To us Westerners, some descriptions of Tai Chi sound like dancing. Others sound more like fantasy and imaginary Asian-style thinking. Dragon Ball comes to mind when hearing about some forms of Tai Chi. Left-brained people such as myself would never give any due consideration to such an activity, other than those that arise from engaging in any kind of physical exercise. And yet I was shocked to find more science and more common sense in an activity that has been orally transmitted for generations. It turns out that the finest form of this martial art and spiritual activity is focused on empowering the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s most important region.

And yet this is a discipline that has rarely been studied in depth, and certainly has never acquired much credibility in the scientific establishment. Tai Chi cannot be anything beyond mere choreography, can it?

Or perhaps it can. If the science I see in this activity is accurate, its foundations can help combat impulse-driven thinking, chronic stress, and perhaps even mitigate some forms of autoimmunity, as it regulates cortisol levels in the body.

Science, Magic or Woo-Woo in Qi (Chi) and Tai Chi?

The sole mention of Qi (chi), or life force, is a huge turn-off for most rational thinkers. It seems that energy flows around the body, and one can channel it to move objects. Sure, uh huh. There’s talk about energies that come from everything and about the ability to look into one’s interior. There’s talk about its magical healing powers, and how almost everything can be cured with Qi (chi).

And to make matters worse, much of this information is reserved for practitioners who have spent years dedicating themselves to the practice. And that, of course, is a huge red flag for any skeptic. Dedicate your life to this Qi (chi) thing, dearies, and you’ll eventually be able to do magic. It sounds rather… unbelievable.

And yet none of this matters, in truth, because a left-brained thinker’s very first months of Tai Chi practise can be the most important months of their life. There’s a science to it. Everything else about Tai Chi, whether true or fictional, is irrelevant.

The Brain’s Advanced Thinking Center (the Prefrontal Cortex) and the Impulse Center (the Amygdala)

The brain’s prefrontal cortex is in charge of our advanced behavior as human beings. It is in charge of making the high-level connections with our most significant thoughts. It is what we use for intellectual learning, for studying, and also what makes us more capable of self-control.

In contrast, the amygdala is the impulse center of our brains. It handles pleasure, fear, anger, insecurity, and stress. It is the limbic response of the body. It makes our thoughts less clear, our reactions more primal. It makes us lose control of ourselves. And, in many ways, it is the source of most of the things we regret in life. We rarely regret acting out of a lack of wisdom or foresight, but it’s easy to regret being angry at someone, getting back at someone, or prioritizing a mindless form of pleasure over something wiser.

The Problem Of High Intelligence and the Prefrontal Cortex

Modern lifestyles mostly encourage a switch over to limbic mode. Most forms of entertainment and social interaction are designed to engage the amygdala rather than the prefrontal cortex. And, ironically, the more intelligent someone is, the less they want that. Most intelligent people identify themselves with their clearest thought patterns. They think of themselves as the prefrontal cortex, and everything else is just freaking out and reacting. Most of my intellectual friends dislike any activity that disengages their prefrontal cortex and puts them in reactive mode. And as they get more and more reactive about life, they dislike everything a little bit more, and become less clear thinkers.

Learning more and more leads to creating more connections in the brain, more neurons. This, in turn, makes it easier to observe more, to be more reasonable, to analyze the world a little bit more. This leads to conclusions that sometimes stir up your own mind. It’s not nice to conclude something that goes against everything you’ve always believed in, and yet it’s better to see it than to not see it. It’s certainly unpleasant to realize that you’ve been an idiot in the past, that you could have made wiser choices. It’s even worse when you see fault in everything around you, because nothing is ever perfect. And, the more one’s brain grows, the more one sees. All these new connections trigger unplesant emotional responses in the brain. A spiraling toward stress, fear, resentment, and a cocktail of emotions that spirals out of control. And the more someone builds their brain, the more connections they will create. It’s funny, isn’t it?

Considering the above, it’s almost natural that we think of mad geniuses, isn’t it? The more you see and the more you know, the more there is to disapprove of. And of course, any kind of emotional response strengthens the limbic system and weakens the prefrontal cortex. That is, every emotional response pushes you farther from high-level clear thinking and into a ridiculous state of illogical reactivity. The decline seemed unavoidable unless one chose to cease all forms of high-level intellectual activity. That is, until I learned about Tai Chi.

The Magic of Standing in Tai Chi

Standing is one of the foundations of the Heaven Man Earth style of Yang Tai Chi. It revolves mostly around an activity that is so strenuous on the body that it triggers a significant cortisol spike. And to make matters more difficult, you are supposed to remain cognitively engaged during a total of twenty-five grueling minutes during which thoughts range from rage to ridicule, from displeasure to absolute pain, from frustration to irrationality. And no matter how hard you try to silence the mind and focus on the body, the mind refuses to comply. There are even times when, hours after the practice, you analyze your mind and wonder if this activity is akin to the consumption of hallucinogenic substances.

