Why You're Not Stuck the Way You Think You Are | John R. Miles - EP 804

0:00Music, food, art. These things define and unite us. And they come in colors that breathe culture. Colors that connect us with their variety and richness. You'll find that same variety in Valspar Ultra paints. Great coverage and durability starting at$29.98 per gallon. Enjoy everyday protection against scuffs and wear with a smooth, washable finish. We're made of colors. And with Valspar Ultra, you can reflect that pride of culture you have inside on every wall of your home. Available at Lowe's. Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves.

0:39No hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market. There's a word I keep hearing lightly. In emails, in comments, in conversations, backstage after events. Stuck. My focus feels stuck. My anxiety feels stuck. My temper, my weight, my relationship, stuck. people say it's like a diagnosis, like a verdict on who they are. But here's what almost nobody knows. The part of your brain that decided you were stuck, it's already different than it was five minutes ago.

1:34Hey, it's your friend, John, and welcome to PassionStruck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

2:15Welcome back to episode 804 of Passion Struck. We're in week one of our August series, The Adaptive Brain, how your mind learns, changes, and heals. Earlier this week, I had two remarkable conversations on exactly that. If you haven't caught them yet, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to them. Today is a solo episode, and I want to go straight at the question underneath almost everything I hear from you. Can I actually change? Or is it just who I am? Here's what's ahead. We're going to look at the brain of a London taxi driver and what neuroscientists found when they scanned it. We're going to look at one of the strangest, most famous cases in the history of neuroscience.

3:02A man who survived an iron rod being driven straight through his skull. what it taught us, and what it took over a century to get right. We're also going to talk about the thoughts that quietly run your life without your permission and exactly how to kill them. And we're going to sit with someone who has logged over 62 ,000 hours of meditation and what happened inside their brain that made scientists sit up and take notice. By the end of today's episode, I want you looking at whatever feels permanently fixed in you right now. A habit, a fear, a pattern, a label you've been carrying since childhood, and seeing it differently.

3:46Not as a life sentence, as a rep you just haven't practiced yet. Let's get into it. Thank you for choosing PassionStrap and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

4:07You are not a photograph. I mean that literally, not just as a nice turn of phrase. There's a study neuroscientists love to cite, and I love it too because you can't argue with it. Researchers scanned the brains of London taxi drivers, the ones who spend years memorizing the knowledge, the impossibly dense map of over 25 ,000 streets in London with no GPS allowed, what they found was that these drivers had immeasurably larger hippocampus, the part of the brain tied to spatial memory, than people who didn't drive cabs. And it wasn't just that cabbies happened to have bigger hippocampus to begin with.

4:52The longer someone had been driving, the more pronounced the difference. The structure of their brain changed in proportion to years spent doing the work. Nobody photographs a taxi driver's brain on day one and declares that's simply how it is. The brain doesn't come from the factory finished. It gets carved daily by whatever you keep asking it to do. Here's the mechanism under that in plain terms. Neuroscientists actually have a phrase for it. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Every single time you think a thought, feel an emotion, or repeat a behavior, you're activating a specific chain of neurons.

5:40Do it once and it's nothing. A flicker. Remarkable. Do it a thousand times and the brain does something remarkable. It strengthens that exact pathway and starts to prune away the pathways that you're not using. It's not a metaphor. It's closer to a trail through the woods. The first time you walk around, you're pushing through the brush, but over hundreds of times, it becomes a groove so worn you barely have time to think where your feet land. That's what happened in the taxi driver's hippocampus. And it's exactly what's happening in your brain right now with whatever thought pattern or story or reaction you've been walking through the most.

6:30It's not just spatial memory either. Researchers have found the same principle in the motor cortex of violinists and pianists. The region controlling the fingers used for fretting or fingering literally takes up more physical space in a trained musician's brain than in someone who's never picked up the instrument. Different skill, same law. Repetition doesn't just get easier over time, it leaves a physical blueprint. Which means the real question was never, what were you given? it's what are you carving into it right now, today, with the repetitions nobody's watching. Let's take a quick break.

7:17When we come back, I wanna tell you about a man who lost part of his brain in an instant and what his case got right and what it took over a century to get wrong. But first, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

7:41Welcome back. You're listening to PassionStruck right here on the PassionStruck Network. Imagine it's September 1848. A railroad foreman named Phineas Gage is packing blasting powder into a hole in solid rock using a three-foot iron tamping rod. A spark hits the powder early. The rod launches upward, enters just below his left cheekbone, and exits through the top of his skull. He survives. He's talking within minutes. He walks to a cart under his own power. Physically, Gage recovered almost completely, but the people who knew him for years said the man who came back wasn't the same man they knew before.

