A neuron extending and forming a connection over approximately 20 minutes.
Video captured by neuroscientist Dr. Lila Landowski; two frames shown in sequence.
Author’s Note
What Are You Practising? marks an important convergence in my continuing enquiry into consciousness and human development. For years, I have explored these questions through seemingly different avenues: neuroscience, Transcendental Meditation, the Seven Layers of Manifestation, the Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress, and, more recently, Adaptive Elegance. Increasingly, I no longer experience these as separate enquiries.
Each asks, in its own way, how human beings participate in what they become.
This essay also represents a further articulation of what I mean by the Transcendental Brain. I am interested not merely in whether meditation changes the brain, nor in reducing consciousness to neural activity, but in the relationship among consciousness, orientation, experience, adaptation, behaviour, and the biological instrument through which so much of human life is expressed.
Dr. Lila Landowski’s remarkable recording gave me a visual language for something I have been considering for years: we are continually interacting with an organism capable of responding to experience. The scientific questions surrounding that process deserve rigour and restraint. The human question it raises deserves equal attention.
If experience participates in shaping the instrument through which we subsequently experience the world, then perhaps we should become considerably more attentive to what we repeatedly ask that instrument to do.
—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
I recently came across a video captured by Dr. Lila Landowski, an award-winning Neuroscientist, that shows neurons making a connection. The video is an important revelation as it highlights humans and the systems that govern our existence are functioning in ways to which we scarcely give meaningful attention. Of her remarkable capture, Dr. Landowski writes:
This is a video taken of a neuron in a culture dish that I was just about to toss out. This video has been sped up using the magic of technology - this was actually the growth that occurred over the space of 20 minutes.
This essay grew from my having viewed the video more times than I will publicly admit and the reflections that surfaced surrounding a decision made seventeen years ago where I changed the hand with which I brush my teeth.
There was nothing particularly philosophical about the decision. I was sitting in a neuroscience class taught by Dr. Fred Travis when a fellow student, seated a couple of rows behind me, described something she had begun doing after learning about neuroplasticity. She had started brushing her teeth with her non-dominant hand.
Later that evening in my dorm as I was preparing for bed, I remembered hearing her comment and becoming curious.
We had been studying the human brain and its remarkable capacity to change in response to experience. Neuroplasticity was not simply an interesting concept to memorise for an exam. If what we were learning was true, then it ought to be observable in ordinary life. The brain should respond to what we repeatedly do.
So, standing there in the mirror clad in my night clothes after a long shower, I decided to conduct a decidedly unscientific experiment on myself and began brushing my teeth with my left hand.
At first, the experience required attention. Movements that had become automatic with my right hand suddenly needed to be executed in meaningful detail. The angle of the toothbrush felt off as I clasped it with my thumb and index finger. The movement of the wrist also felt similarly as I navigated the familiar terrain of my mouth from this new perspective. So much so, the maiden voyage required a level of conscious involvement that brushing my teeth had not required in years. And of course there was my right hand. It felt weird to just be there doing nothing. Something I had never even considered in all the years of brushing my teeth with my right hand as it related to my left.
Then something happened.
With a dedication to this new and deliberate practice, it became easier and easier. And over the course of the semester, I stopped thinking about it altogether. And now, seventeen years later, I still brush my teeth with my left hand—be it with an electric toothbrush or the good old-fashioned elbow powered version. So much so, that when I am brushing my teeth with one of our children and they note me doing so with my left hand while doing something else with my right hand, they comment. Neither have yet to give it a shot themselves. But there is time.
What began as an experiment became a behaviour. And that behaviour over time became a practice which eventually gave rise to my new normal.
I have thought about that little experiment many times over the years, particularly as my interests in consciousness, neuroscience, and human development have continued to converge. Having encountered Dr. Landowski’s video showing neuronal structures extending toward one another, I found myself watching the twenty-five-second clip repeatedly. Frame by frame, delicate projections reached across the space separating them until what had initially appeared disconnected became connected.
There was something almost mesmerising about seeing biological structures reaching across space in a seemingly intentional fashion. Yet what fascinated me most was not simply what I was watching; it was what the images caused me to consider about myself and the human species writ-large.
We frequently speak about learning as though information simply enters the mind and resides there, habits assuming they are things we possess, and personality as if it were a finished object. We even, sadly, say, “That is simply how I am,” often without considering how much of what we call who we are may also reflect what we have repeatedly thought, attended to, experienced, and done. However, the more I study the human brain, reflect on my own experiences with neuroplasticity, not to mention observe others seemingly unaware of the power of their brain, the more I see a far more complicated story.
