In this post, I’ll explore whether humans can tap into this internal communication system, drawing on groundbreaking work from Michael Levin and his lab at Tufts University, along with related scientific studies.

What Is Bioelectric Communication?

At its core, bioelectricity refers to the electrical potentials and ion flows across cell membranes that allow cells to “communicate” with each other. Unlike the nervous system’s rapid firing of neurons, these signals operate more like a slow, distributed network that guides large-scale processes in the body. Cells maintain voltage gradients — differences in electrical charge — that influence everything from gene expression to cell migration and proliferation.

Research shows that these bioelectric networks form a kind of “code” that cells use to store memories of body patterns and respond to injuries. For instance, in regeneration-capable organisms such as flatworms and frogs, bioelectric signals help cells “decide” what to rebuild after damage. Levin describes this as cells exhibiting “basal cognition” — basic problem-solving abilities that enable collective intelligence across tissues.

But can we, as conscious beings, interface with this system? While direct “conversation” like commanding your kidney to heal itself isn’t yet possible, experiments demonstrate that manipulating bioelectric signals can redirect organ behavior, hinting at future technologies for human applications.

Michael Levin’s Pioneering Experiments at Tufts

Michael Levin’s lab has been at the forefront of this field, focusing on how bioelectric signals control morphogenesis—the process of forming tissues and organs. Their work reveals that by altering these signals, we can essentially “instruct” cells to build or repair structures in ways that defy normal biology.

Inducing New Organs in Frogs

In a landmark 2011 study, Levin’s team manipulated bioelectric signals in frog (Xenopus) embryos to trigger the formation of entirely new organs. They used genetic tools to deliver mRNA encoding ion channels, altering membrane voltage in specific cells. When they depolarized (made less negative) cells in the head, it disrupted normal eye development, leading to deformed or missing eyes. More astonishingly, by hyperpolarizing cells in non-eye areas like the back or tail to match the “eye-specific” voltage gradient, they induced fully functional eyes to grow there.

This experiment showed that bioelectric gradients act as a blueprint for organ identity. Each structure has a unique voltage “signature,” and by mimicking it, cells anywhere in the body can be reprogrammed. Implications? This could lead to regenerative therapies where we “communicate” instructions to grow replacement organs on demand.

Rewiring Regeneration in Flatworms

Levin’s group has also worked with planarians — flatworms famous for their regenerative abilities. In a 2013 study, they altered bioelectric patterns using drugs that target ion channels, creating two-headed worms. Remarkably, these changes persisted across generations without altering the DNA; the bioelectric “memory” instructed subsequent regenerations to produce the same multi-headed form. They even grafted heads from different species, demonstrating how bioelectric signals override genetic defaults to control anatomy.

This highlights bioelectricity’s role in long-term pattern storage, akin to how software updates hardware behavior. In terms of communication, it suggests we could “edit” the body’s internal dialogue to promote healing or prevent malformations.

Regrowing Limbs and Tails

Extending to frogs, Levin’s lab used bioelectric modulation to regrow tadpole tails (including spinal cord and muscle) and even adult hind legs — a feat previously thought impossible in non-regenerative stages. By delivering targeted electrical signals via ion channel drugs, they guided cells away from scarring toward rebuilding complex structures.

In amphibians like axolotls, “currents of injury” — natural electric fields at wound sites — drive regeneration. Disrupting these with channel blockers halts the process, while applying exogenous fields induces it in non-regenerative species. These studies underscore bioelectric signals as a universal language for tissue repair.

Broader Scientific Studies on Bioelectric Mechanisms

Beyond Levin’s lab, numerous papers support the idea that bioelectricity enables “communication” between cells and organs.

Guiding Cell Behavior in Regeneration

A 2009 review details how electric fields direct cell migration (galvanotaxis) during wound healing and regeneration. For example, in corneal injuries, natural fields guide keratinocytes to close wounds, while voltage-gated channels control proliferation and differentiation. In zebrafish eyes, proton pumps regulate retinoblast growth, and hyperpolarization via potassium channels influences stem cell fate in human mesenchymal cells.

These mechanisms show bioelectricity as an epigenetic cue, integrating with genetic pathways to orchestrate pattern formation. Polarity in planarians, for instance, is set by ion flows, allowing fragments to regenerate heads or tails correctly.

Bioelectricity in Brain Development and Cancer

Bioelectric signals also shape organs like the brain. In frog embryos, voltage gradients regulate neural development, and manipulations can alter brain structures. Levin’s work extends this to cancer: by forcing bioelectric states in frogs, they suppressed tumors despite oncogenes, viewing cancer as a breakdown in cellular communication where cells revert to selfish, unicellular behavior.

