Brain Fact Friday on ”The Neuroscience of Belief”

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast for Brain Fact Friday and EPISODE #173 on “The Neuroscience of our Beliefs” where we will take a deeper dive into what are beliefs are, how they impact our day-to-day life, habits, successes, and failures, and how we must pay attention to them “because they can make the difference between life and death, health and illness” (Larry Dossey, MD)[i] and increased clarity in our life. In Today’s Brain Fact Friday, You Will Learn: ✔︎ What are beliefs from the perspective of neuroscience? ✔︎ What's the problem with what we believe? ✔︎ Understanding our Cognitive Biases. ✔︎ Becoming a Better Believer in 3 Steps. For those who are new here, I'm Andrea Samadi, author, and educator from Toronto, Canada, now in Arizona, and like many of you listening, have been fascinated with learning and understanding the science behind high performance strategies that we can use to improve our own productivity in our schools, our sports, and workplace environments. The purpose of this podcast is to take the fear out of this new discipline that backs our learning with simple neuroscience to make it applicable for us all to use right away, for immediate results. This week’s Brain Fact Friday comes to you as I am in the final stages of writing a research paper, or an abstract to complete a year-long neuroscience certification course I have been taking with Mark Robert Waldman, who began teaching me how to understand the impacts of neuroscience on the brain and learning, back in 2014. I know that I was one of his very first students who began working with him years before he launched his training program that is rigorous, and not everyone who joins, completes it. Learning anything new requires consistent focus and effort, and my hopes are to continue to translate the most current and accurate neuroscience research, to be useful in your daily life through this podcast. Once this abstract is graded, I will share it with you for a more in depth look at the future of educational neuroscience, with a look back at where it began, some of the criticism it’s faced, while sharing the impact I see it having on our future generations of teachers and learners. Stay tuned for this, and for more interviews coming next week, but until then, for this week’s Brain Fact Friday, we will examine how beliefs show up in our brain and what we should all know about what we believe and how to sharpen and even challenge our beliefs, for improved results. If I asked you right now to define what a belief is, I am sure we would all come up with a different definition. But did you know that from the perspective of neuroscience that all beliefs (factual beliefs, self-beliefs, social beliefs, monetary beliefs, health beliefs) just to name a few- are “incomplete predictions, formed in the Default Mode Network (Imagination Network—the yellow and orange areas in the brain in the image below). These predictions (whatever it is that we believe) combine subjective feelings (that are mostly imaginary and a product of the DMN-our Imagination Center) with factual observations, forming an emotional cognitive bias which is embedded into our long-term memory.   IMAGE SOURCE: Mark Waldman “Beliefs and the Brain” showing what our beliefs look like in our brain in the Default Mode (Imagination) Network. Remember that “all beliefs have limitations, and every one of them contains assumptions and inaccuracies concerning the true nature of the world.”   (Born to Believe, Mark Waldman and Dr. Andrew Newberg)[ii] SUMMARY: “Our beliefs are incomplete predictions about the future, formed as a part of our imagination network, combining current feelings with factual observations, with bits and pieces of old memories, forming a cognitive bias (whether you are right or wrong—this is how your brain sees the world). Your brain doesn’t care if it’s true or false, right, or wrong.  It will create what you need to help you to go