Dear Jeyamohan,
In the recent past, there are growing talks about our lapse in concentration and our inability to retain memory. You have also shared your experience and have written about, how to get back our lost focus , hence perform tasks for longer duration. On thinking further along these lines, I have a question for you : ” Can we manage our brain ? Can we control our brain ?”
Doctors & scientists are prescribing many trainings for concentration & increasing our memory. Small pleasures just only alter the chemical structure of the brain temporarily. But a new habit grows the brain functionally. Only when brain grows functionally then we can learn new habits like cycling, swimming. More such information on brain is available now. They all talk about understanding the biological possibilities of human body, hence also the brain. I would like to know from you if this is doable in daily life.
As an example, forgetting the bad or unnecessary events from the past , hence leaving space for important things in your memory – can we control our memory structure ourselves or can we even train & prepare our brain towards it ? Can we manage our brain ourselves? As we age, does our memory shrink? How do you handle such need for memory as a writer?
Vasanth Balakrishnan
Dear Vasanth,
When we look to answer this question, we need to be clear of one thing. What can manage our brian? Which is the part of our body that can manage brain itself?
Brain can be supervised only by brain itself. Brain can be managed by brain itself. For this to happen, there should be some minimum part of the brain that should be healthy and in balance. Failure of this part is called pyschiatric depression. Here in this state, one loses ability to reflect himself, assess his values and to command himself . He will need doctors’s help. Experts can only help here. Yoga, meditation or any such courses will not be of any help.
We can only generally explain how one can manage his brain if he is in a stable state. I can share some thoughts from my own experience , readers can consider them and see if they are useful through their own experience.
We know our brain only through our relentless, continuous stream of thoughts – ‘a river of inner language’. This river of inner language is our Mind. This is very complex. It may appear to be a single stream but it will easily divide and divide itself into many streams. If you try to supervise & control this river of thought , you will then notice this supervising itself becoming another stream flowing itself inside this same river.
Conquering our brain using the very brain is not possible. One who tries to conquer the brain this way, will make the river of thought even more forceful and uncontrollable. One who is doing meditation or writing for many years will know this and can speak for it. Mind is a river of thoughts, trying to conquer mind through another thought is also within the mind. This is the difficulty.
How do we then conquer the mind? Mind is formless, boundless. But mind is always working together with objects and events in the external world. It often extends the objects and events in the external world. Mind cannot function without the external world. In fact , mind is just a reflection of the external world. But it is not a live and immediate reflection. This reflection is mixed with the past and future through our memories and imaginations. So it is a complex relflection. But it is still a reflection.
Hence the strong handle to conquering the mind is through the external world. External world has form and is understandable. We can control and change our external world. By effectively controlling our external world, we can change the fundamental functioning of our mind, change its direction and make it focus on just one thing when we need to.
This way of organizing the external world in order to conquer our mind has been practiced all over the world for a long time. They do it through rules and rituals. When we do a specific task at a specific time , we can always see that our mind and brain being always ready for it. Are we not controlling our brain here?
We can manage our time, tasks and our environment. Through this we always manage our brain. The only way to control our brain is through this handle of our external world. Beyond this there is no way to control it. Diseases can wear our brain down. Various antibiotic drugs , pain killers make our brain fade. Still , our age will make the brain gradually reduce its function. Brain not replenishing its neurons or losing the chemicals it needs to function, is beyond our control.
All these apply to our body too. Body will always wear through disease and aging. But we can keep it healthy through continuous exercises and healthy food as long as we can. Same holds for brain too. Through rules and practice we can keep our brain as healthy as possible.
Rules for a healthy brain are same as the rules of a healthy life. By streamlining our time and environment , we can streamline our brain. We can avoid the substances that the brain is allergic to. Pain killers, unnecessary anti-biotics, narcotic drugs are examples. Brain needs sufficient rest. This is why I have been writing about the need for good sleep.
To add to all this, like our body, brain also needs good training and healthy food. I have often seen people who do not train the brain, will become brain handicaps easily. We continue to see such people around us. Girls who once were brilliant students, after they enter family , get buried inside and become dull. Government servants who pass difficult exams end up losing all their sheen once they get jobs.
Training our brain is the only way to defeat this stagnation. It can be called as dissolving our brain fat. It is about doing work that requires our brain to be alert and sharp. It is not doing that work which makes our brain tire. I have written about this in another article – Whip your brain -.
I have realized that brain needs healthy food just as the body. Good literature, good art and travel are the good food for our brain as I know. I have seen them growing my brain. A brain filled with many happy memories of the past , thoughts that made us act and lot of positive thoughts , will energize itself.
I would say brain requires its daily shower too. Spending time in nature every morning and evening gives its bath. Meditation and yoga are its bath too. Music is my brain shower at night.
I have been caring and preserving my brain, keeping it the field of action, raring to go. I am managing my brain as much possible myself. Yes, can’t do anything against aging. But there are those great people who lived close to 100 years but yet lived those last years right in the field of action, with sense of humour and with all hope. Ki, Rajanarayanan is one of them. Indira Parthasarathy & Krishnammal Jagannathan are still living such lives. Last month Indira Parthasarathy wrote a good short story in Uyirmai .
Jeyamohan.
Translated by Vasanth Balakrishnan
