Amazing Cerebellum

• Attitude counts for much.
  
• Optimism trumps pessimism.
  
• A hopeful spirit sees the good in everything.
  
• Satisfaction comes to those who make the effort.
  
• Expunge troublesome thoughts from your mind; replace them with forward-looking and achievable goals to enhance your life.
  
• If you let yourself fester in misery, you will become miserable.
  
• Always look on the bright side of life.
  
• A sunny personality is its own salvation.
  
• You can and will make yourself ill by thinking ill.
  
• Pull yourself out of depression.
• Be determined to be the best you can.
• Remember, people have faced much worse, and survived.
• Look to the future with full appreciation of your potential.
  

As though wishing could make it so. Think again. It might, it can. Neuroscience is teaching us just that.

The brain, evidently, is capable of learning from itself. Or from outside intervention. Medical science is continually discovering new and surprising things about ourselves. And there is much yet to be learned. But a new discovery, labelled neuroplasticity lets us know that the brain and its channelling of what it learns and what it knows and what it memorizes is not immutable.

Medical science now realizes that we don't use all of the potential of our prodigious brains. And that if a portion of the brain is somehow damaged, becomes non-functional, with time and training, another intact portion of the brain can become capable of resuming that particular function that was fractionated by damage.

The brain, it would appear, is capable of "thinking itself" into a new anatomic configuration. To take over a supervisory and functional role it was hitherto incapable of producing. Responding to injury with functional reorganization. Just as some primitive life forms are capable of re-growing severed limbs.

Evidently the potential to restructure our capabilities is available to elderly brains just as it is with younger ones. Plasticity is available to anyone in the right circumstances. We can teach an injured brain to over-ride its injuries; either by outside intervention through a series of electrical stimuli formulated for that very purpose, or by our own mental resources.

Determination, knowledge, understanding and application can result in charging our brain's electrical impulses to alter and amend. Described as a solid quantification of the power of thought. Experimentation is ongoing and exciting and promising, but yet relatively primitive in its scientific application.

We are malleable as reasonable and intelligent human beings. New ideas are accessible and help to change our way of thinking, enabling acceptance of things we might previously have rejected through lack of opportunity to discern, to weigh and balance. In just the same way our brains can be malleable, in being taught to perform functions that illuminate and assist us in formulating a way of life that promises to enhance our experiences.

History has proven that culture and tradition can form peoples' understanding and lead them to limit themselves or to open themselves to new experiences. We are vulnerable to being exploited by those who seek to use other human beings as pawns. We can as easily become victimized, and accept that condition, as we can also become liberated because we choose to use our native intelligence and make the suitable choices.

We know all of that from experience, from history. How populations can be accepting of a despotic rule, succumb to a truncation of human liberties. Religions and the beliefs and blind trust they evoke in the human mind have the capacity to enrich us or to entrap us. There are entire populations which silently consent to severe restrictions of their human potential simply because they become trapped into accepting the seeming inevitability of their existence.

Why should we then be surprised that the individual human has the potential to self-suggestibility with the capability to become egotistical, ambitious, charitable, tyrannical, or self-effacing, devotional, sacrificial? All, after all, part and parcel of human emotions, symptomatic of the way we react as human beings to situations and life in general.

The big idea here is that we can form ourselves, convince ourselves and our brains to react and behave in ways other than what has formerly pertained. We are fully capable of transforming ourselves. We can become other than what we have been.

Come to think of it, there's nothing all that new in that discovery. It's always been with us, we've always been aware that keen determination can help us accomplish anything. Just kind of interesting to have that scientific validation.