Behavioral riddle: You have been put in a cage, stuck behind titanium bars. There is no way out. To live through this ordeal you must eat 240 tiny pellets of food every hour. The problem is they are outside the cage and grabbing them quickly seems almost impossible. When you beginning the process it takes you 30 seconds per pellet. If you continue to do things the same way you will only consume half the food you need for survival. You will starve to death.
The answer: You must expand your thinking and complete the task in a faster manner.
Impossible, Right!!!!! Not exactly. The story is actually based on research done on squirrel monkeys. After just under 500 tries the monkeys were more proficient at their task. Their new mindset saved their lives. So how does that relate to your life? Well we have all heard the old saying, "practice makes perfect." What makes this so interesting is that the researchers were able to scan these monkeys brains. They found that as the monkeys reached over and over for the pellets that the cortical area being activated by the task had increased several times over. That is precisely what saved their lives, through mere repetition, each monkey had expanded the section of its brain necessary for accomplishing this task. Recent studies in neuroscience have proven that this process works identically in human brains.