The Thalamus - a Brain Part that Can Make Liars of Us All

Do you get angry when you'd rather not?  Have you tried 'shouting an obsession or phobia out?' - you know, that old trick about going 'STOP!' and that's supposed to interrupt the response before it happens (but it still happens).

Are you frustrated you have emotional responses before you can consciously control them?  Do you feel angry towards others who challenge you to face up to the pain within, particularly when they seem to have no such pain?  This inner-world-versus-outer-world conflict is caused partly by the work of the Thalamus.

It's the job of the Thalamus to make the decision whether or not you get to react mostly emotionally or mostly with thinking to a situation.

Unfortunately how you think about how you feel makes very little difference to how you currently feel - it's whether or not you're willing to feel that decides if one day you will be able to just think about an issue.

The reason we can't change our emotional responses using our thinking is because all of our senses are routed to enter 'behind' our conscious thinking brains.  Your visual centre, for example, is at the rear of your brain and visual signals entering your brain do so below your thinking neocortex.  The decision as to whether it is your upper thinking brain or your lower emotional brain that gets to respond to a stimulus is decided before your thinking brain receives the signals.  The fact our eyes are at the front of our heads maybe creates the illusion that our visual and sound signals go straight into our thinking brains, but it isn't so.  For people suffering with emotional disorders this is an extremely confusing and frustrating fact of our biology.

You cannot directly affect this routing process through thinking - but you can indirectly change it through feeling.

I firmly believe the decision to send sensory signals upwards or downwards is made purely on the basis of the levels of currently held emotional charge in the body produced in regard to particular sensations/images/sounds.

The job of which direction incoming signals are sent in is made by your Thalamus.

The Thalamus (or Thalami)


All sensory information entering the brain is routed through the Thalami - two walnut sized structures that sit side by side and lay between the conscious thinking brains and the unconscious, emotionally responding Limbic Brain.

Your Thalamus receives all the information coming in from your senses.  It filters these signals for information relating to those images, sounds and sensations already attached to strong emotional responses.

If your emotional responses are already firing in response to related information it sends the signals downwards into the emotional brain before your thinking brains have any say in the decision.  Your thinking brains are informed of the decision by the fact your body produces physical symptoms.

The Thalamus believes the more emotionally charged your body is in regard to an issue the more life threatening a situation actually is.  If this is not the case in reality your entire emotional system begins living a lie.  Your conscious thinking brain picks up on the fact these reactions are liars and in most cases it does the opposite of what it needs to do to release the lie (ie feel and release the painful feelings) - it refuses to allow the feelings release from the body and this just perpetuates the signals-being-sent-downwards cycle.

The feelings are real but the triggers to which they relate don't exist.

Have you noticed how people who habitually lie put up a terrific fight before allowing themselves to go through the 'truth recognition process'?  Quite often we think of such people as 'devout and deliberate liars' but most liars are just people craving pleasant feelings while trying to escape the build-up of emotional pain that accompanies the 'reality shifts' involved in feeling negative emotions such as guilt and loss of social power that the Thalamus has been producing for them.  They started one lie that produced pain for them, which they didn't face, and they've been running ever since.  Even people who don't habitually lie can have this problem. In obsessions, for example, the life threatening image or sound they believe will kill them is completely harmless.  Consciously they know this; unconsciously they don't.

Lies may appear manipulative, 'evil', or things produced by  people living on a planet completely opposite in nature to our own - but it's really their Thalamus and their inability to manage it's decisional process causing this false reality to be maintained.

The emotional release required to adjust the Thalami settings is always intensely painful and involves a shift in our perception of 'reality' that can be quite a blow to the ego.

The pay-off of tuning into true reality and reversing the polarity of the Thalamus so it sends the signals upwards for thinking instead of downwards for emoting is the release of current negative emotional energy, prevention of the further build-up of unnecessary negative responses.  This is a huge step closer to being unconditionally happy.

