The widespread pop version of positive attitude gives the impression that all you have to do is think the right thoughts and feel the right feelings. Critics of the pop version respond with the accusation that if that’s all it takes then it amounts to an ego trip of self-delusion about how the world ought to be. Positive attitude is not just the thoughts you think nor is it just being happy or having good feelings. It’s not just self-delusion, either.

Properly understood it is a process of developing control over your states of mind and aligning the social, economic, ecological and political systems in which you are embedded to assist you as you navigate towards optimal states of mind. The ultimate positive attitude is about always learning and always connecting with both the people around you and your world.

Attitude

Attitude is a combination of your state of mind and your orientation to the world around you.

You can read my detailed exploration of different definitions of attitude by clicking here.^

What it boils down to is

1. there is a literal core definition of attitude that refers to things and their orientation in space and
2. metaphorical extensions from that literal core that refer to how our minds are oriented relative to the world and our experiences.

The question of “positive” attitude is making sure your mind is oriented in a direction that is beneficial.

Positive Attitude vs. Negative Attitude

Positive versus negative in this case refers to whether you will benefit from your states of mind.

The practical way to explore the benefits of different states of mind is to

1. develop increasing control over your states of mind and

2. experiment with different states of mind to find out what benefits you get from them.

The key is developing control and that is why I promote the idea of teaching kids attitude first.

Positive Attitude is Psychologically Inclusive

The more you can control your state of mind independent of the world around you, the more freedom you will experience.

But, positive attitude is also about being fully engaged with the world and your experience of it. This is why positive attitude is not about the content of your thoughts and emotions. You can have thoughts that are completely out of touch with reality and you can have emotions that you cannot safely express in some situations.

If you do not have control over your state of mind then when you have those kinds of thoughts and feelings they may prevent you from dealing effectively with reality. A truly positive attitude must accommodate all the thoughts, feelings and experiences that you can have, but in service to what is required to make the best of the situation you are in.

A negative attitude separates you from the world or from aspects of yourself by denying that some thoughts, feelings or experiences are valid or appropriate. A positive attitude, on the other hand, connects you with the world and yourself regardless of the feelings and experiences that you have.

(This is naturally assuming relatively normal variations of both good and bad situations, not severe traumas.)

Positive Attitude in Education

In education^ positive attitude is not mere obedience. Nor is it unreflective or unthinking conformity. A positive attitude in education is about learning to be in touch with reality, which inherently means a life long process of continuously deepening our practice of disillusionment^.

Disillusionment is how we see through the illusions that our minds naturally generate to help us get better and better at dealing with the infinite complexity of the world and our place in it. We can never gain a complete understanding of what causes the world to be the way it is nor how we

cause things to happen in the world. But we do know that we can cause things to happen and that we must exercise responsibility for the conditions we cause in people’s lives, even though we know we are not the sole cause of anything.

The frame of reference for attitude in education should be our ability to perceive accurately, think clearly and act effectively to achieve self-selected goals and aspirations.

A state of mind that diminishes the accuracy of our perceptions, muddles our thinking, decreases the effectiveness of our actions, and/or interferes with our ability to select our own goals and aspirations is negative.

A state of mind that increases the accuracy of our perceptions, clarifies our thinking, expands the effectiveness of our actions, and/or supports our ability to select our own goals and aspirations is positive.

Assessing Positive Attitude

How do we assess or judge the difference between positive and negative attitudes?

In general we have the common sense emotional assessment option.

Emotions such as anger, fear, depression, and sadness are pretty universally recognized as negative states of mind if they occur with undue intensity or frequency.

Of course, the opposite emotions of happiness, joy, ecstasy etc. can also be negative if they are too intense with too much frequency.

The fact is that we need a social group in which to calibrate our judgment of our own and other people’s states of mind because we cannot do it alone.

Collective judgments of attitude should also be based on states of mind, but more precisely on how the systems we put in place affect our states of mind.

I believe that the most basic elements of our social systems are the structures of governance we put in place to manage our own and other people’s behavior for the common good,

the processes of exchange we go through with each other and our environment to meet our needs, and the patterns of consciousness that result from living within those governance structures and exchange processes.

The measure of success should be increasing the patterns of consciousness that we recognize as optimal states of mind such as purpose, optimism, cognitive order, cognitive complexity, cooperation, and agency.

As we support each other to achieve these observable states, then we will find our perceptions become increasingly accurate, our thinking gets clearer, the effectiveness of our actions will be enlarged and we will be supported to select our own goals and aspirations.

Positive Attitude is a Community Project

Positive attitude is the result of mutually engaging with the world and each other; provided that the engagement is based on accurately perceiving the situation, thinking clearly about the situation and acting effectively to achieve our goals.

This means that we accurately perceive how our actions and choices have both long and short term effects on not only those in our immediate vicinity in time and space, but those who are far away and in times to come.

Negative attitudes are the result of disengaging from the world and each other. When we forget or ignore our connectedness and the consequences of our actions, then we will act foolishly.

We cannot ever know the full consequences of any action, but we can always strive to know more than we did before. And that is the ultimate positive attitude; always learning and connecting ever more with each other and our world.

In practical terms whatever attitude we have, positive or negative, we can (and will) seek out and find other people who will reinforce and support our attitude.

If we shift to a new attitude after holding an old one for a long time, then we find ourselves surrounded by the people we collected around us when we developed our previous attitude, so it may be a challenge to maintain the shift if they are not shifting in a similar way.

The key to creating a better world is improving your attitude; improving your ability to accept and deal with who you are, how you feel, whatever you experience, and the world in which those things happen to you.

As you become better able to accept and deal effectively with yourself and the world, then you will also find support for your attitude.

Positive Attitude in Politics

There is one final level of attitude in groups that is worth considering, political attitudes. The polarity of positive versus negative in politics is one that is often noticed but I don’t know that anyone has really considered it deeply.

What would it mean to have a seriously positive politics?

That is, not a positivity that ignores the bad, ugly, unpleasant things in the world, but a positive political message and organization that is deeply engaged with the world and makes an effective difference for the better.

The frame of reference that I think is relevant in politics is the metaphors that are used by politicians and activists to explain their vision of the world.

A negative political vision is one in which we are stopping negative forces in the world, slowing negative movements, reacting against other people, suppressing vices, dividing groups or controlling negative human impulses.

A positive political vision is one in which we accelerate positive movements, encourage virtuous behavior, support people to be better and improve their lives, or enabling freedom that contributes to the common good.

Holding onto a positive attitude politically does run some risk of being used for negative purposes but only if we do not honestly observe how people’s lives are actually being affected by our actions.

But that is the risk of deceiving ourselves that we run everyday, so it is easily reduced by regular practices of empathy and compassion that help us to connect and re-connect with other people and our world.