Neuroplasticity has shown us that the brain is not merely a static organ through which experience passes. It is a living biological system capable of changing in response to experience, intentional learning, and repeated activity. Neural pathways can both strengthen and weaken with functional networks possessing the capacity to reorganise. So much so that skills that initially require considerable attention can, through deliberate practice, become increasingly efficient.
In sitting with my experience and observations, it must be said that the implications extend far beyond learning to play an instrument, acquiring a language, or brushing one’s teeth with the opposite hand. They extend into the life we are practising.
I sometimes tell audiences that human beings can become proficient at almost anything with enough practice. We can even become proficient worriers.
It usually produces laughter because people recognise themselves somewhere inside the observation. Yet beneath the humour rests something worth considering deeply. Worry, anger, suspicion, avoidance, annoyance, and hate can be rehearsed. So too can patience, attention, compassion, discernment, equanimity, and love.
This does not mean that every thought instantly rewires the brain, nor that human beings can simply think themselves into whatever neurological condition they desire. Biology is considerably more complicated than such claims allow. Genetics, development, health, sleep, environment, trauma, age, and countless other variables participate in shaping the nervous system. Neuroplasticity is neither unlimited nor inherently positive. But that may be precisely the point.
The brain’s capacity for adaptation does not determine the direction of our development—orientation matters.
Long before I began thinking about neuroplasticity in this way, I had become interested in a more fundamental question: What happens when the human being is incorrectly oriented toward reality?
Seemingly by design, much of our attention is directed outward. We study the things human beings create while devoting comparatively little attention to the consciousness from which those creations emerge. We analyse institutions, technologies, economies, political systems, educational structures, and cultures while frequently treating the human being producing them as though the builder were somehow separate from what has been built. Yet every human-derived system begins somewhere upstream—within.
Every action is preceded by a thought. Just as everything began as an idea within someone’s mind and is then brought into existence by bringing together resources—both human and non-human—to make it so. Be it an institution, product, company, city, or country. All began as an idea that then gave rise to behaviour.
This is one reason I developed the Seven Layers of Manifestation. The model begins with Pure Consciousness and moves through Universal and Natural Laws, the phenomenal world, human consciousness, the human-derived world, constructs, and, ultimately, outcomes. Its purpose is not merely to categorise reality. It is to remind us that outcomes have antecedents.
If we continually intervene only at the level of outcomes, we may spend generations repairing consequences while leaving their originating orientation largely untouched.
The brain adds another dimension to this proposition because orientation does not remain merely philosophical.
What we repeatedly attend to influences what we repeatedly do and what we repeatedly do becomes practice. As a result, our practice—deliberate or otherwise—then participates in the process of our learning. And learning can alter the functional organisation of the brain itself. Here, I am reminded of one of Fred’s comments from class that is also the title of his book “Your brain is a river, not a rock.” His dictum highlights that experience changes the brain. And that changed brain subsequently participates in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the next experience.
The observer is therefore participating in the development of the instrument through which subsequent observation occurs and thus highlights the importance of intentionality and consistency if one desires to be better in a specific area. Because that is an extraordinary loop.
Just think: we are continually training the instrument—directly or indirectly—through which we encounter the world.
This may also help explain why lasting personal change can prove so difficult. Many people sometimes imagine that recognising an error should be sufficient to eliminate it. They understand intellectually that a behaviour no longer serves them and become frustrated when the behaviour persists. But insight and embodiment are not identical. The former is awareness with the latter being based on the fruit of action. The old pattern has been practised. Perhaps for years; decades even. Whereas the new one has not.
Changing direction therefore requires more than recognising where we would prefer to go. It requires repeatedly travelling the new road until the unfamiliar becomes familiar—automatic even.
This is where my Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress enters the conversation. Growth is not simply the acquisition of knowledge. The seeker encounters knowledge, develops tools, intentionally refines their use, places them into service, and moves towards increasing mastery through practice. The emphasis on practice is essential because knowing something and becoming something are different processes.
Adaptive Elegance extends the proposition further.
Human development cannot consist merely of becoming extraordinarily efficient at repeating yesterday’s successful patterns. Conditions, environments, knowledge, and we humans change. What served us brilliantly at one stage of development may become an impediment at another.
The capacity we require, therefore, is not simply adaptation. It is the ability to recognise when adaptation is required, to release attachment to patterns that have outlived their usefulness, to adopt more appropriate responses, and eventually to stabilise those responses without becoming imprisoned by them.