Hurts like hell, but it does the job.

Regards - Carl

How the Body Works : The Thalamus

The Thalamus The thalamus, shown in red, is part of the forebrain. It plays an integral part in relaying sensory information from the sense organs to the cortex. Acting as a major relay center, the thalamus passes incoming messages on to higher centers in the cortex. A thalamus with its nuclei color coded is represented here. Some nuclei deal with several different types of messages, while other nuclei deal with only one type. The lateral geniculate body relays information to the visual ...

Birth of an Obsession: Did You Lock the Door?

Well, did you lock the door?  Did you really lock the door or do you just think you did?

A pal was describing to me how her mum has to keep going back to check she locked the door and has been diagnosed with OCD.  In this post I am going to talk about what starts the obsessive process and how full blown obsessions develop (and also how to start getting rid of them).

WORRY

The 'itchy' nature of things that bug and worry us is how obsessive thinking is initially triggered.  Obsessive thinking, fuelled by unreleased negative emotional energy, lays a foundation for full blown obsessions to develop later.  The important thing to concentrate on here is 'fuelled by'.  Take away the fuel of your worry-engine and you take away the worrying.  I will explain how to do this near the end of the post.

Worrying About Worrying

There comes a point when we know for sure that door is definitely locked but the worry keeps grabbing our attention and then we start to worry about why we are worrying.  It is not the actual lock that bothers us but the emotional attachments held within the body linked to multiple dire and painful possibilities.  We do not think we could cope with our own emotional responses to those possibilities if they ever happened.

The brain likes to represent things for us (it is very efficient and effective like that) and represented behind the focal point of that little door lock, and the little key we keep with us, is a whole host of scary stuff we imagine lies in wait if we get that door-locking-process wrong.  Criticising yourself for worrying about the lock distracts you from facing up to the real concerns behind it - those things you do not believe you could cope with such as:

• finding your home ransacked by burglars and even worse finding them still in your house when you arrive


• losing things you have worked for all your life


• precious memories tainted (eg jewellery from your mother) by having items stolen


• loss of the belief your home is 'safe'


• wondering if the burglars will come back and what kind of evil people do such things


• the concern you will be irreversibly damaged by the event.

These are all representations - products of our imagination.  Knowing that is all they are causes us to criticise ourselves for being emotionally attached to them and refusing to feel the emotional responses associated with those underlying representations.  We regard our emotional responses as 'over-reacting' and consciously try to stop worrying; we try to freeze the process.  We attempt to stop both the thinking and the feelings involved.

Trying to Stop The Thinking Does Not Work


Fighting worrying thoughts with additional counteractive thinking such as 'I should not be thinking about this repeatedly because it only exists in my imagination', and then trying to distract yourself by deliberately focusing on nice things to think about instead means you must first think about what it is you are trying to avoid thinking about - and this keeps re-creating it. Doh.

Un-think a pink elephant - can you do it?  Try again.  Try again.  Later when you are around the thing you do not want to think about, such as that lock, you think 'I hope I do not think about it otherwise all those negative sensations will come back with it'.  Guess what you just did.  Yup, you thought about it.

Feelings Are The Key to Stopping Worrying


You are actually designed to cope with all of your feelings in all real-life scenarios regardless of content or intensity.  Feelings work in a specific way.  They appear, you feel them, and they eventually move through and out of you - if you let them.  When you try to stop this process in its tracks you develop an 'I would not be able to cope with my feelings in that situation' belief system (in truth it is because you do not want to feel your negative feelings, rather than because you cannot, but who can blame you for not wanting to?).  Nevertheless, to heal this worrying you must feel your feelings out.

By refusing to acknowledge these imagined scenarios as being a valid part of your built-in emotional response system you refuse to release the emotional charge attached and you keep the festering 'I could not cope' message running in your brain and body.  When you set out to deliberately destroy these worries, because you see them as 'wrong', you then risk creating secondary emotional responses.