In order to maintain a positive attitude it is not enough to have control of your states of mind, it is also necessary to be embedded within systems of exchange and governance that are designed to support

your on-going engagement with reality and supports seeking optimal states of mind.

This is what seems to be missing in the popular culture version of the concept.

The keys to achieving positive attitude are control over your own states of mind (which is hinted at in the pop culture version) and actively engaging in the world to create systems of support that consistently result in more peole having more control over their own states of mind, too.

We humans are fundamentally state of mind optimizers and we are embedded within complex systems that have an alignment that can either guide us towards or divert us away from optimal states.

So the challenge is to think about attitude in terms of the effects of embedded systems, not as an individual test of will power.

by Don Berg, Founder

Attitutor Services

This essay is reproduced from Teach-Kids-Attitude-1st.com^. It is also included in the Attitutor Essay Collection^ which includes over 30 other essays. All the links that refer to web pages end with a carat (^), just like the links above.

© By Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D.

Living in the world under your skin is a bustling metropolis of 50 trillion cells, each of which is biologically and functionally equivalent to a miniature human. Current popular opinion holds that the fate and behaviour of our internal cellular citizens are preprogrammed in their genes. Since Watson and Crick’s discovery of the genetic code, the public has been programmed with perception that DNA acquired from our parents at the moment of conception determines our traits and characters. This conventional view of genetics further has us believe that our inherited gene programs are apparently fixed, the equivalent of a computer’s “read-only” program.

The notion that our fate is indelibly inscribed in our genes was directly derived from the now dated scientific concept known as genetic determinism. It is still a conventional belief that genes “control” the many wonderful attributes passed down through a family’s lineage, as well as dysfunctional familial traits such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and depression, among scores of others. As “victims” of heredity, genetic forces outside of our control, we naturally perceive of ourselves as being powerless in regard to the unfolding of our lives. Unfortunately, the assumption of being powerless is the road to personal irresponsibility. “Since I can’t do anything about it anyway… why should I care?”

Shattering Illusions

Just as the Human Genome Project got off the ground in the late 1980’s, scientists began to acquire a paradigm-shattering new view of how life works. Their revolutionary research has become the foundation for a new branch of science known as epigenetic control. The world of epigenetics has shaken the foundations of biology and medicine for it reveals that we are not “victims” of our genes, but are in fact “masters” of our genes.
The conventional version of heredity still being taught in schools emphasises genetic control, which literally reads as “control by genes.” However, newly revealed epigenetic control mechanisms provide a profoundly different view of how life is managed. The Greek-derived prefix epi- means “over or above.” Consequently, the literal translation of epigenetic control reads as “control above the genes.” Genes do NOT control life – life is controlled by something above the genes. Knowledge is power and this knowledge of how life works provides the most important element in our quest for self-empowerment. Epigenetics leads us from our perception of victim to our proper role as a participatory creator.
The new science of epigenetics recognises that environmental signals are the primary regulators of gene activity. As described in the Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, cells read and respond to the conditions of their environment using membrane protein perception switches. Activated switches send signals into the cytoplasm to control behaviour and regulate the activity of the genes, the hereditary blueprints used to make the body. Proteins are the cell’s molecular building blocks and their characters provide for our physical and behavioural traits.
Amazingly, epigenetic information can modify or edit the readout of a gene blueprint to create over 30,000 different variations of proteins from the same gene. This editing process can provide for normal functional protein products as well as dysfunctional proteins from the same gene. One can be born with healthy genes and through epigenetic processes express mutant behaviours such as cancer. Similarly, one can be born with defective mutant genes and through epigenetic mechanisms create normal healthy proteins and functions.
The conventional belief that the genome represents “read-only” programs is now proven to be false. Epigenetic mechanisms modify the readout of genetic code, therefore genes actually represent “read-write” programs wherein life experiences actively redefine an individual’s genetic expression. As organisms experience the environment, their perception mechanisms fine-tune genetic expression so as to enhance their opportunities for survival. The environment’s influence over the genome is dramatically revealed in studies on identical twins. When first born, these siblings express almost the same gene activity from their identical genomes. However, as they begin to experience life, their personal individualised experiences and perceptions lead to the activation of profoundly different sets of genes.
The “new” biology is based upon the fact that perception controls behaviour AND gene activity! This revised version of science emphasises the reality that we actively control our genetic expression moment by moment throughout our lives. Rather than seeing ourselves as victims of our genes, we must come to own the responsibility that our perceptions are dynamically shaping our biology and behaviour. The expression of a healthy or dis-eased biology is directly influenced by the accuracy of an individual’s interpretation or perception of their environment. Misperceptions rewrite genetic expression just as effectively as accurate perceptions, yet with far graver, perhaps even life threatening consequences.

