Welcome, fellow brain health and neuroscience discovery traveler.
I’m Michael Cummings and I’m from Silicon Valley. Palo Alto, actually. Saying so likely loaded a stereotype in your mind. An ambitious nerd or “tech bro”, perhaps? A creative technologist, I hope? If the latter, only, you’re not wrong.
While stereotypes can give us some comfort, a short-cut through ambiguity or uncertainty when we meet someone for the first time, they also have have a downside. A dark side. Besides, no one is a stereotype.
Stereotypes short circuit real human connection and impede opportunities to learn, grow, and help each other as much as we can. They don’t foster mental elasticity or the open mindedness a growth mindset, our intended mindset here, demands.
Neuroplasticity, our brain’s ability to change itself, is instead helped by embracing ambiguity. Getting comfortable or even playing in the vague discomfort of uncertainty. A “beginner’s mind”, it turns out, is pretty advanced. Not just for beginners!
If you’re like me and have a consistent, persistent growth mindset, perpetual curiosity, and can negotiate two seemingly opposing thoughts in mind at once, consider BrainHealth.news your home for whole self health.
Many newsletters, particularly those curating or summarizing news and science, are faceless. Bland inhuman brands. I’ve decided to take a different approach. Because I intend to connect as people with a common purpose: help each other achieve as much personal self-actualization as humanly possible.
The ambitious and entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley and San Francisco, where I grew up and have worked most of my life, also has a dark side. And this newsletter will go there too, when necessary to find our way to back to light. The light of personal fulfillment in a society often mis-matched to human nature from evolution, called technocratic capitalism.
My career as a web/software designer and builder is primarily based in a simple principal: make people’s lives better, in each moment and as much as possible in total, by reducing the pain and increasing the pleasure of human-computer interaction. After thirty years of doing so, I can confidently say I’m an expert.
My journey to professional confidence and personal inner joy, however, was not easy. By no means inevitable. It was long, fraught, and riddled with both deep mysteries and towering obstacles. Not that I’ve completely arrived, either. I’m on this journey with you.
This journey is itself a destination. Because there’s a fundamental paradox in setting and achieving personal and professional goals. As author/entrepreneur Jim Rohn put it:
What you become in the pursuit of your goals is more important than the accomplishment itself.
A central premise of the BrainHealth.news newsletter is understanding “the pursuit of happiness” as a journey worthy of our best efforts. Efforts challenged by life in our global, competitive, complex and technology-driven socioeconomic age.
Together we’ll explore, share and discover the obstacles to, and opportunities to improve, our mind-body health, holistically. For
Professional achievement
Personal well-being
Social health
Healthspan
We’ll let science lead us and light the way to brighter todays, by applying it day by day in practical, practicable ways. Without letting science blind us to the awe and mystery beyond the frontiers of human knowledge. Because science and spirituality are not, ultimately, mutually exclusive.