Switch Brain Off Quotes

and just like that, I shut off the switch to my brain.

Frame your world with your words.

And, hey. You. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's as creepy as hell. Thank you for seeking out stories, the kind that take place in your brain.

I wished there was some kind of switch on my brain. That I could turn it off in the same way that I could turn off the television. Just click it off and immediately empty my mind of all these images and worrying thoughts. And simply leave a blank screen. Or if I could just remove my head and put it on the bedside table and forget about it until morning. And then attach it again when I needed it.

I wish my brain had an off switch. Maybe that way I could get some sleep.

A switch went off in the rear of my brain and the animal came out to play.

I'd love to watch TV all the time, but it rots our brains. Before I came down from Heaven Ma left it on all day long and got turned into a zombie that's like a ghost but walks 'thump thump.' So now she always switches off after one show, then the cells multiply again in the day and we can watch another show after dinner and grow more brains in our sleep.

Our choices—the natural consequences of our thoughts and imagination—get “under the skin” of our DNA and can turn certain genes on and off, changing the structure of the neurons in our brains. So our thoughts, imagination, and choices can change the structure and function of our brains on every level:

If only you could command your brain to actually do that. It would be cool to have some kind of remote control to switch off your thoughts. Thoughts off, Siri. Or, more positive thoughts, Siri. Forget about this thought, Siri. if only.

...Sonja had to switch off. She turned down that knob in her brain that let her take in the world at full blast...

While I'm in the water, I’m laughing and laughing. All my automatic thoughts switch off. I always dip my head under to make sure the cold gets to my brain. And afterwards, I can’t remember what was even worrying me. A switch has been flicked. It’s a physical thing.

I am a knitting fool. It's a quiet pastime, and a productive one. It enables one to join in the conversation or switch one's brain off, according to the interest or the excruciating dullness of what is being discussed. And the product does keep people warm and comfortable.

I just have to be normal Starr at normal Williamson and have a normal day. That means flipping the switch in my brain so I’m Williamson Starr. Williamson Starr doesn’t use slang—if a rapper would say it, she doesn’t say it, even if her white friends do. Slang makes them cool. Slang makes her “hood.” Williamson Starr holds her tongue when people piss her off so nobody will think she’s the “angry black girl.” Williamson Starr is approachable. No stank-eyes, side-eyes, none of that. Williamson Starr is nonconfrontational. Basically, Williamson Starr doesn’t give anyone a reason to call her ghetto. I can’t stand myself for doing it, but I do it anyway.

Roth grinned then. Anyway, back to me. I'm all better and I am back. He slid me a sly look that made me want to punch him instead of cry into my pillow like a baby. I'm sure I was missed. He took a big bite of the hamburger and grinned around the mouthful. A lot. I didn't know what happened that switched my emotions so fast. The hurt his rejection had left behind exploded into rage- like the head-spinning, spraying-green-vomit kind of rage. My brain kicked off. I wasn't thinking as I reached over and plucked the hamburger right out of his hand. Twisting at the waist, I threw the hamburger on the floor behind Roth as hard as I could. The satisfactory splat it made as ketchup and mayo splattered like a gruesome burger massacre brought a wide smile to my face.

Hot.” The last word, barely a whisper, lost itself in my hair as he pressed his lips to that spot just below my ear that can, apparently, flip the off switch in my brain. Before I realized it my hands were inside that jacket, stroking the hard planes of his chest and stomach. And then, as if moving without any prompting from me they reached down, undid his belt, pulled it loose, and…“Ahhh, that feels great,” I moaned.“I am completely grossed out over here!” Cassandra informed us.Vayl, who’d been peering down at me with an expression of utter disbelief, stared at Cassandra over the top of my head. “It is not what you think,” he assured her.“As if I’d do something that disgusting,” I said, pulling away from him, but keeping the belt, because the buckle relieved the itching so much better than fingernails. I continued using it to scratch the inflamed skin across my stomach as I sat down by Cassandra. “You are pathetic,” she told me. “I’d get all offended, but I’m pretty sure you’re right.

Those men who on the off-chance happened to be taller than her often had some genetic species-survival switch tripped in their brain that made them crave women on the opposite end of the height spectrum, to balance out the gene pool. 

I felt something switch off in my brain at that moment, as if I was suddenly on standby, not able to function at full capacity. I later learned that this is called disassociation. When your brain disconnects to protect you from stress or trauma.

It was the feeling she'd had when Sam had first kissed her in the pub. When he'd first put his lips against her. She didn't know if she'd imagined it or if it had just been the effects of the booze, but it had felt as if a thousand flash bulbs were going off in her brain. As if someone had turned on a very bright, very intense light. And she;d sure as hell never wanted to switch it off.

People get themselves all steamed up about weather they're in love or not. They ought to realize that the love part is perfectly easy; the hard part is working out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love" as a signal a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechising about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it.

I’ve never awaited a kiss more in my whole life. “It won’t hurt, I promise.” He husks throatily, lowering his head, blocking out the sun so all I see are twin blues and my own lust mirrored back in them. I’m right. It’s a kiss like no other I’ve had before. He doesn’t plunder, not at first. His lips edge across mine—first the top, then the bottom, coaxing me to open. He presses lightly, teasing me almost into whimpering. Of course I want more, I’m out of my flipping mind wanting the kiss, so I drag at his shirt, as if to tell him to get on with it already and that’s when his mouth opens, and my brain switches off. His mouth lays waste to mine in a not-so-surprising and yet all arousing eating kiss that feels as though he’s wolfing me down from the inside with each measured flick of his tongue. His taste floods through me, not a corner of my body is left out of the pleasure soaking out of Theo and into me. He kisses like I’ve always wanted to be kissed by a man.

When it comes to productivity and creativity, scatterfocus enables you to do three powerful things at once. First, as I’ll discuss in this chapter, it allows you to set intentions and plan for the future. It’s impossible to set future intentions when you’re immersed in the present. By stepping back and directing your attention inward, you’re able to switch off autopilot and consider what to do next. Your brain automatically plans for the future when you rest—you just need to give it the space and time to do so.

some birds and marine mammals are able to switch off one half of their brain at a time, so that one half remains alert while the other is snoozing.

Heroes and fast sleepers, then, can switch off their thoughts when necessary. Cowards and insomniacs, my people, are plagued by babble on the brain.

Take an angry person, tell them you feel their pain, give them a target for their anger and help them to switch off their brain.