From the Microcosm of the Cell to the Macrocosm of the Mind

For the first three and a half billion years of life on this planet, the biosphere consisted of a massive population of individual single-celled organisms, such as bacteria, yeast, algae, and protozoa like the familiar amoeba and paramecium. About 700 million years ago, individual cells started to assemble into multicellular colonies. The collective awareness afforded in a community of cells was far greater than an individual cell’s awareness. Since awareness is a primary factor in organismal survival, the communal experience offered its citizens a far greater opportunity to stay alive and reproduce.
The first cellular communities, like the earliest human communities, were basic hunter-gatherer clans wherein each member of the society offered the same services to support the survival of the community. However, as the population densities of both cellular and human communities reached greater numbers, it was no longer efficient or effective for all individuals to do the same job. In both types of communities, evolution led to individuals taking on specialised functions. For example, in human communities some members focused upon hunting, others upon domestic chores and some upon child rearing. In cellular communities specialisation meant that some cells began to differentiate as digestive cells, others as heart cells, and still others as muscle cells.
Most of the trillions of cells forming bodies such as ours have no direct perception of the external environment. Liver cells “see” what’s going on in the liver, but don’t directly know what’s going on in the world outside of the skin. The function of the brain and nervous system is to interpret environmental stimuli and send out signals to the cells that integrate and regulate the life-sustaining functions of the body’s organ systems.
The successful nature of multicellular communities allowed evolving brains to dedicate vast numbers of cells for use in the cataloguing, memorising and integrating complex perceptions. The ability to remember and select among the millions of experienced perceptions in life provides the brain with a powerful creative database from which it can create complex behavioural repertoires. When put into play, these behavioural programs endow the organism with the characteristic trait of consciousness. In this presentation, the term consciousness is used in its most fundamental context… the state of being awake and aware of what is going on around you.
Many scientists prefer to think of consciousness in terms of a digital quality, an organism either has it or not. However, an assessment of the evolution of biological properties suggests consciousness, like any other quality, evolved over time. Consequently, the character of consciousness would likely express itself as a gradient of awareness from its simpler roots in primitive organisms to the unique character of self-consciousness manifest in humans and other higher vertebrates.
The expression of self-consciousness is specifically associated with a small evolutionary adaptation in the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the neurological platform that enables us to realise our personal identity and experience the quality of “thinking.” Monkeys and lower organisms do not express self-consciousness. When looking into a mirror, monkeys will never recognise that they are looking at them selves; they will always perceive the image to be that of another monkey. In contrast, neurologically more advanced chimps looking in the mirror perceive the mirror’s reflection as an image of themselves.
An important difference between the brain’s consciousness and the prefrontal cortex’s self-consciousness is that consciousness enables an organism to assess and respond to the immediate conditions of its environment that are relevant at that moment. In contrast, self-consciousness enables the individual to factor in the consequences of their actions in regard to not only how they impact the present moment but also as to how they will influence the individual’s future.
Self-consciousness is an evolutionary adjunct to consciousness in that it provided another behaviour-creating platform that included the role of a “self” in the decision-making process. While conventional consciousness enables organisms to be participatory members in the dynamics of life’s “play,” the quality of self-consciousness offers an opportunity to simultaneously be an observer in the “audience.” From the perspective of our being able to observe the role of “self” in the unfolding of the “play,” self-consciousness provides the individual with the option for self-reflection, reviewing and editing their character’s performance. The conscious and self-conscious functions of the brain may be collectively referred to as the mind.
In conventional parlance, the brain’s conscious mechanism associated with automated stimulus-response behaviours is referred to as the subconscious or unconscious mind, for the reason that its functions require neither observation nor attention from the self-conscious mind. Subconscious mind functions evolved long before the prefrontal cortex, consequently it historically was able to successfully operate a body and its behaviour without any contribution from, or involvement with, the more evolved self-conscious mind.
The subconscious mind is an astonishingly powerful information processor that can record perceptual experiences (programs) and forever play them back at the push of a button. Interestingly, many people only become aware of their subconscious mind’s automated programmed behaviours when they realise they’re engaged in an undesirable behaviour as a result of someone “pushing their buttons.”
The power of the subconscious mind lies in its ability to process massive amounts of data acquired from direct and indirect learning experiences at extraordinarily high rates of speed. It has been estimated that the disproportionately larger brain mass providing the subconscious mind’s function has the ability to interpret and respond to over 40 million nerve impulses per second. In contrast, it is estimated that the diminutive self-conscious mind’s prefrontal cortex can only process about 40 nerve impulses per second. As an information processor, the subconscious mind is one million times more powerful than the self-conscious mind.
As a tradeoff in acquiring its computational bravado, the subconscious mind expresses a marginal creative ability, one that may be best compared to that of a precocious five year old. In contrast to the freewill offered by the conscious mind, the subconscious mind primarily expresses prerecorded stimulus-response “habits.” Once a behaviour pattern is learned, such as walking, getting dressed or driving a car, those programs are processed as habits in the subconscious mind… meaning you can carry out these complex functions without paying any attention to them.
In contrast to the massive information processing by the subconscious mind, the smaller prefrontal cortex responsible for self-consciousness is limited to juggling only a small number of tasks at the same time. Though its ability for multitasking is physically constrained, the self-conscious mind can focus upon and control any function in the human body. It was once thought that some body’s functions were beyond the control of the self-conscious mind, such involuntary functions included the regulation of heartbeat, blood pressure and body temperature, behaviours controlled by the unconscious autonomic nervous system. However, it is now recognised that yogis and other practitioners that train their conscious minds can absolutely control functions formerly defined as involuntary behaviours.
The subconscious and self-conscious components of the mind work in tandem. The subconscious mind controls every behaviour that is not attended to by the self-conscious mind. For most people, their self-conscious minds are rarely focused upon the current moment since their mental processing continuously flits from one thought to another. The self-conscious mind is so preoccupied with thoughts about the future, the past or resolving some imaginary problem, that most of our lives are actually controlled by programs in the subconscious mind.
Cognitive neuroscientists conclude that the self-conscious mind contributes only about 5% of our cognitive activity. Consequently, 95% of our decisions, actions, emotions and behaviours are derived from the unobserved processing of the subconscious mind.

Simple Insights… Profound Consequences!

Through the management of “programmed” perceptions, the mind controls our biology, behaviour and gene activity. The seat of thinking, freewill, personal identity, and our wants, desires and intentions is a small 40 “bit” self-conscious processor that controls our lives only 5% of the day or less. The million times more powerful subconscious mind controls 95% or more of our lives using “habits” derived from instincts and the perceptions acquired in our life experiences.
This data reveals that our lives are not controlled by our personal intentions and desires as we may inherently believe. Do the math! Our fate is actually under the control of the preprogrammed experiences managed by the subconscious mind. The most powerful and influential programs in the subconscious mind were downloaded into consciousness in the profoundly important formative period between gestation and six years of age. Now here’s the catch – these life-shaping subconscious programs are direct downloads derived from observing our primary teachers… our parents, siblings and local community. Unfortunately, as psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors are keenly aware, many of the perceptions acquired about ourselves in the formative period are expressed as limiting and self-sabotaging beliefs.
Unbeknownst to most parents is the fact that their words and actions are being continuously recorded by their children’s minds. Consequently, when they inform their child that he or she does not deserve things, or that they are not good enough, or smart enough, or that they are sickly, these pronouncements are directly downloaded into their child’s subconscious. Since the role of the mind is to make coherence between its programs and real life, the brain generates appropriate behavioural responses to life’s stimuli to assure the “truth” of the programmed perceptions.
Let’s apply this understanding to the behaviour in one’s life. Consider that you were a 5-year-old child throwing a tantrum in Walmart over your desire to have a particular toy. In silencing your outburst, your father yelled, “YOU don’t deserve things!” You are now an adult and in your self-conscious mind you are considering the idea that you have the qualities and power to assume a position of leadership at your job. While in the process of entertaining this positive thought in the self-conscious mind, all of your behaviours are now being automatically managed by the programs in your more powerful subconscious mind. Since your fundamental behavioural programs are those derived in your formative years, your father’s admonition that “you do not deserve things” may become the subconscious mind’s automated directive. So while you are entertaining wonderful thoughts of a positive future and not paying attention, your subconscious mind is automatically engaging self-sabotaging behaviour to assure that your reality matches your program of not-deserving.
Now here’s the catch – Behaviour is automatically controlled by subconscious mind’s programs when the self-conscious mind is not focused on the present moment. When the reflective self-conscious mind is preoccupied in thought and not paying attention, it does not observe the automatic behaviours derived from subconscious mind. Since 95% or more of our behaviour is derived from the subconscious mind… then most of our own behaviour is invisible to us!
For example, consider you intimately know someone and you also know his or her parent. From your perspective you see that your friend’s behaviour closely resembles their parent. Then one day you casually remark to your friend something like, “You know Mary, you’re just like your mom.” Back away! In disbelief and perhaps shock, Mary will likely respond with, “How can you say that!” The cosmic joke is that everyone else can see that Mary’s behaviour resembles her mom’s except Mary. Why? Simply because when Mary is engaging the subconscious behavioural programs she downloaded in her youth from observing her mom, it’s because her self-conscious mind is not paying attention. At those moments, her automatic subconscious programs operate without observation.
Another familiar example of how “invisible” behaviour operates: You are driving your car while having an intense conversation with a friend in the passenger’s seat. You become so involved in the discussion that only later, when your gaze returns to the road, do you realise that you haven’t paid attention to the driving for the last ten minutes. Since the self-conscious mind was preoccupied with the conversation, the car was being driven by the subconscious mind’s “autopilot” mode. However, if you were asked to describe your driving behaviour during that ten-minute hiatus, you would be forced to say, “I don’t know… I wasn’t paying attention.” Aha! That’s the point – when the conscious mind is busy, we do not observe our own programmed subconscious behaviours.
Consequently, when life does not work out as planned, we rarely recognise that we were very likely contributing to our own disappointments. Since we are generally unaware of the influence of our own subconscious behaviours, we naturally perceive of our selves as victims of forces outside of us when things don’t work out as desired. Unfortunately, assuming the role of victim means that we assume we are powerless in manifesting our intentions. Nothing is further from the truth! The primary determinant in shaping the fate of our lives is the database of perceptions and beliefs programmed in our minds.

