PDF Summary:The Source, by Tara Swart

Do you feel like you’re getting the most out of your brain? Or do you struggle to tap into its immense power? In The Source, neurologist and professional adviser Tara Swart explains that to achieve your desires, you must tap into the full power of your brain. This means understanding how the brain changes itself in response to your experiences, the different modes of thinking, and the major principles of the Law of Attraction.

In our guide, we’ll explain Swart’s ideas about how to get the most out of your brain’s functioning to build the life you want. We’ll explore the concept of neuroplasticity and the modes of thinking that you need to tap into to maximize your brain’s potential. We’ll then explain the principles underlying the Law of Attraction. Finally, we’ll describe Swart’s four-step process for putting these ideas into action. We’ll add ideas from other writers on how to use your brain, as well as scientific context for Swart’s ideas and additional tips for applying them.

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However, cautions Swart, be careful not to rely too much on negative motivators, which can override your positive motivators and cause you to self-destruct: If your fear of having too little money in your current job becomes your sole motivator, you might become so anxious that your work performance suffers, leading you to be passed over for the promotion. When you begin to feel like negative emotions are weighing you down rather than propelling you, you need to challenge them.

(Shortform note: In The Purpose Driven Life, Christian pastor Rick Warren contends that negative emotions like guilt, fear, and the need for approval serve as ineffective motivators that create conflict in your life and argues for the value of a single, positive, faith-based motivator to guide everything you do. If you find yourself overwhelmed with conflicting motivators, simplifying these into a single purpose might help you tap into your motivation more effectively.)

Swart writes that you can challenge your negative motivators by reframing them through a different perspective. Take a step back from the problems that are motivating you and consider them through a wider lens. While your problems are valid and meaningful, remember that everyone in the world faces difficult situations, and there will always be people whose situations are worse than yours. Think about how your problem will feel five years from now: Chances are good it won’t matter anymore. These practices help depersonalize your problems so they have less sway over you and your motivation.

(Shortform note: Others recommend talking with others as a way to depersonalize or minimize your problems so they don’t interfere with your motivation. However, people with certain psychiatric conditions might need medical assistance to improve motivation. This includes those with disorders of diminished motivation, who may have a hard time reaching goals due to apathy (considered the mildest syndrome), abulia, or akinetic mutism (considered the most severe syndrome). These disorders can be caused by things like brain injury or stroke, neurodegenerative diseases, or psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia.)

Third Mode of Thinking: Physical Attunement

Another mode of thinking that Swart describes is being attuned to your physical body and senses, which helps you strengthen the connection between your mind and your body. This involves a specific type of sense called interoception, which is the sense related to perceiving the internal workings of your body. Interoception tells you when you’re hungry, tired, too hot, or need to go to the bathroom, among other things. Because emotional responses have a strong impact on the body, being out of touch with your emotions can interfere with your interoception. Thus, when children grow up being told to “get over” what they’re feeling, they often lose touch with their physical bodies and have trouble with interoception.

Swart says that improving your physical awareness and interoception requires you to make a conscious effort to get in touch with how your body feels in response to different situations. She recommends keeping a daily journal in which you record 1) what you eat, 2) how you feel, and 3) how many times you move your bowels. This helps you make the connection between your body’s functions and your mood. She also recommends practicing a body scan, which is a meditative activity in which you focus your attention on each part of your body from the bottom up while breathing deeply.

(Shortform note: Issues with interoception are known as interoceptive dysfunction, and they’re often found in people with ADHD, autism, and mental disorders like depression, as well as people with trauma-related conditions. This dysfunction can make it difficult for people to regulate other modes of thinking like emotion and motivation, and it can also contribute to other conditions such as eating disorders. As with the other modes of thinking, Swart’s tips (such as body scanning and journaling) may be useful to some degree, but people with interoceptive dysfunction may need other assistance to improve their interoception, or they may need others to help them manage and accommodate their conditions.)

Fourth Mode of Thinking: Intuition

Next, Swart discusses intuition, which is closely related to physical attunement. We often refer to intuition as “trusting your gut,” and while this may seem metaphorical, research shows that the gastrointestinal and digestive systems actually have a direct impact on our brain’s functioning. Evidence suggests that a healthy microbiome has a positive effect on mood and reduces negative thinking. Additionally, 90% of the serotonin (the “happy” hormone) in our bodies is produced in the gut, further linking gut health with mood.

