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Change your focus, change your brain

Thursday, June 7, 2012

A small change in how you focus your mind can perhaps permanently alter your brain. Yes, this can go a long way towards improving your health and happiness. As far fetched as this may seem, Carol Kershaw and Bill Wade, two respected psychotherapists have based their practices on such an idea. By combining psychology, bio and neurofeedback, and hypnotherapy, they have found that by changing what you pay attention to changes your mental state while significantly changing the structure of the neural networks that control your mental state.

Although many aspects of their theory, which they label Brain Change Therapy, are rather new and refreshing, many related ideas have been discussed for several decades – if not longer.. For instance, starting with the work of Santiago Ramon Cajal, in the late 19th and early 20th century, scientists started looking at how the brain affects personality. Until the 1970’s, it was widely accepted that the brain’s structure and functions were fixed. Later several scientists, such as Michael Merzenich, David Hubel, and Torsten Wiesel, began discovering how the brain can be changed if a person merely started thinking differently. This idea was further built upon by Edward Taub, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, as he started using the concept of brain plasticity during the treatment of stroke patients. Therefore, the previous ideas that the brain is fixed has pretty much been debunked.

What Kershaw and Wade have contributed is specifically how changing one’s focus and attention can be used to change many mental health concerns as well as aiding business owners and executives as the face their typical challenges.

Dr. Carol Wade and Dr. Bill Wade, who are the directors of the Ericksonian Institute of Houston, will be my guests at 9 a.m. Central Time on It’s Your Life on WDNG.net.

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Keywords: psychology, hypnotherapy, biofeedback

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