But then! If you sit there long enough, an enormous emotional shift happens inside you. Your Monitor switches its assessment of your goal from “attainable” to “unattainable,” and it pushes you off an emotional cliff, into a pit of despair. Lost in helplessness, your brain abandons hope and you sit in your car sobbing, because all you want to do now is go home,

Let me tell you about spirit.” The teacher comes alive, making eye contact with each of us as he speaks. “No one can command you to have spirit—not principals, governors, presidents, or even kings. There’s no spirit switch in your brain that can be flipped on or off. Spirit isn’t a week you can put on your calendar. It doesn’t come from posters, or streamers, or rallies, or funny hat days. And it definitely doesn’t come from making an ungodly racket with a cheap plastic instrument of torture that was invented purely for disturbing the peace!

Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. In other words, sleep is not a light switch in your brain that is either on or off. Your body is doing amazing things at night while you sleep.

And, hey. You. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That’s a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn’t read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that’s as creepy as hell. Thank you for seeking out stories, the kind that take place in your brain.

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.

kids whose brains have undergone epigenetic changes because of early adversity have an inflammation-pro-mot- drip of fight-or-flight hormones turned on high every day—and there is no off switch.

Imagine for a moment that your body receives its stress hormones and chemicals through an IV drip that’s turned on high when needed, and when the crisis passes, it’s switched off again. Now think of it this way: kids whose brains have undergone epigenetic changes because of early adversity have an inflammation-promoting drip of fight-or-flight hormones turned on high every day—and there is no off switch.

Picnic, Lightning It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Safes drop from rooftops and flatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body’s rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens— the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.

the human brain is a binary system—synapses either fire or they don’t—they are on or off, like a computer switch. The brain has over a hundred trillion switches, which means that building a brain is not so much a question of technology as it is a question of scale.

Eric R. Kandel, a Nobel Prize–winning neuropsychiatrist for his work on memory, shows how our thoughts, even our imaginations, get “under the skin” of our DNA and can turn certain genes on and certain genes off, changing the structure of the neurons in the brain.[1] So as we think and imagine, we change the structure and function of our brains. Even Freud speculated back in the 1800s that thought leads to changes in the brain.[2] In recent years, leading neuroscientists like Marion Diamond, Norman Doidge, Joe Dispenza, Jeffrey Schwartz, Henry Markram, Bruce Lipton, and Allan Jones, to name just a few, have shown how our thoughts have remarkable power to change the brain.[3] Our brain is changing moment by moment as we are thinking. By our thinking and choosing, we are redesigning the landscape of our brain.

Furthermore, whenever parents talked about “love,” some part of my brain switched off. They had their story, and they were sticking to it. The story was that they loved us with a love that we were incapable of understanding, and the reason things were the way they were was because they loved us so much.

The dopamine desire circuit is powerful. It focuses attention, motivates, and thrills. It has a profound influence over the choices we make. Yet it isn’t all-powerful. Addicts get clean. Dieters lose weight. Sometimes we switch off the TV, get off the couch, and go for a run. What kind of circuit in the brain is powerful enough to oppose dopamine? Dopamine is. Dopamine opposing dopamine. The circuit that opposes the desire circuit might be called the dopamine control circuit.

Meaney and colleagues, one of the most cited papers published in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience. They had shown previously that offspring of more “attentive” rat mothers (those that frequently nurse, groom, and lick their pups) become adults with lower glucocorticoid levels, less anxiety, better learning, and delayed brain aging. The paper showed that these changes were epigenetic—that mothering style altered the on/off switch in a gene relevant to the brain’s stress response.

There are times that I am doing so well, I stop taking my meds. And suddenly I feel like the light switch has flipped off. And suddenly I feel like I am not better because of my hard work. And suddenly I feel like a fraud. I try to remind myself that the brain is an organ, that this is a disease, that diabetics need insulin and no one thinks of that as cheating. I try to remind myself that this is not a boost, this is a treatment. So I swallow my pride along with my pills and let myself get better.

But perhaps the newest and most exciting instrument in the neurologist’s tool kit is optogenetics, which was once considered science fiction. Like a magic wand, it allows you to activate certain pathways controlling behavior by shining a light beam on the brain. Incredibly, a light-sensitive gene that causes a cell to fire can be inserted, with surgical precision, directly into a neuron. Then, by turning on a light beam, the neuron is activated. More importantly, this allows scientists to excite these pathways, so that you can turn on and off certain behaviors by flicking a switch. Although this technology is only a decade old, optogenetics has already proven successful in controlling certain animal behaviors. By turning on a light switch, it is possible to make fruit flies suddenly fly off, worms stop wiggling, and mice run around madly in circles. Monkey trials are now beginning, and even human trials are in discussion. There is great hope that this technology will have a direct application in treating disorders like Parkinson’s and depression.

The phrase "going to sleep" has always given me great anxiety. I don't like doing things I'm bad at, and I have been told since I was very young that I am a bad sleeper. As soon as I become prone, my head will begin to unpack. My mind will turn on and start to hum, which is the opposite of what you need when you begin to switch off. It is as if I were waiting the whole day for this moment. Trying to go to sleep is often when I feel most engaged and alive. My brain starts to trick me into thinking this is the moment it should turn on and start working overtime. It is a problem. I need some rest. I have a lot to do.

How did he know my dad helped get me this job? Did someone in the office tell him? I mean, it’s not like I’m some spoiled, incompetent rich kid with zero work experience and mega connections. My dad’s just aCPA! But I’m not going to bother explaining that or anything else. Because right now, I’m halfway convinced a hole in my skull has blown right off and my brains are flowing out like molten lava. I think I might well and truly hate Porter Roth. “You know nothing about me or my family. And you’re a goddamn dickbag, you know that?” I say, so enraged that I don’t even care that a family of four is walking up to my window. I should have. And I should have noticed that I left the green switch turned on from the last pair of tickets I sold. But the family’s wide-eyed faces clue me in now. They’ve heard every nasty word. For one terrible moment, the booth spins around me. I apologize profusely, but the parents aren’t happy. At all. Why should they be? Oh God, is the wife wearing a crucifix pendant? What if these people are fundamentalists? Are these kids homeschooled? Did I just ruin them for life? Jesus fu—I mean, fiddlesticks. Are they going to ask to speak to Mr. Cavadini? Am I going to be fired? On my first day? What is my dad going to say?

I get out the car. For at least seven hours I don’t have to talk about One-Fifteen. I don’t have to think about Khalil. I just have to be normal Starr at normal Williamson and have a normal day. That means flipping the switch in my brain so I’m Williamson Starr. Williamson Starr doesn’t use slang—if a rapper would say it, she doesn’t say it, even if her white friends do. Slang makes them cool. Slang makes her “hood.” Williamson Starr holds her tongue when people piss her off so nobody will think she’s the “angry black girl.” Williamson Starr is approachable. No stank-eyes, side-eyes, none of that. Williamson Starr is nonconfrontational. Basically, Williamson Starr doesn’t give anyone a reason to call her ghetto.

