A Reminder That Everything Changes Your Brain

Therapists and coaches deceive you when they claim they uniquely change your brain.

May 6, 2023

Gurus and the therapists and coaches who follow them are fond of claiming that their approach changes your brain. Be skeptical and wonder if someone might be trying to fool you and to take advantage of your respect and trust in them.

Peace, love, happiness From Pixabay

Consider the possibility that the trainers and coaches are fooling themselves. They personally shelled out lots of money and invested lots of time with some higher and mightier gurus, masters, or experts who really had no basis for the claims they make of being special. Someone telling you that their product changes the brain is a power move in a game. How can you dispute that your brain is changed? You have no way of actually knowing what is going on in your brain. You had better listen to someone who somehow knows exactly what is going on in your brain and tells you precisely where.

In a couple of Substack posts that became associated with threats of legal action, I have pointed out the hustle of marketing training packages on the internet.

McMindful: Make money as a mindfulness trainer, no background or weekend retreat required

Did a Study Show Expressing Gratitude Improves Your Physical Health?

The phony certificate game begins with an expensive price tag getting attached to a kit that is downloadable from a website. The price is quickly discounted, with a warning that a great deal won’t last. Buy now or it will be gone forever and you will feel very silly.

I have not figured out why the urgency is justified, other than consumers liking to think thy got a bargain. The kit does not contain any perishable ingredients and the seller hitting the send button after you pay does not deplete a limited supply. A special deal offered on National Suicide Awareness Day really does not mean that you miss a chance to save a life if you purchase later rather than now. Sellers do not become better person fby lowering an artificially high price, but they can make extra money by slipping onto a bandwagon of compassionate people dispensing hope.

The only requirement for you to be able to purchase this package is your ability to pay for it. There are no background checks. Purchase is open to axe-murderers and puppy-beaters or shady nonprofessionals bound by no code of ethics and who sexually or financially exploit people who paid them for advice.

Buying a misleading certificate showing that you are mindfulness trainer and getting to inflict yourself on unsuspecting clients is almost easy than buying a gun in Mississippi and shooting someone.

The charts and video links and all the suggested exercises to which you have access in the kit can immediately be deleted. Just find the downloadable certificate announcing that you have completed training in changing brains and frame it. The training package also provides templates for business cards and ads and even lists of things to do that can be personalized with your logo or a picture of an imagined spa you work out of when you are not at your ordinary office with its stained cushions and wobbly Ikea furniture.

Everything changes your brain

"The truth is that everything you do changes your brain. Everything. Every little thought or experience plays a role in the constant wiring and rewiring of your neural networks. So there is no escape. Yes, the internet is rewiring your brain. But so is watching television. And having a cup of tea. Or not having a cup of tea. Or thinking about the washing on Tuesdays. Your life, however you live it, leaves traces in the brain."

-- Tom Stafford

This pithy quote popped up in my Facebook Memories for a day and I was stumped when asked where I got it. Fortunately, Facebook friend Alina Arshi was able to track it down in seconds (.41seconds) by simply plugging the quote into Google. The search engine suggested correcting my original dyslectic “Snyder” to “Stafford” and then provided a link to a great BBC commentary from Tom Stafford.

Does the Internet rewire your brain? Tom Stafford 24 April 2012

Being online does change your brain, but so does making a cup of tea. A better question to ask is what parts of the brain are regular internet users using.

Great quotable quotes from the article capture the bigger picture that Tom Snyder wants to convey:

This modern age has brought with it a new set of worries. As well as watching our weight and worrying about our souls, we now have to worry about our brain fitness too – if you believe the headlines. Is instant messaging eroding the attention centres of our brains? Are Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools preventing you from forming normal human bonds? And don’t forget email – apparently it releases the same addictive neurochemicals as crack cocaine! Plenty of folk have been quick to capitalise on this neuro-anxiety. Amazon’s virtual shelves groan with brain-training books and games. (I confess I am not entirely innocent myself). You can fight the cognitive flab, these games promise, if you work that grey matter like a muscle.

