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Neurons can learn. If you spend any time at all driving down a typical city street or watching commercial television, one of the constant inputs into your brain is "I see food. I see food. I see food."
Neurons can learn. If you spend any time at all driving down a typical city street or watching commercial television, one of the constant inputs into your brain is "I see food. I see food. I see food." Eventually the hunger neuron does not need to get electrical information from the "I see food" neuron to fire.
Similarly, if you develop a condition called insulin resistance, your blood sugar levels gradually creep up more and more over a period of months or years. Eventually the blood sugar level neuron's input is not important to the hunger neuron, either.
These changes are part of a phenomenon known as neural plasticity . Neurons inside the brain (and out) rewire themselves on the basis of how often they are stimulated. If your brain is constantly bombarded with images of food, the food sensing neurons that relay an electrical charge to your appetite neurons get more and more connected so it takes less and less of a stimulus to make them fire.
Something similar happens to the blood sugar sensing neuron. The "I see food" neuron fires so often that eventually "I am thinking about food" or "I drove by the Big Boy sign" sends a strong message to the hunger neuron. This message is so strong that it overrides the "But my blood sugar levels are fine" message from the blood sugar neuron.
What happens here is feedback disinhibition . This is literally a condition of inhibiting inhibition because there is feedback from the hunger neuron "I'm going to eat anyway." The "But my blood sugar levels are fine" message simply gets ignored as the brain rewires itself to adjust for stimuli it receives over and over and over again.
Neural plasticity, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. Jon Gabriel figured out that one way to correct this problem was to imagine being chased by wild animals so his hunger would go away. Fortunately for Gabriel and his readers, most of us are not chased by wild animals that want to eat us in our daily lives, so our brains are still sensitive to this input.
Gabriel realized that it is possible to change the central integrative state of a functional unit of neurons by changing the central integrative state of a single neuron. How did he do this?
Gabriel managed to change his central integrative state by imagining himself being chased by lions and tigers and bears. The neuron that reports "Danger! Danger!" to the brain had not been activated so many time that the brain stopped paying attention to it. And because of the way that nerve cell is wired into the rest of the brain, the sensation of danger, whether real or imagined, scared Jon Gabriel's brain into making it easy for him to avoid eating so he could lose weight.
You may not need to imagine yourself being chased by wild animals. You might be able to scare yourself thin just be reading the many, many reports of how overweight can shorten your life. Or rob you of your sex life. Or bankrupt you. Or leave you old and lonely, surrounded by a house full of cats. Or just make you look fat.
Whatever you need to do be "scared straight" from overeating, consider doing it. Your brain is hard wired to make dieting easier when you do.
These changes are part of a phenomenon known as neural plasticity . Neurons inside the brain (and out) rewire themselves on the basis of how often they are stimulated. If your brain is constantly bombarded with images of food, the food sensing neurons that relay an electrical charge to your appetite neurons get more and more connected so it takes less and less of a stimulus to make them fire.
Something similar happens to the blood sugar sensing neuron. The "I see food" neuron fires so often that eventually "I am thinking about food" or "I drove by the Big Boy sign" sends a strong message to the hunger neuron. This message is so strong that it overrides the "But my blood sugar levels are fine" message from the blood sugar neuron.
What happens here is feedback disinhibition . This is literally a condition of inhibiting inhibition because there is feedback from the hunger neuron "I'm going to eat anyway." The "But my blood sugar levels are fine" message simply gets ignored as the brain rewires itself to adjust for stimuli it receives over and over and over again.
Neural plasticity, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. Jon Gabriel figured out that one way to correct this problem was to imagine being chased by wild animals so his hunger would go away. Fortunately for Gabriel and his readers, most of us are not chased by wild animals that want to eat us in our daily lives, so our brains are still sensitive to this input.
Gabriel realized that it is possible to change the central integrative state of a functional unit of neurons by changing the central integrative state of a single neuron. How did he do this?
Gabriel managed to change his central integrative state by imagining himself being chased by lions and tigers and bears. The neuron that reports "Danger! Danger!" to the brain had not been activated so many time that the brain stopped paying attention to it. And because of the way that nerve cell is wired into the rest of the brain, the sensation of danger, whether real or imagined, scared Jon Gabriel's brain into making it easy for him to avoid eating so he could lose weight.
You may not need to imagine yourself being chased by wild animals. You might be able to scare yourself thin just be reading the many, many reports of how overweight can shorten your life. Or rob you of your sex life. Or bankrupt you. Or leave you old and lonely, surrounded by a house full of cats. Or just make you look fat.
Whatever you need to do be "scared straight" from overeating, consider doing it. Your brain is hard wired to make dieting easier when you do.
- Gabriel, Jon. The Gabriel Method: The Revolutionary Diet-Free Way to Transform Your Body (Atria Books/Beyond Words, 2009).
- Photo by shutterstock.com