The Power of Neuroscience

Our thoughts and mental patterns have a profound impact on our physical health. This connection between mind and body is not just philosophical—it is backed by emerging neuroscience. In this post, I’ll share a personal story about how I discovered, quite by accident, that an outdated mental model drove my long-standing aversion to physical exercise. With a simple shift in how my brain predicted physical exertion, I was able to completely transform my ability to exercise without wishing I were dead. This is the power of neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to change and adapt in response to new experiences.

My Personal Experience

For as long as I can remember, every time I engaged in hard physical exertion, I experienced severe nausea. Growing up, I never played sports, I was active, but rarely found my limits, so this wasn’t something I encountered often. The first time it became a real issue was after I graduated from high school and went to basic training. We ran every day—something I’d never done before. After every run, I felt absolutely awful. No runner's high for me; instead, running and other intense exercises were torturous, and this pattern persisted throughout my adult life.

In January 2022, I began working with a personal trainer. Again, during every workout, the nausea would return, forcing me to stop and recover. Before one particular session, I remembered that ginger, when held between the cheek and gum, could help prevent nausea. I had some ginger candy in my pantry and decided to try it. To my surprise, it was like magic—no nausea! Then, a few weeks later, I forgot to take the ginger before a workout and didn’t even notice the absence of nausea until I was walking home. For the first time in my life, I had completed a workout without feeling sick!

At that point, I was doing yoga three times a week and walking five miles daily, so I was in decent shape. Still, I found myself drawn to the empirical evidence suggesting that resistance training was the most important form of exercise for health and longevity, particularly as we age (Doidge, 2007). But I had always struggled to maintain an exercise routine because of how it made me feel. So, why had the nausea suddenly stopped? Was it random, or had something fundamentally changed?

I don’t believe my physiology simply shifted overnight. Instead, I suspect that sometime before I turned 18, I developed a faulty mental model that caused my brain to associate intense physical exertion with nausea. This mental model was likely reinforced every time I exercised. But when I used ginger to interrupt the nausea, I believe I inadvertently interrupted that model and allowed my brain to form a new more beneficial model.

The Neuroscience Behind It

In 2022, I came across How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. Barrett’s research shows that our brains are predictive rather than reactive, constantly generating predictions based on past experiences to prepare us for future events (Barrett, 2017). According to her theory of constructed emotion, emotions are not hardwired responses, but rather constructed experiences based on the brain’s predictions. This aligns with the idea that my nausea during exercise wasn’t a direct reaction to the exertion itself, but rather a prediction my brain had been making for decades. When I used ginger to interrupt this response, I believe I began to "teach" my brain a new prediction model—one that no longer associated physical exertion with nausea.

Ginger and Nausea: A Practical Solution

The use of ginger to combat nausea is backed by science. Ginger contains compounds such as gingerol and shogaol, which have anti-inflammatory and antiemetic properties. Research supports its efficacy in preventing nausea in various contexts, including motion sickness and postoperative recovery (Lien et al., 2003). When I began using ginger before workouts, I effectively interrupted the brain’s conditioned response to physical exertion. This allowed me to dissociate exercise from the nausea response, resetting the faulty mental model that had plagued me for decades.

Interestingly, I had learned about ginger's anti-nausea properties back in 2005 when I practiced Native American spirituality with Lakota Indians in San Diego. During our sweat lodge ceremonies, where the heat and steam could become overwhelming, the lodge leader would hand out ginger to those feeling sick. Despite knowing about ginger’s effectiveness, it took me 16 years to make the connection and apply that knowledge to my exercise-induced nausea. Functional fixedness in action.

Now, I live in Da Nang, Vietnam, where I work with a personal trainer three times a week, walk five miles a day, and, as of last week, I’ve started running. For the first time in my adult life, I ran for 20 minutes without feeling sick—and I was ecstatic! I can run, and it's now a regular part of my routine.

Rethinking Our Mental Models

This experience made me realize how deeply ingrained mental models can affect our behavior and physical responses. Our brains create mental models—also known as cognitive schemas—that predict what will happen based on past experiences. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a well-established approach in psychology that helps individuals identify and modify harmful or limiting thought patterns. CBT operates on the premise that by changing these cognitive schemas, we can alter our emotional and physiological responses (Beck, 1979). It was created long before Barrett's research and doesn't take advantage of the predictive nature of our brains, but it's in the right neighborhood, as are its more modern counterparts.

In my case, the nausea I experienced during exercise was likely due to a cognitive schema that my brain had developed long ago, associating exertion with discomfort. By interrupting this model with the use of ginger, I essentially rewired my brain to expect a different outcome from physical exertion—a process known as cognitive restructuring.

The Future of AI and Wearable Technology

This leads me to wonder about the potential for technology to help us identify and correct faulty mental models more systematically. Cognitive therapies like CBT provide us with the tools to recognize and replace unhelpful thought patterns, but what if we could take this a step further? Imagine a future where wearable technology and AI could monitor our physiological and psychological responses in real-time, predicting when a mental model might be working against us and offering suggestions for improvement.

Already, companies like Apple, Google, and startups like WHOOP are developing wearable devices that track health data and provide personalized insights (Topol, 2019). AI-driven predictive models are being explored for their ability to detect early signs of chronic diseases by analyzing continuous data from wearables (Esteva et al., 2019). It’s only a matter of time before such technologies allow us to identify faulty mental models and replace them proactively. This could represent the next step in preventive medicine, where AI can monitor and optimize our mental and physical health.

While this level of monitoring may feel invasive to some, I predict future generations will more readily accept and adapt to it, recognizing its potential to improve both mental and physical well-being.

References

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Beck, A. T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. Penguin.
Clark, A. (2013). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.
Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Penguin.
Esteva, A., Robicquet, A., Ramsundar, B., Kuleshov, V., DePristo, M., Chou, K., Cui, C., Corrado, G. S., Thrun, S., & Dean, J. (2019). A guide to deep learning in healthcare. Nature Medicine, 25(1), 24–29. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0316-z
Lien, H.C., Sun, W.M., Chen, Y.H., Kim, H., Hasler, W., Owyang, C. (2003). Effects of ginger on motion sickness and gastric slow-wave dysrhythmias induced by circular vection. American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, 284(3), G481-G489. https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpgi.00187.2002
Topol, E. J. (2019). Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. Basic Books.