But alas, this is all the consequence of a cortisol spike in an unprepared mind, and that is the beauty of it. It is forgiving, because you can try again tomorrow. You can stand more, learn more, engage more, and indulge in the purest and wildest idiocy that your mind can devise. And eventually, you learn to ignore your own mind, and to focus on the task at hand.

The best part of standing is that you can learn to re-activate your thoughts during a stress response in a safe space. There’s no need to face real danger to do so. You don’t have to fight a tiger, risk your life, or narrowly escape death to improve your ability to find calm even in the worst of circumstances. And in doing so again and again on a periodic basis, you become better at it. You can think more clearly when your cortisol spikes.

When your cortisol spikes in real life and you are used to standing, you can think more clearly. And the more you stand, the more you learn to apply these same principles to your life. Whenever something stresses you, you try to calm your muscles and mind. And if you can’t, at least you learn not to worry about that, either. The more you repeat this activity, the better you get at it.

Clear thought during peak cortisol levels isn’t the only benefit of standing. Everyone knows that chronic stress levels are linked to poor health outcomes and to a generally poor quality of life. By increasing our ability to stay calm, our bodies become more naturally calm, or song, as the Tai Chi crowd might call it. And in doing that, we may once more stand at the helm of our brains, at our prefrontal cortex, at our highest level of cognition. We are logical, capable of long-term planning, of impulse control, of emotional control, of greater empathy toward others.

Tell me, dear reader, is the above not magical?

A Modern Human Is Brain-Driven, Not Impulse Driven

I must admit that my childhood hero was Goku. I didn’t want to be an astronaut; I didn’t want to be a doctor or a scientist. I wanted to be a super saiyan. I know; I was rather unconventional as a little girl. And perhaps that’s one of the reasons why I signed up for a logic-defying form of Tai Chi, one that is supposed to defy the laws of physics, of gravity, of reality. Some of the Tai Chi videos I have watched in the recent past did remind me of Dragon Ball. Take a look at some of Adam Mizner’s Tai Chi videos on YouTube and see for yourself. I might have been fascinated by the possibility of someday bending reality too, and there was little to lose, so I signed up for what I thought would be another tremendous waste of time in the pursuit of knowledge.

I may or may not learn to channel energy like Goku, but the magic I have found is real. The magic I am referring to, of course, is a reconnection with my prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the part of our brains that makes us human, the part that makes us homo sapiens sapiens. That region of the brain is roughly the opposite to the amygdala, the impulse center. By improving prefrontal brain activity, we become less reactive to the world and everything that happens in it. We become more proactive about our lives, more in control. And by being less prone to reactions of extreme joy, anger, stress or sadness, we are capable of understanding more of our surroundings. This, in turn, makes us smarter.

To a left-brained person like myself, the above is, indeed, all the magic anyone can ever wish for.

Why You Should Be Standing Too

When the prefrontal cortex is engaged, life is no longer about being on auto-pilot. We are able to enjoy every moment, even those that would have made us too happy or too sad to truly indulge in the small details that surround us. I am not at that stage yet, but I can extrapolate the possibilities from the benefits I have derived from my brief exploration of Tai Chi. We no longer judge based on impulse, but based on our acquired knowledge. We are able to walk more confidently in life, to interact with almost anyone as though they are a close friend, to realize that nothing is a problem if one’s brain is at its peak performance.

And of course, we can do that because our prefrontal brain makes humans smarter, more capable of reacting wisely to whatever circumstances arise. Intellectuals spend their lives building a prefrontal cortex that eventually becomes one of their greatest hindrances, because it disengages from emotional circumstances. Standing can change that. Standing, if my observations are not flawed, re-trains the brain to re-engage the prefrontal cortex. And by changing that, one can continue to build intellect without limits.

But of course, all the magic does not come from one source. The ideal of a human being is not only in possession of a well-developed prefrontal cortex. There is also a need to live a healthy lifestyle, avoid inadequate habits, disengage from ruminating thoughts, and continue improving oneself and growing on a daily basis. And the more I read the previous sentence, the more I find myself smiling at the memory of the Karate Kid movies. Perhaps the martial arts do, indeed, help build character more than learning and books ever did.

From that point on, it seems that intellectual growth will no longer be impaired by its supposedly-natural limitations. Tai Chi, and standing, might help prevent the emotional instability of genius, the social withdrawal and awkwardness of high-level intellectuals, and even some kinds of attention deficit disorders. All these tendencies seem based on an inadequate limbic reaction. By learning to re-engage the prefrontal cortex, these tendencies should naturally become milder, and perhaps even disappear in their entirety.

And here I am, chuckling at the possibilities that Tai Chi might bring for supposedly intelligent people if only we got past our own closed-mindedness. Get past the woo-woo, people, and you might be surprised. I know I was.

Standing works because it does what science is still unable to do. It returns us to our highest state as human beings. It’s magical.