I call that Adaptive Elegance.
Interestingly, the brain itself provides us with a biological metaphor for this process. It is simultaneously capable of stability and change. Learning requires both. A nervous system incapable of retaining anything would be useless. And a nervous system incapable of changing anything would be equally limiting.
Life seems to require both continuity and transformation.
Even our understanding of the brain’s maintenance has changed. In 2012, researchers described what became known as the glymphatic system, a brain-wide pathway involved in the movement of cerebrospinal, interstitial fluids, the clearance of metabolic waste or as some have taken to call it “brain dirt.” Subsequent research has continued to refine our understanding of how the sleeping and waking brain maintains itself. Perhaps the best book from 2017 that discusses the need for proper sleep is Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.
The significance, for me, extends beyond any particular physiological mechanism largely because the brain increasingly reveals itself not as fixed machinery but as living process.
It adapts, reorganizes, maintains, responds, and it learns.
That raises a question perhaps considerably larger than neuroscience.
What are we teaching it?
Consider the environments human beings have created for themselves. We awaken to notifications, then scroll through streams of outrage, aspiration, fear, entertainment, titillation, and comparison. As a result, algorithms learn what captures our attention and become increasingly skilled at presenting more of it. Be it political communications that reward emotional reaction, advertising that cultivates dissatisfaction, or social identities that are repeatedly reinforced through language, imagery, and affiliation. All are designed, it seems, to design us according to some larger whim of some unnamed human actors.
Culture creates environments of repetition. And those repetitions occur inside actual human nervous systems.
Culture therefore does more than communicate ideas. It creates conditions under which attention is repeatedly directed, behaviours are repeatedly performed, and interpretations are repeatedly rehearsed. Then those human beings create culture and the loop closes.
This is why the question of orientation cannot remain merely philosophical. If consciousness influences attention, attention influences behaviour, behaviour influences experience, experience influences the brain, and the brain participates in subsequent perception and behaviour, then how we orient human consciousness may have consequences extending from the neuron to civilisation.
This is also why contemplative practices deserve serious consideration without requiring us to exaggerate what science presently knows about them. Practices that systematically alter the quality or direction of attention introduce different experiences into an adaptive nervous system. What those experiences do, how durable their effects become, and under what conditions they influence behaviour remain legitimate scientific questions.
For me, Transcendental Meditation occupies a particular place in that enquiry because it introduces the possibility of systematically experiencing consciousness at increasingly subtler levels of mental activity, eventually transcending thought altogether. My interest is not merely whether meditation changes the brain. The more interesting question is what happens to human life when consciousness, brain, behaviour and environment participate in a sustained process of development.
That is the territory I have come to think of as the Transcendental Brain.
It is not simply a brain that meditates. Nor is it a claim that neuroscience can explain consciousness. Instead, it is an enquiry into what becomes possible when we begin understanding the relationship among consciousness, orientation, experience, adaptation, and the biological instrument through which so much of human life is expressed.
Seventeen years ago, none of this was running through my mind as I stood at the bathroom sink clad in my night clothes awkwardly moving a toothbrush around my mouth with my left hand.
I simply wanted to see whether something I had learned in Fred’s neuroscience class worked. Eventually, I stopped noticing that I was conducting an experiment and my left hand simply reached for the toothbrush.
Perhaps that is where some of the most consequential transformations eventually arrive—not when we can articulate them beautifully, nor when we understand them intellectually, but when what once required deliberate practice has become an effortless way of being.
Which leaves each of us with a deceptively simple question: What are you practising?
Because whatever it is, you may be getting better at it. But the real question is, do you really want to?
Suggested Practice
For the next several days, identify one thing you have become good at through repetition. It need not be something you deliberately chose to master. Perhaps you have become skilled at listening carefully, exercising regularly, solving difficult problems, or remaining calm under pressure. But perhaps you have also become skilled at worrying, postponing, reacting defensively, reaching automatically for your phone, or expecting the worst.
Do not judge what you discover. Simply observe it.
Then ask yourself: What have I been practising?
Choose one small behaviour that reflects the direction in which you actually wish to develop and practise it deliberately. Keep it sufficiently small that you can repeat it consistently. Pay attention to the awkwardness that accompanies the unfamiliar. Notice the impulse to return to what is automatic. And remember that unfamiliarity is not necessarily evidence that something is wrong. Sometimes it is simply evidence that you are travelling a road you have not travelled often enough.
Over time, return to the deeper question:
Am I practising the person I intend to become?
—
About the Author
Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.
He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.
Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.
His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.
He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.
To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.