System #22: Upgrade Your Software

In 2016, while attending an American With Disabilities Act (ADA) Conference, a blind speaker got on stage and was navigating the computer. He couldn't see, so he navigated the computer by sound. The computer was talking to him at such a high speed, that none of us could understand what it was telling him, but there he was, explaining what it was saying to him...back to us. He came across an issue with the computer that he had to diagnose while being a translator between his world and ours. I was fascinated. I tried so hard to understand the computer, but simply couldn't catch the context, or much less the content quick enough.

Back home, while listening to Youtube videos, I started to increase the speed to see at what pace I could understand and slowly increased my ability to listen to videos at 2x speed which pales in comparison with his 10x, but that was the max speed Youtube allowed. Since then, I've learned that his ears, themselves, weren't any better than mine, it was just his brain that was more attuned to his senses. He was able to focus, and parse the incoming traffic of noise into coherent sounds more efficiently than I was able to. From then on, I started wondering what other senses this could apply to.

Dogs

For instance, dogs are known for their ability to smell. They are so good in fact that they can smell cancer, or diabetes. That's why dogs sniff each other when they meet, they are getting to know one another. It's a much more complete way of communicating that we achieve with our limited language. Their noses contain 100 - 300 million olfactory cells compared to our 5 - 7 million. That's usually why we're told that dogs have a much better ability to smell than we do. We forget, however, that just one olfactory cell is triggered by the same smells than 300 million of them are. And while it's harder to have that one molecule hit that one cell, it shouldn't be that much more difficult for it to hit 5 million cells, versus 300 million cells. The only difference is the signal strength. Our noses still smell smells, but whether our brains are sensitive to those weaker signals or not actually becomes the main issue. Humans have already shown the seemingly exceptional ability to smell sicknesses such as Parkinsons disease like in the case of Joy Milne which was later proven by science. Also pregnant women's sense of smell become more acute, allowing them to navigate things that could do harm to them or their babies, but it's not like their noses birth new olfactory cells, it's just that their brain becomes more attuned to them.

African Kudus

Let's look at another example of overriding senses, this one involving taste. I recently heard a story of ranches in Africa raising Kudus (an African antelope) which were dying by the thousands from no apparent reason. A wildlife professional was flown out to investigate the cause and after cutting a few open, noticed that the leafs they were eating had significantly more tannins than Kudus could handle (12% vs their maximum tolerance of 4%). What could have caused this? Especially since giraffes, who were eating the same diet, with a similar tolerance, were not dying.

It turns out that because the farmers were trying to increase their profit, they were increasing the number of Kudus per acre. These Kudus eat acacia trees which, when "attacked" slowly increase the tannins in their leaves. Usually, this builds to a point where the leaves aren't enjoyable for the Kudus to chew on, and the plant is left alone until the tannin levels die down. Not only that, acacia trees release chemicals into the air warning other acacia to produce more tannins. Since there were too many Kudus per acre, and food was scarce, they overrode their taste buds leading to a mass suicide...or possibly a plant induced genocide.

You might be wondering, how did the giraffes survive?! They apparently were wise enough to start eating down wind first and work their way up. This way, as the plants tried to warn the others, the chemicals they released in to the air never made it to neighboring plants. How did giraffes know this? Could they smell the warnings? Was this a habit learned that was passed down through generations? The implications are fascinating.

Humans have about 10,000 taste buds on their tongues. When compared to olfactory cells, this number feels minuscule, but when compared to cattle, for instance, who have about 25,000 taste buds, it feels much more in line with the rest of the world. Each taste bud, it should be noted, has about 50 - 150 receptor cells bringing the number of taste cells to around ~1 million or ~2.5 million for cattle. These cells allow us to taste the 5 current tastes that we have identified so far, sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami (savory - recently accepted as a type of taste in the early 2000s). But who's to say there aren't more?