A recent 2025 paper frames bioelectric networks as a “tractable interface” for biomedicine, allowing us to “communicate” goals to cellular collectives. Techniques such as optogenetics and pharmacology can induce ectopic organs, repair birth defects (e.g., activating HCN2 channels to correct brain morphology), and normalize cancer by restoring connectivity.

Mindful Dialogue with the Body: Supporting Experiments

Complementing the bioelectric perspective, the concept of mindfully “talking” to your body — through listening to its signals and responding with kindness — finds support in experiments on mind-body interventions. For example, in a 1998 randomized controlled trial with psoriasis patients, those practicing mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) during ultraviolet light therapy cleared skin lesions significantly faster than those receiving therapy alone, demonstrating how mindful attention accelerates physical healing. 

Another study explored the impact of perceived time on wound healing: participants with induced bruises healed faster when they believed more time had passed (via manipulated timers), underscoring how mental perceptions directly influence physiological recovery and align with the blog’s emphasis on intuitive, non-verbal communication with the body. Additionally, RCTs in HIV patients showed that 8‑week MBSR programs increased CD4+ T lymphocyte counts, boosting immune function, while in stressed adults, brief mindfulness retreats reduced inflammatory markers like IL‑6 by enhancing brain connectivity to buffer stress.  

These experiments illustrate how re-establishing a “two-way conversation” via mindfulness — focusing on present-moment body signals and responding with gratitude and care — can restore feedback loops, reduce chronic stress disconnection, and promote self-healing.

Can You Communicate with Your Organs Today?

While Levin’s experiments are mostly in model organisms, the principles apply to humans. Biofeedback techniques—where you monitor and influence physiological signals, such as heart rate variability—offer a rudimentary way to “talk” to your body. However, true communication via bioelectricity might involve emerging “electroceuticals” — devices or drugs that modulate ion channels to treat conditions like chronic pain or inflammation.

For now, it’s not about willing your spleen to behave but about scientific tools that hack the body’s electrical language. Levin envisions an “anatomical compiler” in which we input desired outcomes, and bioelectric interventions make them happen. Challenges remain, such as scaling to complex human organs and ensuring safety, but studies in mice on limb regeneration are underway.

The Future: A New Era of Regenerative Medicine

The question “Can I communicate with my body organs?” is evolving from speculation to science. Through bioelectricity, we’re learning to eavesdrop on — and intervene in — the body’s internal chatter. Levin’s lab has shown we can rewrite cellular instructions for regeneration, organ formation, and disease control, paving the way for therapies that harness the body’s own intelligence.

As research progresses, perhaps one day you’ll “tell” your body to heal a damaged heart or grow new tissue. Until then, this field reminds us that our bodies are not just machines but dynamic, communicative systems waiting to be understood.

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With organizational growth comes the need for structural change: responsibilities have to be assigned properly, hierarchies are created in order to allow for concerted management and a proper controlling of the company. In many cases, the founders will sidestep or leave the company and will be replaced by external managers experienced in running large organizations. 

“Human Population Corp.” (HPC), the company founded by the first settlers, already has a very long tradition of approximately 30,000 years. Its corporate history can be described as a mixed success: , HPC is known for hugely powerful inventions, products, and services, such as electricity, all sorts of industrial machines leisure and business travel, technologies, medicine, educational programs, and more. These inventions have created massive wealth for HPC over time – quite interestingly — most of it over the course of the last 150 years. HPC’s management can afford to live a life of abundance and security, being equipped with everything they need. While this sounds like a great story, HPC’s annual financial statements reveal the company’s dark side: out of its more than 7.5 billion employees, HPC can’t pay roughly 11% of them enough salaries to only survive — around 800 million people are starving. Furthermore, HPC cannot guarantee the security of its employees: there is a constant level of violent conflicts in many of HPC’s departments that can’t be solved without employees killing themselves or being killed by HPC’s armed forces. 

From time to time, these conflicts affect the complete company and lead to the closing of departments, a replacement of managers, and an overall reduction in employment. As long as there are enough profitable and secure HPC departments that guarantee the company a net profit, these problems are regarded as manageable. However, the HPC risk analysis department has been sending memos to the board showing concern about the exponentially increased dimensions of these problems in recent years. Analyses in these memos uncover not only the above-mentioned problems with employees, but HPC’s product and service offering itself is having a dramatic impact on the environment. In many of HPC’s locations, environmental, security and economic problems have been aggravating — resulting in migration of employees, new levels of violence, and significant health problems including global pandemics and bioterror attacks. 