He ends with excellent advice:

Get a life

In the absence of any substantial evidence, I would hazard a guess that the majority of internet use is either information search or communication, using email and social media. If this is so, using the internet should affect our brains so that we are better at these things. Probably this is already happening, part of a general cultural change which involves us getting better and better at dealing with abstract information. Internet use would only be a worry if it was getting in the way of us practicing some other life skill. If Facebook stopped people seeing their friends face to face that could have a harmful effect. But the evidence suggests this is not the case. If anything, people with more active internet lives have more active “meat-space” lives. Most of us are using the internet as a compliment to other ways of communicating, not as a substitute. So there is no magic extra risk from the internet. Like TV before it, and reading before that, it gives us a way of practicing certain things. Practice will change our brains, just like any habit. The important thing is that we are part of this process, it is not just something that happens to us. You can decide how much time you want to put into finding pictures of funny cats, bantering on Facebook or fitting your thoughts into 140 characters. There will be no sudden damage done to your brain, or great surprises for your brain fitness. You would be a fool to think that the internet will provide all the exercise your brain needs, but you would also be a fool to pass up the opportunities it offers. And those pictures of funny cats.

Follow my advice and be McMindful

Time for me to remind you to be McMindful. Your mindfulness coach may change your brain as more or less than a walk in the woods does. Go to the woods if even if you have to look other benefits to justify it. I think walking in the woods is quite satisfying as an end in itself. I blows some cobwebs out of my thinking when I am stuck(*) There is no harm in me being wrong, especially if I can avoid adverse events like poison ivy or wasp stings.

Your mindfulness coach may be someone with no training or supervised practice and may have no clue what they are doing. They may have paid money and simply downloaded that certificate hanging on their wall, as well as some business cards and handouts that support false claims of competency.

At best, your mindfulness trainer may provide you with a performative ritual placebo, but you may lack the discipline to practice on the regular basis in a way that your trainer insists you need to do. Without evidence, I do not buy that “every day makes for a better and better brain.”

Should you seek psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy instead?

I don’t see that the therapy in psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy is more than another hocus pocus ritual placebo, despite a lot of mystical epistobabble about profoundly and irreversibly changing your brain. The therapy is at least an excuse to do drugs with less chance of getting busted while they remain medicalized but not decriminalized.

Professor David Nutt says ingesting psilocybin is statistically less likely over time to cause death than drinking alcohol. That may be true, but there is increasing evidence that microdosing is worthless from a psychopharmacological perspective. It took repeated comparative studies to establish its placebo status, with so many people convinced that they had wonderful effects.

Getting a more intense subjective effect from a higher dosage may require a commitment of more time than you want to give. So many people who have experimented with psilocybin who say they won’t ingest it again, because they do not want to invest that amount of time in an experience that they cannot end for hours if they change their mind. I would wager that most people like me who experimented with psychedelics in the 1960s and 1970s do not take these drugs now.

Finally, don’t drive an automobile while under the influence of either psilocybin or alcohol.

Being evidence-based in your decision-making may seem like a buzzkill. You lose faith in what some many people promote as experiences of enlightenment. I think being evidence-based is liberating. You can do whatever suits you and with the extra money that you would otherwise waste buying placebo.

Being evidence based is beingcommitted to two ideas:

(1) We all generally know whether we are satisfied, although our report of that feeling can be manipulated by instructions and context. You have some authority as an expert in expressing how you feel. In a decent restaurant, a waiter cannot get away with telling you that you are wrong when you say that your all-beef burger tastes like fish.

(2) We are all generally not so good in analyzing what causes our satisfaction. A definitive determination involves sorting out possible causes we cannot readily making hypothetical comparisons to how satisfied we would be in other situations that we did not experience this time. This is where therapists and coaches speaking brain-talk catch the unsuspecting with strong suggestions wrapped in a ritual.

If you are inclined to disagree with my assessment, consider again the example of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy. Lots of flawed studies keep piling up, but I have keep looking at them carefully. I do not think researchers are getting any closer to specifying what changes in what areas of the brain are producing lasting changes in outlook and feelings, if any. Taking the podium to speak to a lay audience like in a TEDx talk, they nonetheless keep pointing to a brain pictures as a distraction from what they cannot find with flimsy self-reports in a weak study design.

Note: *I am not making a scientific claim meant to be testable about any cobwebs in people’s brains or that they can be blown out. It is just me spinning a metaphor (bad poetry) and doing some marketing in what we find in email alerts or after clinking on a link.

CoyneoftheRealm on Substack