SECONDARY EMOTIONAL RESPONSES

Secondary emotional responses cause obsessions; panic attacks; phobias and a whole host of other anxiety-related disorders.  Although they are intended to remove a primary emotional response they merely cement it further in place - they fail to work in the same way trying to un-think thoughts fails to work and they keep regenerating the problem.

In most cases a secondary emotional response is a repeat of the primary response: we can generate anger at being angry (rage attacks); fear of being afraid (panic attacks).  We can also generate  fear of feeling disgust and also anger towards feeling fear.  It is often easier to notice the second type of secondary emotional responses because they produce different physical sensations, whereas 'fear of fear' and 'anger at anger' can seem to blend into an overall painful mass and we have difficulty seeing which is a primary and which is a secondary response.

When you have a secondary emotional response your thinking and feelings have been geared up for war against your own original emotional response.  The determination not to have the primary response is so strong you are trying to physically remove the entire thinking/feeling process from your body.  This cannot be done.  Instead you must aim for the goal of flowing the energy through your body until the overspill is down to a reasonable level and your mind stops regarding the situation as a problem.

In the case of a phobia of door locks, for example, you have created a secondary response that causes you to emotionally fight every door lock you come across just in case it causes you to have a fearful emotional response.  In the case of an obsession you have the image of a door lock repeatedly flashing in your conscious mind attached to the most extreme emotionally intense responses you are capable of producing.  And because you know it's not 'real', you keep fighting it.

HYPERVIGILANCE

Hypervigilance, or being super-aware, is designed to keep you alive in long-term immediately life threatening situations.  You are unconsciously driven to look for evidence of things even slightly related to the perceived threat.  When you are hypervigilant your holistic thinking is shut down as you focus solely on looking for sensory signals related only to the trigger.

Feeling hypervigilant  is the difference between seeing a wild, hungry lion on your television and having a wild, hungry lion in your home.  Lions on the telly engage your conscious thinking brain in seeing nature at its most powerful and beautiful; lions in your home engage your unconscious emotional brain in contemplating the painful deaths of you and your loved ones and cause you to have powerful physical responses.

A heavy breath; a moving shadow; scratching claws; sharp teeth.  In hypervigilance your unconscious emotional brain runs you and automatically produces the signals that tell your senses 'danger!'.  But you do not need a real lion in your home to become hypervigilant.  All you need to achieve this state in normal every day life is to refuse to engage your conscious thinking brain in working with your negatively charged emotional issues.

Refusing to consciously work with an emotional issue does not make the issue go away - it forces the issue downwards into your unconscious emotional brain.

Because your unconscious emotional brain does not know the difference between imagined and real scenarios it assumes it has received the information because the scenario is real.  When your unconscious emotional brain takes control of dealing with issues you refused to deal with consciously your risk of hypervigilance is greatly increased.

Two other things that can increase the risk of hypervigilance are:

• the feared event, or something similar to it, actually happening or having happened in the past so your unconscious mind has evidence such a threat could be real


• having your sense of control over the prevention of such imagined events being undermined; for example a partner who always leaves the door unlocked when they go out.

Becoming hypervigilant towards triggers you know to be false in the present moment means you have emotional reactions you do not want or understand.  Your unconscious brain creates imagery, sounds and sensations that appear in your conscious brain against your conscious will and you have physical reactions, driven by extreme emotional responses, that exactly mimic the false situation as if it were real.  If there were an actual lion in the room you would welcome this reaction because it could keep you alive - but when you know these reactions are happening around imagined events you continue to fight them; continue to try and force them out of conscious awareness but send them repeatedly down into your emotional brain for unconscious processing.

To undo this unconsciously driven nightmare you have to do just one thing: consciously reclaim your feelings.  The earlier you start the better.