(Shortform note: Other research suggests that the gut is responsible for producing as much as 95% of the body’s serotonin, further supporting Swart’s assertion that mood is heavily dependent on gut health. Also, research on drugs that affect serotonin suggests that this relationship may be reciprocal, and that medications like fluoxetine and other antidepressants that target serotonin can directly impact your microbiome and gut health.)

Swart says that maintaining a healthy gut enables good intuition, which leads to better decision-making. To improve your gut health, she recommends you exercise regularly and maintain a healthy diet like the one we described earlier in the “Fueling the Changing Brain” section. Additionally, she says that managing stress well is essential to a healthy gut—chronic stress reduces the amount of energy the body is able to expend for digestion, leading to digestive problems that negatively impact the brain.

Intuition, Emotions, and Physical Attunement

Rather than viewing intuition as its own mode of thinking, you might consider it a combination of emotional thinking and physical attunement because it involves monitoring physical signals from your gut and connecting them to your immediate emotional responses to help you make decisions. Because of this, interoceptive dysfunction can also impair intuitive thinking, as can issues with emotional intelligence. Thus, Swart’s tips for improving your emotional and physical thinking may also help improve your intuition.

In addition to the lifestyle advice Swart offers to maintain a healthy gut, you may want to avoid excessive alcohol consumption, which is shown to negatively impact the gut’s microbiome. Excessive drinking can also increase stress and contribute to anxiety and depression, further harming your gut and impairing your intuition.

Fifth Mode of Thinking: Logic

According to Swart, logical thinking is what helps us make good decisions. When we engage in logical thinking, we’re attempting to use our pattern recognition skills to identify cause-and-effect relationships in our behaviors and actions and then base our decisions on the effects we expect them to have. This can lead to a sense of accountability for our actions (“If I perform [X] action, I’ll get [Y] result”), which is a good thing, but it can also have the negative side effects of making us fear and avoid risk—and healthy risk-taking is what helps us innovate and make daring choices.

We also often think of logical thinking as being isolated from the other modes of thinking, particularly emotion. But, according to Swart, the opposite is true: Emotion biases every “logical” decision we make, and the other modes of thinking also impact our logical processes. The key to tapping into our logical mode of thinking is to balance it out with the other modes of thinking, on which it’s dependent, and use all our cognitive faculties when we approach complex problems or decisions.

Causal Fallacies and Decision Fatigue

Despite popular belief, emotion’s influence on logical decisions doesn’t necessarily impair our logic. However, logical thinking can be impaired when we base our reasoning on logical fallacies, or flaws in an argument that result from faulty logic. Cause-and-effect thinking in particular can be impeded by the causal fallacy, which reflects a misunderstanding of how a cause leads to an effect.

For example, if you were planning to work out and trying to decide whether to go for a swim, you might think, “The last time I swam, I didn’t feel good afterwards, so I won’t swim again.” However, you may not have enough evidence to conclude that swimming is what made you feel bad last time. There could have been other factors at play, such as what you ate, how you slept, or whether you were fighting off an illness, so this faulty logic could result in you avoiding what could otherwise be a fun and rewarding physical activity.

Decision-making can also be impaired by decision fatigue, a phenomenon where the more decisions you have to make, the harder it becomes to make decisions because your brain is running out of energy. Consciously employing all the different modes of thinking in each decision you make may cause you to quickly develop decision fatigue. To avoid burning out from making too many choices, try to create routines that reduce the number of decisions you have to make each day—for example, by planning all your meals at the beginning of the week—and see if you can pass off some of your decisions to others where appropriate.

Sixth Mode of Thinking: Creativity

Finally, Swart discusses creative thinking. We tend to think of creative thinking as artistic expression, but this is only one part of it. Creative thinking also encompasses the ability to create a vision for your future and make choices that help you make that future a reality, as well as the ability to come up with new uses and interpretations for existing ideas and improve upon them. This requires you to be confident in your creative abilities, which is where many people struggle, particularly if they’ve been told in the past that they’re not artistic. (Remember, creative doesn’t equal artistic; some people are naturally more artistic than others, but everyone can be creative).

