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 ...