Your Prefrontal Cortex - Your Superconscious

Positioned just below and behind your forehead the Prefrontal Cortex looks backwards, like a rower in a rowing boat, into your brain and body (it is listed as the ‘Front Cortex’ in the diagram above). 

It performs your Executive Functions.  As your Strategic Senior Manager the PFC develops and monitors your long-term self-image and self-awareness process as you travel various journeys through different environments. 

'You’ lives there.

Central you is unconditionally happy you with the role of your PFC being to repeatedly return you to that state.  When you are internally emotionally conflicted it is the PFC that tells you 'you are not yourself'.

I became more aware of the workings of this brain-part about three months into my self-devised healing plan during which I was carrying out daily self-exposure therapy sessions in regards to my obsessions.  Until then I hadn't known it even existed and became gradually more aware through the functions it performed. 

Initially I imagined I had somehow developed a new place from which to look at things, almost like a new personality, but in truth I was learning to shift my consciousness - the point from which I saw things - into this part of my brain.  I did this by asking just one question:  'how does it (my emotional process) work?'.  I had spent years telling myself how it should work, but it wasn't working that way.

Simply by repeatedly looking inwards, watching my emotional system for prolonged periods of time without critical judgement, I began to change my inner dynamic.   Other parts of my brain's conscious activity, such as my thinking chatter, began shutting down quicker while memories and pictorial information were being accessed more often.  I was now in the habit of hunting emotional energy responses and matching them to imagery to which they were attached - then moving consciously towards both.

At first I named this newly discovered part of myself my Silent Observer.  I called it 'Silent' because it did not work in word-based thinking.  I called it 'Observer' because I noticed the moment it saw a particular part of myself in a different way permanent changes began to occur in the way my emotions operated.  They began to release in dramatic bursts and then disappear.

Initially I had started the process of going in using just my thinking word-based brain - I would mentally talk to myself a lot - but this new picture-based part was taking over the job and any thoughts for or against working on myself would quickly die down.  After I had done the self-work for a couple of months I couldn't stop going in even if I wanted to - it was now automated.  Day and night my Silent Observer forced me to go into emotional reactions I hated.

For a specific period during sleep the Prefrontal Cortex works on the imagery flowing through our brains - we call it dreaming - and during this time it talks to the Unconscious through the Right Neo-Cortex (your Conscious Pattern and Picture Mind).  It decides which images are dreams and which are reality.  It establishes a visual map of how different areas of your life are connected or disconnected.  By the way, your Right Neo-Cortex never sleeps and your Unconscious uses it to talk back to your Conscious all of the time.

I watched as my Silent Observer observed, experimented and tested my emotions like a cold hearted scientist.  The 'Observing' moments began to increase in number.  The Silent Observer began spending more of its time away from what was going on in the outside world because it was getting results internally it had always previously looked for out there.  I imagined it to be like an ecstatic engineer who had been trying to bring an old engine back to life for years and suddenly understood what needed to be done. I started to experience a great deal of frustration - something overwhelmingly determined had lit up in the front of my head and was angry at how long the change process was taking. 

Now starting to develop a belief I could actually remove my obsessions my Prefrontal Cortex pursued anything new it spotted like a rabid hunter.  It wanted to get the work done before any external-world event could distract it.  I would occasionally wake in the middle of the night to find myself having a panic attack in my sleep, shaking and sweating with a pounding heart.  A new emotional layer, with new imagery, would come up into consciousness and my Unconscious would fight back with arguments such as 'I can't go there, it'll kill me!'.  My Silent Observer - the Prefrontal Cortex - would say 'that's an acceptable risk, carry on'.

My doctor, who I had been seeing regularly, advised me to slow the self-directed exposure-therapy process down as my physical symptoms were getting more severe.  I had started making regular trips to the hospital due to having strong heart palpitations; my stomach acid had become imbalanced and my blood pressure had rocketed - one nurse told another a reading she took from me was the highest she'd seen in her career.  But I couldn't stop.  I explained to my doctor it was like I'd gone over the curve of a rollercoaster ride and to stop now would take more effort than to just go with the ride.  My Prefrontal Cortex  had won the battle - it was going to keep working on my inner world now whether my Unconscious wanted it to or not. 

The Prefrontal Cortex is our predatory brain part. 

It forces us to hunt.

It performs multiple functions such as:

• acting as self-motivator; moving you in different directions, in different physical postures and generating different emotions according to different environmental contexts


• your main source of judgement (is it you or is it them?); it decides what 'real' is as it assesses the meaning of the many signals reaching it through the rest of your brain - sometimes, when it's tired and sleep deprived, those signals get sent straight to the emotional Limbic brain in error and you can find yourself reacting automatically to something without knowing why


• managing your value systems - it decides what goals in life you are emotionally attached to and moving towards, and how you prioritise or line up your journeys towards those goals, one over another, and then redesigns your brain to adapt your behaviours to support the value hierarchy this creates for you.