(Shortform note: Swart’s definition of creative thinking aligns with others’ definition of divergent thinking. Divergent thinking involves coming up with new ideas and considering different uses for existing ideas, as opposed to convergent thinking, which is the process of coming up with a single correct answer that can be logically deduced. Drawing on all of Swart’s modes of thinking would mean combining divergent thinking and convergent thinking, which would allow you to engage in lateral thinking. In simple terms, lateral thinking allows you to identify the best solution from a number of different possible solutions. Lateral thinking is the type of thought process that goes into solving puzzles and riddles, for example.)

The Principles of the Law of Attraction

Swart explains that once you’ve figured out how to properly fuel your brain and have maximized your brain agility, you can tap into the Law of Attraction to create the future you want. Many people are familiar with the Law of Attraction as a spiritual or faith-based concept, as it’s the focus of a lot of self-help books and programs, but Swart explains that there are actually neurological reasons why this law works. She explains six principles underlying the Law of Attraction. We’ll highlight the two most important of these below.

(Shortform note: Many people associate the Law of Attraction with The Secret, a book that popularized the concept. But the term first appeared in a book called Isis Unveiled by 17th-century spiritualist Helena Blavatsky and continued to appear in the work of such writers as Thomas Troward, Wallace Delois Wattles, and Napoleon Hill.)

Principle #1: Abundance

Swart explains that the first step to utilizing the Law of Attraction is to take on an abundance mindset. An abundance mindset is one that perceives the world and the universe as having enough resources to support all who inhabit it, and thinking this way leads you to think positively and behave generously. This is opposed to a “lack” mindset, which is one based in the fear that there’s not enough to go around and that you have to work hard to avoid losing what you have.

(Shortform note: While Swart explains how an abundance mindset changes your behavior, leading to positive changes in your life, Rhonda Byrne in The Secret suggests that such a mindset changes the world around you so that the universe will provide you with what you need. Both of these perspectives focus on making internal changes to improve your life, but Byrne’s more spiritual approach asserts that these changes are a means of communicating with the universe and that the universe will respond to that communication with changes in your life.)

Swart notes that the brain focuses twice as much on losses as it does on gains, which means our natural tendency is to go to much greater lengths to steer clear of a loss than we do to achieve a gain. This aversion to risk blocks our ability to change. To take on an abundance mindset, you have to reconsider how you view failure. Failure doesn’t mean you should give up so you don’t lose anything. In fact, failure is vital for success. It’s what propels improvement, and an abundance mindset helps you make improvement an intrinsic motivator.

(Shortform note: Some writers suggest that how you view failure is closely tied to how you view your natural talents and the concept of success. In Mindset, Carol Dweck argues that the belief that your talents are inborn and can’t be changed leads to a fixed mindset (similar to the Law of Attraction’s lack mindset), because if your talents are purely natural, then success is all about being validated by others, which means failure is final and unacceptable. However, a growth mindset (similar to an abundance mindset) views talent as changeable and failure as a means to positive change, encouraging you to take on risks to help yourself grow.)

Principle #2: Manifestation

Manifestation is when your desire and your intentions line up in a way that allows you to attract the things you want in life. Swart emphasizes that this is an action-based concept. It’s not just about thinking happy thoughts and waiting for what you want to magically appear, but rather about focusing on what you want so you can more easily take the actions needed to make it a reality. She writes that manifestation relies on two neurological processes: selective attention and value tagging.

(Shortform note: In The Secret, Byrne also emphasizes the action aspect of manifestation. She argues that you should specifically engage in inspired action, which is when you allow the universe itself to motivate your behavior. This is opposed to forced action, which is behavior you engage in because you think it will get you a certain result. Forced action feels like labor and can lead you to take on too much because you believe that more work will get better results, but inspired action feels like you’re being guided by the universe and opens you up to receiving what you want.)

Selective attention is when you focus only on important information while filtering out irrelevant or extraneous information. The brain is constantly receiving massive amounts of information, and it can only focus on a small amount at any given moment. If you devote your limited attention to the things you want in life, you’ll soon find yourself noticing those things more and more because you’re priming your brain to watch out for and alert you to them.

Brain Processing and Selective Attention Bias

Research shows that the brain receives around 11 million bits of information from the senses per second, but it can only consciously process about 50. This means that your unconscious mind is filtering out or compressing millions of bits every second to provide your conscious mind with the information it needs to focus on—and it does so in the space of just half a second.