HOW TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT YOU LOCKED THE DOOR

When a person develops OCD or an obsession in regard to whether or not they locked the door they've taken what started out as a fear-laden area of worry, refused to spend time with it, started to fight it and then turned that fight into an unconscious long-term habit supported by secondary emotional responses that defend against the undoing of that habit.

This habit actually restructures both your brain and your emotional release system.  Specific emotional responses are blocked from leaving the body while  thought patterns are created that act like 'shields' trying to stop you from thinking about certain areas of life.  But like any other habit it can be reversed if you're willing to pay the price and give it the time required.

Here's an example of a strategy you can use to remove the initial obsessional worrying process:

Step 1:  Focus On the Door Lock

Accept it is not your thoughts but your feelings that keep driving you to pay attention to the lock. The feelings we're talking about here are feelings already present in your body waiting to be released - I'm not talking about deliberately generating new feelings.  If when you focus on an object you have feelings automatically come up they are already present in your body and they will keep asking you to pay attention to the issue they represent until they are released.

Step 2: Explore Your Feelings and the Issues to Which They Relate

Explore the threat of burglary and how you would react; explore the threat of feeling stupid after the event if you forgot to lock your door; having the police come round and point security issues out to you that you should have been thinking about and did not - explore the embarrassment all that entails.  Explore the issues and feel the feelings in depth. Do this consciously and this reduces the need for your unconscious emotional mind to keep getting involved.

Step 3:  Tell Yourself You Would Cope if These 'Terrible' Things Happened

Because you would.  You would hurt; but you would cope.  The feelings you have while imagining the scenario are roughly the same as you would have if the scenario were real, if you can cope with the imagined scenario you can cope with the real version.

Step 4:  Accept that Locking the Door is an Important Thing You Need to Concentrate on When You Are Doing It

Sometimes the reason we worry is because we are distracted by other things fighting for our attention and our memory of having performed an important act is blurred.  Our unconscious is telling us we did not pay enough attention to the door at the time of locking.  What is happening here is your unconscious is working in line with your deepest value systems and reminding you to keep in line with them.

Step 5:  Replay Issues and Release the Emotional Responses Attached to Them Until They Stop Grabbing Your Attention


Do not wait until the issue reappears and you say 'oh no, not again'.  Set aside a regular time slot each week where you deliberately go searching for issues; deliberately seek to feel the feelings attached.

Step 6:  Do Not Self-Criticise

Self-criticism about this process is like telling yourself it is wrong to feel pain when you cut yourself.  Almost all people I have met who worry or who develop anxiety disorders tell themselves 'I have gone wrong' on the basis of their experiencing negative feelings.  You get a broken leg, it hurts physically.  You imagine a harmful life event, it hurts emotionally.  It is not desirable, but it is not 'wrong'.  When you catch yourself telling yourself this, challenge it.  The self-criticism needs to be repeatedly stopped when it surfaces - eventually it will be become a habit not to do it.

Step 7:  Rinse and Repeat

If you follow this process over and over again you will find your worries eventually disappear.  That lock no longer keeps grabbing your attention.

To summarise ...

I guess what I'm saying here is the more you deliberately fester on a worry the less it worries you and eventually it completely fades.  The more you fight it the more it keeps demanding you pay attention to it.  Self-acceptance is about accepting your emotional responses and allowing them to release from your body.

HOW TO GET RID OF AN OBSESSION WHEN YOU'VE DEVELOPED SECONDARY EMOTIONAL RESPONSES

Unfortunately you won't be able to follow the above 7 step process until you've removed your secondary responses and this involves taking your conscious thinking down into your unconscious mind repeatedly to pull back up those issues you refused or were unable to deal with earlier.  You must now brave the 'shields' your unconscious has put in place to prevent you from doing this.

Repeatedly experiencing secondary emotional responses, which are very intense, until the unconscious starts to transfer the handling of the information over from the unconscious to the conscious mind is easier to do as the unconscious stops regarding the threat as real.  Discharging the intense emotional charge naturally leads to this transfer taking place but for this process to begin the conscious mind must start to see the development and removal of an obsession as a natural process.

