Tuesday, May 31, 2011

How does our brain work?

It may surprise you that how the brain works won't be explained in a blog, but perhaps a couple of interesting things can be considered. We have two hemispheres to our brains, a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. The left hemisphere largely controls the right hand side of our bodies, and roughly corresponds to our conscious mind, and controls rational thought, logic, lists, analysis, linearity, letters, numbers, seeing details. The right hemisphere largely controls the left hand side of our bodies, and roughly corresponds to our subconscious mind. It controls imagination, symbolism, dreaming, flashes of intuition, pictures, and tends to see the world as a whole without the details.

There are deeper levels of brain function, our "reptilian brain", which controls survival instincts, our "mammalian brain", which controls our emotions, and our cognitive brain which controls our thinking. Of course, we have a huge network of nerves and glands for mind body communication, and energy flow.

Our subconscious minds handle vast amounts of information every second, all the sensations, all the sights, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes, where we are in relation to everything around us. It handles all the thoughts and memories we are having also, which also fire off the sensory parts of our brain. Our subconscious minds constantly evaluate our environment, if you were to compare the volume of information bombarding us to water flow, it is like a the volume of water the Niagara falls provide every second. Our conscious minds can handle between five and nine units of information at a time, e.g how long is a phone number, and how easy is it to hold a phone number in your mind before you memorise it?

Our subconscious minds then have the job of sorting through this Niagara falls flow of information, and provide our conscious minds with a flow of information equivalent to the flow from a tap. However, it usually provides us with the most important information that is relevant at the time. For example what is the correct meaning and context of a word (whenever you become aware of a word, your subconscious has to fire off all the associations it has with that word, and provide your conscious mind with the correct meaning based on context and comparision). Even if you are deep in conversation, and ignoring everything else around you, if your subconscious was to notice a tiger, it would immediately bring it to your attention by firing off your fight/flight response.

Your fight/flight response works without emotions. Have you have ever experienced an emergency situation where you acted coolly and calmly, and after the situation had been resolved, then the emotions e.g. fear, anger kicked in? The emotions are secondary responses to the action required from flight or flight and are there for the purpose of teaching you responses to similar situations. However, what can happen is that an inappropriate emotion can get associated with an event that is actually safe, but which your subconscious has labelled as an event that is dangerous. This is an important survival mechanism for a simple world that is full of dangers, and sometimes does not serve us well in a safer but much more complex world. It is the cause of PTSD, where fear and/or anger can serve well for survival in a war situation, but are not at all useful when back in peacetime.

Go to http://www.experiencetheworlddifferent.com/ for more details, or ring Daniel Madden on 085 1318344 to arrange your free consultation.

Email: dmadden@experiencetheworlddifferent.com

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