Where Did That Behaviour Come From?

There are three sources of perceptions that control our biology and behaviour. The most primitive perceptions are those we acquire with our genome. Built into our genes are programs that provide fundamental reflex behaviours referred to as instincts. Pulling your hand out of an open flame is a genetically derived behaviour that does not have to be learned. More complex instincts include the ability of newborn babies to swim like a dolphin or the activation of innate healing mechanisms to repair a damaged system or eliminate a cancerous growth. Genetically inherited instincts are perceptions acquired from nature.
The second source of life-controlling perceptions represents memories derived from life experiences downloaded into the subconscious mind. These profoundly powerful learned perceptions represent the contribution from nurture. Among the earliest perceptions of life to be downloaded are the emotions and sensations experienced by the mother as she responds to her world. Along with nutrition, the emotional chemistry, hormones, and stress factors controlling the mother’s responses to life experiences cross the placental barrier and influence fetal physiology and development. When the mother is happy, so is the fetus. When the mother is in fear, so is the fetus. When the mother “rejects” her fetus as a potential threat to family survival, the fetal nervous system is preprogrammed with the emotion of being rejected. Sue Gearhardt’s very valuable book Why Love Matters reveals that the fetal nervous system records memories of womb experiences. By the time the baby is born, emotional information downloaded from the life experiences in womb have already shaped half of that individual’s personality.
However, the most influential perceptual programming of the subconscious mind occurs in the time period spanning from the birth process through the first six years of life. During this time the child’s brain is recording all sensory experiences as well as learning complex motor programs for speech, and for learning first how to crawl and then how to stand and ultimately run and jump. Simultaneously, the subconscious mind acquires perceptions in regard to parents, who are they and what they do. Then by observing behavioural patterns of people in their immediate environment (usually parents, siblings and relatives), a child learns perceptions of acceptable and unacceptable social behaviours that become the subconscious programs that establish the “rules” of life.
Nature facilitates the enculturation process by developmentally enhancing the subconscious mind’s ability to download massive amounts of information. EEG readings from adult brains reveal that neural electrical activity is correlated with different states of awareness. Adult EEG readings show that the human brain operates on at least five different frequency levels, each associated with a different brain state:

Activity          Frequency          Brain State
delta 0.5-4 Hz               sleeping/unconscious
theta 4-8 Hz                      imagination
alpha 8-12 Hz           calm consciousness
beta 12-35 Hz              focused consciousness
gamma >35 Hz            peak performance.

EEG vibrations continuously shift from state to state over the whole range of frequencies during normal brain processing in adults. However, brain frequencies in developing children display a radically different behaviour. EEG vibration rates and their corresponding states evolve in incremental stages over time. The predominant brain activity during the child’s first two years of life is delta, the lowest EEG frequency range. In the adult brain, delta is associated with sleeping or unconsciousness.
Between two and six years of age, the child’s brain activity state ramps up and it operates primarily in the range of theta. In the adult, theta activity is associated with states of reverie or imagination. While in the theta state, children spend much of their time mixing the imaginary world with the real world. Calm consciousness associated with emerging alpha activity only becomes a predominant brain state after six years of age. By twelve years, the brain expresses all frequency ranges although its primary activity is in beta’s state of focused consciousness. Children leave elementary education behind at this age and enter into the more intense academic programs of junior high.
A profoundly important fact in the above timeline that may have missed your attention is that children do not express the alpha EEG frequencies of conscious processing as a predominant brain state until after they are six years old. The predominant delta and theta activity of children under six signifies that their brains are operating at levels below consciousness. Delta and theta brain frequencies define a brain state known as a hypnogogic trance, the same neural state that hypnotherapists use to download new behaviours directly into the subconscious mind of their clients.
The first six years of a child’s life is spent in a hypnotic trance. Its perceptions of the world are directly downloaded into the subconscious during this time, without the discrimination of the, as yet, dormant self-conscious mind. Consequently, our fundamental perceptions about life and our role in it are learned before we express the capacity to choose or reject those beliefs. We were simply “programmed.” The Jesuits were aware of this programmable state and proudly boasted, “Give us a child until it is six or seven years old and it will belong to the Church for the rest of its life.” They knew that once the dogma of the Church was implanted into the child’s subconscious mind, that information would inevitably influence 95% of that individual’s behaviour for the rest of their life.
The inhibition of conscious processing (alpha EEG activity) and the simultaneous engagement of a hypnogogic trance during the formative stages of a child’s life are a logical necessity. The thinking processes associated with the self-conscious mind’s processing cannot operate from a blank slate. Self-conscious behaviour requires a working database of learned perceptions. Consequently, before self-consciousness is expressed, the brain’s primary task is to acquire a working awareness of the world by directly downloading experiences and observations into the subconscious mind.
HOWEVER, there is a very, very serious downside to acquiring awareness by this method. The consequence is so profound that it not only impacts the life of the individual, it can also alter an entire civilisation. The issue concerns the fact that we download our perceptions and beliefs about life long before we acquire the ability for critical thinking. Our primary perceptions are literally written in stone as unequivocal truths in the subconscious mind, where they habitually operate for life, unless there is an active effort to reprogram them. When as young children we download limiting or sabotaging beliefs about ourselves, these perceptions become our truths and our subconscious processing will invisibly generate behaviours that are coherent with those truths.
As an important point for personal reference, it should be noted that acquired perceptions in the subconscious mind could even override genetically endowed instincts. For example, every human can instinctually swim like a dolphin the moment they emerge from the birth canal. This might prompt you to ask, “Why is it that we have to work so hard at teaching our children how to swim?” The answer lies in the fact that every time the infant encounters open water, such as a pool, a river, a bathtub, the parents freak out in concern for the safety of their child. However, in the baby’s mind, the parent’s behaviour causes the child to equate water as something to be feared. The acquired perception of water as dangerous and life threatening, overrides the instinctual ability to swim and makes the formerly proficient child susceptible to drowning.
The following is further reference to the fact that our unconsciously acquired cultural beliefs control biology and behaviour. Through our developmental experiences we acquire the perception that we are frail, vulnerable organisms subject to the ravages of contagious germs and disease. The belief of being frail actually leads to frailty since the mind’s limiting perceptions inhibit the body’s innate ability to heal itself. This influence of the mind on healing processes is the focus of psychoneuroimmunology, the field that describes the mechanism by which our thoughts change brain chemistry, which in turn regulates the function of the immune system. While negative beliefs can precipitate illness (nocebo effect), the resulting dis-ease state can be alleviated through the healing effects of positive thoughts (placebo effect).
Finally, the third source of perceptions that shape our lives is derived from the self-conscious mind. Unlike the reflexive programming of subconscious mind, the self-conscious mind is a creative platform that provides for the mixing and morphing a variety of perceptions with the infusion of imagination, a process that generates an unlimited number of beliefs and behavioural variations. The quality of the self-conscious mind endows organisms with one of the most powerful forces in the Universe, the opportunity to express freewill.