It can take months and sometimes years to get to this point.  OCD and obsessions are powerful conditions and the speed of recovery depends on how much daily work a sufferer is willing to put in.

In the case of a door lock obsession, for example, the person concerned has to go towards the door lock in their mind (in an obsession the image that terrifies is contained in the mind) and release all emotional charge attached to any underlying worries and issues.

Does this remind you of a situation you have had or are having?  Please leave a comment below.

Regards - Carl

Mindmapping to Balance the Left and Right Brain

Mindmapping is an approach that helps in exploring new ideas; recording your life experiences and working through emotional issues. As often as I can I swing open my A4 journal to draw an A3 sized mindmap across two pages. I start with a central point (such as the date) and then link off from it on everything I've done that day.

At the bottom of this post there a video on iMindmap from Tony Buzan (I've never used this software but would love to); to the left there's a sample mindmap I produced using Inspiration 8; these are paid software packages but you can get free, if not quite so colourful, mindmapping software. I've put a link to a list of free software at the bottom of the post.



My approach to mapping is to write one word or a short sentence (or a quick sketch) and then revisit the map putting in little 'tick boxes' to tick when an action has to be performed.

I record feelings, images, scenarios, actions.  The initial steps use my right brain and then I move over to left brain activities.

I transfer the actions to a small notebook and tick off completed actions through the working day - this is a left brain process.

If you're right brain dominant (which I am) leading a left-brain life can leave you feeling unfulfilled and on a treadmill of to-do's - but those to-do's still need to be done!

You can increase your Mind Power using mindmapping to bring your left and right brain thinking together. Mindmapping is particularly useful when you want to record the outcomes and insights achieved during intense emotional work (exposure therapy, for example, produces overwhelming sensations that 'hijack' the thinking brain - mindmapping allows you to record what you learn experientially without asking you to 'pull yourself together' in order to engage the left/logical mind).

Hope you enjoy the following article from Dr. Vj Mariaraj:

How to Increase Your Mind Power by being a Whole-brain Thinker Using the Technique of Mind Mapping
By Vj Mariara

The term ‘ambidexterity’ means being adept in using both right and left hand. It is a rare inborn trait but it can be learned. The versatility displayed in the use of each hand determines a person’s ambidexterity. Michelangelo, Leonardo Vinci, Einstein, Fleming, Harry Truman, etc., were all ambidextrous. In modern times, you will find many, who were originally left-handed but in the course of their childhood, acquired right-handed habits (at school or home) and thus became ambidextrous.

Along the same lines, we could say we are being ambidextrous when we are multi-tasking – talking over the phone and taking notes or riding a bike, etc. The difference being that instead of our hands, we are using both our right and left hemispheres to successfully juggle our tasks. We have all heard about some people being ‘right-brained’ or ‘left-brained’. In essence it means that the person displays more ‘right-brain’ or ‘left-brain’ oriented skills, although we are all the time integrating both hemispheres in our daily activities.

‘Right’ brain qualities involve imagination, risk taking, artistic abilities, highly philosophical, creative, etc. ‘Left’ brain qualities, on the other hand, are practical, conformist, seek order, have good comprehension skills, etc. Thus ‘right-brain’ people are said to think subjectively, holistically and have strong intuition, while ‘left-brain’ people tend to be more logical, analytical and highly rational. It is found that more often, left-brain thinkers are engineers and scientists, while right-brain thinkers end up being artists and poets.

How and why is it that some people are more adept at certain kind of thought patterns than others? The fact is that while we may inherit certain mental traits and capacities, how we use our mind is what determines our mental prowess. As children we are innately right-brained, displaying great creativity, imagination, spontaneity, open-mindedness and enthusiasm but ironically, as we grow, social, cultural and racial influences constrain these natural traits.

