhausting because you are sending a message to your brain that no matter what you do, you will never be well enough.
And it is one of the great mental and cerebral exhausters. Perfectionism is great for achieving great results. We have to teach these brains to know how to rest from protectionism. This is achieved once again by training frequencies and it is also achieved by forcing yourself to do certain things. And there is a phrase that I really like, which is in the book, which is: “good things come from hard-working minds, but brilliant things come from free minds.”
In blow your mind You say that stress is good at certain times, why are we so afraid of it?
There is a part of stress that is good. It is the capacity that we have to take the organism beyond what we have normally done. Stress is the basis for achieving new things, for developing… And in that sense, stress is not only necessary, but also good. In fact, subjecting our system to controlled stress rejuvenates us, it causes our system to regenerate itself.
Since the pandemic, cases of anxiety have skyrocketed, what clicks in our brain to make this happen?
Anxiety is the accumulation of negative stress. Many times it has started with positive stress, but since we have not set a time limit on it, it has become negative. And it is that there needs to be nothing at that moment, no stressor element and even so your anxiety rises. That is to say, anxiety is how a brain mechanism becomes, in this case, it happens without you calling it, without there being something, it’s like stress has become chronic. Anxiety must be treated in a similar way to stress, in that you have to take a new perspective.
In the book I explain some guidelines to calm anxiety. In the end, it is treating our brain as if it were actually a child having a tantrum. It is a tantrum that comes from within, at the brain level.
Have new technologies made our brain “dumb”?
The new technologies are influencing the brain a lot and I think we have to be fair and say that there are things that are positive and things that are negative.
The positives are that we are seeing that there are brains that are much more multidisciplinary. They are capable of changing information faster, they are more flexible when faced with changes in information, and they can also receive it from different media. What’s negative? Well, this change of attention so quickly makes sustained attention less exercised and this is a problem on a day-to-day basis, because to do things well we need to dedicate time and be able to attend in a concrete way and in a sustained time, and this technologies go against.
We still do not know the positive of new technologies. I think it is important to stay very close to what is still manual, playing and reading, because that is what is exercising our sustained attention and being able to combine it to find balance.