Taking Personal Responsibility

The conclusions of the “new” biology provide a radical departure from our conventional beliefs of how life works. In contrast to the notion that we are biochemical automatons driven by genes, the new insights reveal that it is the mind that controls genes, which in turn shape our biology and behaviour. The self-conscious mind, associated with our individual identity and the manifestation of thoughts, is guided by our own personal desires and intentions.
While we generally perceive that our self-conscious mind is “controlling” the show, neuroscience has established the fact that 95% of our behaviour is under the control of the more powerful subconscious mind. As most of our personal and cultural problems arise from the fact that behaviours derived from the subconscious mind are essentially invisible to us, we rarely observe our automated behaviour.
Compounding the problem is the fact that fundamental programs in the subconscious mind are derived from others, people who generally do not share your personal goals and aspirations. While our conscious minds are trying to move us toward our dreams, unbeknownst to us our subconscious programs are simultaneously shooting ourselves in the foot and impeding our progress.
The subconscious mind is simply a “record-playback” mechanism that downloads experiences into “behavioural tapes.” While the self-conscious mind is associated with creativity, the subconscious mind’s function is to engage previously recorded programs. Unlike self-consciousness that is overseen by an entity (you), the subconscious mind is more closely related to a machine, meaning there is no thinking, conscious entity controlling the subconscious programs.
We have all been shackled with emotional chains wrought by dysfunctional behaviours programmed by the stories of the past. However, the next time you are talking to “yourself” with the hope of changing sabotaging subconscious programs, it is important to realise the following information. Using reason to communicate with your subconscious in an effort to change its behaviour would essentially have the same influence as trying to change a program on a cassette tape by talking to the tape player. In neither case is there an entity in the mechanism that will respond to your dialogue.
Subconscious programs are not fixed, unchangeable behaviours. We have the ability to rewrite our limiting beliefs and in the process take control of our lives. However, to change subconscious programs requires the activation of a process other than just engaging in a running dialogue with the subconscious mind. There are a large variety of effective processes to reprogram limiting beliefs, which include clinical hypnotherapy, Buddhist mindfulness and a number of newly developed and very powerful modalities collectively referred to as energy psychology.

For a list of resources, visit: www.brucelipton.com.

source:  Power Of the mind

]]> http://www.idrisjusoh.com.my/wp/?feed=rss2&p=385 http://www.idrisjusoh.com.my/wp/?p=9 http://www.idrisjusoh.com.my/wp/?p=9#comments Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:09:37 +0000 admin http://www.idrisjusoh.com.my/wp/?p=9 19 September 2007 by Graham Lawton How does your brain work? Brain imaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and similar advanced techniques have given neuroscientists huge insights into this question. Yet studying the brain doesn’t have to be such a high-tech enterprise. Simple experiments can still probe the inner workings of the [...]]]>

19 September 2007 by Graham Lawton

How does your brain work? Brain imaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and similar advanced techniques have given neuroscientists huge insights into this question. Yet studying the brain doesn’t have to be such a high-tech enterprise. Simple experiments can still probe the inner workings of the brain, and many of these are easy to set up at home or are available on the internet.

Try them on yourself and you will experience first-hand some of its strangest, most amazing workings - facets of brain function that scientists are only just starting to understand. You’ll see aspects of perception, memory, attention, body image, the unconscious mind - and the curious consequences of your brain being split in two.

Watch a video demonstrating the rubber hand illusion

1 Seeing isn’t believing

TAKE a moment to observe the world around you. Scan the horizon with your eyes. Tilt your head back and listen. You’re probably getting the impression that your senses are doing a fine job of capturing everything that is going on. Yet that is all it is: an impression.

Despite the fact that your visual system seems to provide you with a continuous widescreen movie, most of the time it is only gathering information from a tiny patch of the visual field. The rest of the time it isn’t even doing that. Somehow from this sporadic input it conjures up a seamless visual experience.

What is going on? Bang in the middle of your retina is a small patch of densely crowded photoreceptors called the fovea. This is the retina’s sweet spot, the only part of the eye capable of seeing with the rich detail and full colour we take for granted. This tiny spot - which covers an area of our visual field no bigger than the moon in the sky - feeds your visual system almost all of its raw information.

To build up a big picture, your eyes constantly dart about, fixating for a fraction of a second and then moving on. These jerky movements between fixations are called saccades, and we make about three per second, each lasting between 20 and 200 microseconds.

The curious thing about saccades is that while they are happening we are effectively blind. The brain doesn’t bother to process information picked up during a saccade because the eyes move too rapidly to capture anything useful. All in all, your visual system works like a man blundering around in the dark waving around a flickering torch with a very narrow beam.

Despite the fact that you don’t normally notice saccades, you can catch them in action. Look at your eyes close-up in the mirror and flick your focus back and forth from one pupil to another. However hard you try you cannot see your eyes move - even though somebody watching you can. That’s because the motion is a saccade, and your brain isn’t paying attention. Now pick two spots in the corners of your visual field and flick your gaze from one to the other and back again. If you’re lucky you’ll notice, just barely, a brief flash of darkness. This is your visual cortex clocking off.