The HPC Management Challenge

HPC’s management board, which itself has comprised thousands of different members due to the long tradition of the firm, routinely meets in specifically created organizational groups, named after thematic priorities, such as World Health Organisation WHO, UNESCO — the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization., World Economic Forum WEF, or MSC — the Munich Security Conference. Sometimes, these meetings are given more obscure, intransparent names, such as G8, or Bilderberg conference. At these gatherings, HPC leaders try to agree upon the company’s strategy and discuss how to minimize the above-mentioned problems. From time to time, HPC leaders leave with the good feeling of having agreed on a new, successful strategy. However, it routinely turns out that agreements are short-lived if complied with at all. 

Reconnect! 

The HPC story shows that it is completely unrealistic to assume the planet earth’s global challenges could be solved by HPC management. The people in charge call themselves top managers, or leaders, but they aren’t capable of second- or higher-order thinking. They simply can’t asses the effects of their actions. In other words: we cannot and we must not do business as usual. Time is running out. In 2020, Homo Sapiens must re-invent himself to survive. After the Cognitive Revolution, which has resulted in today’s good as well as bad outcomes, we need the Mindful Revolution — mankind needs to take the next evolutionary step to ensure its own survival. 

The bad news: We need to take this step immediately — otherwise it will be too late. The good news: We can take this step ourselves, without the support of others. Additionally to our achieved intellectual level of being the most highly developed mammal, we need to connect our mastermind brains with our guts, we must synchronize our bodies and our minds. This synchronization will eventually broaden our minds and enable us to understand more of our ecosystem’s complexity.

The Story of HPC is an excerpt of The Mindful Revolution

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Mankind has learned to develop technology that adds convenience to life by instrumentalizing inherent human capabilities, such as language and storytelling — during the phase of the Cognitive Revolution, some 70–30,000 years ago. However, humankind found itself at the top of the food chain of all living beings in a blink of history; whereas other animals used millions of years to develop further, humans succeeded from eating bigger animals’ leftovers to build AI-powered machines within a few thousand years. This evolutionary short track is the main reason for today’s challenges, such as the destruction of our ecosystems and wars. As Yuval Harari puts it: Humans aren’t wolves but rather resemble a sheep flock that — thanks to a freak of nature — have learned to build tanks and nuclear weapons. And sheep armed with weapons are far more dangerous than wolves. Humans have neither learned to cope with these challenges coming with their new abilities nor have we learned to use our brains in an adequate evolutionary way.

Now, being confronted with obvious, imminent challenges, such as climate crisis, migration, and global political tensions, we can’t rely on improving technology further in a linear way. We can’t rely on building slightly better tech when giant challenges are looming. We must initiate a paradigm shift, a change of our own inherent system — we must improve ourselves — since our current human capabilities prove to be insufficient for solving these challenges. We are overwhelmed, and we are only starting to realize this mental overload. Unfortunately, the typical human reaction of being overwhelmed is either to ignore the problem, to run away, or to be panicked. None of which is helpful. Think about it and you will find many practical examples for each of these three coping strategies.

The Mindful Revolution — How To Manage Complexity

The systemic change we have to initiate now is that we enhance ourselves in a way that enables us to solve these challenges, quickly. Obviously, the challenge lies in being unable to solve existing problems with the same level of consciousness that created them. The good news is that there is a way of self-enhancement that can be embarked on by everybody. Each individual can (and should) start working today on her personal improvement. By unleashing our inherent human potential that we have only fractionally materialized by now, we not only improve ourselves, our performance, but we consciously contribute to the next evolutionary step of humankind, the Mindful Revolution. The Mindful Revolution will prove to become a similar quantum leap for humanity as the Cognitive Revolution 30,000 years ago. Historians aren’t completely sure, why Sapiens survived and Homo Florensis, Neanderthals, and others did not. Presumably, Sapiens succeeded because of their greater capabilities, mainly derived from their bigger brains. Now is the time for the next evolutionary step of  Sapiens: we can choose: complete distinction of our species — or The Mindful Revolution.

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Since the prevailing ‘no time’ argument and a certain unease regarding an overwhelming and partially contradictory amount of recommendations regarding fitness, diet and mindful living, I wrote down my own regimen which could serve as an exemplary schedule, easy to be coxed and pasted into other lives.

