Super Brain

As an avid promoter of my favorite television network, PBS, I'd like to share a program I recently watched called Super Brain which is based off of Tanzi and Chopra's newly released and NYT best-selling book also titled, you guessed it, Super Brain! Tanzi and Chopra are both Neuroscientists at Mass General and professors at Harvard Medical School. As the world's foremost experts on the causes of Alzheimer's disease they have developed a model that uses the brain to maximize overall well-being or as they put it, teach people to "use/control your brain instead of letting it use/control you." They have done this by focusing on three areas of the brain:

     1. The Reptilian brain- controls our (animal) instincts

     2. The Limbic brain- controls our emotions

     3. The Neocortex- controls our intellect

Their theory is that if we can learn to become more aware of when one area of the brain is reigning over the others, we can teach our brain to behave differently and in a sense rewire ourselves. The book is based off of the premise that when one area of the brain is dominant, a person lacks the potential of attaining the highest possible quality of life. Examples they use are overly aggressive behavior in business as a symptom of the reptilian brain, a stereotypical drama queen as a result of the limbic brain and a snotty intellectual as a by-product of the neocortex. Each of these examples lacks a fundamental component to overall happiness and actually affects our health and longevity. As someone who has admittedly been guilty of and/or witnessed all of these examples on different occasions in my life and can vouch for the negative consequences, I found this theory to be particularly compelling as there is always room for self-improvement. The book lays out a number of exercises to achieving this ideal harmony known as the super brain. Let's just say it has topped my winter book list of most interesting must-reads. And leave it to the art world to shed light on all of this mumbo jumbo in a much more graceful and thought-provoking manner, at least that is how I have interpreted photographer David Maisel's project depicted below titled History Shadow.