Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 5) - Your Left Neo-Cortex is Your Conscious Filing Cabinet

I am now communicating directly with your Prefrontal Cortex through your Left Neo-Cortex.

My Left Neo-Cortex is talking directly to your Left Neo-Cortex by sending the signals processed in my Left up to my Motor Cortex (positioned in the top of my brain) which then activates my fingers to project my internally held ‘words’ onto an external surface which you can then read.

You produce visual signals on reading this surface and these are transferred into your brain from your eyes; first into your Thalamus, your brain’s sensory signal filtering system, which decides these are safe, unemotional ‘words’, after which it then sends these signals towards the visual processing areas at the back of your brain, then through your Left Neo-Cortex towards your Prefrontal Cortex.

If your Thalamus interpreted these same signals as dangerous they would be sent a slightly different route into your emotional brain.

The only reason I feel motivated to create these visual signals for your brain to read is because I know, in my Left Neo-Cortex, you will have roughly the same language programming in your Left Neo-Cortex as I do.

The Left Neo-Cortex is the place in which you store 'what you know' because it acts as your organic filing cabinet from which your Prefrontal Cortex later draws known information when required.

It is the place where final completion and closure of emotional information cycles takes place, where 'insights' are stripped of emotional charge and integrated as newly learned facts alongside other known 'facts' already filed away.

Once these insights and facts are stripped from an emotional experience and transferred to the Left Neo-Cortex you are now able to 'forget' emotional issues and move your attention to other things.

The symbols you are reading with your eyes right now are being processed at the rear of your left brain, near your visual cortex, They are then sent forwards to a sound association area, still in your Left Neo-Cortex, and you are identifying which sounds these symbols you see are attached to in your left, logical association memories. You name the strings formed by these associated symbols and sounds 'thoughts'. Thoughts are your brain's way of representing journeys already made, and repeatedly mapped, in your logical mind.

Now, if as you read this information I seem to be repeating myself with just a few small tweaks added each time I’d agree with you.  And that’s one of the points we need to see in regards to this stage of completing an emotional information cycle.

By experiencing a blocked emotional cycle repeatedly you do two things: you release the emotional energy driving it and you develop and gather logically structured thoughts about it which you then think over and over again until they become a part of your permanent thinking structures. 

By nature thoughts can be quite boring and emotionally un-stimulating but you need to pay attention to them when they appear in the midst of your more attention-grabbing feelings.

We Use Thoughts to Create Representations 

If I've arranged these symbol-sounds we call words in the correct order, and by 'correct' I mean in the socially accepted order you've been trained to receive and communicate language grammatically in; you will now be able to locate the thought sequences already stored in your brain and go on to generate what I call 'representations'.

Representations are objective, unemotional viewpoints of journeys which should be taken when certain circumstances or situations present themselves again. They are beliefs of 'how things should be' and 'how things are'. They are automated procedures to follow; fast and effective in guiding you from A to B with a minimum of mental attention and almost no emotional energy production involved.

The only time we change our 'how things should be' and 'how things are' representations is when they are effectively challenged by new information arriving in conscious awareness. If new information acquired in this way is an addition to the information we're already working with this may feel like an acknowledgement of what we already know. If, on the other hand, new information received goes directly against what we currently believe or want to receive we may find ourselves feeling uncomfortable and confused about what to do with it. Feeling uncomfortable and confused means we have now started using our Right Neo-Cortex.

I refer to Representations that have had emotional energy attached in this way, and so have been transferred back over to the Right Neo-Cortex, as ‘Reflections’.  Reflections are experiential full-body activities.  Your Right and Left Neo-Cortices swap Representations and Reflections with each other all the time - the deciding factor of which is which is made by whether or not an emotional charge is attached.

How Do You Know When an Emotional Cycle has Completed?

Stripped of emotional energy the information regarding both the subjective content of the emotional response (for example, the imagery) and knowledge about the process of extracting the energy itself, is transferred over from the Right Neo-Cortex to be stored in your Left Neo-Cortex’ lined-up filing system. 

