Rebooting Your Brain

CHAPTER 19Finding Peace in Your Time

A year ago, if someone had asked me where I thought I would be able to find peace of mind, likely my answer would have been, “Sitting on a mountaintop with the Dalai Lama in Tibet.” Little did I know that it would be found with much less travel required.

In fact, it was David Vago who helped me home in on the illusive value I had chased my entire lifetime. David is a cognitive neuroscientist who earned his PhD about 10 miles from where I live. He was first introduced to me by Dan Harris (you remember him—Dan is the author of Ten Percent Happier).

David teaches at Harvard Medical School and does his research at Vanderbilt University. What he showed me is how to remold my brain and with it to find the one value that had eluded me for the better part of my life: peace of mind.

David taught me that our brain is made up of about 80+ billion neurons. Think of these like the branches of a tree; where they make contact with other branches, they can transmit information from one to another. Connecting these neuron branches is what are called synapses, which are like the telephone lines that transfer the signals from one branch to another. We have a lot of these synapse connection points in our brain (about 150 trillion of them).

Up until relatively recently, it was believed that once our brain was fully formed in adulthood, it largely stayed the same over the course of our lifetime. However, David and researchers like him have discovered that really ...