Daily REJUVENATION Routine — Synch Body And Mind Towards A Max Health Span

My daily routine consists of physical, mental, and mindful elements that can be copied by anybody who wants to change her life in a healthy way and brings along a certain commitment. Most elements require to overcome one’s inner temptation. That might be tough at the start, but it becomes easier after every repetition and after some time you probably wonder how you could have lived without this training before: the significant positive results on your lifestyle and well-being become so obvious that you can’t think of living without it anymore.

Overview Daily REJUVENATION Routine

For a full Daily REJUVENATION, you need 1.5 h of your time each day. If that sounds much to you, choose between two options: either you just select some specific elements out of the DRR, e.g. you might forgo the run and thus spare 25 minutes. Or, you use it as an excuse for not starting the DRR at all. If you‘re ready to choose the second option, wait for a second, and think about how much of your time is spent on Social Media, TV, and consuming daily news — with none making you a bit happier, let alone more healthy. You might be able to take a bit of this unconsciously spent time budget and instead turn it into an investment in your healthspan.

If you‘re motivated and ready to start with the Daily REJUVENATION — perfect — you won‘t regret your decision! The DRR is probably (one of) the very best wellness programs you can treat yourself with. You train your body to manage oxygen and calorie intake much more efficiently with an optimized metabolism and energy management as a result. You will feel better, you will look better, you will be healthier and you will most probably maximize the healthy part of your life span — your healthspan.

For the skeptics, there is another, totally different, compelling argument in favor of DRR: it’s free! There is no monthly gym bill, no app subscription fee — your sole investment is your time. and willpower.

Now, let‘s start!

Early Morning — After getting up

6:00
Get up — Morning Toilet

6:20
Meditation and Humming (20min)

6:45
Yoga Sun Slute (5min)

6:55
Running incl. 3 HIT intervalls, each 30sec (25min)

7:20
Deep Breathing (3 rounds) followed by 1 round with subsequent Push-ups (10min)

7:35
Warm showering followed by 2min cold showering with ice-cold water

Nighttime — Before going to bed

Deep Breathing(10min)
Humming (5min)

You find a detailed version with explanations of the individual elements of my Daily Rewire Routine on REJUVENS (German). Now, don’t think twice — give it a try and start today with maximizing your own health span!

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If you plan to choose a healthy diet, you should address:

• what you eat and drink,
• how much you eat and drink, and
• how often you eat and drink.

Most diet recommendations are limited to the first aspect of what you should eat. Obviously, this is important, since as we say in the information business: „shit in, shit out“, which means if your food intake is of low quality, your organism won‘t be able to achieve good results. If you opt for the so-called Mediterranean diet, that‘‘s perfect. If you want to know more about specific diets, have a look here

Next, it seems also obvious that the amount of (the calories of) food intake defines your BMI.  Calorie restriction  (CR) is the best advice if you‘re heading for a good, long life. Scientists working in the field of aging, cite CR as the ultimate recommendation for longevity.

The last aspect, however, is the third relevant criteria of a healthy diet: the frequency of your food intake results in short-term effects, such as losing or gaining weight, but much more relevant are the long-term effects, its impact on your health span — that part of your overall life span you do not suffer from chronic illnesses, which is, on average, roughly the last 10–15 years of your life. After food intake, our bodies need time to digest, to make use of the input. It takes about six to eight hours for food to pass through your digestive system. Food then enters our large intestine for further digestion, absorption of water, and, finally, elimination of undigested food. It takes about 36 hours for food to move through the entire digestive system. All in all, from the time we swallow food to the time it leaves our bodies as feces, it takes about two to five days, depending on the individual.

Obviously, nobody waits for 3 days to start eating again. However, the recommendation here is to provide your digestive system with enough time to do its work. Religions and philosophies, such as Christianity, Buddhism, or Sufism, teach us to fast for 8 hours before start eating again. In the health and wellness area we speak of Intermittent Fasting (IF). IF can be done in various ways — the best-known version is 16:8, which means you don‘t eat for 16 hours, and you eat in a time window of eight hours. Another famous version is the Fast-Five diet, which recommends only eat in a time window of 5 hours, ideally from 5 pm-10 pm. In this period, you can eat what you want and how much you want, the proponents of this version argue (I’d be skeptical, and I’d recommend to mainly eat high-protein and high-carb food if you opt for Fast Five).

On Healthy Eating — How To Choose A Healthy Diet

Whatever version of IF you choose, my advice is to go for one that best fits into your daily schedule and that is socially acceptable. I, personally, only choose behaviors that I can fit into my overall lifestyle for an extended period of time. IF for me means 14:10 on typical days, i.e. skipping breakfast (going for green tea and espresso, only). Then, I try to have 8 hours between lunch and dinner without food intake. Roughly 14 hours after food intake, a key homeostatic mechanism called autophagy kicks in. Autophagy is the body’s way of cleaning out damaged cells, in order to regenerate new, healthy cells.