You will remember you once had an emotional response that was difficult to clear but you also know how you removed it and how to remove it should you struggle with a similar problem again; you roughly remember the content and some of the physical responses involved - but you cannot generate the same intense emotional responses you once had in regards to the same imagery.

You may have some feelings come up, but they are mild in comparison to how you used to feel.

You have now re-established a sense of direct control over how you manage the information because your Left Neo-Cortex has several information management qualities your Right Neo-Cortex lacks such as:

• being able to resolve problems at the speed of speech
• being specific; the Left Neo-Cortex thinks convergently; drilling down onto identified targets with a specific intention in mind
• being externally focused - it communicates with the outside world and can draw on the logic of others in resolving problems
• providing structure - and in providing structure to your thought-based responses it makes your world look controllable which leads to fewer strong emotional reactions.

But of course, the best outcome of completing your emotional information cycle problem is that, unless you deliberately want to remember it so you can write about it and explain the cycle to others like I do, you are now able to file it away in your Conscious Filing Cabinet and completely forget you ever had it.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles (Part 4) Dealing with the Power of Your Unconscious

Your brain is an organic map writing system.

It is also an ‘association machine’, associating positive and negative places and situations with positive and negative emotional responses in order to move you behaviourally towards and away from those places and situations mapped.  Consciously this linking takes place in the Right Neo-Cortex under the watchful eye of the Prefrontal Cortex.

When it comes to completing an emotional cycle the Right Neo-Cortex is also the brain part in which you disassociate these memories and their attached responses through the mental act of focusing coupled with the physical act of feeling.

Usually the overall emotional process operates at just the right intensity for you to be aware of the right directions to take, at what pace and for what duration, without overwhelming you with the powerful energies of the emotional process itself. 

Now and again you may experience a life-threatening emergency during which your emotional system forces your mind to shrink to pinpoint focus on the threat.  When we can see the benefits of this reaction we usually accept it even though we may still dislike it.  If an intense fear reaction prevents you being bitten by a vicious dog, for example, you will find it easier to accept the symptoms of the reaction than if the same response is produced when you approach an empty elevator and don’t understand the unconsciously held triggers as to why.

(Strangely enough, we can even learn to enjoy an unconsciously driven negative experience - which is why we spend time engaged with fictional action and horror stories).

While baseline unconscious reactive settings are genetically programmed into us, such as the automatic urge to withdraw from pain, many more are added by conscious interpretations of new life events.  If repeated enough times these new reactions become learned automated responses also managed unconsciously. 

Internal Maps

Your brain’s mapping system does not just create maps of the outside world - it also creates maps of your internal world too. These internal maps can be positive or negative and are emotionally attached the same way your maps of the external world are.

When you create negative maps of your own negative internal responses you create a negative self image and start fighting the warning signal system of your own Unconscious. Your Unconscious turns against itself declaring your own thoughts and feelings to be ‘wrong’ or ‘abnormal’.

Your Unconscious is now stuck in the world of denial; suppression; repression and secondary emotional responses. You are in a war against your own intuitive process. Intuition, the means by which we bring together all our Unconscious signals in order to make decisions suitable for who we really are, is shot to pieces in this war. Nothing you do seems right - you’re trying to do everyone else’s ‘right’; you don’t even know what your own ‘right’ is any more.

We become over-sensitised (hyper-vigilant) because our emotional responses are being repeatedly triggered due to our refusal or inability to leave the triggering situation (sometimes because of our belief it’s us that’s the problem) combined with resistance to the emotional response process itself.

Like an organic pressure-cooker we produce an emotionally overcharged Unconscious;  a painful battery desperate to discharge yet terrified things will blow-up internally in some way if we do.

In a perfect world our brain would be master controller of our entire body (and beyond) at all times and these crazy-paving paths we dance between our inner and outer worlds would be straight and clear. Trouble is, our Unconscious has several powerful minds, each with the power to override the one in our heads.