8:31Prior to the accident, by every account, he was steady, responsible, well-liked. Afterward, he became impulsive, foul-tempered, unreliable, a stranger wearing a familiar face. His doctor summed it up in five words that are still quoted in neuroscience textbooks today. Gage was no longer Gage. For over a century, his case has been taught as one of the first hard proofs that personality isn't just something you have. It's something your brain does. Damage the tissue, and the person changes with it. For a long time, that's where the story stopped, and it hardened into a grim conclusion. The brain is fixed machinery, and if something breaks it, that's just who you are now.

9:27But that's not exactly where the science ends. Gage's case proved the brain could be changed by force in a single violent instant. If the brain can be changed by force, it can also be changed on purpose. Earlier this week, I sat down with Dr. Daniel Amen, one of the most respected brain health physicians in the world, and someone who spent his career studying brain scans most doctors never bothered to look at. One of the things he teaches every single patient is something he calls ANTS, automatic negative thoughts. They're the thoughts that show up invited and quietly ruin your day. I'm not enough.

10:12I always mess this up. Nobody actually wants me here. Dr. Amon showed me the exact technique he uses to kill them, adapted from his friend Byron Katie. When an ant shows up, you write down exactly what you're thinking, and then you interrogate it. Take I'm not enough. Is that true? Most people, if they're honest, will say yes. Then he pushes further. Was it absolutely 100 % true? Almost always the answer is no. And then the final question. How would you feel without that thought? Would you feel free? Lighter? Once you feel that gap, you don't just delete the thought. You deliberately flip it to its plain opposite.

11:04it. Not some grandiose overcorrection. Just, I'm enough. And that becomes the new thing you rehearse. Here's what really struck me. Eamon doesn't treat any of this as a character flaw. He treats it as a skill problem. And skills can be trained. He keeps a literal toy ant sitting on his desk as a reminder, and he mails one to patients who need it. A physical cue for a mental practice. He published a study on 2 ,000 anxious people, split it into a high negativity group and a low negativity group. The brain scan showed that the high negativity group's frontal lobes were dramatically less active, but he was clear that's not a life sentence.

11:53It's a starting point because positivity bias, like anything else, can be trained. The exercise he uses is embarrassingly simple. Before bed, instead of gratitude journaling, he asks what went well today? Not what you're thankful for in general. What actually went well, specifically today? Here's the story that stopped me. Eamon told me about the night his father died, the worst day of his adult life. That same night, he still did the exercise. What went well today? And he said three things came to him immediately. He still grieved deeply. The practice didn't erase the grief, but he still knew how to manage his own mind in the middle of the worst moment of his life.

12:44Because in his words, it's a practice you have to do over and over again. The same way a professional athlete shoots free throws. Nobody learns free throws once and skips practice until it's crunch time. The pros practice it so relentlessly that it's simply there when the moment that matters finally arrives. The mind you have in your hardest moment is the mind you've been quietly training in all your ordinary ones. If Amon's work shows us the mechanism, my conversation yesterday with Dr. Richie Davidson and Dr. Court Dahl shows us the ceiling of what's possible. Davidson has spent decades running one of the most respected neuroscience labs studying meditation and well-being.

13:34Early in their work, they brought a Debitian Buddhist monk named Nyangé Mingor Rinpoche into their lab, A man who's been a guest on this show with an estimated 62 ,000 hours of lifetime meditation practice. I want you to sit with that number for a second. That's not a weekend retreat. That's decades of daily repetition. Here's what most people don't know about him. Mingura Rinpoche didn't start out calm. As a child, he suffered from panic attacks. And he said that those panic attacks became some of his greatest teachers. The stillness scientists eventually measured in a lab wasn't his factory setting.

14:17It was built. When they recorded the electrical activity of his brain, they found something they'd never seen before, gamma oscillations, the high amplitude brainwave bursts that in an ordinary brain might last a quarter of a second during a flash of insight. In his brain, they didn't just spike during formal meditation. They were his baseline, sustained for minutes at a time, even when he wasn't meditating at all. I want you to hear that again. 62 ,000 hours of practice didn't just give him a skill he could call up on demand. It became his resting state. His photograph didn't just get retouched, the sculpture itself was permanently reshaped.