The most comforting thought however is that we can greatly improve our mental abilities by choosing to change our thoughts and applying our mind in a particular direction. Thus if a person is a known conformist, who always walks down the beaten path, he could deliberately try new things, learn to take risks and think imaginatively.

When we combine the power of the two hemispheres, we will be working at our full potential. Ambidextrous mind or whole brain thinking - as it is also known - enhances our brain functions and injects a heightened level of awareness. To foster an ambidextrous mindset, we can work on right-brain learning activities by including patterning, metaphors, analogies, role-playing, visuals, and movement into reading, calculation, and analytical activities. Conscious effort to incorporate left and right brain activities, human consciousness studies, reflective thinking and meditation are excellent means to achieve an ambidextrous mind.

One easy technique that helps in such whole-brain thinking process is Mind Mapping. It aligns the mind to the diffusion of thought and paves way for streaming thoughts and linking new associations. Association essentially is finding the links in logic and ideas, and when these are explored in full, it leads to insight, imagination and creativity.

If we look at great discoveries, we will find the application or association of principle (s) to another. Pertinently, colors, pictures, symbols, etc., highly enhance our learning process as they invoke vividness, clarity of perception and easy dissemination. Mind Mapping technique employs all these aspects and therein lies its power and dynamism. When learning and understanding is done using the Mind Map technique, it naturally becomes a highly effective and powerful way of gaining knowledge. It sure is an ideal way for fostering an ambidextrous or whole brain thinking culture.

Dr. Vj Mariaraj is a Mind Map enthusiast and has been using Mind Maps for the past twelve years. He has created over 5650 Mind Maps. To learn more about mind mapping and to download a free Mind map of a Business Book, send an email to freemindmap@aweber.com

Article Source: Vj Mariara
How to Increase Your Mind Power by being a Whole Brain Thinker Using the Technique of Mind Mapping

My favourite mindmapping software is Inspiration 8, which I've used to produce some of the work on this blog. The main site is here but you can buy Inspiration relatively cheaply on both Amazon and Ebay (just type 'Inspiration software' into the search boxes on the right). I started with version 6 and just kept buying the next upgrade off these sites.

There are also some very good free mindmapping software programmes; here's a list from Wikipedia.

Tony Buzan's iMindMap Mind Mapping Software

Whilst many products have claimed to allow you to Mind Map on a computer, none have managed to fully duplicate Tony's world renown process. Until now that is! iMindMap™ gives you the infinite visual variety, portability, freedom, brain friendliness and effectiveness of traditional highly proven Mind Mapping techniques. Watch our free videos on computer based mind mapping to find out more.

How do you use mindmapping? Please leave a comment.

Regards - Carl

Tim Kitchen poem - Song for the Redundant Man

A Better Way (Song for The Redundant Man)

Now they don’t want me, now they don’t care
Might just as well go back to bed, up those wooden stairs.
They took it all away from me, everything I knew
Now it’s all gone and there’s nothing I can do.
I wondered if it would happen, ever happen to me
And now that it has, the future’s hard to see.
There has to be a reason, why it’s me this time,
Don’t think I want to know; just want to save my mind.
Maybe there’s a better way, a better way to be,
Maybe it’s out there waiting, waiting there for me.
Got to try to find it, got to take the time,
See if I can find a way, to make the future mine.

Life is very different now, with no place to go
Some days I’m fine, other times I’m low.
My thoughts remind me, of what I left behind
On a sad and lonely day, which often comes to mind.
But I must take a look, at what’s before me now
To see if I can try, to start again somehow.
Maybe follow a dream, is something I should do
And find somewhere else to be, where I can see it through.
Maybe there’s a better way, a better way to be
Maybe it’s out there waiting, waiting there for me.
Got to try to find it, got to take the time
See if I can find a way, to make the future mine.

Tim Kitchen (Tim's just self-published a book of poetry you can buy from Lulu here)