Hello, fellow segmented worm!

According to Dr Candace Pert (mentioned in previous posts) our body operates like that of a segmented worm. Control of mind and body - the bodymind - is moved between the segments depending on which segment is sending out the strongest peptide (hormones and neurotransmitters) signals at any one time.

Try not going to the toilet; not eating or drinking; not breathing - you’ll soon get the gist of this idea.  On second thoughts, please don’t try any of those things and if you do I’m not responsible for the consequences, OK?

Gut Feelings

I’m not a very good cook. I’ve never to my knowledge created mood-altering meals to order. At the time of writing this I am, however, lucky to be working in a college teaching catering and we have several of the UK’s top chefs supervising our meals. A few years ago the managers decided to combine the student canteen with the college restaurant resulting in award-winning food at canteen prices. Woohoo!

Sometimes when I’ve had a hectic morning’s work I’ll go there intending to have a quick meal before the next ‘emergency’ but the food stops me in my tracks; slows me down and totally changes my mood. There’s also a pub just round the corner serving a chicken, ham and leek pie, with chips and peas, and that meal and that meal alone at that pub has the same affect. I don’t know what they’re putting in these meals, I suspect there’s something in the pastry - but my Unconscious loves them. It feels completely satisfied and energised for five to six hours afterwards.

It comes as no surprise to me then that the unconscious is based mainly around our digestive system and heart, which is why when you’re emotionally negative you’ll feel a lot of tension coming up from just under your sternum.

This is certainly the area for me where I experienced the most painful emotional symptoms during my healing process.

We used to think Seratonin, the chemical that communicates ‘satisfaction’, was only found in the brain as a neurotransmitter but it turns out we have more of this satisfaction-triggering chemical in our digestive system as a hormone then anywhere else in the body - it’s what your stomach produces when you feel full.

The heart is also rich in all the molecules of emotion, including all those neurotransmitters to be found in the brain. They’re not there by accident - your heart operates like a secondary brain to the body.

It doesn’t stop there.

In addition to digestion and circulatory segments you have a reproductive segment; a waste disposal segment and an autonomic brain based in your spine allowing your body to react first and tell your brain about it later.  These different parts of you are all capable of taking control of what your brain thinks about at any one time.

The ‘molecules of emotion’ driving you are active in your skin, in your immune system and many other parts of your body.   

Your whole body talks. Are you listening to it?

When releasing negative emotions you may ‘suffer’ from heart palpitations, increased blood pressure, sweating, changes in stomach acid balance and yet - strangely enough - releasing in this way leads to an improved immune system (tests show that when a person releases trapped anger, for example, their immune function improves).

The ‘molecules of emotion’ are driving these changes as the vibrational energies they produce allow each of your different bodily segments, and other interweaving parts, to ‘speak’ when you are willing to listen.

If you listen for long enough, letting those segments release, your Prefrontal Cortex eventually becomes the ‘last segment standing’ and you feel like yourself once more.

When deliberately completing a trapped emotional cycle you may find yourself entering a state of shock, of freezing and overwhelm, as the sheer power of the Unconscious hits you.  Counsellors refer to this as ‘opening up’ (I don’t recommend you do this without professional support if available although I did do this myself on a daily basis for several years during healing without a counsellor being present).

It may seem you have entered a very strange world, a frightening and abnormal world no-one else ever talks about, but the truth is one of your ‘segments’ is releasing whenever you allow your feelings to flow and this is completely normal.

Flow - not removal - is the thing to focus on.  Once the intensity of the initial emotional flooding starts to pass and the vibrational discharge is allowed to die down you can concentrate on deliberately finding and consciously entering any remaining ‘puddles’ ensuring full discharge takes place and, gradually, the information cycle will finally complete.

Regards - Carl

Where Superconscious and Unconscious Collide - Completing Your Emotional Information Cycle (Part 3)

Your Superconscious and Unconscious collide in your Neo-Cortex (your conscious mind).

