What I’m going to focus on here is the idea you manage the same information using different parts of your brain and body and how the information affects you depends on which part of you is doing the managing of the information; rather than the nature of the information itself.
Let me put it this way: you usually process television news with your Left Neo-Cortex - your thinking brain - with some of the information leaking over to your emotional brain. This means you have, on the whole, an objective viewpoint and you are watching the news from an outsider’s view.
If you had to process the same information using only your Limbic Brain - and this was sending signals to your image brain - your Right Neo-Cortex - you would be having very powerful emotional responses to what you saw and might never watch the news again. The Right Neo-Cortex, working with your Limbic Brain, is where you manage your subjective viewpoints - when the same information is being managed here you are in the news.
Same information, but managed by a different part of you.
A person with an emotional disorder is someone stuck in subjective viewpoint even though their personal ‘news’ may have happened and in reality finished 30 years ago. They’re still experiencing the sensations first hand from within the experience with the sensory signals being repeatedly sent to the Right Neo-Cortex for processing but being blocked.
They are sent there by the Thalamus. Whenever sensory information is produced, either internally or externally, the Thalamus is the brain part deciding which part of you will receive those signals.
The Thalami (because there are two of them) are a pair of oval structures sitting between your upper Neo-Cortex and the lower Limbic Brain and they send incoming sensory signals either upwards through what’s called the ‘long route’ or downwards to your emotion-processing Limbic Brain through what’s called the ‘short route’.
The Thalamus Decides
The Thalamus is home to your automated prejudice and bias processes.
Although prejudice and bias may be frowned on socially, the truth is we are automatically designed to regard anything new and unfamiliar as potentially threatening until we have learned it is actually safe and then integrated knowledge about it into the rest of our thinking mind. Integration can be a time consuming long-route process (this is certainly the case when working with an emotional blocking disorder).
We are, by default, designed to pay attention to negative information first, whether generated externally or internally, because it is this type of information that keeps us alive. This is why most people glue their eyeballs to ‘negative news’ on the television more often than to nice self-improvement programmes.
Broadcasters are using what marketers call the ‘rubber chicken-neck affect’ of our negative bias process to get our attention and then we thank them for keeping us ‘informed’. Unfortunately the good news, of which there is an abundant supply, doesn’t grab our automatic attention so easily so we have to deliberately focus on it through the practice of ‘gratitude’.
The Thalamus operates a referencing and routing system whereby it automatically feeds fresh information coming in to where that particular type of information is currently being managed.
If you currently manage sensory information of a certain type using mainly your Left Neo-Cortex the information is sent quickly through the long route and you receive the information as ‘thoughts’ which you associate with various other previously stored thought-based memories.
If you currently manage fresh incoming information of a certain type using mainly your Right Neo-Cortex this means you focus on such things as imagery and sound tones, not so much with thoughts, and in addition this also usually means there is a more emotional component to the way you handle the information.
Picture a sunny holiday beach and having your feet massaged - thoughts or feelings and images?
You may still involve your thinking in resolving any problems associated with the information, but you also have to deal with an emotional response. This means having to feel your feelings until they have been released while at the same time controlling your thinking in such a way it allows the emotional experience to pass safely through without you forming strong negative judgements about it (you have to stop yourself feeling bad about feeling bad or it turns into a vicious cycle).
If you currently manage fresh incoming information of a certain type using mainly your Limbic system the information is sent quickly down the short route and you have an extremely powerful emotional response affecting your entire brain and body - whether you consciously want to have the response or not.
Short-route responses always produce intense emotional reactions. For those of us suffering with emotional disorders this is a frustrating part of our organic design. Your body reacts, your thinking brain is overwhelmed and then your mystified Pre-frontal Cortex, the part of you that watches yourself, cannot understand why you cannot prevent the response (unless you’ve been reading this!).
Avoiding Sensory Information Overwhelm
Many times a day Your Thalamus receives much more sensory information than your brain can cope with so it sends it into your body.
Your Conscious brain can only work with 4 to 11 bits of information per second with its optimum level being at about 7 bits.
The senses feeding information into the Thalamus present it with a potential 2 million bits of information per second. For this reason one of the main jobs of the brain is to reduce the amount of information getting through to the Conscious.
External sensory information entering the Thalamus is filtered allowing the Conscious and the Limbic Brain to focus on things they are currently looking for. Internal sensory information, including emotional information, is filtered or resisted using the Reticular Formation, a structure in your brain stem.
All this excess unprocessed information does not just disappear of its own accord. It stores in your body.
Your body acts as a dumping ground for all the as yet unsorted and repressed sensory information. Focus on any memory and your body starts providing you with information on the environment you were in; how you felt; who else was there; what the weather was like and so on. You can feel this information as it comes up.
If you feel inexplicably tense about something about the past and don’t know why it’s because experiential memories - energetic ‘ligand’ information - is stored in your body and needs processing.