Different types of cells (brain cells, muscle cells, etc.) differ from each other in the structure and chemistry of their cell-bodies. The differences are due to the interaction between gene-complex cell-body and the cell's environment. In each growing and differentiating tissue a different portion of the total gene-complex is active-only that branch of the gene-hierarchy which is concerned with the functions assigned to the tissue in question; the remainder of teh genes is 'switched off'. And if we inquire into the nature of the agency which switches genes on and off, we find once more the familiar devices of triggers and feedbacks. The 'triggers' are the chemical 'inducers', 'organisers', 'operators' and 'repressors', etc. already mentioned.

Everyone has an inner warrior. It’s a silent voice--not a nagging in your head, but a warm, strong, gut feeling of perusing and persevering. It comes in the moments of stillness when you switch off your mind and let your instincts take over. In Amber’s case, her head was telling her that she couldn’t win DWTS with a wrecked knee. It made sense to her intellectually, but her passion overrode her brain. It led her to defy the odds, and prove--especially to herself and me--that she was fierce and fearless. Her win inspired me, and it inspired millions of people who watched her claim that Mirror Ball trophy. It’s simply a question of unleashing that warrior. If you can control your mind, you can control your life. So in moments when you’re feeling helpless, hopeless, overwhelmed (you fill in the blank here!), that’s when you have to let the warrior out. Inside each of us is an abundant reserve of strength, determination, and courage. All you have to do is let it loose.

Many potential readers will skip the shopping cart or cash-out clerk because they have seen so many disasters reported in the news that they’ve acquired a panic mentality when they think of them. “Disasters scare me to death!” they cry. “I don’t want to read about them!” But really, how can a picture hurt you? Better that each serve as a Hallmark card that greets your fitful fevers with reason and uncurtains your valor. Then, so gospeled, you may see that defeating a disaster is as innocently easy as deciding to go out to dinner. Remove the dread that bars your doors of perception, and you will enjoy a banquet of treats that will make the difference between suffering and safety. You will enter a brave new world that will erase your panic, and release you from the grip of terror, and relieve you of the deadening effects of indifference —and you will find that switch of initiative that will energize your intelligence, empower your imagination, and rouse your sense of vigilance in ways that will tilt the odds of danger from being forever against you to being always in your favor. Indeed, just thinking about a disaster is one of the best things you can do —because it allows you to imagine how you would respond in a way that is free of pain and destruction. Another reason why disasters seem so scary is that many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when confronted with everything at once —but if you dice it into its tiny parts and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can seem as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time. In a disaster you must also plan for disruption as well as destruction. Death and damage may make the news, but in almost every disaster far more lives are disrupted than destroyed. Wit­ness the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011 and killed 158 people. The path of death and destruction was less than a mile wide and only 22 miles long —but within thirty miles 160,000 citizens whose property didn’t suffer a dime of damage were profoundly disrupted by the carnage, loss of power and water, suspension of civic services, and inability to buy food, gas, and other necessities. You may rightfully believe your chances of dying in a disaster in your lifetime may be nearly nil, but the chances of your life being disrupted by a disaster in the next decade is nearly a sure thing. Not only should you prepare for disasters, you should learn to premeditate them. Prepare concerns the body; premeditate concerns the mind. Everywhere you go, think what could happen and how you might/could/would/should respond. Use your imagination. Fill your brain with these visualizations —run mind-movies in your head —develop a repertoire —until when you walk into a building/room/situation you’ll automatically know what to do. If a disaster does ambush you —sure you’re apt to panic, but in seconds your memory will load the proper video into your mobile disk drive and you’ll feel like you’re watching a scary movie for the second time and you’ll know what to expect and how to react. That’s why this book is important: its manner of vivifying disasters kickstarts and streamlines your acquiring these premeditations, which lays the foundation for satisfying your needs when a disaster catches you by surprise.

The Bad-Moon Girls appear on days when Dad doesn't know what he is thinking, or even if he is thinking. Those days can weigh less than air or more than an ocean. He has blank thoughts without feelings, followed by heavy feelings without thoughts. Time means nothing. A minute ticks by in the same rhythm as an entire day. He can look at one thing for an hour without moving. He can see me or Victor without knowing we are in the room, peering at us as if we are underwater, moving in warped slow motion. After the nothingness, he wades through a stagnant lake with the moon reflected in it, waiting for the daylight to rinse it away. He almost drowns while time ticks on. The sky is filled with black milk. No stars. Two days can pass before he surfaces. Dad's brain-switch, the focusing thing the rest of us switch on to make things look better, is a bit buggered. Those are his words, not mine. The Bad-Moon Girls whisper evil in Dad's ear, the sort of women who would set their own mother on fire if there were no other way to light their cigarettes. The trouble is, they can follow. Just as we were setting off to Clacton last autumn, they hunted him down.

Baking and cooking bring me inner peace, like a tasty version of yoga, without all the awkward stretching and sweating. When my life spins out of control, when I can't make sense of what's going on in the world, I head straight to the kitchen and turn on my oven, and with the press of a button, I switch one part of my brain off and another on. The rules of the kitchen are straightforward, and when I'm there I don't have to think about my problems. I don't need to think about anything but cups and ounces, temperatures and cooking times. When I was a freshman at Cornell, I heard a plane had flown into the World Trade Center while sitting in my Introduction to American History lecture. My friends and I ran back to our dorm rooms and spent the next few hours glued to the television. I kept my TV on all day, but after talking to my parents and watching three hours of the coverage, I headed straight to the communal kitchen and baked a triple batch of brownies, which I then distributed to everyone on my floor. Some of my friends thought I was crazy ("Who bakes brownies when the country is under attack?"), but it was the only thing I could do to keep from having a panic attack or bursting into tears. I couldn't control what was happening to our country, but I could control what was happening in that kitchen. Baking was my way of restoring order in a world driven by chaos, and it still is.