Your Unconscious is everything below your Neo-Cortex, including your body.  Your Superconscious is your Prefrontal Cortex just behind your forehead.

We store memories, experiential states and the thoughts that go with them, both in our brain and body. When we ‘remember’ an experience we draw up and mentally reconstruct the situation we were in at the time - different aspects of what we remember are stored in different places. We’re not alone in this. Scientists tell us, for example, that when a bird has an unpleasant reaction to a toxic berry it stores information on the size and shape of the berry in one place; the taste memory in another; the shine-level memory of the berry in yet another and memories of the unpleasant physical consequences somewhere else. When it sees another similar berry these different memories are brought together and reconstructed to cause the bird to avoid it.

Let’s say you had an argument with someone in the past and for you the argument remains emotionally unresolved. If you want to you can draw up the emotional memories from your body in such a way it takes you right back to those moments. You re-enter the location or atmosphere; re-visit the person; re-generate the verbal content and tone of your argument and enter the emotional vibratory state you produced at the time causing the sensations to be re-felt. When these memories come together against your will, which is what happens when you are suffering with a trapped emotional response, you may find them upsetting - but rather than see yourself as a victim of a bad experience you can instead deliberately enter into it intending to complete and resolve the argument without the other person ever knowing you did so or taking any external action.

It may be you found the initial experience so painful your only concern was with escaping it as quickly as possible. During the argument things said to you, by a then trusted person, went straight into your unconscious. Left unchallenged, these criticisms have been damaging your self-image or self-esteem and now in the safer revisiting of the experience (in which you know its full limits) you are able to see things more objectively. Drawing up those negative judgements made against you now means you have time to carefully challenge them; re-frame your opinion of yourself and release the trapped emotional energies repeatedly driving these re-forming memories into conscious attention.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But it’s not at all easy. In fact for someone with an emotional disorder making the change means going through a series of internal battles before the war can be won; sometimes for months and, as in my case, for years. This war takes place between the Superconscious (your Prefrontal Cortex telling the rest of your brain and body how you intend to feel) and your Unconscious, telling how you currently feel.

This big argument between the two meets in the Neo-Cortex.

Whenever you ‘change your mind’ it is the Prefrontal Cortex that drives this. But there is a problem when you change your mind - you are confronted by all the years of biased interpretations and learning you previously sent down into it and oh, how we value the miserable work we’ve put into creating and keeping it there!

The argument is ‘it’s kept you and your loved ones alive and safe this long - so why risk it?’. Most of your current unconscious programming probably doesn’t show up much in your Neo-Cortex - with all those nasty emotional responses attached - until you fully commit to doing the opposite of what it keeps telling you to do. And then the emotionally driven arguments appear telling you such things as:

‘You cannot change how you interpret the past - that’s lying to yourself. You’re trying to pretend the other person was wrong. You need these bad feelings to remind you to stay on track and protect what you value’.

‘Don’t go into these painful feelings - if you go in you will never come out and then what? You will have to commit suicide to escape them - or you may get cancer and die. There is no you on the other side of this. This is you!’.

‘This is your punishment in life for not being good enough’.

‘Normal people do not experience these feelings - you’re crazy!’.

‘If you talk to someone else about what’s going on inside not only will they start avoiding you they might call the police who will then lock you up and throw away the key. You’ll be sectioned and drugged and electrocuted or even lobotomised. Your kids will never see you again’.

‘You can’t change yourself - it’s who you are. It can’t be done’.

As you keep moving inwards images start to come up accompanied by overwhelming emotional responses which cause normal thinking to shut down and the evidence being presented to the observing Prefrontal Cortex by the Unconscious is that the new approach will cause the entire self to close down (die).

If you imagine yourself as an organisation, with your Prefrontal Cortex acting as senior management, your Unconscious as the front line workforce threatening to go on strike and your Neo-Cortex acting as the day to day supervisory managers trying to keep normal productive life going on in the meantime it provides quite a good model. Both sides are well intentioned, but one has to win over the other to prove its case in regards to the new direction being taken.

