An article about the structure of the brain might not at first sound like it has much to do with personal development; rather, you would perhaps think it is intended for neuroscientists or researchers in artificial intelligence. If that is what you think, this article will hopefully be an eye-opener for you as the structure of the brain has everything to do with personal development.

The structure I will talk about is not the division of the brain into different specialized areas like hearing, seeing and language. Rather the interesting structural aspect is that all the areas are built of a common component and they communicate in a common way. The brain has a lot of responsibilities but the remarkable fact is that all the functions of the brain is made up of a common unit namely the neuron. Each neuron has one or many inputs where it recieves signals and depending on these signals the neuron decides what kind of signal it will output. The output of the neuron is then used for input to one or many other neurons that in turn decide how their output signal will be like. Each neuron will learn to recognize the most common pattern in the input signals. The output signal is then a measure of how much this neuron thinks it has recognized the pattern it normally sees. Think of each little neuron as a man (or woman!) that recieves a message (the input signals) and if he thinks the message is addressed to him he will start to yell and scream to his friends that someone sent him a message

Continuing with the metaphor of the little man, your brain consists of about 100 billion men who on the average have 7000 friends With so many men and so much communication (and so much screaming!) it is possible for the little men to transfer the knowledge of very complex patterns from one part of the brain to another. Although the communication between the men happens very fast, it is not instantaneous and therefore there might be a slight delay from when your eyes see a piece of chocolate till you remember that you are actually on a diet and should not eat it. The delay is what underlies the experience of one thought triggering another, which then triggers another and so on and so on. Each thought you have is the snapshot of what the little men are communicating to the conscious part of your brain (the “you”) in that very moment.

The key point to notice about how the brain works with respect to personal development is that each neuron/man learns and adjusts the trigger-pattern as time progresses. Therefore the concepts that your little men communicate will change according to what kind of input they recieve. So in a very real sense what you feed your brain is also a controlling factor in what you will get out of it. Knowing this will hopefully strengthen what you already know : that a life of continual learning and stimulating experiences is also the best way to enrichen your “inner life” - that is the voice inside your head that encapsulates your thoughts.

That we are all born with free will (although this is debatable among philosphers, we can assume this without any consequence for the thesis of this article) is what makes it possible to direct the communication going on in your brain. You can not control everything inside your brain, in that you can not decide which thought is triggered by what thought (what is known as your associations), but you can control the communication by controlling your focus. When you consciously focus on one particular thing, you are in effect deciding what group of men you will listen to and all other men will then be silenced or atleast muffled somewhat - we all know how hard it can be to concentrate with loud music in the background or other distracting factors. While you focus on a particular group of men, the message that they tell you is what will enter your conscious mind and what enters your conscious mind is conveniently also used as input to the rest of the brain - this means that what you focus on will be part of the information the neurons/men learn from and therefore contribute to the development of your brain (and consequently you).

The techniques and ideas of personal development are all either directly or indirectly designed to affect the way the men in your brain communicate and the patterns they react to. Learning how to do this in an intelligent way will make your personal abilities a result of your design rather than the random product of the information and thoughts you have been unconsciously feeding your brain in the past. Learning such techniques will put you in the driver’s seat of your own personal development. Learning such techniques will let you design your destiny!