Harvard pointed. “You know, right there is when the stuntman catches the sword out of frame.” “I know.” Aiden did know. Harvard always told him this fact at this precise moment. Aiden had watched this movie without Harvard once—on a date. Seeing the sword fly without the familiar murmur had upset Aiden enough to turn off the movie. Tonight, Harvard was here with him. They were both lying on their stomachs with their legs kicked up and their hands cupped in their chins, as though they were six years old. They weren’t. Aiden tangled their legs together slightly, deliberately. It felt far more dangerous than crossing swords. Aiden couldn’t imagine a match with so much at stake. “During a date when you stay in,” Aiden said, teaching, “you should try to see if the other person is receptive to you getting closer.” Harvard gave Aiden a look out of the corner of his eye, and let their legs stay tangled, resting with light pressure against one another. Love was a delusion, nothing but an electrical impulse in the brain, but there were many impulses running electric under Aiden’s skin right now. The man in black smiled beneath his mask and switched his sword to his right hand. The clash of swords rang over the sound of the sea. Aiden sneaked another look at Harvard, the shine of his dark eyes and white teeth in the silvery glow from the screen. Harvard caught him looking, but he returned Aiden’s look with a look of his own, warmly affectionate and never suspicious at all. Harvard never suspected a thing. Because Aiden was his best friend, and Harvard trusted him. And Harvard could trust him. Aiden would never do anything to hurt Harvard, not anything at all. Aiden moved in still closer, his arm set against Harvard’s, solid muscle under the thin material of his shirtsleeve. He could put his arm around Harvard’s shoulders or slip an arm around his waist or lean in. He was allowed, just for tonight.

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, always curious about new phenomena, once placed himself in a sensory deprivation tank and tried to leave his physical body. He was successful. He would later write that he felt that he had left his body, drifted into space, and saw his motionless body when he looked back. However, Feynman later concluded that this was probably just his imagination, caused by sensory deprivation. Neurologists who have studied this phenomenon have a more prosaic explanation. Dr. Olaf Blanke and his colleagues in Switzerland may have located the precise place in the brain that generates out-of-body experiences. One of his patients was a forty-three-year-old woman who suffered from debilitating seizures that came from her right temporal lobe. A grid of about one hundred electrodes was placed over her brain in order to locate the region responsible for her seizures. When the electrodes stimulated the area between the parietal and temporal lobes, she immediately had the sensation of leaving her body. “I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk!” she exclaimed. She felt she was floating six feet above her body. When the electrodes were turned off, however, the out-of-body sensation disappeared immediately. In fact, Dr. Blanke found that he could turn the out-of-body sensation on and off, like a light switch, by repeatedly stimulating this area of the brain. As we saw in Chapter 9, temporal lobe epileptic lesions can induce the feeling that there are evil spirits behind every misfortune, so the concept of spirits leaving the body is perhaps part of our neural makeup. (This may also explain the presence of supernatural beings. When Dr. Blanke analyzed a twenty-two-year-old woman who was suffering from intractable seizures, he found that, by stimulating the temporoparietal area of the brain, he could induce the sensation that there was a shadowy presence behind her. She could describe this person, who even grabbed her arms, in detail. His position would change with each appearance, but he would always appear behind her.)

Sexual Excitation System (SES). This is the accelerator of your sexual response. It receives information about sexually relevant stimuli in the environment—things you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine—and sends signals from the brain to the genitals to tell them, “Turn on!” SES is constantly scanning your context (including your own thoughts and feelings) for things that are sexually relevant. It is always at work, far below the level of consciousness. You aren’t aware that it’s there until you find yourself turned on and pursuing sexual pleasure. Sexual Inhibition System (SIS). This is your sexual brake. “Inhibition” here doesn’t mean “shyness” but rather neurological “off” signals. Research has found that there are actually two brakes, reflecting the different functions of an inhibitory system. One brake works in much the same way as the accelerator. It notices all the potential threats in the environment—everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine—and sends signals saying, “Turn off!” It’s like the foot brake in a car, responding to stimuli in the moment. Just as the accelerator scans the environment for turn-ons, the brake scans for anything your brain interprets as a good reason not to be aroused right now—risk of STI transmission, unwanted pregnancy, social consequences, etc. And all day long it sends a steady stream of “Turn off!” messages. This brake is responsible for preventing us from getting inappropriately aroused in the middle of a business meeting or at dinner with our family. It’s also the system that throws the Off switch if, say, in the middle of some nookie, your grandmother walks in the room. The second brake is a little different. It’s more like the hand brake in a car, a chronic, low-level “No thank you” signal. If you try to drive with the hand brake on, you might be able to get where you want to go, but it’ll take longer and use a lot more gas. Where the foot brake is associated with “fear of performance consequences,” the hand brake is associated with “fear of performance failure,” like worry about not having an orgasm.

In The Frog Prince, a beautiful princess drops her golden ball into a deep spring and must allow a frog into her bedroom to get it back, maturing thereby into a woman. Fairy tales and myth often place an odd creature on the path of the hero to signal an opportunity exists: turn right for good or left for evil. Of all the harbingers of change in fairy tales and myth—disfigured dwarfs, shriveled witches, even Yoda—it is reptiles (and amphibians) that are considered ugly enough without embellishment to awaken the part of the brain that listens to fairy tales. In real life, it is possible that reptiles have the power to switch off a person’s thinking brain and switch on the subconscious, opening the door to a person’s most deeply suppressed passions. Perhaps this is what makes reptiles so terrifying. Coiled at the center of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the word fascinate is this: “of a serpent.” Evolved from lizards, deliverers of venom—snakes are the villains of the animal kingdom. And yet, throughout history, snakes have been recognized for their power to bewitch man, to deprive him of resistance, to draw him near.

I want all of you,” he said. “I don’t want you holding back because you think I can’t take it—and I’m not just talking about spanking or whatnot. Let me decide for myself what I can take, yeah? I’ve said it before: I want to know you. I don’t want you to be afraid of that.” “You’re right. I am afraid,” I replied. Tugging on his hair gently, I gave him a self-deprecating smile. “You scare me.” “Why?” Such a simple question… so hard for me to answer. “Your persistence is part of it—you were so sure I would come around, and I don’t know why. Your optimism about us, frankly, is intimidating.” I shook my head and frowned, stroking the side of his face. “And… I can’t stop thinking about how you’re so young and sexy and smart and sweet and so new to all of this… and I’m… Well, I’m me.” I heaved a sigh. “And… because of your love. You know, Travis used to tell me all the time that he loved me?” “I’ll stop saying it if you want me t—” “No! No… Please don’t. I want to hear it. I need to hear it. I just wish I could turn off the switch in my brain that makes me—” I gestured in frustration to my head, and he nodded in understanding. “You know—fuck, you know I am absolutely crazy about you, kiddo, don’t you? You make me so fucking happy.” I had to clear my throat before I could continue. My chest ached and my pulse was racing again… But it was in a good way. “I’m happy with the way things are right now.” I frowned. “I don’t want to hurt you.” My hoarse whisper caused a wrinkle to appear between Emyr’s brows. He shook his head. “Again, you won’t. I won’t let you. Trust me. Please trust me, Greg. I’m not him

Dogmentia is like what old humans get, except only dogs get it. Parts of your memory brain switch on and off. Like, you can’t remember if your master gave you a bone yesterday, but you remember where you buried a bone when you were just a pup.