When you prime your brain to focus on certain things (for example, the things you want in life), you’re training your brain to focus on those more, which can lead to a selective attention bias (also known as frequency bias or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon). While we usually think of biases as something to avoid, this bias can benefit you by keeping you focused on what you’re trying to manifest.

The second neurological process of manifesting is value tagging. This refers to ascribing emotional value to the information you take in. As explained above, emotion heavily influences our thinking and motivates our actions and decisions, so associating a strong, positive emotional value with things that help you progress toward your goal will gear your behavior toward achieving more of those things.

For example, if you enjoyed going on walks with your family as a child, you’ll probably have a positive emotional value assigned to walking or outdoor areas that resembled where you used to walk. If your goal is to spend more time outside or get more exercise, this positive value can help you progress toward that goal. Alternatively, if outdoor walks were a stressful event for you, you may have an aversion to them—so it may be easier to focus on other activities that have more positive associations for you.

(Shortform note: Swart doesn’t specify how you can control the value that you assign to information. Research suggests that emotional tagging (which seems to share a definition or overlap with value tagging) takes place on a subconscious level and mostly impacts the way you remember things. That said, although you can’t always control the type of emotional values your brain assigns to important information, simply being aware of them could help you pay better attention to information that’s relevant to your goal.)

The Four-Step Process to Change Your Life

Finally, Swart offers a step-by-step process for utilizing all the above ideas to put your whole brain into action to create the future you want. This is where you’ll apply everything you’ve learned so far.

Step 1: Increase Your Self-Awareness

According to Swart, self-awareness is what helps you identify and take advantage of opportunities for change. She describes several journaling exercises that can increase your self-awareness.

First, Swart recommends a journaling exercise to increase your awareness of how your childhood continues to influence you today. She explains that your upbringing, and particularly what you learned from the people you were attached to, strongly influences who you are today. These relationships served as models for you in childhood. They created neural pathways between triggers (like stress, poverty, and nourishment) and responses, giving you a blueprint for how to deal with the situations in your life. To keep these learned responses from controlling your life, you must be aware of them.

Swart recommends listing things like the roles you and other members of your family played when you were growing up, the secrets your family kept and how they impacted you, the beliefs and values your family held, and how your family viewed boundaries and rules. Consider how these things continue to impact you and write down ways in which you notice them in your life today.

(Shortform note: Other experts also highlight the benefits of reflecting on your childhood experiences and roles to better understand your present. Some recommend creating a narrative account of your childhood using activities like those Swart describes, as well as resources like the Adult Attachment Interview. They suggest the self-awareness you gain from creating such a narrative helps your brain integrate different regions and connections to improve its functioning. Some experts suggest you go even further and create a genogram, a diagram detailing your extended family and their different traits. This can enhance your self-awareness even more and help you understand and deal with generational issues and other family patterns.)

Next, Swart recommends an exercise to help you more deeply understand the patterns and beliefs you picked up from childhood (many of which you’ll have noticed during the first exercise). She suggests listing six beliefs that restrict or obstruct your happiness. Then, for each one, describe the evidence you have to support that belief. Next, write down the evidence you have that contradicts that belief. Finally, reflect on whether these beliefs add or detract from your life, and how you might let go of the ones that don’t serve you.

Types of Limiting Beliefs

In Time to Think, Nancy Kline describes three types of limiting beliefs. Some limiting beliefs are statements of facts, which are objectively true—for example, “I currently don’t have [insert what you want].” While facts may seem absolute, holding onto them as beliefs can limit you by making you think they’re unchangeable, which they often aren’t.

Another type of belief she describes are conjectures, or beliefs about things that might happen—for example, “If I take a risk to try to get what I want, I might fail, and that would be bad.” In addition to misframing failure as a bad thing, this belief assumes that something will go wrong when it might not.

The third type of limiting belief Kline describes is core assumptions. These are the foundational beliefs about ourselves and the world that we often don’t even realize we have—for example, “I don’t deserve [insert what you want].” These are frequently picked up during childhood and thus may be the best ones to address in Swart’s exercise.

