Where It All Begins: The Healthy Functioning of Your Prefrontal Cortex

The cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that gives you your higher cognitive functions (language, logic, and planning). It modulates the primitive emotional responses of your limbic system, including those of your brain’s fear center, the amygdala, and your reptilian complex, which regulates fight or flight. Your cerebral cortex also monitors and influences

1 Dec, 2014
Posted by Steve Fogel
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Pause Your Machinery: Operating Principles

Stop and take a moment to “pause your machinery.” The concepts and techniques I present throughout my latest book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, require mindfulness to learn and master, and this brief written exercise will give you the opportunity to rest, step outside the pattern of passive reading, and

27 Nov, 2014
Posted by Steve Fogel
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How my Organizing Principles Can Dominate and Control my Experience of the Present

Here’s a firsthand example of how one of my Organizing Principles—part of my prior learning—can dominate and control my experience of the present. Let’s say I’ve gone out socially with a new friend whom I want to connect with. If I’m being mindful, input from what’s occurring in the moment will enter from the

24 Nov, 2014
Posted by Steve Fogel
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The Interplay between Mindful Awareness and the Brain as “Anticipation Machine”

Let’s look at what’s happening in our brains when we operate on automatic pilot that allows our Organizing Principles to run us, no matter how dysfunctional these beliefs may be and how disabling a bind they create for us. Because of the brain’s very nature and structure, we are programmed to react. That’s what we

20 Nov, 2014
Posted by Steve Fogel
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Culture vs. Mandate: How a Company’s Culture Can Erode Its Mandate

In my book Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living and its predecessor, My Mind Is Not Always My Friend, I concentrate on how becoming more mindful—that is, being focused with intent in the present, experiencing the present circumstance as it TRULY is, without judgment and interpretation and, most importantly, WITHOUT AN

10 Nov, 2014
Posted by Steve Fogel
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