Now, we can’t switch off our automatic system’s filtering function—by definition, it’s automatic. But we can adjust the settings, by being more proactive in defining what our brain sees as “important” each day. If we do that, we can affect what our conscious brain gets to see and hear. It’s one of the most powerful ways to steer our day toward the reality we’d most like to experience.

An interesting point: A cell in your brain and a cell in your kidney contain the exact same DNA. And while in utero (in the womb), the nascent (emerging, developing) cells differentiate into either a brain cell or a kidney cell only when crucial epigenetic processes turn the right genes on or off. So God has designed perfectly timed epigenetic signals to switch on in the womb as the baby is developing. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jer. 1:5). Our

The two hemispheres of our brains don’t operate as on-off switches—one powering down as soon as the other starts lighting up. Both halves play a role in nearly everything we do. “We can say that certain regions of the brain are more active than others when it comes to certain functions,” explains one medical primer, “but we can’t say those functions are confined to particular areas.”6 Still, neuroscientists agree that the two hemispheres take significantly different approaches to guiding our actions, understanding the world, and reacting to events.

One of the most devastating consequences of chronic stress is that it damages stress’s off switch.26, 27 This makes the body stress resistant, allowing cortisol to rise to uncontrollably high levels that damage the body28 and mind.29 Exercise protects the brain from the damaging effects of chronic stress by supplying it with a dose of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).30, 31 BDNF acts like a fertilizer that promotes the growth, function, and survival of brain cells, including those that turn off the stress response. Immediately after exercising, our brain cells are bathed in BDNF, which protects those cells against the toxic effects of high stress.

Although scientists are still struggling to understand the neural basis of human thoughts and feelings, it has recently become possible to eavesdrop on the mind as it recognizes a face, remembers a word, or snaps to attention. Neurobiologists have discovered that such acts of cognition are linked to a brief surge of neural synchrony, in which millions of far-flung brain cells suddenly switch on and off in precise lockstep at about 40 times a second, and then just as rapidly unravel to allow the next thought or perception to occur. If this view is right, a flash of insight is literally a burst of electrical synchrony, an instant when separate parts of the brain begin to harmonize.

The second way switching harms your attention is what we might call the screw-up effect. When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in, because – Earl explained – ‘your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off’ – and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. ‘Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial, because you’re spending a lot of time correcting errors and backtracking.

worse. The second way switching harms your attention is what we might call the screw-up effect. When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in, because – Earl explained – ‘your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off’ – and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. ‘Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial, because you’re spending a lot of time correcting errors and backtracking.’ Then

what’s it actually like?” And I think for a moment, because people don’t actually ask that very often. They tell me what they think I feel because they’ve read it in books, or they say incredible things like autistic people have no sense of humor or imagination or empathy when I’m standing right there beside them (and one day I’m going to point out that that is more than a little bit rude, not to mention Not Even True) or they—even worse—talk to me like I’m about five and can’t understand. “It’s like living with all your senses turned up to full volume all the time,” I say. And I stop and he sort of spins around so he is looking at me. “And it’s like living life in a different language, so you can’t ever quite relax because even when you think you’re fluent it’s still using a different part of your brain so by the end of the day you’re exhausted.” And I think about getting home from school and the effort of making it through the noise and the lights and the people and the change and the cars and the smells and the sun and the rain and holding it together through all that, and then getting home. And how when I get home and I can switch off, that’s when I blow up, because it’s safe.

Aza [Raskin] said: 'For instance, Facebook tomorrow could start batching your notifications, so you only get one push notification a day ... They could do that tomorrow.' ....So instead of getting 'this constant drip of behavioural cocaine,' telling you every few minutes that somebody liked your picture, commented on your post, has a birthday tomorrow, and on and on - you would get one daily update, like a newspaper, summarising it all. You'd be pushed to look once a day, instead of being interrupted several times an hour. 'Here's another one,' he said 'Infinite scroll. ...it's catching your impulses before your brain has a chance to really get involved and make a decision.' Facebook and Instagram and the others could simply turn off infinite scroll - so that when you get to the bottom of the screen, you have to make a conscious decision to carry on scrolling. Similarly, these sites could simply switch off the things that have been shown to most polarise people politically, stealing our ability to pay collective attention. Since there's evidence YouTube's recommendation engine is radicalising people, Tristan [Harris] told one interviewer: 'Just turn it off. They can turn it off in a heartbeat.' It's not as if, he points out, the day before recommendations were introduced, people were lost and clamouring for somebody to tell them what to watch next. Once the most obvious forms of mental pollution have been stopped, they said, we can begin to look deeper, at how these sites could be redesigned to make it easier for you to restrain yourself and think about your longer-term goals. ...there could be a button that says 'here are all your friends who are nearby and are indicating they'd like to meet up today.' You click it, you connect, you put down your phone and hang out with them. Instead of being a vacuum sucking up your attention and keeping it away from the outside world, social media would become a trampoline, sending you back into that world as efficiently as possible, matched with the people you want to see. Similarly, when you set up (say) a Facebook account, it could ask you how much time you want to spend per day or per week on the site. ...then the website could help you to achieve your goal. One way could be that when you hit that limit, the website could radically slow down. In tests, Amazon found that even 100 milliseconds of delay in the pace at which a page loads results in a substantial drop-off in people sticking around to buy the product. Aza said: 'It just gives your brain a chance to catch up to your impulse and [ask] - do I really want to be here? No.' In addition, Facebook could ask you at regular intervals - what changes do you want to make to your life? ...then match you up with other people nearby... who say they also want to make that change and have indicated they are looking for the equivalent of gym buddies. ...A battery of scientific evidence shows that if you want to succeed in changing something, you should meet up with groups of people doing the same. At the moment, they said, social media is designed to grab your attention and sell it to the highest bidder, but it could be designed to understand your intentions and to better help you achieve them. Tristan and Aza told me that it's just as easy to design and program this life-affirming Facebook as the life-draining Facebook we currently have. I think that most people, if you stopped them in the street and painted them a vision of these two Facebooks, would say they wanted the one that serves your intentions. So why isn't it happened? It comes back... to the business model.