For me, that 14:10 regimen is always the goal, but I don’t see it in a dogmatic way. If I’m offered fresh fruits or very dark chocolate during an afternoon meeting, I eat some. It fascinates me, that our bodies provide us with several options to regenerate and rewire ourselves, physiologically as well as mentally.

A little trick for those days you have to travel: just skip meals you typically would not have actively chosen yourselves, s.a. snacks on the plane, fast food at the airport, or bad finger-food at receptions. Especially when being in transit, it is easy fasting by not opting for bad choices.

On Healthy Eating — How To Choose A Sustainable Diet

To sum it up: eat only good food, but less, and less frequently. That‘s the simple nutrition program that should work best for everybody who is prepared for a minimum of commitment to a regimen. If you combine this diet with the Daily REWIRE Routine, you should become quite old while staying healthy!

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Since all our brain modules are plastic to some degree, we have the ability to create signature cultural activities and to respond to changing conditions. This cognitive fluidity is the human equivalent to Artificial Intelligence. The human cortex has 30bn neurons and is capable of making 1 million billion synaptic connections, at least 10 followed by a million zeros. Knowing that the universe consists of 10 followed by 79 zeros particles, it becomes clear why mindfulness beats AI. We call the shots to fully capitalize on our inherent capabilities.

Tenuous Civilization

Civilization is a combination of higher and lower brain functions and the plastic brain can always allow these functions that it has brought together earlier to separate. That said, a regression to barbarism, a civilization breakdown in civil wars and brutal instincts, such as theft, rape, murder, and destruction, is possible anytime. Civilization will always be a fragile affair that has to be taught in each generation anew. Many of today’s societal challenges can be ascribed to a necessary, but strenuous neuronal rewiring process in human beings‘ brains.

Cultural Change Triggers Neuroplasticity In Human Brains

For the adult brain, immigration is a brutal workout, requiring a massive rewiring of cortical real estate. When a new culture plastically competes with legacy neural networks of home country origin, successful assimilation requires at least a generation. Most immigrants experience disorientation and traumas. In the same way, people living in the country that welcomes immigrants, have to cope with different cultures, often associated with significantly lower living standards followed by respective ways of life that immigrants have been accustomed to.

Within one generation, it proves to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to completely rewire in order to fully understand another culture. Faced with a massive migration challenge, it‘s our duty to enrich our educational curricula at (pre-)schools and universities with as much information about different cultures as we can. Since cultural rewiring takes time, we must educate our children and enable them to develop culture-rich neural networks at a time they are most susceptible to learning. This could become a relevant factor for the coexistence of future societies.

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The impact of this so-called perceptual learning is bigger than most of us imagine. Not only literacy and language but also such fundamental brain activities, such as sight and perception, are changed by culture. This fascinating impact of culture on our brain has been shown in several inter-cultural experiments, by Richard E. Nisbett. These experiments showed that Westerners (US Americans) perceive words or images differently from Easterners (Japanese). While Easterners approach words and images „analytically“; i.e. by dividing what they observe into individual parts and therefore perceiving objects in isolation, Easterners approach the world „holistically“, seeing objects as related to each other, perceiving „the whole“.

Our Functional Cognitive Architectures Are Modified By Our Culture

However, if people of one culture emigrate to another, after a few years they start perceiving as people of the newly adopted culture do. Perception, as it turns out, is not a passive, bottom-up process, but already starts when energy from the outside world reaches our body’s sense receptors and move on to the perceptual centers in our brain. While perceiving, the human brain is active and constantly adjusting itself.

The fact that culture changes perception should lead to a much higher tolerance and better understanding among human beings. If I know that my neighbor does not perceive the same while looking at the same object, I might be called upon to have a conversation about the object’s properties first, before getting into a potential argument. Let’s always remember Darwin!

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Media outlets switch from the term climate change to climate crisis because environmental developments have to be addressed urgently if we want to keep our planet habitable. Politically, we notice a strengthening of parties at the far-right and far-left spectrums and increasingly irrational behavior of leading politicians who seem not to be aware of their responsibilities as heads of governments. Due to environmental, but also economic reasons, there is a mass migration underway that brings millions of people from the southern hemisphere to Europe and other rich areas. — a migration caused by poverty, wars, and other conflicts with the refugees’ single hope for living peaceful, secure lives. This inflow of immigrants also results in huge challenges for governments and people living in rich countries having to somehow share many aspects of their rich lifestyles with millions of new arrivals, most of them not used to western conventions and democratic mores.

