One of the clearest memories of my childhood is of attending kindergarten. On the classroom walls, there was a large poster labeled the "Dream Tree," featuring a tree with plump, round apples. The teachers would give my friends and me a sticker whenever they felt we had done something well, instructing us to place it on an apple on the poster with our name on it.
Back then, every night when I went to sleep, I would dream of my apple tree being completely filled with stickers.
I believe that was a time when the immediate feedback and reward system of the behaviorist B.F. Skinner was applied to learning.
These days, the stories I find most compelling come from neuroscientists who reveal that when we practice "gratitude,"the positive areas of the brain expand, increasingly influencing our behavior. Another is the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, an idea that focuses on finding joy and meaning in the action itself.
Unable to suppress my curiosity, I always feel the need to run an experiment.
My personal application involves a simple practice: the moment I'm engaged in the most tedious task, I utter, "I am a person who truly loves this work."-Self-Determination Theory, SDT- I know there's a huge difference between simply thinking it and saying it out loud, so I always speak it, loud enough for myself to hear.
And, strangely, from that very moment, the boredom vanishes. Instead, a feeling swells up inside me—a sense that I truly am a person who enjoys doing this work. "Oh! This actually works!"
The basic routine conversation I have with my patients involves checking on the three areas categorized in traditional Korean medicine: Upper Jiao (상초), which concerns sleeping well; Middle Jiao (중초), covering appetite and digestion; and Lower Jiao (하초), dealing with excretion and essence (Jing)—which connects to the brain, marrow, bones, vessels, gallbladder, uterus, and seminal vesicle—essentially, a confirmation of biological metabolic activity.
I listen very carefully to the stories about sleep (Upper Jiao) because they are so deeply linked to a person's unconscious mind, which I find truly fascinating.
According to David Eagleman, the author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, dreams appear to be stories created by interpreting the storm-like electrical activity that happens in the brain at night. Neural signals released from the midbrain reproduce the realizations and feelings derived from things the unconscious encountered during the day—people briefly glimpsed while riding an escalator in a mall, the thrill felt looking up at a tall building, the accidental view inside a car while driving... These things are truly happening in the unconscious brain.
In traditional Korean medicine, dreaming frequently means that a person has not achieved deep sleep and is having difficulty resetting the day at night. It’s believed that the human spirit (Shen) wanders in dreams; this spirit resides in the blood, and the heart is the home of that blood. If the blood cannot settle in the heart during sleep, the spirit within the blood also wanders. Consequently, people who remember many vivid dreams often don't wake up feeling refreshed and start their day burdened by complex, interconnected thoughts.
Scientists have revealed that the brain is divided into functional areas, and it is beneficial to focus on expanding the positive regions.
Traditional Korean medicine has a Constitutional Theory which suggests some people are simply born a certain way. However, my clinical experience has taught me that even if one is born a certain way... nevertheless—my favorite phrase—as the theory of Epigenetics suggests, people change, influenced by climate and environment.
Research shows that a short daily meditation combined with breathing, and sipping water little by little help expand the positive areas of the brain. When the positive area expands, it naturally follows that the negative area shrinks(Neuroplasticity Theory).
The hardest thing to do in life seems to be acceptance: accepting myself as I am, and accepting others as they are. When that fails, it feels like anger, depression, and loneliness bubble up every day.
Cleaning the house, tidying up, doing things that make me happy... these are all good, but finding even a brief moment each day for peaceful time to reset myself is essential.