As you have probably noticed, however, a large part of our sense of taste is our sense of smell. Just like Kudus, our taste buds are there to keep us safe. By tasting something, and sometimes even just smelling something, our bodies tell us if the food we're eating is healthy for us. However, just like the Kudus, we've systemically overridden that sense. We rely instead on external knowledge, like our dreaded food pyramid, or what experts have told us to eat. All the while, we could be listening to our bodies. We could increase our ability to interpret the signals that are already sent to us by our senses.

Meditation

If you've ever heard of Vipassana meditation, you're familiar with their initial meditation that you do for 4 days straight. You simply focusing on the space below your nose; feeling the air go in and out. After those initial days, you start to feel tingling below your nostrils, you start to feel everything going on in that small section of skin. Once you master that, you use your new found ability to scan your whole body. To feel what you actually feel. This sense starts to feel brand new even though your body has tried to be speaking to you your whole life...you haven't been listening. It's so easy to focus on the loud, intense feelings that our senses allow, but we rarely allow ourselves the privilege of calming the noise. We've allowed ourselves to create a culture that depends so much on eyesight and hearing that we've lost many of the other sensory stimuli the world provides.

For instance, Daniel Kish, famous for being able to echolocate uses his hearing and his sense of touch to navigate the world without sight. By creating clicking noises with his tongue, he is correctly able to identify the general shape of something in front of him, and what materials it consists of. This hearing doesn't just use his ears, but his skin as well. Lower tones aren't able to be heard by human ears, but our bodies can feel the reverberations. This complete ability allows him to ride a bicycle...as a blind man!

I first heard of him in 2007, and since then, through his organization, World Access for the Blind, he's helped hundreds of people learn to echolocate, he's helped hundreds of people level up their software. Our brains are so malleable that the visual cortex (the space at the bottom back of the brain) can become rewired and coopted for different uses.

The chart above shows how much of our brain is allocated to a certain sense, and you might be thinking, "no wonder why we prize our vision so much!" But you'd have to remember that our brain is a representation of what we use. How big could our taste or smell become if we only used that to communicate?

The Knowledge

If you need proof of our brains ability to change due to how we use it, let's take a trip to the streets of London. To become a taxi driver, you need to pass a test affectionately referred to as "The Knowledge," a rigorous and detailed examination of London’s 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks, restaurants, parks, theaters, and other points of interest. What's interesting is that cabbies that past this test show significant enlargement of their posterior hippocampus (the part responsible for spatial memory).

This not only happens for memory but also happens between your muscles and your brain. A large part of initial strength gains when you begin working out is actually training your brain to allow more muscle fibers to contract. Isn't that crazy?! You have the same available strength, yet all that happens is you're able to use more of it!

For a while, when I'd wake up, I'd write down, or dictate my dreams. I would dream a lot, almost every night. As a result of writing those down, I started being able to remember my dreams really easily. It makes you wonder, what is humanity capable of that we no longer use?

For instance, we all have vocal cords, and most of us have them intact. By that very fact, everyone should be able to sing, yet very few actually do. Since we haven't trained our vocal muscles, it's similar to trying to eat soup with your non-dominant hand. However, once you help your brain fine tune its signal through practice, you gain the skill. This could apply to anything, like sign language or reading braille.

How do we start?

Chances are you'd love to upgrade your mental software, but you don't know how. You'd love to be able to increase your reading speed, ten times, or even more like in the system called EyeQ but we usually don't like doing the work that's necessary to get there. However, in case you do, here's some practical advice.

1. Slow down. Calm the noise. Remove yourself from constant sensory overload. Feel your senses. What do you hear? Smell? Taste? What sensations can you feel in your body? What do you notice in others?
2. Make your life harder. Pick something you take for granted and remove it from your life...for a time (or learn a new skill):
   1. Food - fasting
   2. Talking - silence
   3. Sight
   4. Sex - energy
   5. Caffeine/Nicotine/Weed
   6. Say (or write down) what you see - circling
3. Be consistent. Your brain and body won't adapt unless you continue nurturing that skill.