At the moment, convincing strategies to meet these challenges are missing. Now and then, some politicians, scientific task forces, or entrepreneurs come up with bold plans, such as installing bases on other planets in order to relocate humankind when planet earth has stopped functioning. Then there is AI, a technological development that awakes the same amount of enthusiasm and belief in the future as skepticism and fear of an uncontrollable behemoth that will subjugate human beings based on its superior intelligence. And there are thousands of mostly grassroots-driven, well-intended activities, many of them somewhat extreme or solitarily designed and therefore rather impractical.

Language And Storytelling

In his fascinating book Sapiens, Israeli historian Yuval Harari describes language and storytelling as the most differentiating abilities of homo sapiens compared to other mammals. For him, modern man has successfully survived and displaced other hominins because of this Cognitive Revolution. The language was the tool to suppress speechless contemporaries and to easily pass knowledge horizontally within huge populations as well as vertically from generation to generation. Unfortunately, wars of religion, autocratic jurisdictions and the more modern phenomenon of fake news have uncovered the flip side of language and storytelling: simple stories make people around the globe kill each other, allow governments and religious leaders to dictate terms for correct clothing and enable democratically elected presidents to trick and deceive as only con artists do.

Beginnings Of A New Era

At the end of the 19th century, there were first indications of a new era in understanding human capabilities. When, in 1890, Harvard psychologist William James published The Principles of Psychology, he was praised in America and Europe both by academics and lay readers. Some declared it a classic and likened it to Moby Dick. James transformed both, psychology and philosophy by popularizing his thesis of pragmatism, a way of thinking that argues human beings must test their beliefs and decisions by results. James invented the phrase “stream of consciousness” to describe the workings of our minds. For him, our thinking is not orderly or logical, but chaotic, and our moods constantly and inexplicably shifting. Without the knowledge of modern neuroscience, the synapses that connect billions of neurons, and neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and oxytocin, he wasn’t able to peer into the brain. Still, he was (one of) the first to state that human beings should be aware of the combination of their mental and physical abilities that by far exceed their physical abilities, alone.

In the past, development in most parts of the world has been regarded as a primarily technical development — first in terms of hardware and, with the advent of the computer, increasingly in terms of software. Any conference, task force, or scientific study that addresses “the future” mainly covers technological developments. I think, this is — an absolutely necessary — but entirely insufficient strategy to ensure the survival of homo sapiens on planet earth. It is my belief that humans living in the 21st century must meet a very individual challenge first, in order to commonly survive as a population: we must start the Mindful Revolution.

After The Cognitive Revolution Comes The Mindful Revolution

For me, the Mindful Revolution is the logical next step built on top of Harari’s Cognitive Revolution. A common feature of both revolutions is that neither one solves any major problem per se — but each one provides human beings with a toolset that can be used to leverage the abilities of individuals and populations to the next level of life. As with language and storytelling, mindfulness isn’t something that has been invented quite recently, but something that has been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Whereas some scientists believe that Neanderthals living 300,000 years ago, could speak, Gutenberg invented the first printer quite sometime later, around 1440. That machine allowed stories to be distributed efficiently for the first time. The first signs of mindfulness appeared with the advent of Buddhism, in the 5th century BCE. In today’s Tibet, China and India many scholars teach behaviors and attitudes such as compassion, self-compassion, altruism, and others. In Western sciences of recent date, these teachings have been regarded as esoteric or folklore, measured against modern scientific frameworks. This chasm has started closing due to the fact that more and more knowledge about and results of mindfulness practice has been confirmed with scientifically collected and computed data gauged by high-tech medical gear.

High Demands On Ourselves

At the beginning of the 21st century, we know for sure that human beings know little about themselves, that we only use a tiny fraction of one of our mots important endogenous resources — our brains. In other words: we run the show — i.e. ruin our planet and kill our fellow human beings — without knowing ourselves in-depth, utilizing just a fraction of our capabilities. This must not be our expectations. As a humanist, my expectation must be to learn to know myself, to feel self-compassion, and thereby compassion for others. As an enlightened academic, I must utilize my endogenous resources in the best possible way — and I must not accept to capitalize on only 10% of my skill set.

What is the Mindful Revolution?