15:08And it started with a scared kid having panic attacks, not so different from wherever you might be starting from right now. Davidson and Dahl's research points to four trainable skills that show up across nearly every contemplative tradition and hold up under modern neuroscience. First, there's awareness. awareness, next there's connection, then insight, and finally purpose. Awareness is simply the capacity to be fully tuned into whatever's happening within you and around you in a given moment. Connection is your ability to genuinely relate to other people. Insight is what older traditions would just call wisdom, seeing clearly how your mind constructs your experience.

16:01And purpose is the sense that your life is oriented towards something that matters. Their finding echoes everything that we've covered today. These aren't fixed personality traits you either have or you don't. They're skills. And with enough repetition, they become more of your baseline over time. Exactly what happened in the most extreme case imaginable to a monk in a brain scanner. Dahl offered something else in that conversation that I haven't been able to shake because it wasn't about a monk in a lab. It was about himself. He told me flatly, I'm a textbook case for plasticity. Years ago, he had such severe social anxiety and such a strong phobia of public speaking that he said if we'd been having the exact conversation when he was 18 or 19, he would have been in a complete emotional tailspin just sitting across from me.

17:01Today, he said he feels zero nervousness, not because the anxiety was some shallow habit that faded on its own, but because he'd spent years deliberately training the same qualities he now researches for a living. His own resting state changed the same way Mingori Rinpoche's did, the same way the taxi driver's hippocampus did, and the same way Phineas Gage's brain changed, just in the opposite direction. So let's get back to where we started. Your brain was never a photograph. It's a sculpture, one that's being shaped right now, today, by whatever you keep asking it to do, whether you're paying attention to it or not.

17:48The taxi driver's hippocampus grew because he drove the same impossible map. Year after year, not because he was born with a bigger one, Phineas Gage's case proved in the worst possible way that the brain can be changed in an instant. But a century of science since him has proven the reverse is just as true. It can be rebuilt on purpose one repetition at a time. Daniel Amon still knew how to find what went well on the worst night of his life, because he'd practiced it like free throws for years before he needed it, and he had a physical reminder of that on his own desk to prove it. Cortland Dahl went from a public speaking phobia so severe it would have wrecked him at 19 to feeling nothing at all today, purely through years of trained practice.

18:42And a monk who once had childhood panic attacks now has resting brainwaves scientists have never seen before. Not because he had one great meditation, but because he had 62 ,000 hours of ordinary ones. None of that is a photograph. All of it is a sculpture still being carved. So here's the only question that actually matters. What are you carving into your brain today in the repetitions nobody's watching? If you want one place to start today, borrow Eamon's exercise and make it this simple. Tonight, before you go to sleep, ask yourself, what went well today? Not amazing, not perfect, just three ordinary things that actually went well.

19:36For instance, you got out of bed on a hard day. You showed up to something you didn't feel like doing. You caught yourself mid-spiral for a half second before the old story took over completely. Write them down if you can. That's one rep. It won't feel like it's doing anything, but do it anyway. The taxi driver didn't feel his hippocampus growing either. Next week, we're going a layer deeper into that sculpture. Because your brain was never built alone. It was built by every relationship that ever mattered to you. I'm sitting down with Dr. J. Van Babel, social psychologist at NYU and author of The Power of Us.

20:19We're in an expanded conversation on how deeply our sense of identity and even our perception of reality is shaped by the groups we belong to. We'll get into why your brain treats belonging as a survival need rather than a nice to have. how group identity can quietly rewire what you believe is even true and what that means for the sculpture we've been talking about today. Because it turns out you never carve it alone. I think it's harder to build trust across groups. I'm starting to study it more and more. I think trust is also one of those linchpin basic things. We're dealing with a loss of trust in institutions, a loss of social trust in our neighbors, and countries that don't have trust lack resilience.

21:03When a crisis happens, people don't support one another. And so social trust and trust in institutions are two of the most fundamental things for a flourishing society. So now we're talking going from an individual to a society. If you don't have trusting institutions, societies fall apart. If today's episode reshaped how you think about your brain, share it with someone who needs to hear that they're not stuck with the one they have. Follow PassionStruck on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Subscribe on our YouTube channels and find this week's companion workbook through the Ignited Life on Substack.

21:36Until then, remember, the life you leave behind will always be shaped by what you practice in the brain you're building today. I'm John Miles. Until next time, live life passion struck.

22:00Thank you.