So how does your brain weave such fragmentary information into a seamless movie? This remains something of a mystery. The best explanation, according to Andrew Hollingworth of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, is that your short-term and long-term visual memories retain information from previous fixations and integrate them into a here-and-now visual experience (Visual Cognition, vol 14, p 781).

There is also some guesswork going on. You can get a feel for this from the frozen-time illusion - the sensation that you sometimes get when you look at a clock and the second hand appears to freeze momentarily before tick-tocking back into action.

This happens because of saccades. To compensate for the temporary shut-down of vision, your brain makes a guess at what it would have seen, but it does so retrospectively. So the 100 or so milliseconds of blindness gets back-filled with the image that appears after the saccade is over. If your eyes happen to alight on the clock just after the second hand has moved, your brain assumes that the hand was in that location for the duration of the saccade too. The “second” then lasts about 10 per cent longer than normal, which is enough for you to notice.

The weirdness isn’t confined to vision. Your auditory system is also full of gaps and glitches that the brain cleans up so we can make sense of the world. This is especially true of speech.

In everyday life we encounter lots of situations that obscure or distort people’s voices, yet most of the time we understand effortlessly. This is because our brain pastes in the missing sounds, a phenomenon called phonemic restoration. It is so effective that it is sometimes hard to tell that the missing sounds are not there.

A good demonstration of this effect was published last year by Makio Kashino of NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Atsugi, Japan. He recorded a voice saying “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” then removed short chunks and replaced them with silence. This made the sentence virtually unintelligible. But when he filled the gaps with loud white noise, the sentence miraculously becomes understandable (Acoustic Science and Technology, vol 27, p 318).

“The sounds we hear are not copies of physical sounds,” Kashino says. “The brain fills in the gaps, based on the information in the remaining speech signal.” The effect is so powerful that you can even record a sentence, chop it into 50-millisecond slices, reverse every single slice and play it back - and it is perfectly intelligible. You can listen to Kashino’s sound files at http://asj.gr.jp/2006/data/kashi/index.html.

Another demonstration of the brain’s ability to extract meaning from distorted signals is a form of synthesised speech called sine-wave speech. When you first hear a sentence in sine-wave speech it sounds alien and unintelligible, somewhat reminiscent of whistling or birdsong. But if you listen to the same sentence in normal speech and then return to the sine-wave version, it suddenly snaps into auditory focus. Try as you might, you cannot “unhear” the words that you didn’t even realise were words the first time you heard them (listen to demos at www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/sine-wave-speech and www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/Chris_Darwin/SWS).

According to Matt Davis of the UK Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, this happens because the brain has circuits that respond to speech, but doesn’t switch them on unless it detects spoken language (Hearing Research, vol 229, p 132). Sine-wave speech isn’t speech-like enough to trigger the circuits, but once you know it is speech they spring into action. “It’s an example of top-down influence,” says Davis. “What you know about what you’re hearing changes the way you hear it.”

Given the tricks that your visual and auditory systems play, it probably comes as no surprise that when they get together, fights can break out. A good demonstration of this is the McGurk effect, in which listening to a series of identical syllables such as “ba ba ba ba” while watching somebody mouth “ba da la va” makes you hear “ba da la va”. Try it for yourself at www.faculty.ucr.edu/~rosenblu/lab-index.html.

Until recently, psychologists believed that the visual system always trumps the other senses, but in 2000 a team of psychologists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena proved that this isn’t the case. They showed volunteers a single flash on a computer screen. If they accompanied the flash with two very short beeps, the volunteers saw two flashes - in other words, this time the auditory system wins (Nature, vol 408, p 788). See the illusion at www.cns.atr.jp/~kmtn/soundInducedIllusoryFlash2/index.html.

2 This is not my nose

YOU may know the crossed-hands illusion. Hold your arms out in front of you and cross them over, rotate your hands so your palms face each other, then mesh your fingers together. Now slowly rotate your hands up between your arms so you’re staring at your knuckles. Ask someone to point to one of your index fingers, then attempt to move it. Did you move the wrong one?

If so, you’ve just experienced a minor failure of your body schema - your mental representation of the location, position and boundaries of your body. Your brain builds this up by drawing on data from vision, touch and a body-wide network of proprioceptive sensors that monitor position. Your body schema is a critical part of self-awareness, which is why it feels so odd when it goes wrong.

In the crossed-hands illusion, the schema fails because of a confusing visual input. You don’t normally see your hands in this convoluted position; the finger you move is the one that is pointing in the direction that the correct one would be pointing if you had simply clasped your hands as if in prayer.

An even odder way of disturbing your body schema is an illusion that taps straight into your sense of body ownership. Known as the rubber-hand illusion, it fools you into thinking a rubber hand - or even a piece of wood, or a table - is part of your body.

To experience the illusion, get hold of a model hand (it doesn’t have to be very realistic) and put it on the table in front of you. If it is a left hand, put your actual left hand somewhere you can’t see it, in the same pose as the rubber hand. Now get someone to touch and stroke your unseen hand and the rubber hand with identical movements. If you concentrate on the rubber hand, you will probably get the uncanny feeling that it is your own. (See a video of the rubber hand illusion here)

What this illusion shows is that your sense of body ownership is less anchored in reality than you think. Your brain will happily override information from proprioception to conjure up an incorrect yet coherent body schema based on vision and touch.

In fact, your mental body map is an absolute sucker for visual information. This year Frank Durgin of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania set up the illusion as described above but instead of touching the rubber hand he merely “stroked” it with light from a laser pointer, leaving the unseen hand alone. Two-thirds of 220 subjects reported a sense of ownership of the rubber hand and said they had the sensation of heat and even touch from the laser pointer (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 152). “It’s obvious the hand is rubber - no one is fooled at all,” says Durgin. “But if your brain decides it’s your hand, all the conscious awareness in the world won’t change it.”

If you can’t get hold of a fake hand, there are other (though less reliable) ways to experience the illusion. Some people can be fooled into believing a piece of wood has replaced their hand. Around half of people can even be made to feel a table top is part of their body. Sit at a table and put your hand out of sight underneath. Get someone to tap and stroke this hand while doing exactly the same to the table top directly above. If you watch the table top, you may experience the illusion that the table has become part of your body.

Proprioception may be the junior partner to vision and touch in creating your body schema, but it still plays a key role. You can demonstrate this with an illusion that taps into proprioception alone. This Pinocchio illusion is hard to do without a specialist piece of equipment called a physiotherapy vibrator, but if you can get hold of one, try this. Close your eyes, touch the tip of your nose and then get somebody to apply the vibrator at about 100 hertz to skin at the very top of your bicep. This creates the strong sensation that you are straightening your elbow, and that your nose is simultaneously growing longer and longer, like Pinocchio’s.

