POWER UP YOUR BRAIN: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment An Interview with Co-Authors David Perlmutter and Alberto Villoldo
by Linda Sechrist N
eurologist David Perlmutter, M.D., and medical anthropologist and shaman Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., are the co-authors of a new book, Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment. This groundbreaking guide explores how to acquire enlightenment—a deep insight into the meaning and pur- pose of all things and the pure awareness and experience of peace and joy—that will pave the way for success in the challenges of life. Combining spirituality and science in practical ways, the book contains nutritional advice; recommendations for dietary supplements and physical exercises; shamanic practices; and medita- tions and visualizations that, when used together, can awaken the higher brain. Perlmutter, who practices in Naples, is a Fellow of the American College of Nutrition and the author of The Better Brain Book. Villoldo has studied Incan shamans and the 5,000-year-old medicine they use to heal through spirit and light, in the jungle and the Andes mountains. Today he trains Western shamans—doc- tors, nurses, therapists and lay people—in the principles of energy medicine at his Healing the Light Body School.
How do we know if we are operating in the old brain or the new? If the nature of reality is stored in our neural networks, what does this mean?
Dr. Perlmutter: We are operating in the old brain, the limbic system of instinct and emotion, when we have an instanta- neous response to something. In our instant response, we are not relating to the event via thought processes or acquiring knowledge through the use of reasoning, intuition or percep- tion. In an emergency situation, this reflex response is good. When we pause and reflect on the meaning of our ac- tions or plan and recognize future actions and consequences, we are using the neocortex, part of which, the prefrontal cortex, is involved in meditative and transcendental experi- ences. This sophisticated new brain defines us as humans and allows us to reason, create new ideas, express selfless love, write poetry and music and think logically.
Dr. Villoldo: Shamans believe that all we perceive is a pro- jection through our senses of an internal map of reality, which we carry in our psyche. Whatever the landscape of your map, it is one that you are informed about by your culture and genes. For example, in our American culture, red means dan- ger. To the Chinese, it means fortune and opportunity. Most of our maps of reality are encoded in neural net- works located in the more primitive limbic brain, which is very survival-oriented and predatory. When we perceive from here, we see a world full of fear and violence, rather than the world of safety that we perceive from the neocortex. Shamans have a perceptual tradition, and when they want
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Your perceptions won’t change, and you can’t establish new maps of reality, until you repair the brain.
Dr. David Perlmutter
to change their world, they don’t pass new laws or come up with new ideas, they simply change their perception (internal map), and the world changes. Your perceptions won’t change, and you can’t establish new maps of reality, until you repair the brain. This is why Christian mystics and shamans, who discovered ways to create higher order in the brain with neural networks wired for joy, peace and creativity, went into the desert or jungle to fast. They ate specific foods that triggered the process of neurogenesis, which grows new neurons or repairs those that have been damaged from stress and emotional trauma.
What is neurogenesis?
Dr. Alberto Villoldo
Dr. Perlmutter: The recent discovery of the process of neurogenesis is the brain’s ability to actually grow new neurons, which we can do even into our 80s and 90s. This discovery over- turned generations of conventional wis- dom in neuroscience, which purported that the human brain was limited to the neurons it was born with.
We once believed that our genes and DNA were locked in, and that
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