Mind Body Spirit And Fluttering Thoughts: BrainWorks

Now, let's take just a moment to think. Is it our brain who acts funny when we refuse to want to do something? Or is it our physically self that become resistant to doing it? Or is it the way we are wired up that we form states in response to situations that we are not encouraged to what to do something? The subject is mind-twisting. Read how Dr. Michael Hall looks at it and how he intrigues us with his perspective of the brain and how it triggers us into certain states. A very provocation article, one of many of his.

By L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., cognitive psychologist, international NLP trainer, entrepreneur; prolific author and international training; developer of Meta-States and co-developer of Neuro-Semantics. www.neurosemantics.com.

The Brain Game
How Do We Run Our Own Brain?

Brains follow directions. They take the directions that you give them and they follow them.

"John, did you see that red, white and blue cat yesterday? Yes, red, white and blue― in fact, the American Flag colors were bright red, white, and blue. Someone in the neighborhood must have thought it would be a patriotic thing to do. Where did I see it? On Linda's yellow car. It was being chased by a pair of French Poodles across the greenbelt by the swimming pool. That was just before King Kong climbed to the top of the school and beat his chest at the circling plane."

Provide a little description and the brain goes to work representing the information on our internal mental screen. Like a movie director, brains use the information as instructions for our mental Cinema. This explains why the following are very important questions for our states:

What directions are you giving your brain?

What are the default instructions that you've learned to give your brain?

What instructions did your parents or teachers provide you about yourself, life, others, etc.?

How useful, ecological, healthy, balanced, valuable, true, etc. are those instructions?

Do those instructions create empowering states for you?

Would you want to give those instructions to your children?

Do they map out an exciting and loving life?

Why are these questions so important? Because the quality of our lives is a function of the quality of the information processed by our brain. The quality of that information flows from the quality of its instructions. The most important thing you do in life then are the instructions that you give your brain. Are the instructions those that you would use to create a world-class movie?

Recently a young man wrote to me.

"I'm an extremely shy person. When I see a social situation, I avoid it because I say to myself that I'll have nothing to say and that I'll be a complete idiot because they will find me boring, then I'll feel depressed. So I just don't go. Every time I make a mistake, I feel stupid, then depressed. And that's what causes me to procrastinate. It's really stupid, and I know better, and I see it causing me to produce sub-optimally. I feel like these are insurmountable problems...."

I copied the words from the email, cut and pasted them back into my reply. I then asked him to step back from the words and view them as brain instructions.

"Just pretend for a moment that these are instructions for your brain. Are these ideas healthy or sick ones? Would you recommend this way of thinking? Suppose the most popular kid at the university thought this way. How much of a party would these instructions make his or her life?"

There's a principle in this. Namely, feed your brain toxic ideas and you enter into a toxic world. Your brain will go there because that's what brains do. Brains go places. Just this week I caught a Brain (thank God it wasn't mine) going to "Worst Case Scenario!" The person was talking about terrorism in the world. He then entertained unimaginable scenarios. Then he freaked out. Then he said, "This shouldn't happen!"

And I can tell you, these instructions did not put him in a very resourceful state.

Brains use words, pictures, sounds, tones, volumes, smells, tastes, all kinds of things as the basis for swishing us places. Mention a word and off your brain goes. But where? It depends on your learning history, experiences, memories, imaginations, hopes, etc. Brains are phenomenal at linking things. They do so very, very quickly. Actually, this is one of the chief problems we have with our brains. The problem is not that they don't learn, but that they learn too quickly. It's just what they learn that often times is just not true or useful.

Brains are also incredible instruments that never shut down. Even in sleep, we dream as brain wave activity continues. This becomes a problem if we don't give the brain lots of interesting things to process. The stimulus hunger of brains will trigger them to play the old B-rated movies or hallucinate freely.