Step 2: Create an Action Board

For the second step, Swart recommends creating an action board, or a visual representation of what you want to achieve. This will prime your brain to create the change you want by reminding you daily of your goals. Using a piece of paper, some poster board, or any other material that gives you a lot of space to work with, paste images from magazines or online sources that embody what you want to achieve in life. Place this board somewhere you’ll see it every day.

(Shortform note: While Swart uses the term “action board” instead of “vision board” specifically because it emphasizes the action aspect of manifestation, some people suggest that such boards only serve as a distraction, and that it may be better to devote the time you would spend making an action board to doing the actual work to achieve what you want. Others suggest that action boards may be more useful for visual learners (as opposed to auditory or kinesthetic learners) and that non-visual learners may get more out of a board that uses text instead of pictures or adapts to their unique learning style in other ways.)

Step 3: Become More Mindful

For the third step, Swart recommends that you deliberately focus your attention on your experiences as they happen, a practice commonly known as mindfulness but that Swart refers to as presence. Staying in the moment like this takes you out of your established patterns, which helps you clear old neural pathways that don’t serve you and create new ones that do.

To become more mindful, Swart recommends practicing mindfulness meditation, which is proven by brain scans to change the structure and connectivity of the brain, which in turn improves your ability to process the information your brain is constantly taking in. This could include a body scan like the one described in the “Physical Attunement” section of this guide. Swart also recommends yoga, or simply taking time a few times a day to deeply focus on the sensory stimulation of a given moment or experience (like eating a meal, taking a walk, or listening to music).

(Shortform note: Mindfulness practices have many benefits in addition to those that Swart describes. Research suggests they can help you improve your ability to sustain your attention and block out distractions, which can help you with the selective attention aspect of manifestation described earlier in the guide. Mindfulness can also enhance your ability to relate to others, improving your relationships. It can be difficult to make Swart’s mindfulness practices a habit, but you can make it easier by joining communities where other people will help you in your practices.)

Step 4: Practice

The neural changes Swart describes don’t happen easily or quickly. They require you to actively and regularly devote your whole brain to establishing and reinforcing these changes. All of the principles and steps described above will propel you through the final step.

She recommends identifying the barriers lying between you and the life you want. To do this, draw three columns on a piece of paper and write your goals in the first column. In the second, write the behaviors that are interfering with you achieving these goals. Consider the behavioral patterns you see playing out. In the third column, write down the beliefs that are motivating these behaviors. These are what stand in the way of you achieving an abundance mindset, which in turn halts your progress toward your goals.

(Shortform note: Other authors provide different suggestions for how to identify the gaps between the life you have now and the life you want. In Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans suggest that you begin by considering your overall satisfaction with four areas of your life: health, work, joy, and relationships. They suggest rating your satisfaction in each of these areas on a scale of one to 10, then comparing these numbers to see where you need to devote your attention. This exercise may work better for you than Swart’s if you’re struggling to prioritize your goals or understand what areas of your life need improvement.)

Swart also recommends creating a list of affirmations. Write down several inspirational quotes (from books or movies, from people you respect, or directly from your own brain), and repeat them to yourself multiple times a day. This will cement them in your brain and help move your goals from your subconscious to your conscious mind.

(Shortform note: To write the best affirmations, some experts recommend writing them in the present tense because it simplifies them and makes them easier for the subconscious to understand. They also recommend keeping them positive, avoiding negators like “not” or words with negative connotations, and keeping them solution-centric rather than problem-centric. Additionally, they suggest placing reminders of your affirmations (through sticky notes or other visual reminders) around your house so you see them frequently.)

Additionally, Swart recommends pushing yourself into new experiences. This will help you overcome the fear of failure that can be so debilitating in creating the future you want. New experiences trigger neuroplastic change in your brain and give you a wider understanding of the world around you. These new experiences can be small or large. For example, you could go hiking on a trail you’ve never been on before or listen to a new genre of music.

(Shortform note: New experiences don’t just improve your neuroplasticity: Research suggests they also activate the brain’s reward center, producing dopamine and making you feel happier. They also make you feel more present in the moment, which aligns with Swart’s third step to change your life. However, it’s important to note that the neuroplastic changes created by new experiences may be temporary. If you’re trying to make a permanent change in your brain, you’ll need to repeat the new experience frequently to create and strengthen the neural connections involved in it.)