In college, my friend and I, being bored, tried to find games to play with a tennis ball. After making up a game similar to racquetball, in what we would learn was actually a room made just for that, we decided to test our skills. We'd stand, with our backs against the wall, on either side of the room. One person would throw the ball as hard as they could and the other could dodge, or catch it. If they dodged, or got hit, the thrower could keep throwing. But when it was caught, the roles would switch.

At first, we both were pretty scared. The ball was moving so fast! But since the roles wouldn't change until we successfully were able to catch the ball, we got good really quickly. After a while, time began to would slow, and it felt like we had so much time to see the ball and understand its motion. By the end of the first day, we could catch the ball ~80% of the time. We had upgraded our software! Now imagine what pro hockey goalies, or baseball players feel like?...I'm sure they'd be incredible at this game.

What are the benefits?

There are so many examples that I couldn't even begin to give you a complete picture but I'll talk about one. For instance, why would fasting upgrade your software? Fasting has been done since ancient times, and while lately it's been talked about for muscle gains and fat loss, it's historically been used as a spiritual practice. For me, I've noticed that when I fast, I can depend less on my brain since it's begging for calories, which makes me more dependent on feeling my body. I don't get stuck in the mental masturbation of trying to figure things out, but just act and do. If I'm tired, I sleep. If I'm thirsty, I drink. I tend to conserve my energy which means I no longer try to entertain everyone in my life but instead speak when an energy in me propels it out. All of this trains me to understand how I work, how this vehicle that I inhabit best likes to run when the mind isn't in control...and hopefully we all know that the mind, as useful as it is, shouldn't be in control.

This brings up another point. Listening to your body helps you know what to eat. If you've just eaten sugar, chances are, unless you've trained your brain to be afraid of the crash of sugar, you'll want more. After fasting, however, sugar is the last thing you crave, at least it's the last thing I crave. This learning can be stored in your mind, which can hold the reins for a bit while you overcome your addiction...to food, to sugar. But once those chains are broken, your body is more than capable of taking you the rest of the way. In that regard, our mind is a wonderful tool for overriding habits but it shouldn't be calling all the shots. If that were the case, you'd only ever pee when you had planned to pee.

Urges like the need to urinate, are strong, so we listen. But your body experiences a sea of sensations like it but much weaker which we constantly choose to ignore. Just like dogs, we have, through generations, honed senses that still speak to us about the wellness of others beyond language. In split brain patients, when only the right hemisphere had access to emotional stimuli (meaning that the left eye was covered since the eyes connect to opposite brain hemispheres), patients could better detect deceit. This has proven true even in the rest of the population whenever people use more of their right hemisphere.

It begs the question, why when granted a natural ability to detect lies, deceit, manipulation, do we lower ourselves to protecting ourselves with facts, data, and analysis when those can even more easily be faked? Hopefully by now, you know the answer. It's because we haven't learned to trust our own senses, we haven't learned to build those connections with the data streaming through our subconscious but instead have relegated its abilities to fairytales and myths. It's so much easier to trust what is right in front of us, permanent, physical, tangible than it is to train our senses to understand and trust a fleeting thought, and fleeting...feeling. (Check out my Yogaville Experience)

Conclusion

A part of this is what I believe the ancients speak of when speaking of God (more coming in a later article). That's why I believe most spiritual practices are about quieting the senses. It's about listening to that "still small voice."

"The Lord (YHWH - יְהוָה) said, 'Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.'

Then a great and powerful wind tore through the mountains and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper."
1 Kings 19:11-12 (NIV):

As we grow our ability to listen to that still small voice, we allow ourselves to remove the chains that bind us to the world that we live in now. We allow ourselves to connect authentically, to protect ourselves socially (maybe even spiritually?) and to unlock skills and, dare I even say, powers beyond our common imagination. This is not about any specific religion, but about the inklings that we've all felt in our lives.

It's time we start listening. It's time you start listening, and as you do you'll aid in the movement that's building. This movement will allow us to take back the reins of the world we've created and allow us to heal our lives, our culture, our relationships, and the ultimately the earth.

Join us...