You will see this kind of inner battle in the simplest life situations. For example you start a new job thinking your college training makes you an expert only to discover you’re once again ‘at the bottom of the ladder’ and have to learn whole new skill sets to thrive in the workplace. Or you suggest a new idea to someone and get criticisms for feedback.

As the Prefrontal Cortex drives these inner changes home it is confronted by these old arguments against change, and they are powerful arguments that change your actual body chemistry for a while. Now the Prefrontal Cortex has to agree to come up with alternative ways of thinking. You must give yourself permission to like yourself. You must accept the feelings you are experiencing as normal given the thought seeds, buried deep in your memories, that are driving them.

Whenever these thought seeds appear in your conscious mind (in your Neo-Cortex) your Prefrontal Cortex must grab them and deliberately change them or they will just carry on festering away in your Unconscious again.

‘Not only was I good enough I was outstanding - it was they who had the problem’.

‘These kinds of feelings are normal for anyone having to deal with that kind of situation’.

Whatever thought seeds you need to plant in your Unconscious in order to bring about inner happiness you plant right in the middle of this argument phase - repeatedly and whenever you have to. It doesn’t matter if these thoughts are not someone else’s truth - the truth is they’ll be your truth.

Achieving internal happiness, not re-writing history or making everyone else look good, is your goal here.

Regards - Carl

Completing Your Emotional Information Cycle (Part 2) - Opening a Closed Mind

Your Prefrontal Cortex opens and closes the Electrical and chemical information channels in your brain

We tend to think of the brain as a fixed structure but it can be physically trained in the same way a muscle can. There are two communication systems running your body and brain:

• the electrical system, operating through nerves and neurones;
• the chemical system, based on the transportation of ‘ligands’, molecules carried in liquid form acting as the neurotransmitters and hormones (also called peptides) of our brain and body, transporting information signals triggering different things to happen - including the production of moods.

Dr Candace Pert Ph.D, a research professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Centre in Washington DC, famous for discovering the Opiate Receptor (she has also discovered many other things about our emotional information cycles) tells us the Prefrontal Cortex can restrict the flow of electrical signal information travelling through the brain by sending instructions to brain ‘way stations’, instructing them not to allow certain brain signals through (she says at the moment there are seven of these brain ‘way stations’ known to us). .

The brain is interlaced with anti-emotional signal resistance mechanisms, including the Reticular Formation in the brain stem and the Ascending Reticular Activation System (ARAS), an extension of the Reticular Formation which spreads fan-like throughout the brain. Without this resistance system you would be so overwhelmed by emotional signals coming up from your body you would never wake up.

When it decides it doesn’t like a particular set of signals your Prefrontal Cortex can use these and other built-in resistance systems to deliberately block their effects.

Dr Pert tells us the Prefrontal Cortex can also resist chemically transported (ligand) information by shrinking blood vessels. This reduces both the level of communicating ligands reaching certain parts of the brain and also the amount of glucose - the brain’s only food supply - reaching those brain areas. The Prefrontal Cortex literally starves itself of the ability to think and feel about things it doesn’t want to. Brain scans confirm that during depression brain activity physically moves further back into the brain as a result - which unfortunately moves conscious awareness further down into the Limbic Brain - the automatically more emotional and worrying brain area. This is a self-defeating strategy causing the sufferer to remain emotionally blocked. Depression really is an act of ‘pushing down’ your thinking and feeling processes.

In order to open up to the emotional responses, so allowing the signals through and the energy to evaporate, we need the Prefrontal Cortex (that is, ‘you’) to start sending instructions to the brain’s way stations to start allowing the electrical signals to come through and open up the blood vessels in the brain to allow more of the chemically transported ligands through so all that emotional energy can be released.

In her writings Dr Pert tells us the good news is we can fully reverse the process and return to full unrestricted brain health once we start putting the self-work in.