Vibrating the skin above a tendon excites stretch receptors in the muscle, creating a powerful sensation that the muscle is stretching and the joint is extending. This confuses your proprioceptors, which revise your body schema accordingly. The result is rather like having a phantom limb: the sensed position of your arm in space doesn’t correspond to its actual position.

If you’re touching your nose at the same time, this leads to a weird sensation that it is growing. Your brain integrates the touch sensation from your fingers with the “movement” of your arm and comes to the erroneous conclusion that your nose must be growing to fill the gap.

The Pinocchio illusion is an important tool for understanding how the brain calculates the size and shape of our bodies. This isn’t just an academic question. When it goes wrong, such as in body dysmorphic disorder, anorexia and phantom limb, the results can be devastating (PLoS Biology, vol 3, p e412).

3 A brain of two halves

WOULD you consider yourself to be logical and analytical or creative and empathic? According to popular psychology you’re one or the other, and it’s all down to which half of your brain you use the most: the rational and calculating left or the intuitive, artistic right.

It’s a myth, of course, but like all good ones it contains a grain of truth. Your cerebral cortex - the outer layer of your brain that deals with higher functions - is indeed split into two halves. They are connected by a flat bundle of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum, but work in subtly different ways - and these differences occasionally flicker into your conscious awareness.

The left-brain/right-brain myth arose from experiments done in the early 1970s on people who had had their corpus callosum cut as a last-ditch treatment for epilepsy. These “split-brain” patients showed some strikingly odd responses to information that was preferentially sent to one side of the brain or the other by presenting it to the extreme left or right of their visual field. This works because the right visual field is monitored by the right eye, which routes straight into the left brain, and vice versa.

For example, when a word or picture is presented to their right brain, split-brain patients are often unable to read or recognise it. This and similar experiments led to the idea that the left side of the brain deals with logic and facts while the right side is more intuitive and interpretive. We now know that this dichotomy is too simplistic, but its essence holds true. The latest view is that the two hemispheres have subtly different styles of information processing: the left has a bias towards detail, the right a more holistic outlook. You can watch a video of a split-brain experiment at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo&mode=related&search=.

Most people, of course, have a functional corpus callosum that shunts information between the hemispheres. Even so, subtle left-right differences exist. One task where the hemispheres operate differently is face recognition. When most of us see a face, our right cerebral hemisphere does the lion’s share of the work recognising its gender and decoding its expression. And because the right hemisphere is fed by the left visual field, that means we have a notable left-sided bias in our judgement of faces.

Look at this pair of faces (left). Which appears happier? Chances are you chose the bottom one. The two faces are, however, identical apart from being mirror images of one another. The picture is called a chimeric face and is made by taking two pictures of the same face, one with a neutral expression and the other smiling, chopping the pictures in half and joining the two mismatched pieces. Our general bias towards the left side of the face (as we look at it) makes us see the faces as different even though they are essentially equivalent.

It isn’t just visual processing that is lateralised. There is some evidence that emotion is too, with the right side of the brain more specialised for negative emotions and the left for positive ones. Amazingly, simply activating one or other hemisphere by moving parts of your body can noticeably change your emotional state.

You can experience this by repeating an experiment first done in 1989 by Bernard Schiff and Mary Lamon of the University of Toronto in Canada (Neuropsychologia, vol 27, p 923). They asked 12 volunteers to perform a “half smile”, lifting one corner of their mouths and holding it for a minute. Left-smilers reported feeling sadder afterwards, while right-smilers felt more positive.

Other researchers have reproduced the effect simply by getting people to contract the muscles of their left or right hand a few times. More recent research has suggested that motivation is similarly affected: people who performed right-sided muscle contractions became more assertive and spent longer trying to crack an impossible maths puzzle.

Unsurprisingly, these claims are controversial, with some teams failing to replicate the results. Last year, however, Eddie Harmon-Jones of Texas A&M University in College Station used EEG to confirm that flexing the hand muscles produces changes in emotion, but only when it is preceded by activation of the opposite cortex (Psychophysiology, vol 43, p 598). The left-brain/right-brain legend, it appears, is alive and well.

4 Probe your subconscious

IT WAS a ground-breaking investigation into the nature of consciousness and free will. In 1983, psychologist Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco, hooked five volunteers up to an EEG machine and asked them to make voluntary movements, such as lifting a finger, whenever they felt like it. Watching the electrical activity in their brains, he discovered that his subjects only became consciously aware of their intention to act a few hundred milliseconds after their brain had initiated the movement. Libet was forced to conclude that what feels like a conscious decision may in fact be nothing of the sort (Brain, vol 106, p 623).

This experiment was the first demonstration of what is now an established theory in neuroscience: a major proportion of your thoughts and actions - even things you believe you are in conscious control of - actually take place in your unconscious. Most of the time you are essentially flying on autopilot.

Libet’s experiment involved equipment that you’re unlikely to have at home, but you can tap into a similar phenomenon using what is known as the “ideomotor effect”. Make a pendulum out of a paper clip and a piece of thread and dangle it over a cross drawn on a piece of paper. Ask yourself a simple yes/no question, such as “am I at home?” or “do I have a cat?”, and tell yourself that if the pendulum swings clockwise, the answer is yes, while anticlockwise means no. Spookily, the pendulum will generally start rotating in the direction of the correct answer.

It looks supernatural, but it’s not. The reason it works is that, as soon as you ask the question, your unconscious brain fires up motor preparation circuits in anticipation of the answer it expects to see. These circuits initiate subtle muscle movements that you are not normally aware of - except when they are amplified by a pendulum (or dowsing stick or Ouija board). This is your unconscious brain in action.

A different aspect of your mental underworld is reflected in your “implicit assumptions”. Your subconscious mind isn’t just planning and executing actions, it also spends a great deal of time analysing the world, looking for patterns and relationships that can help you navigate through life. The conclusions it comes to are called implicit assumptions - subtle prejudices about people and events. For example, if you hear on the radio that a teenage boy has been shot dead in a car park near his home, it’s almost impossible not to make assumptions about his family background and the area where he lived.

“Everybody has implicit assumptions,” says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who played a big part in their discovery. “They’re a necessary part of how the brain operates and they generally serve us very well.”

But not always. Nosek and colleagues argue that because we are not in control of our implicit assumptions, and are seldom aware of them, it is possible to develop unconscious prejudices that your conscious mind would find unappealing or even abhorrent - such as associating men with science and women with the arts, preferring thin people to fat people or assuming that blonde women are stupid. “You may think you’re egalitarian, yet your associations are often quite different,” says Nosek.

Nosek and colleagues have devised a way to access these implicit assumptions (take the test at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit). The tests are based on the idea that people find it easier to recognise pairs of stimuli that fit their unconscious assumptions - white people and positive words or black people and negative words, for example. People often find the results of their tests “provocative”, says Nosek. “The most common implicit associations are race and age - they’re quite profound.”

Maybe sometimes it is better to ignore your unconscious mind.