After oceans, rivers top the list of “perfect landscapes for brain restoration,” according to Wallace Nichols in his book Blue Mind. Each to our own—for me, following a river is my absolute favorite walk, whether it’s a short stroll at night or a long-distance hike. River walks require minimal navigation and map reading, making them ideal for either a solo hike or a social saunter where the priority is conversation. This doesn’t mean we can switch off altogether. Rivers test our cognitive abilities in unexpected ways (navigating all those meanders, shifting banks, and low-hanging willows), making a river walk equally beneficial for our brains.

In an unpredictable environment, this approach quickly falters. The longer and more rigorously we persist with it, the more quickly and completely things will break down. The environment we are in creates gaps between plans, actions, and outcomes: The gap between plans and outcomes concerns knowledge: It is the difference between what we would like to know and what we actually know. It means that we cannot create perfect plans. The gap between plans and actions concerns alignment: It is the difference between what we would like people to do and what they actually do. It means that even if we encourage them to switch off their brains, we cannot know enough about them to program them perfectly. The gap between actions and outcomes concerns effects: It is the difference between what we hope our actions will achieve and what they actually achieve. We can never fully predict how the environment will react to what we do. It means that we cannot know in advance exactly what outcomes the actions of our organization are going to create.

Local and Nonlocal Effects of Coherent Heart Frequencies on Conformational Changes of DNA.” This study showed that thinking and feeling anger, fear, and frustration caused DNA to change shape according to thoughts and feelings. The DNA responded by tightening up and becoming shorter, switching off many DNA codes, which reduced quality expression. So we feel shut down by negative emotions, and our body feels this too. But here’s the great part: the negative shutdown or poor quality of the DNA codes was reversed by feelings of love, joy, appreciation, and gratitude!

(the first switch you turned on), a light bulb that is cold and on (the second switch you turned on),and a light bulb that is cold and off (the third switch). Go Back | Go to the Next

THE IMPACT OF DOING TOO MUCH A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it’s really not that amusing that one of the most common “productivity tools” can make one as dumb as a stoner. (Apologies to technology manufacturers: there are good ways to use this technology, specifically being able to “switch off” for hours at a time.) “Always on” may not be the most productive way to work. One of the reasons for this will become clearer in the chapter on staying cool under pressure; however, in summary, the brain is being forced to be on “alert” far too much. This increases what is known as your allostatic load, which is a reading of stress hormones and other factors relating to a sense of threat.

THINK OF THE WAY a stretch of grass becomes a road. At first, the stretch is bumpy and difficult to drive over. A crew comes along and flattens the surface, making it easier to navigate. Then, someone pours gravel. Then tar. Then a layer of asphalt. A steamroller smooths it; someone paints lines. The final surface is something an automobile can traverse quickly. Gravel stabilizes, tar solidifies, asphalt reinforces, and now we don’t need to build our cars to drive over bumpy grass. And we can get from Philadelphia to Chicago in a single day. That’s what computer programming is like. Like a highway, computers are layers on layers of code that make them increasingly easy to use. Computer scientists call this abstraction. A microchip—the brain of a computer, if you will—is made of millions of little transistors, each of whose job is to turn on or off, either letting electricity flow or not. Like tiny light switches, a bunch of transistors in a computer might combine to say, “add these two numbers,” or “make this part of the screen glow.” In the early days, scientists built giant boards of transistors, and manually switched them on and off as they experimented with making computers do interesting things. It was hard work (and one of the reasons early computers were enormous). Eventually, scientists got sick of flipping switches and poured a layer of virtual gravel that let them control the transistors by punching in 1s and 0s. 1 meant “on” and 0 meant “off.” This abstracted the scientists from the physical switches. They called the 1s and 0s machine language. Still, the work was agonizing. It took lots of 1s and 0s to do just about anything. And strings of numbers are really hard to stare at for hours. So, scientists created another abstraction layer, one that could translate more scrutable instructions into a lot of 1s and 0s. This was called assembly language and it made it possible that a machine language instruction that looks like this: 10110000 01100001 could be written more like this: MOV AL, 61h which looks a little less robotic. Scientists could write this code more easily. Though if you’re like me, it still doesn’t look fun. Soon, scientists engineered more layers, including a popular language called C, on top of assembly language, so they could type in instructions like this: printf(“Hello World”); C translates that into assembly language, which translates into 1s and 0s, which translates into little transistors popping open and closed, which eventually turn on little dots on a computer screen to display the words, “Hello World.” With abstraction, scientists built layers of road which made computer travel faster. It made the act of using computers faster. And new generations of computer programmers didn’t need to be actual scientists. They could use high-level language to make computers do interesting things.* When you fire up a computer, open up a Web browser, and buy a copy of this book online for a friend (please do!), you’re working within a program, a layer that translates your actions into code that another layer, called an operating system (like Windows or Linux or MacOS), can interpret. That operating system is probably built on something like C, which translates to Assembly, which translates to machine language, which flips on and off a gaggle of transistors. (Phew.) So, why am I telling you this? In the same way that driving on pavement makes a road trip faster, and layers of code let you work on a computer faster, hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms.

Part of the brain’s job in managing our dreams is to keep us safe, so during REM sleep, the brain shuts off neurons in our spinal cord (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, n.d.). This renders us unable to move our muscles, which prevents us from acting out our dreams. In effect, the brain “switches off” our behavior. Some people report experiences of coming out of a dream and for a few seconds feeling “paralyzed.” That’s known as sleep paralysis, and is the brain’s way of protecting us from harming ourselves or others while we dream.

Mike’s brain was hardwired directly into his genitals and most higher functions appeared to have switched themselves off. In other words, he was just like most men.

