You should now be more than aware of just what you have in your possession. You are the owner, guardian and keeper of the most advanced and most sophisticated super bio-computer ever created. How you use it, how you look after it and what you do with it is of course entirely up to you.

What could possibly hold anyone back?

During childhood your brain cells got wired together according to your own personal experience of the outside world and the people in it. The result is that each and every one of our brains is individually and uniquely moulded by whatever has gone on around us, by what we've seen, heard, touched, tasted, felt and smelt in innumerable different situations.

Young children have a natural, unbridled curiosity which encourages them to set off on a voyage of discovery to help gain a better understanding of the big and exciting world that surrounds them. As soon as a toddler begins to grasp the ability to speak, they'll be off on a relentless quest to find answers to anything and everything. With no mental barriers in their way and driven by an unstoppable need to know, their appetite for knowledge, as any parent will tell you, is ferocious. A survey once claimed that a typical four year old asks 437 questions a day – didn't realize it was so few!

The feedback children receive from their constant questioning has a critical impact on their ability to accelerate their understanding of the world around them. Whether it be through informa­tion gained from older, more experienced humans, or what they have learnt first-hand through their own trial-and-error exploits. Through both these mechanisms a set of beliefs about how the world works begins to form. Once we have developed a sense of self we start to develop beliefs about ourselves. These self-beliefs start to develop over the course of early childhood with the feedback our brains take on board being key to their formation.

To start with, our beliefs are easily moulded but, as the years roll by, they slowly begin to firm up. Gradually they become less flexible, until in old age they all too often appear to become as solid as reinforced concrete and invariably provide the firm foundations of a deeply entrenched outlook!

Self-beliefs, whether formed through information obtained from adults or through our own exploratory adventures, are rarely accurate representations of reality.

The feedback we received and the impact it had

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” may have afforded many children over the years some degree of comfort but, as far as our brains are concerned, this old ditty could not be further from the truth.

It's a sad fact that much of the feedback we received as children was misguided, inaccurate, misinterpreted or just plain wrong. Just a few ill-considered, ill-timed, spur-of-the-moment, negative comments from an influential person can trigger off a nosedive in self-belief. That's because once you start to believe something confirmation bias sets in.

Confirmation bias describes a filtering mechanism of your brain that registers and accepts information. It agrees with what you already think and rejects what you don't. So if, for example, based on comments made to you as a child, you have accepted that you are hopeless when it comes to dancing, then you'll have the unfortunate tendency to listen to any future comments that confirm this notion and ignore most of what goes against it.

Repetition rules

Should a certain theme crop up again and again, that's when a young person's self-belief really starts getting backed up into a cul-de-sac. Blocked in and dented, they are unlikely to be overly enthusiastic about venturing out of their comfort zone next time round.

When the feedback we received was wrong, we'd either find ourselves believing that we are good at things that in reality we're not (think of some of those poor deluded souls who audition for TV talent shows!) or that we are bad at things that in reality we could become very good at. Thankfully, life usually sets things straight in the former instance but unfortunately not nearly so often in the latter. The vast majority of people think they are useless at certain things that they could possibly be brilliant at. Countless numbers of people go through life blissfully unaware that they have been held back early on in life, never getting the chance to realize their true potential. Simply because certain “grown-ups” had a habit of making repetitive, negative, flippant remarks, they have unwittingly become prisoners of other people's thinking.

More often than not comments are made by adults in an attempt to vent personal frustration rather than to give a fair assessment. Whatever the motive, the long-term effects can be both damaging and profound. Bearing in mind the very people making the comments may well have had their own self-belief knocked and dented somewhere down the line, it's easy to see how a negative cycle can develop. When a person has damaged self-belief, admitting that others are better than them at something can at times be too much to bear and sadly, criticism replaces praise.

The consequence is that, many years later, when any recipient of the inaccurate feedback then comes to perform a certain task, they stumble. That voice in their head says, as it always has said on these occasions – “You've never been any good at this!”

The fact that the personal feedback we received during childhood wasn't always true to reality was, for us as children, completely unavoidable. It obviously varies considerably, being far worse in some childhoods than in others, but whether you realize it or not, we've all had our fair share of inconsistent feedback somewhere along the way.

To be absolutely clear here, the odd comment now and then will not harm a child's long-term prospects – kids are pretty resilient and, as far as adults are concerned, a negative comment here and there might just be the wakeup call needed to motivate them to kick off their slippers and get going. Problems only arise when a certain theme is repeated regularly throughout childhood. Repetition is what causes the cement to set. That's when an adult's harmless comments begin to make an indelible impression on young impressionable minds, flavouring all future experience.

Photo albums

When we experience anything we never get the full picture all in one go. Instead we take away lots of small, snapshot pictures of different experiences. Think about what you did yesterday, you won't be able to picture the whole day but you will have several pictures of different bits of the day. These snapshots all combine and build up together in your brain to form much larger, jigsaw-style pictures of how the world works and how we fit into it. These big pictures will never, ever be complete because of the scale and complexity of life around us and limitations in our brain's ability to take it all in. There will always be pieces missing. With our brains having nothing else to go on, this is what our beliefs are based on.

What really counts when it comes to forming and re-enforcing self-beliefs is that a certain, constant theme is encountered; in other words, when similar snapshot views are glimpsed over and over again and, the same old familiar pictures keep popping up in our mind.

Your brain will change according to the consistent messages it receives from the outside world and your self-beliefs will continue to be moulded in a similar fashion.

Advertising companies are more than aware of this; they know that good branding is all about consistent messages presented in novel, unusual and emotionally-stimulating ways. It has been estimated that, on average, each one of our brains is exposed to up to 5000 ads a day. Most are just a background blur, with only around 1% having any conscious impact. 1% may not sound a lot but that's up to 50 messages a day that your brain is likely to take onboard, at least on a subconscious level. Like it or not, this nonstop bombardment of messages does have an influence on our decision making, that's why companies spend vast sums of money on it. Ad campaigns are most effective when the message a target audience is picking up on is consistent and coming at you from all directions. Yes, re-enforcement is indeed the name of the game.

Believing is seeing?

Tragically, self-belief for the vast majority of people does tend to stay blocked in.

There are, however, exceptions. They are individuals who have realized that they don't have to watch others achieve great things to realize they can be achieved.

As believers in life before death, they are ordinary people who achieve extraordinary things. They get out there, make the most of whatever talents they have, smash open long-held, restrictive beliefs, push back boundaries, turn current thinking on its head, really make a difference – and then watch others follow.

You have the keys to the world's fastest high-performance engine. If you want to keep on driving up and down the same streets and remain within limits set by others, that's fine. It's your brain and it's your choice. But what a waste!

Hopefully, having read this book you'll be curious to discover more about your own brain, you'll be inspired to want to open up the throttle and find out for yourself just what that precision-tuned, pulsating pink blob between your ears really is capable of!

For information about Adrian – please visit www.adrianwebster.com or tweet @polarbearpirate

For information about Jack – please visit www.drjack.co.uk or tweet @drjacklewis

For references and suggestions for further reading please visit: www.sortyourbrainout.com.