1. Meet Your Mind

2. The Traditional View of the Mind
 The mind is “the element of a person that enables them to be
aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel”
(Wikipedia)
 The above definition of the mind describes quite well the everyday
understanding of what is “our mind”
 However, this everyday understanding of the mind does not
recognize the overwhelming influence of subconscious processes
on virtually every function of the mind (awareness of the world,
thinking, feeling) mentioned above
 For that we need to look at the underlying physical system, i.e. the
nervous system

3. The Nervous System
 As the illustration shows, the nervous
system has three basic parts, namely:
1. The central nervous system
which includes the brain and the
spinal cord
2. the peripheral nervous system
linking the brain and spinal cord to
the sensory organs and muscles or
glands that release hormones
3. The autonomic nervous system
which manages everything else in our
body ranging from managing body
temperature, keeping the heart
pumping, dilating eyes, breathing,
digesting

4. Building Blocks of the Nervous System
 The building block of the nervous system is the nerve cell, or
neuron
 Each neuron is composed of
• a cell body which is like a min-brain in sense that it processes,
i.e. determines an appropriate response to an external stimulus
(as provided by the sensory organs like eyes and ears) or to a
message received from other neurons
• An axon which is like a microphone in the sense that the cell
“talks” to other cells to which it has a connection, called synapse
• dendrites which are like earphones in the sense that the cells
“listens” to what other cells it is connected with have to say to it

5. Building Blocks of the Nervous System
Source: http://spiritrambler2.blogspot.com/

6. Neural Networks
 The nervous system is composed of 100 billion neurons
in the brain alone, with additional cells in other parts of
the nervous system described earlier
 An average cell may be connected to from one thousand
to ten thousand other cells
 Cells in a given part of the nervous system are
connected to other cells in that part or other in other
parts of the nervous system to form “neural networks”

7. Neural Networks
 Each neural network carries out a specific function
 For example, the visual network describes the photons
of light entering our eyes to specific parts of the brain
which, after seemingly instantaneous but nevertheless
extremely sophisticated internal processing by the
subconscious, is presented to the conscious part of our
brain as what our “eyes are seeing”
 A vast variety of the functions of our nervous system,
ranging from causing heartbeats and digestion to walking
and running and memorizing to determining various
aspects of our personality have been traced to specific
neural networks

8. Neural Networks and Our Personality
 Our personality has been shown to be shaped by the
operation of specific neural networks
 For example, some people are resilient in the sense that they
can take serious setbacks in a stride, while others find life
unbearable to the extent that similar setbacks would send
them into depression
 These differences are reflected in the physical nature of a
neural network that has been named the “Resilience
Network”
 More resilient people have been found to have specific parts
of the Resilience Network to actually have thicker nerves
present there than in less resilient people!

9. Strengthening our Personality
 Other networks have been identified whereby some
people are more motivated than others, some have social
skills that others lack and so forth
 Thus our resilience to stress, motivation, focus, social
skills are reflected in the physical nature of the
underlying neural network
 In addition, it has been shown that just as there is an
underlying physical basis for our thoughts and
personalities, our thoughts can bring about physical
changes in the underlying neural networks as well

10. End