5 Pay attention!

IMAGINE you are walking down the street and a passer-by asks you for directions. As you talk to him, two workmen rudely barge between you carrying a door. Then something weird happens: in the brief moment that the passer-by is behind the door, he switches places with one of the workmen. You are left giving directions to a different person who is taller, wearing different clothes and has a different voice. Do you think you would notice?

Of course you would, right? Wrong. When researchers at Harvard University played this trick on 15 unsuspecting people, eight of them failed to spot the change.

What this demonstrates is a phenomenon called “change blindness”. It happens because of a chronic shortage of a crucial mental resource: attention. You are blithely unaware of most of what is going on around you, to the point where you can fail to notice “obvious” changes in your surroundings.

Attention is not well understood, but whatever it is, we have a limited amount. Of all the information entering or being generated by your brain at any one time - sights, sounds, memories, ideas and so on - only a tiny fraction enters your consciousness. Object-tracking studies suggest that the maximum number of items we can attend to at any one time is around five or six (see demos at http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/finstlab/demos.htm).

Scientists studying attention spend a lot of time playing with change blindness because it provides direct access to the attentional system. In the door experiment, the subjects fail to see the change because their attention is elsewhere and the door conceals what would otherwise be attention-grabbing motion.

You can experience the same thing by watching “flicker images“. These consist of two consecutive images that differ only in one key feature - two cowboys who swap heads, say. If the images are flashed up in quick succession with a brief blank screen between them (which acts like the door), most people take an astonishingly long time to spot the difference (see demos at www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download, or try flicking your attention between the two images in the diagram below).

Similarly, we often fail to notice blatant continuity errors when films cut from one scene to another. We also usually fail to detect gradual changes to a static scene, such as the addition of a large building (see demos at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html and http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/Slow%20changes%20bis/intro.html).

“Basically, the explanation is that attention is needed to see change,” says psychologist Ronald Rensink of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “Attention is drawn automatically to the motion signals that accompany a change. But if these are swamped, then the observer can’t rely on automatic control, but needs to hunt around with their attention.”

A similar phenomenon is motion-induced blindness, in which concentrating on a moving pattern causes what should be very prominent static objects - such as bright yellow dots - to disappear (see demos at http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Ebs265/demos/MIB-percScotoma.html). Motion-induced blindness was only discovered in 2001 and it is still unclear why it happens, but most researchers think it has something to do with attentional resources.

There is a related and even more counter-intuitive demonstration of our limited capacity for attention. If you are deliberately concentrating on something, it can render you oblivious to other events that you would normally have no trouble noticing. This “inattention blindness” is probably the reason why motorists sometimes collide with objects such as pedestrians and buses that they simply “didn’t see”.

The most famous demonstration of inattention blindness was staged in 1999 by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It involves a game of basketball. Chances are you’ve seen it or read about it before. If not, have a look at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html. The task is to count the number of passes made by the team in white. You won’t believe your brain.

6 Made-up m emories

A FEW years ago, the actor Alan Alda visited a group of memory researchers at the University of California, Irvine, for a TV show he was making. During a picnic lunch, one of the scientists offered Alda a hard-boiled egg. He turned it down, explaining that as a child he had made himself sick eating too many eggs.

In fact, this had never happened, yet Alda believed it was real. How so? The egg incident was a false memory planted by one of UC Irvine’s researchers, Elizabeth Loftus.

Before the visit, Loftus had sent Alda a questionnaire about his food preferences and personality. She later told him that a computer analysis of his answers had revealed some facts about his childhood, including that he once made himself sick eating too many eggs. There was no such analysis but it was enough to convince Alda.

Your memory may feel like a reliable record of the past, but it is not. Loftus has spent the past 30 years studying the ease with which we can form “memories” of nonexistent events. She has convinced countless people that they have seen or done things when they haven’t - even quite extreme events such as being attacked by animals or almost drowning. Her work has revealed much about how our brains form and retain memories.

While we wouldn’t want to plant a memory of a nonexistent childhood trauma in your own brain, there is a less dramatic demonstration of how easy it is to form a false memory called the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Read the first two lists of words and pause for a few minutes. Then read list 3 and put a tick against the words that were in the first two. Now go back and check your answers…

” The test of first rate of intelligence is the ability to hold to opposite idea in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to fuction”

F.Scott Fitzgarald

Research on the brains has demonstrated that two different sides of the brain (“hemisphere”) are responsible for different mode of thinking. Both of these mode of thinking are required for uncovering the effective solution of the problem.

While most individual have a preference for one style and another, the real key is build the capacity for whole brain thinking in the organisation, where people are comfortable in one style or another, depending on the need of the situation. Building this capability is a key part of the innovative organisation.

Complex  Questions: what is mind? Brain? Thinking?

From Wikipedia : Mind refers to the collective aspects of intellect and consciousness which are manifest in some combination of thought, perception, emotion, will and imagination.

The human brain is the most complex organ in the body. It controls the central nervous system (CNS), by way of the cranial nerves and spinal cord, the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and regulates virtually all human activity.Involuntary, or “lower,” actions, such as heart rate, respiration, and digestion, are unconsciously governed by the brain,specifically through the autonomic nervous system. Complex, or “higher,” mental activity, such as thought, reason, and abstraction, is consciously controlled.

The human brain is vast and complex. It contains some one hundred billion neurons, which are capable of electrical and chemical communication with tens of thousands of other nerve cells. Nerve cells in turn rely on some quadrillion synaptic connections for their communications.

Thought or thinking is a mental process which allows beings to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires. Words referring to similar concepts and processes include cognition, sentience, consciousness, idea, and imagination. Thinking involves the deeply cereberal manipulation of information, as when we form concepts, engage in problem solving, reason and make decisions. Thinking is a higher cognitive function and the analysis of thinking processes is part of cognitive psychology.

The following table illustrates the differences between left-brain and right-brain thinking:

Left Brain Thinking		Right Brain Thinking
Logical Sequential Rational Analytical Objective Looks at parts		Random Intuitive Holistic Synthesizing Subjective Looks at wholes

Photo Source: http://www.extensor.co.uk/articles/leadership_brain/leadership_brain.html

from above table & picture , we can check & analysis about our thinking pattern. Where need more focus according to environment, conditions & requirement?

Kindly read Left Vs. Right: Which Side Are You On? At brain.web-us.com which describe following processing of Brain.

• Linear Vs. Holistic Processing
• Logical Vs. Intuitive
• Sequential Vs. Random Processing
• Verbal Vs. Nonverbal Processing
• Symbolic Vs. Concrete Processing
• Reality-Based Vs. Fantasy-Oriented Processing

Definately , Sometime we need left brain thinking & some time right brain thinking and some times both thinking simultaneously for solution of complex problems.

By AJAY SINGH NIRANJAN