YOUR BRAIN IS EVOLVING

Super Brain- Chopra

All the beneficial choices you
make are ways to evolve your
brain. At a certain level, this is
slow going; it took hundreds of
millions of years for the most
primitive animal brains to grow
and develop into the
spectacularly sophisticated
human brain.

< If you choose to grow and

develop, you are guiding your
own evolution <
Super brain is the
product of
conscious evolution.
Biology fuses with
the mind. Up to the
time you were
around age twenty,
nature took care of
your physical
development, which
happened more or
less automatically.
Learning foreign
languages also has
its optimal age,
which peaks in late
adolescence.
Timothy Doner, age sixteen, a
high school student in New York
City who decided to learn
modern Hebrew in 2009.

“It took him four days to learn the

alphabet, he said, a week to read uidly.
Then he dived into Russian, Italian,
Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwa,
Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Yiddish,
Dutch, Croatian, and German, teaching
himself mostly from grammar books and
ash card applications on his iPhone.”
Conscious evolution leads to super brain, which isn’t
freakish, disordered, or abnormal in any way. Black
specks on a page would have baffled our remote
ancestors, but the brains of those early Homo
sapiens were already evolved enough to permit
language and reading.
Whose Face Is That?
Shows that the brain, when
trained at the optimal time, can
take a quantum leap with a skill
that is already built into it.
A striking example is face
blindness, or prosopagnosia.

At first, scientists connected face blindness to traumatic injuries.

In extreme cases, you cannot recognize even your own face.
They have defects in a part of the temporal lobe that is wired to recognize not
only faces but also body shapes, colors, and words.
The people with face blindness are defective in the fusiform gyrus, a part of the
temporal lobe that is connected to recognizing not just faces but also body shape,
colors, and words. Oddly, it can take years before someone discovers that they have this
defect. Using an excuse like “I’m bad with faces”

Five visual patches in the back of the brain register sights unconsciously. For us to see
them consciously, these signals must be relayed to the cerebral cortex in the front.
When this circuitry doesn’t work properly, recognition is absent.
But there is another side to face blindness. Some people display the
opposite ability—they are “super recognizers,”

Super recognizers remember almost every face

they’ve ever encountered.
 If face blindness is a brain defect, what is super
recognition?

Far more mysterious is how a damaged or diseased brain

can outperform a healthy one. That is the case with savant
syndrome, now considered a form of autism but sometimes
related to injury to the right temporal lobe. Those who
suer from savant syndrome (they used to be called “idiot
savants”) lack simple, everyday abilities but possess
extraordinary ones.

The adult brain is evolving when a person learns to manage

anger, fly a jet, or develop compassion. The rich possibility
of change demonstrates how evolution really works.
The Four-part Brain
For simplicity, we are going to divide the functions of your
brain into four phases: Instinctive, Emotional, Intellectual,
Intuitive
The Instinctive Phase of the Brain
From these beginnings, the oldest phase of the brain evolved, the
instinctive brain. It corresponds to behavior that is programmed
by our genome expressly for the purpose of survival.

In the triune (three-part) model of the brain,

• the oldest part is the reptilian brain, or brain stem, designed
for survival. It houses vital control centers for breathing,
swallowing, and heartbeat, among other things. It also prompts
hunger, sex, and the ght-or-ight response.
• The limbic system was next to evolve. It houses the emotional
brain and short-term memory. Emotions based on fear and
desire evolved to serve the instinctive drives of the reptilian
brain.
• The most recent development is the neocortex, the region for
intellect, decision making, and higher reasoning. As our reptilian
and limbic brains drive us to do what we need for survival, the
neocortex represents the intelligence to achieve our ends while
also placing restraints on our emotions and instinctive impulses.
Most important for super brain, the neocortex is the center
for self-awareness, free will, and choice, making us the user
and potentially the master of the brain.
For simplicity, we are going to divide the functions of your
brain into four phases: Instinctive, Emotional, Intellectual,
Intuitive