Episode Summary
Today I came across a profound piece of neuroscience that effectively allows us to travel back in time and change the past and its effect on us. In this episode I tell you where I discovered this and what it is.
Episode Transcript (Edited)
Hi and welcome to today’s episode of Hope Help, happiness.
Yesterday I talked about whether to choose distraction or disputing my thoughts if ever I found myself in an explanatory style that’s likely to send me into a low. I came up with choosing distraction because it’s the quickest one I can implement.
I’m going to use an elastic band on my wrist. Every time I find myself facing adversity and thinking in a pessimistic style, I will sharply snap the band on my wrist and then start thinking about something else by being mindful.
I only set that up yesterday and nothing’s happened yet to allow me to go through that process so I have nothing to report.
What I want to do today is talk about changing the past – a form of time travel I suppose.
I was watching another Impact Theory interview today from Tom Bilyeu’s channel with a chap called Moran Cerf.
He’s a former hacker, turned neuroscientist who now has a Phd in neuroscience and is doing all sorts of amazing research in that field.
In the interview they got on the subject memory, which in itself is a fascinating subject. Tom had just made a statement about your identity is related to your success.
Moran explained the same thing in neuroscience terms.
He basically said every time we access a memory, something that has happened to us from the past, when we pull it out, we pull out our narrative around that memory. This may or may not be true to reality because we have a certain amount of biases that affect our thinking.
We pull out a memory and it’s our version of reality. What we tend to do when we process that memory is we add to it or change it in some way.
When we put it back into our memory, it is different. It has changed. So when we access again, we pull out that changed version of the memory.
I found this absolutely fascinating because what he then went on to say is that we can choose and change our memories. We can go and change our memory of what’s happened to us in the past.
This is how therapy works.
I thought this was a absolutely profound statement. And I’ll put a link to the video is in the show notes for this and implore you to go and watch it yourself.
What he said gave me hope that I can deal with the challenges that cause me to go into a low train of thought – and that I can do that consciously.
I think the timing of that quote coupled with what I’m reading in the book Learned Optimism, couldn’t have come at a better moment. It justifies how the stuff I’ll be doing from Learned Optimism will actually work.
So a short episode today, but I just thought I’d share that with you because I think it’s really, really powerful.
Until tomorrow.