To be more ‘open minded’ is not just an intellectual process composed of a few thoughts - in the brain it is a physical act. Opening the mind can be a slow, difficult process when it comes to accepting certain types of information. Although I often use the term ‘going in’, because that’s the sense I got during my healing process as I would target my next source of emotional pain and move towards it - the truth is the healing process is one of opening up to. Your Prefrontal Cortex opens up the channels of communication, allowing the signals, both electrical and chemical, to come through.

Regards - Carl

Completing Emotional Information Cycles - Your Prefrontal Cortex & Neo-Cortex Working Together (Part 1)

You may already know your Neo-Cortex is a layer of 'gray matter' only a few millimetres thick covering the left and right halves of your brain. You may also know the Right Neo-Cortex processes and stores imagery, with or without emotional energy attached; while the Left Neo-Cortex processes and stores logical, unemotional, word-based 'thinking'.

When you are awake the Left and Right exchange information with each other continuously, under the watchful eye of your Prefrontal Cortex.

During sleep the Prefrontal Cortex shuts down for about 75% of the time; the Left Neo-Cortex almost completely shuts down (apart from those brief moments where you come back to conscious awareness again); the Right Neo-Cortex remains active - it never sleeps.

For about a quarter of your sleep cycle your Right Neo-Cortex and Prefrontal Cortex communicate with each other and you experience ‘dreaming’ as a result. Dreams form as the Prefrontal Cortex and Right Neo-Cortex work together to create patterns of meaning from emotional signals rising up from your body. Unfortunately you cannot heal a blocked emotional response during sleep - you have to be fully conscious to do that.

If you are suffering with an emotional disorder (a blocked emotional response such as panic attacks or obsessions, for example) and you want to heal yourself, it helps to become more consciously aware of how these three brain parts, the Prefrontal Cortex, the Right Neo-Cortex and the Left Neo-Cortex, function together. In order to bring about full emotional healing, which means full completion of an emotional information cycle through the process of self-directed exposure therapy, all three need to be involved.

You need to be awake, focused, and ready to store freshly obtained ‘factual’ and logical information; both about the subjective experience (how you feel about being subjected to the experience of the content of your internal emotional story itself), and also the objective, ‘outsiders view’ of the emotional release process as your emotional cycle completes (using the Left Neo-Cortex to store the final facts revealed).

Once you start to develop an objective viewpoint, especially when you finally see successes in clearing these cycles, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the reality of the natural emotional process. That is not to say you will like having this new knowledge stored as a ‘fact’ in your brain. Blocked emotional responses are unpleasant whether you know how to remove them or not.

You also need to be consciously (observantly) moving inwards; towards your emotional energies and any attached imagery, using the hunting drive of your Prefrontal Cortex. Your intention is to meet, fully explore and engage with your emotional energies in addition to the images and other sensations they are attached to with the intention of disconnecting those energies and images from each other through the process of ‘feeling’.

Please remember, as I state in most of the things I write on the subject, you need the support of a doctor or other medically qualified professional while going through this process. It is a physical process and, although the symptoms are unlikely to be life-threatening, they can be very uncomfortable and frightening in themselves - there is also the possibility the symptoms are masking other things your doctor should be taking care of.

Your Prefrontal Cortex compels you to go into the hated emotional experience; your Right Neo-Cortex produces various types of imagery in relation to the energies being brought into conscious awareness and the feeling process then strips energy from the imagery involved. Imagery with no direct meaning disappears while ‘factual’ information is transferred to the Left Neo-Cortex with the Prefrontal Cortex agreeing the situation producing the information is no longer ‘active’ and can be forgotten until needed later.

During my own healing process I deliberately and knowingly completed this cycle 42 times; clearing 27 obsessions, 14 phobias and a long-term panic attack condition over a three year period. Unknowingly both you and I have completed thousands of such cycles throughout our lives.

Can you think of any?

Regards - Carl