Eric R. Kandel, a Nobel Prize–winning neuropsychiatrist for his work on memory, shows how our thoughts, even our imaginations, get “under the skin” of our DNA and can turn certain genes on and certain genes off, changing the structure of the neurons in the brain.[1] So as we think and imagine, we change the structure and function of our brains. Even

Where they differ is in temper. Izzy has no control over hers.  When the anger switch flips in her tiny little brain, no one can turn it off.  She is focused to a fault, her tantrums often triggered by the fear of her sightless world. Morgan sighs. She is ready to be released.  She quiets easily and quickly. She is a gentle giant, not a fighter.  She bites only to defend herself.  If her intent were to eliminate her assailant, it would happen in one quick snap of her jaw.  She cannot understand why this monster was brought into our peaceful home.  We were a happy family until Izzy appeared.  She is the Anti-Christ.  She is pure evil.  Our home has become a salient battleground with opponents always vigilant, wary of the other, waiting for the first sign of war. Finally,

The phrase “going to sleep” has always given me great anxiety. I don’t like doing things I am bad at, and I have been told since I was very young that I am a bad sleeper. As soon as I become prone, my head will begin to unpack. My mind will turn on and start to hum, which is the opposite of what you need when you begin to switch off. It is as if I were waiting the whole day for this moment. Trying to go to sleep is often when I feel most engaged and alive. My brain starts to trick me into thinking this is the moment it should turn on and start working overtime. It is a problem. I need some rest. I have a lot to do.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK SO WELL Psst: Check out all the contradictions, which are all part of the entrepreneurial life. Afternoons: Once it hits 2pm my brain doesn’t work so well. I use this fuzzy time to do monotonous tasks such as social media scheduling, WordPress fixes, editing, etc. Scheduling/ batching: I’d also like to batch things like writing blog posts and creating videos. But I tend to do them randomly when the urge takes me, which isn’t productive at all. Social media: It’s a huge time suck that I wrestle with all day, every day. Boundaries: I try to switch off each evening around 3pm (school days) or 6pm (work days). But I often find myself logging in again. (It doesn’t help that Netflix is on my laptop, which makes it all too easy to flick over to my work email or business Facebook groups every two seconds.) Bravery: Because I’m willing to give things a go, I sometimes launch them without thinking things through!

So, when we do experience a non-ordinary state that gives us access to something more, we feel it first as something less—and that something missing is us. Or, more specifically, the inner critic we all come with: our inner Woody Allen, that nagging, defeatist, always-on voice in our heads. You’re too fat. Too skinny. Too smart to be working this job. Too scared to do anything about it. A relentless drumbeat that rings in our ears. This was Silva’s monologue too, but he stumbled onto a curious fact—altered states can silence the nag. They act as an off switch. In these states, we’re no longer trapped by our neurotic selves because the prefrontal cortex, the very part of the brain generating that self, is no longer open for business.

Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.' The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants’ development. [...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom. We can find evidence for this claim in the research of Clifford Nass, the late Stanford communications professor who was well known for his study of behavior in the digital age. Among other insights, Nass’s research revealed that constant attention switching online has a lasting negative effect on your brain. Here’s Nass summarizing these findings in a 2010 interview with NPR’s Ira Flatow: So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand … they’re pretty much mental wrecks. At this point Flatow asks Nass whether the chronically distracted recognize this rewiring of their brain: The people we talk with continually said, “look, when I really have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-focused.” And unfortunately, they’ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They’re suckers for irrelevancy. They just can’t keep on task. [emphasis mine] Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

Breakthrough neuroscientific research is confirming daily what we instinctively knew all along: What you are thinking every moment of every day becomes a physical reality in your brain and body, which affects your optimal mental and physical health. These thoughts collectively form your attitude, which is your state of mind, and it’s your attitude and not your DNA that determines much of the quality of your life. This state of mind is a real, physical, electromagnetic, quantum, and chemical flow in the brain that switches groups of genes on or off in a positive or negative direction based on your choices and subsequent reactions.

The Institute of HeartMath, an internationally recognized, nonprofit research organization that helps people reduce stress, discusses an experiment titled “Local and Nonlocal Effects of Coherent Heart Frequencies on Conformational Changes of DNA.” This study showed that thinking and feeling anger, fear, and frustration caused DNA to change shape according to thoughts and feelings. The DNA responded by tightening up and becoming shorter, switching off many DNA codes, which reduced quality expression. So we feel shut down by negative emotions, and our body feels this too.

The main stumbling block to succeeding at school was how difficult I found it to do the learning in class. Halfway through a lesson, my brain would just switch off. ‘Nope, I’ve had enough. I don’t want to do it anymore’. It wasn’t melodramatic about it, it would just hit its threshold and shut down, leaving me helpless to take in new information

To get the best use out of any tool or machine, it helps to know at least a little about how it works; you will never maximize your wealth unless you can optimize your mind. Fortunately, over the past few years, scientists have made stunning discoveries about the ways the human brain evaluates rewards, sizes up risks, and calculates probabilities. With the wonders of imaging technology, we can now observe the precise neural circuitry that switches on and off in your brain when you invest.

Good.” Xavier sank to his knees and pushed my knees wider, granting him an unfettered view of my soaked arousal. His eyes gleamed up at me, dark and bright as volcanic glass. “Then they’ll know exactly who you belong to.” A humiliating little whimper left my mouth when he bent his head and closed his teeth around delicate silk. A woozy, breathless second of anticipation sent my pulse skyrocketing, followed by something between a cry and a gasp when he ripped my underwear off and dived in. Bursts of light exploded behind my eyes at the sudden switch from lazy sensuality to feral, untamed hunger. My brain couldn’t catch up, so it ceded all power to my body. The buck of my hips; the grasp on his hair; the arousal that raced through me, so fast and potent it was almost painful.

When I am doing art, I’m in what I call a droning state. A different part of my mind is working. That switched-on part of me is turned off. And while I’m off, I can have better conversations about my emotions, or anything, really. I’m just an easier person to talk to.

Switch on one of the light bulbs for a long enough period of time for it to get hot. Then switch it off. Switch on the second switch and immediately go to the room with the bulbs. There will be a light bulb that is hot and off (the first switch you turned on), a light bulb that is cold and on (the second switch you turned on),and a light bulb that is cold and off (the third switch).

Neuroscience of Ideology (The Sonnet) No matter the intention of origin, No ideology can stand uncorrupt through time. Even the perfect of theories fall apart, because, The brain can't pledge obedience without being blind. To maintain the grandeur of an ideology, The mind chooses to switch off certain faculties. Thus the mind starts digging its own grave, As well as for the world, without even knowing it. Ideology relevant today won't be relevant tomorrow, But the ideology itself isn't aware of this. Thus in the guise of savior it keeps raising sheep, Who then turn defensive and ruin all possibility of peace. Borders don't preserve peace, borders only breed war. All peace is fiction till we treat every border as Donald Trump's wall.

Despite his late and haphazard start, Cecchini also became a renowned teacher of both jazz and classical guitar. Students traveled from out of state to pick his brain, and by the early 1980s lines formed down the stairs of his Chicago school in the evenings. His own formal training, of course, had been those free clarinet lessons. “I’d say I’m 98 percent self-taught,” he told me. He switched between instruments and found his way through trial and error. It might sound unusual, but when Cecchini reeled off legends he played with or admired, there was not a Tiger among them.

