Get Brainsavvy

BRAINSAVVY

the secret to progress

Reimagining Maps

Your brain needs maps. You journey in a landscape that reaches into the future and into the past. As you make your way, your embodied brain will travel maps of extraordinary depth and dimension. Your path will unfold on vast neural networks filled with connections about reward and risk, safety and threat—each created by a lived experience. To the biology that moves you, that is success: living maps that shape your path forward. And indeed, they will shape everything from the focus of your attention to your fundamental beliefs about what is possible.
Your mind is a process. Thankfully, our brains have a mapping partner. One that can see the maps shaping our experiences—and help shape generative ones. This is mind, and it is a process—not a place. In the evolutionary brain, it offers a function with limitless value: emerging in real-time, it shapes the flow of emerging resources and connections being accessed and created. When we're on neural pathways that sustain our resources, we become aware of safe sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. Otherwise, our awareness becomes filled with sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts laden with threat. The experience pulls our attention—and narrows our mind.
Presence allows progress. Uncertainty is where presence of mind matters most. Our neurobiology knows from experience—about 60 million years of it—that uncharted territory must be monitored for signals that we are safe enough to stay put and take in the view or turn our attention inward to do some thinking. These are things it can do only in the presence of neuroceptive cues of safety and calm that connect to networking the brain interprets as vitality, curiosity, inspiration, clarity, readiness, confidence, compassion, belonging, and/or peace. When these cues are not present, our most primitive maps ready us to fight or flee. Sound familiar? If so, you know how quickly such primitive maps can limit our pathways forward in modern life.
The future is a resource. In a brain that worships at the altar of the lived experience, infinite maps exist with connections to maps our brains recognize and relax in. Forged in experiences of calm, hope, passion and intention, they persist in neural networks that are rich with felt senses of purpose and motivation. Our neurobiology may be ancient, but our callings are visionary—and our minds are more than capable of expanding our pathways in visionary directions. This is insight we can use to transform uncertainty into discovery and breakthrough, and shape more of the maps our brains can feel confident in: maps filled with lived experiences of futures we're called to create.
Brainsavvy is your birthright. The challenges that come with being human continue to evolve. Thankfully, so do our neural maps, and our understanding of the science we need to create the futures we want. Hemispheres is here to help shape an age of brainsavvy, with applied tools that nurture the resources that make us visionary—and harness the power of the mind.

By the way, did you know you have two?