In short, Mindful Revolution means that human beings know themselves (gnothi seauton), feel self-compassion and compassion for others. The Mindful Revolution enables mankind to capitalize on the maximum of each individual’s physical and mental abilities. The Mindful Revolution enables human beings to develop a new, much broader perspective on life in general and on themselves and fellow human beings specifically. The Mindful Revolution allows for more tolerance, compassion, and understanding, enables people to develop ways and tools for cooperation and collaboration, and in the best case, a new way of jointly saving ourselves and our planet.

Mindfulness is a change that starts within and stays within the individual. By changing oneself, a person becomes more aware of herself, her sensations and capabilities, and, in the next step, more open for her environment including her fellow human beings. Without creating strategies, developing tactics, and planning details, the mindful person opens herself up for any external input. She experiences more sensations on a deeper level and is able to act and behave intuitively in a seemingly effortless way. There are more good things that happen to her, people treat her in a friendlier way, finding solutions to problems becomes easy. The reason for a better flow in life is not any kind of magic of randomness — it is a better utilization of the individual‘s resources, especially her brain. I am not speaking of anecdotal evidence — these effects have been measured and quantified in many scientific studies.

Whether it’s about schoolchildren with experiences in mindfulness practice, inhabitants of retirement homes, athletes, or the average working person, mindfulness results in a quantifiable improvement,ent of a person‘s lifestyle. In recent years, more and more individuals have learned about these positive effects of training without side effects. If this knowledge could be spread further and faster, more people, groups, and, finally, populations could benefit. We should teach our children, and we should integrate mindfulness into school curriculums. Mindfulness should become a mandatory subject in any kind of educational institution. In 2013, Ohio congressman Tim Ryan took this challenge seriously and started Mindful Nation, a non-profit foundation and education outlet teaching mindfulness to everyday Americans.

Mindfulness beats AI

Mindful human beings don‘t have to fear any kind of malicious AI. Whereas AI can easily take over computable tasks from human beings and outperform us in calculations, it should take ages before an AI would be able to emulate our mind. The human cortex alone has 30bn neurons and is capable of making 1 million billion synaptic connections, i.e. at least 10 followed by a million zeros. Knowing that the universe consists of 10 followed by 79 zeros particles, it becomes clear why mindfulness beats Artificial Intelligence, easily.

Beside all meaningful activities, and living a peaceful and eco-conscious life — we have the ability to and must start the Mindful Revolution — now!

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On the private side, I have invested months of reading and learning about what I think is the biggest discovery for mankind in a long time: neuroplasticity and neurogenesis — i.e. the ability of human beings to rewire their brains and generate new neutrons in any phase of their lives. For me, words cannot nearly describe the effects neuroplasticity will have: Until 1995, scientists believed that the brain was hard-wired and there was no new generation of neurons. Wrong. Simply wrong. It’s the other way round: neuroplasticity and neurogenesis mean that people with significant neuronal problems can get rid of them and everybody can enhance his or her mental and physical abilities many times more than initially imagined.

To start your neuroplasticity learning experience you might watch this conversation with Dr. Norman Doidge:

Being an entrepreneur by heart, I had to give this conviction a shape. My readings, online courses, and some visits to meetups and conferences addressing neuroplasticity from a more general perspective, I started building a network of experts acting as neuroplasticity  — or — neuroplastic coaches — each expert in her proper field of expertise. Neuroplasticity is based on four activities of your daily living: sleep, exercise/sports, diet, and meditation.

Interested In The Next Big Thing? It’s Neuroplasticity.

The very first step has been setting up the REWIRE website with some initial content and a basic neuroplastic coaching program as a first offering. Since the program is targeted to the German market, all contents are in the German language, for the time being. Due to the fact that REWIRE has to be set up among my businesses it takes its time. But I have had some very promising discussions with potential future neuroplastic coaches and will have many more in the last weeks of this year. My plan is to start with the first neuroplastic coaching program after some friends and I have run through the program ourselves in spring, 2018.

If you are interested in participating in REWIRE I’d be more than happy to hear from you!

