Welcome to this week's brief discussion about the brain, which is also number 12 of Napoleon Hill's 13 principles to help guide you to a successful life. Let's begin with what sounds like a start to a riddle. How often do you think about your brain? While all of your organs are vital to keeping you alive, your brain is what makes you different from everyone else. Hill believed the brain to be the most spectacular creation in the history of the world and made sure to include some space in his book, Think and Grow Rich, to review its amazing functions.
Thinking About The Brain
To achieve the kind of success you want, you must have a basic understanding of how your brain works. Then you can understand how and why you think the way you do so you can develop the part of your thinking mind that looks toward the positive rather than the negative.Below are chunks of information to help you to ponder and digest how you think about the brain.
1. Nerve Cells
Your brain has a lot of nerve cells — billions of them — arranged in certain patterns that produce emotion, behavior, thought and movement; they control the five senses. Your body is a road map of nerves that connect your brain to various parts. Communication between the brain and these parts happens in almost an instant. For example, if you shut your hand in a car door, it seems like no time elapses between the door shutting and pain starting. However, your hand nerve sent a message to your brain that the hand was squashed, and the brain registered it as pain, sending the message back to the hand that it was in distress … amazing when you think about how fast that communication happens involuntarily.
2. Cerebrum
You probably think of your brain as the lumpy mass with the folds and wrinkles you see in most pictures; that’s the biggest part of the brain, and it's called the cerebrum. It is divided into two halves by a deep crevasse, with each half called a hemisphere. The hemispheres communicate back and forth through nerves at the bottom of the crevasse. Ironically, the left hemisphere usually handles messages from the right side of the body and vice-versa.
3. Lobes
The lobes of the brain are inside of the cerebrum. A brief description of each lobe is provided below.
The frontal lobe: controls thinking, organizing, short-term memory and movement
The parietal lobe: handles taste, touch and temperature
The occipital lobe: interprets what your eyes see and matches it up with long-term memory
The temporal lobe: handles smell and sound along with some memory function
4. Brain Stem
The lowest part of the brain is the brain stem, and it's connected to the spinal cord. The brain stem is responsible for a lot of life functions, such as breathing, heart rate, blood pressure and regulating your sleep.
5. Electricity
Electricity is how your brain makes cells communicate with one another. When a nerve cell is stimulated, it releases an electric impulse, which releases chemicals that act as the messengers. These messengers are called neurotransmitters. Millions of these communications happen every second between cells, also called neurons. It’s this communication process that allows us to do so many things we take for granted, like think, move and talk.
Summary
I’m just so in awe of this machine in our head that we call the brain. It handles what we need to survive, and gives us such intangibles as our personalities, attitudes, and likes and dislikes. As you're striving for success and working to change your mindset, take a moment to appreciate everything that is going on in your brain. It truly is a miracle.If you're looking for guidance on how to harness the power of your brain to change your mindset and achieve success, I’d love to help.
To catch up on my series about how Napoleon Hill's 13 principles help you live the life you desire, start here: "Fuel Your Desire and Live Your Dream."