And there’s more.  The Prefrontal Cortex also produces:

• hope: it projects picture-based suggestions of wonderful environments you could move towards and calls on experiential sensual memories to enhance the affect; it triggers the initial production of Dopamine causing you to become pleasantly attached to the idea of something (craving) and moving towards scenarios built only in your head and then Seratonin to make you feel satisfied when you reach the goal


• despair: it projects picture-based horror stories telling you about things to be avoided; about things pursuing you and which you (allegedly) need to keep a continual lookout for - it triggers the initial production of Adrenaline and Cortisol in order to stimulate fight, freeze or flight reactions (and it can do this in regards to your own emotions too) causing you to avoid scenarios that do not yet exist in reality


• depression: in depression it initially produces rage at being detached from something seen as a high value priority to the self-image; when rage does not ensure reattachment it then attempts non-cooperation with the process of life itself by withdrawing electrical activity in certain parts of the brain; it pulls back into the lower Limbic brain in a bid to avoid acknowledging the painful loss but paradoxically causes itself to set up home in the very worried, brooding brain


• gratitude - it can train you to start upwards from rock-bottom by learning to appreciate every little positive thing; you don't do this by default - this is a re-learning process


• intuition - the Prefrontal Cortex can learn to pay closer attention to certain signals it previously ignored so sharpening its ability to see 'in-between' signals; to shift from a subjective experience to an objective viewpoint and then make better informed directional judgements.

A lot of this activity is carried out in the imagination - the Prefrontal Cortex's image manipulation and association tool.  But we’re not finished yet - it does even more than that:

• it creates logical cause-and-affect memories by deciding which of your brain's signals should be kept and stored as named 'facts' for later retrieval


• it records visual patterns, using these as templates for future actions - it imposes these patterns on your internal and external world; it is the creator of both positive and negative expectations and also of disappointment and pleasant surprise


• it is a solution hunter - searching through your many internal signals for sense and meaning and it does this because it is also your direction-finder - to find 'meaning' is to find 'direction'.

also, of most importance in emotional healing it is the part of you that:

• consciously affects neuroplasticity - the connecting and disconnecting ability of your brain's neural pathways


• it can persuade the Unconscious to co-operate in re-establishing emotional flow by forming new connections


• it is the part of you that, when it hears the mantra 'you can't cure your emotional condition, you can only manage it' decides that message is unacceptable and tells you to proceed towards full healing anyway


• it's the part of you that finally decides to override your social programming, making the achievement of internal unconditional happiness your top priority while developing the view that if you do this your social environment will benefit anyway as a result.

Oh, one more thing - it's also the part of you that made you emotionally ill in the first place because it previously made some wrong decisions about the direction in which you should travel in order to find your unconditionally happy self.  Sorry about that.

Your Prefrontal Cortex is Your Superconscious

We use the Prefrontal Cortex all the time but we may not become consciously aware of it until we start making plans to move into a new environment.  It is this part of us that keeps reassessing just how much we want to move, and then drives us on, making us increasingly determined despite coming up against obstacles.  It reminds us of what we're moving away from and what we're moving towards.  It will even lie to us to get us there by promising things it has no way of knowing exist for sure (we call this faith).

Because we're not consciously engaging with it all the time we may regard it as a part of our Unconscious, but it's actually our Superconscious.  Our overseer and future programmer.

It instructs the Unconscious, which then goes on to automatically work on behalf of the Prefrontal Cortex's instructions once they are imprinted enough times.  Whereas the Unconscious is concerned with self-protection and maintaining the safer status quo, the Prefrontal Cortex is concerned with taking measured risks and trying new things.

The Unconscious and the Prefrontal Cortex are in constant discussion with each other, with your Conscious thinking mind - your Left Neo-Cortex, sitting between the two.  When suffering from an emotional block your thinking mind experiences the discussion as a non-stop fight it can’t quite figure out by using it’s sole resource and tool - thinking.

When deciding to heal emotionally, by using a technique such as exposure therapy, you force your Prefrontal Cortex to reconnect with the parts of the Unconscious it is currently avoiding, getting your word-based thinking mind out of the way and entering their more picture-based discussion. 

Trapped emotional energy is released and the old neural pathways the energy once travelled through start to disintegrate like disused railway lines.

New ‘happiness pathways’ are created and they become your more permanent way of thinking and feeling (this is not a theoretical change in thinking, it is physical reconstruction of the brain - it hurts and takes time to achieve). 

In the next post we look at the Left and Right Neo-Cortex and the roles they play in your Emotional Information Cycle.

Regards - Carl