If you want to read and learn more about neuroplasticity, here’s my recommendations shortlist:

• Neustart im Kopf: Wie sich unser Gehirn selbst repariert, Norman Doidge
• Rewire Your Brain , John B. Arden
• The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge
• The Body Builders, Adam Piore
• Der Ernährungskompass, Bas Kast
• The Way We Eat Now, Bee Wilson
• Dein Gehirn weiss mehr als Du denkst, Niels Birbaumer
• Mindfulness, Ellen J. Langer
• Mind Over Medicine, Lissa Rankin
• The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, Vishen Lakhiani
• Alt werden ohne alt zu sein, Rudi Westendorp
• Altered Traits, Daniel Coleman, Richard Davidson
• The Brain’s Way Of Healing, Norman Doidge
• The Last Best Cure, Donna Jackson Nakazawa
• The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust, John Coates
• The Inner Game of Tennis, W. Timothy Gallway
• Running Lean, Ash Maurya
• Schlaf wirkt Wunder, Hans-Günther Weeß
• Sleep – Schlafen wie die Profis, Nick Littlehales

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A few weeks ago, my business partners and I decided to cooperate with another team to jointly start a new company. The other team brings in experiences and expertise in different areas which would be perfectly complementary to our own expertise. My partners and I, we know each other very well — to the extent that each of us thinks to know what the other one would do or say in a specific situation.  That level of understanding can’t be expected when new members enter the team. Typically, everybody has to get used to the others, learn how they think, act, and react — and what do they mean when they say something. At a certain level of professionalism, with every team member equipped with a few years of teamwork experience, that should be of no fundamental problem. And yet, it is a challenge.

Image an upcoming meeting of your new and bigger team with a potential customer. You talk about what to expect from the meeting and how to present your new company. You agree on the theoretical level and one of your team’s members creates a presentation. The feedback you get from the new team members is that they not only don’t like the contents of the presentation but they expected a very different style.
This feedback contains two different aspects:

• The previous agreement based on a theoretical or oral level can’t be achieved on the execution or practical level.
• There are fundamental differences in how team members want the company to be presented

Let’s start with the first aspect: a mismatch between the theoretical/oral and te execution/practical level is a well-known flaw in all kinds of businesses. Everybody who is used to attend business meetings is fully aware of that. And there are tools to minimize or eliminate that problem: attendees repeat in their own words what others have said before, meeting notes, etc. So, in our case, I wasn’t really surprised about it and there are several ways of optimizing here.

Changing Perspectives — Broadening One’s Mind

The more difficult aspect seems to be the second one: imagine you have been active,y — and somewhat successfully — presenting your ideas, products, and services for quite a few years. You have developed a certain style. Your team agrees on that style which is the result of your team members’ experiences. Now, new ream members expect something totally different. And not just something different, but a style you have learned to dislike and not to apply for certain reasons.

What to do — how to react? My visceral or emotional reaction was: ok, give them a second chance, they just didn’t get it. Their expertise is in a different area, they should accept our expertise here and let us do our stuff. But — I felt bad bad thinking that way — it was one of those typical cognitive dissonances which appear from time to time. Sure it would be wrong or unfair to react as described above. Those guys are new in the team since we think that it’s better with them as without them. So it should make more sense to find a way to implement, integrate, or add their ideas in/to our ideas. But, how?

Don‘t Know What To Do? Change Perspectives!

My answer: change perspectives. A rather mundane approach you might say, but — is it really? Forcing myself taking their perspective and trying to see things through their eyes I learned something very useful.
My first insight: the ability to change perspective is something I have to renew and train on a daily basis. I tend to think that I am right and the other person is wrong — or — that my way of doing things is superior to others, at least in my fields of expertise. By defining that this does not have to be true I stop thinking / acting egoistically and make the change of perspectives possible.

Next, I ask myself and the other team member why he thinks differently. What might be the reasons for him to come up with a solution I would not choose? In our special team member case I asked myself first and found some quite convincing arguments for the other’s perspective. When it comes to business, you can easily evaluate most strategies: how successful have they been in terms of revenues, costs, profits, etc. In our case, it’s obvious that our new partners have been used their styles very successfully in the past. Since we have been successful as well, the difference could lie in different target groups. It turns out that we indeed have been targeting different kinds of people and departments within corporations. So the key to our apparently incongruous strategies could lie in different target groups and not how we see our company or how we expect ourselves to act in general.

Solving Communication Problems Is A Daily Challenge

In hindsight, this conclusion seems to be a pretty basic one. But as long as I was confronted with two apparently incongruous ways of making business it was quite hard to resolve that conflict. By changing perspectives and trying to find the good argument’s for my counterpart’s argumentation I was able to recognize that the problem was not about different styles but about different situations or frameworks both of us had been working most of the time.

Changing Perspectives — Broadening One’s Mind

How did we solve the problem: we agreed about using slightly different styles for different target groups and situations — presented by the team member who is most comfortable with it. For me, this experience once again shows that even when you are equipped with a good chunk of knowledge in this area, solving communication problems is a daily challenge. The trap of not changing perspective is always there and we’re always confronted, directly. Try Changing Perspectives — Broadening One’s Mind.

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