What makes a person successful?

Having a growth mindset? Being a visionary? Being born into the right family?

These may help, but a healthy brain is foundational. Without it, success is going to be far harder to come by. So what is a healthy brain, a successful brain? Its one that has high blood flow and high activity.

TheAmen Clinics perform brain imaging calledsingle photon emission computed tomography(SPECT), which assesses at blood flow and activity patterns in the brain. Since 1991, they have performed over 135,000 brain SPECT scans on patients from 120 countries. The data from SPECT teaches us the four crucial aspects of a persons brain-based success.

Daniel Amen

Here are the 4 crucial aspects of ensuring your brain stays strong, and doesnt dumb down:

1) Protect your prefrontal cortex (PFC).Youve heard me talk about this key region of the brain before. Its behind your forehead and it governs the development of your personality as well as complex behaviors. In humans, it accounts for 30% of the brains volume. Thats a lot. Cats weigh in at 3%, dogs at 7%, chimpanzees at 11% of their brains volume. The PFC is involved with executive functions, such as strategy, visioning the future, planning, focus, judgment, impulse control, and empathy. Its your internal CEO. Low PFC activity = bad decision making. Thats why protecting it is crucial. In astudyAmen published they found that 91% of traumatic brain injuries involve the PFC.

Preventing brain injuries is easy (phew!):

Daniel Amen

2) Protect your brains pleasure centers.The nucleus accumbens (NA), in both the right and left hemispheres of your brain, are involved in pleasure and motivation. Youll remember blogs Ive written about the neurotransmitter dopamine. Well the NA is lit up by the dopamine your brain releases from sex, chocolate, video games, cocaine, stimulants like coffee, high fat and high sugar foods, and fame. Most of us are familiar with the connection between dopamine and addiction, which weve been seeing with excessive video gaming for many years now. Not to bum your high, but intense pleasure actually results in substantial drops in your levels of dopamine. When repeated over time (like with heroin addiction, for instance) the NA becomes less responsive, which leads to needing more of these behaviors. Thats how addiction happens, be it to chocolate or methamphetamines.

Protect your pleasure centers by:

3) You can make your brain better.Amen Clinics is well-known for running the first and largest brain imaging and rehabilitationstudyon active and retired NFL players. Needless to say, they witnessed high levels of brain damage players, many of which had been hit in the head thousands of times. They were thrilledand surprisedto see that 80% of the players showed improvement in as little as two months on their Memory Rescue program. Since most of us have (thankfully) not been repeatedly hit in the head, there is hope for all of us to have better brainsand better lives.

The Net-Net

How does a person become successful? Thats a long answer. For starters, you can stack the deck in your favor by having a healthy brain!

More:
Dont Make Your Brain Dumb: The Neuroscience Of Success - Forbes