Remapping Your Mind: The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation Through Story

Remapping Your Mind: The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation Through Story

By retelling our personal, family and cultural narratives, we transform the patterns of our lives, as well as the patterns that shape our communities and the larger social worlds in which we interact.

by Lewis Mehi-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D., with Barbara Mainguy, M.A. —

We are born into a world of stories that quickly shapes our behavior and development without conscious awareness.

By retelling our personal, family and cultural narratives, we transform the patterns of our lives, as well as the patterns that shape our communities and the larger social worlds in which we interact.

Applying the latest neuroscience research on memory, brain mapping and brain plasticity to the field of narrative therapy, the authors explain how the brain is specialized in the art of story making and storytelling.

They detail mind-mapping and narrative-therapy techniques that use story to change behavior patterns in ourselves, our relationships and our communities.

They explore studies that reveal how memory works through story, how the brain recalls things in narratives rather than lists, and how our stories modify our physiology and facilitate health or disease.

The authors examine the art of helping people change their stories, provide brain-mapping practices to discover your inner storyteller and test if the stories you are living are functional or dysfunctional, healing or destructive.

Detailing how shared stories and language form culture, the authors also explore how narrative therapy can help replace dysfunctional cultural stories with those that offer templates for healthier relationships with each other and the planet.

$18 — Bear & Company, One Park St., Rochester, VT 05767.

Reprinted from AzNetNews, Volume 34, Number 6, December 2015/January 2016.