Cal Newport recommends a “shutdown ritual” in which you take the time to close out the day’s business and prepare for tomorrow. Research shows that writing down the things you need to take care of tomorrow can settle your brain and help you relax. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explains, when you’re concerned about something and your grey matter is afraid you may forget, it engages a cluster of brain regions referred to as the “rehearsal loop.” And you keep worrying and worrying. Writing your thoughts down and making a plan for tomorrow switches this off.

Evidence for this theory comes from the finding that every species seems to have a genetically determined maximum lifespan. While the average life expectancy for humans has increased, the maximum lifespan has remained stable (approximately 120 years). There is also research to suggest that at an early age, our genes trigger hormonal changes in the brain and regulate the cellular reproduction and repair process. At some point in the process, the genes that promote growth are 'switched off,' and those that promote aging are turned on. This leads to a steady decline in the functioning of the body until death occurs. One may see changes not only in physical functioning, but in the cognitive, emotional, and psychological domains as well.

This study showed that thinking and feeling anger, fear, and frustration caused DNA to change shape according to thoughts and feelings. The DNA responded by tightening up and becoming shorter, switching off many DNA codes, which reduced quality expression. So we feel shut down by negative emotions, and our body feels this too.

It’s important to know that at this point, a few weeks into my stay at Hollymoor Hospital, nobody had actually told me what was wrong with me or what had happened in my breakdown or what the prognosis was. I genuinely had no idea what was going on. Because of all the drugs I’d been given, my brain felt like it had been pulled out through my eyeballs, put in a blender and fed back to me in a smoothie. Prior to my hospitalisation, my thoughts were vivid and strange, and there was a kind of electricity flowing through me that was actually rather exciting. Now there was a dull silence and I could hardly string two words together. It felt like someone had switched off the power. But I was going home, finally, and that was all that mattered.

The problem with instant relief Low mood gives us the urge to do things that can make our mood even worse. When we feel discomfort and the threat of low mood, we want to get back to feeling lighter. Our brain already knows from experience what tends to help the quickest. So we feel urges to do whatever will make it all go away as soon as possible. We numb or distract ourselves, and push the feelings away. For some that is via alcohol, drugs or food. For others it is watching hours of TV or scrolling through social media. Each of those things are so inviting because they work – in the short term. They give us that instant distraction and numbing that we crave. That is, until we switch off the TV, close down the app, or sober up, and then the feelings come back. Each time we go round that cycle the feelings come back even more intense.

A coaching session can be compared to the creative process of freestyle rap. Neuroscientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders scanned the brains of twelve professional rappers with an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. The scientists discovered that although the brain’s executive functions were active at the start and end of a song, during freestyle, the parts of the brain responsible for self-monitoring, critiquing, and editing were deactivated. In this context, the researchers explained that the rappers were “freed from the conventional constraints of supervisory attention and executive control,” so sudden insights could easily emerge.1 In other words, the rappers used the executive functions of their cognitive brains as they started rapping to deliberately set the intention of the composition up front. Once they had a sense of where they were going, they switched off their inner critic and analyzer. This allowed for more activity in the inner brain, where the eruption of new ideas—creativity—takes place. As they moved to closing out the song, their cognitive brains came back online to provide a consciously designed ending to the composition.

I wish I could sleep. Close my eyes and drift off so I don’t have to feel anything, just for a little while. Tiredness is a too-warm blanket over my shoulders, loosening my limbs, trying to switch off my brain. But

Research has also suggested that bilingual and multilingual people experience the tip-of-the-tongue sensation more frequently than monolinguals and will often end up exchanging a word from one language for one they find they cannot access in another (as in, I’m going to take a bain). This has been taken to suggest that our brain does not store lexical information from separate languages discretely, and is not able to ‘switch off ’ a language in which a person is fluent, even in monolingual situations.

The human brain functions in a dimensional way, rather than a binary one. It would be less similar to a switch which only has on and off functions, than to the volume dial of a radio which can be gradually regulated.

I didn’t really want to drink. I had played that story forward and knew how it ended. But Holy Origin I missed the numbness. The obliteration. I missed having an off-switch for my brain.

But now I understand that it’s the journey that counts, not the destination. That heroic journey back to Focus, even when it has to be repeated countless times, is what tilts the scale toward bliss. St. Francis de Sales (1567–1622) wrote, “If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently . . . and even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back . . . though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well-employed.” It’s like flipping a switch that’s programmed to be in the “off” position. You notice you’re in the dark, and you flip the switch to “on.” You’re in the light (Focus). But then the switch flips back again, because that’s its default position (Mind Wandering). You again notice you’re in the dark (Awareness). So you flip the switch again (Shift). You’re in the light again (Focus). Discover you’re in the dark, and you regard it as a signal to flip the switch back on again. Do this often enough, and the ratio of dark versus light changes.

But now I understand that it’s the journey that counts, not the destination. That heroic journey back to Focus, even when it has to be repeated countless times, is what tilts the scale toward bliss. St. Francis de Sales (1567–1622) wrote, “If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently . . . and even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back . . . though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well-employed.” It’s like flipping a switch that’s programmed to be in the “off” position. You notice you’re in the dark, and you flip the switch to “on.” You’re in the light (Focus). But then the switch flips back again, because that’s its default position (Mind Wandering). You again notice you’re in the dark (Awareness). So you flip the switch again (Shift). You’re in the light again (Focus). Discover you’re in the dark, and you regard it as a signal to flip the switch back on again. Do this often enough, and the ratio of dark versus light changes. In each meditation, you’re gradually in Bliss Brain more than you’re out. Each deliberate flip of the switch is a declaration to the universe that you’re committed to being in the light. It isn’t the length of time you’re in the light that counts; it’s the moments you’re in the dark and flip the switch yet again.

Step #2. Add friction Generally speaking, the harder something is to access, the less likely you are to do it and vice-versa. This is why you must redesign your environment to make undesirable behaviors more difficult to engage in while making more desirable behaviors easier to conduct. Look at the habits or activities you want to eliminate and ask yourself how you could add friction—the more friction, the better. For instance: If your phone is your biggest distraction, remove all notifications or put it on airplane mode. Or, even better, switch it off and put it in a separate room. If Facebook is your biggest distraction, remove as many notifications as you can and/or use applications such as Newsfeed Eradicator (a Google Chrome extension). If you spend hours watching YouTube

the one and only key to a successful nap was to break the thread of consciousness just long enough for the switch to be thrown to “off.” When it got thrown to “on” again, even if it was only a few minutes later, the brain–body system rebooted itself, like a fucked-up computer that just needs to be unplugged from the wall for ten seconds and restarted in order to come back to life in clean working order.