The Same Information is Scattered Throughout Your Brain and Body
Every cell in your body is covered in millions of floating keyhole-like ‘receptors’. Every single cell, regardless of what type of cell it is. The receptors are different in type, according to the body part they occupy. Rather than the cells of each body part having just one receptor type they have thousands of types with certain types being dominant.
What these keyhole receptors receive are key-like ‘ligands’. Ligands are molecules containing instructions on how the cells should behave once they have attached to the receptors. When a ligand locks to a receptor it transmits instructions into a cell body and the cell reacts.
All thoughts, feelings and physical responses are produced as a result of a ligand locking on to a receptor. After the instructions have been carried out the ligand releases and moves away from the cell.
Ligands are transported in the chemical carriers known as ‘neurotransmitters’, ‘hormones’ and ‘peptides’. This is our internal chemical information transfer system.
Our Electrical and Chemical Communication Systems
Some believe all genuine information - information of value in managing ourselves - is transmitted only through the body’s electrical communication system - the brain and nervous system. This process uses a mechanism called ‘synaptic transition’.
Electrical signals travelling along neurones in our brain come to the neurone end point and meet a tiny synaptic gap. The signal is transferred across the gap by chemicals (containing ligands) to the receiving neurone next in line and the electrical message continues on its path.
The electrical approach tells us everything we think is managed in the brain and the conclusion is if we focus on ‘positive thinking’ we can eventually bring our emotional world under control.
I can tell you without a shadow of doubt this doesn’t work for people struggling to remove an emotional block.
Scientists tell us the true picture is different; there is much more going on than the electrical model alone. Our main communication system is chemical.
Those gaps between our transmitting and receiving neurones are not so tiny. In fact, many are inches apart from each other and not directly in line which means, in relative size terms of how far we used to think those thought-carrying chemicals travelled, is a massive change in distance and direction.
We don’t just send these signals from single neurone to single neurone - we flood our brain with them. A single signal sent out by one neurone travels to many others at the same time.
In fact on average 98% of what our neurones receive comes from a chemically transported ‘ligand soup’ saturating our brain; only 2% comes from the nearest transmitting neurone.
The electrical system is there - but it’s operating in a ligand bath.
That’s why a single emotionally charged issue gets to dominate our minds regardless of what we’d like to think about. We are flooded with an issue for as long as we are emotional about it. Our brain isn’t being flooded with an electrical signal - it is being flooded with a chemical signal causing an electrical signal whenever a ligand attaches to any of our many neurone receptors.
The Information is Everywhere in Your Body
We used to think the blood-brain barrier separated these ligand-carrying chemicals into two types - ‘neurotransmitter’ ligands in our brain and ‘hormone’ ligands in our bodies.
But this turns out to be untrue - the blood-brain barrier doesn’t keep them apart and the body carries the same neurotransmitters your brain does - even your immune system contains them.
Which means the chemicals containing ligands that carry thoughts across your brain synapses are also the same as those carrying thoughts around your body and it works the other way around too. Feelings and thoughts are interchangeable according to where the information is being managed from.
What a very strange concept that is, eh? Not so strange if you acknowledge that how you feel in your body dominates how you think until those feelings are released and the thoughts produced as ‘insights’ are then stored and forgotten.
Your body thinks. It does not think in the same way your brain parts do but it acts as a memory store and when it stores experiential memory in the form of vibrational energy - created by ligands connecting to receptors in your body’s cells - it keeps reminding you those memories need processing.
Drawing the Information Together
Our body, every living bit of it, is information and our Conscious needs to learn how to draw it together and work with it if it is going to live in a happy overall ‘body-mind’.
Scientists who work in the world of ligands and receptors tell us that by releasing a chemical signal into our blood we can draw ligands in towards different brain and body part receptors.
What if, when we deliberately open up to our feelings, we send those attracting signals out and ligands containing the information we want to take a closer look at are physically drawn up into the brain?
The information contained in these ligands, those we ‘think’ with, is the same information we ‘feel’ with when the ligands are stored in our body or being worked with in our other brain parts.
It’s my experience, and that of many others I have spoken to, the process has to follow a specific route - the Emotional Information Cycle.
Scientists used to say specific brain and body parts did specific things - so for example the Limbic Brain is also called the ‘Emotional Brain’ because all negative feelings were believed to be produced and contained within that small area - but now the view is more fuzzy.
The information itself is scattered throughout your brain and body but how you experience the information depends on which part of you the Thalamus directs the information to for management of the information.
How Do We Transfer Responsibility and Control of the Information from the Emotional Brain to the Thinking Brain?
Allow the part currently controlling the information to complete its role in the cycle.
In the case of an emotional blocking disorder this means consciously forcing the cycle to complete.
Unconsciously you are already allowing all those pieces of information you are not blocking, including most or your emotional responses, to be processed by the cycle with little conscious awareness this is happening.
Blocked emotional responses, however, need direct conscious action because you at some point sent conscious instructions to your Unconscious to stop the signals. If you have repressed emotional energy trapped in your body you need first to start tuning into your feelings and set aside time to ‘go in’ to them.
For someone with an emotional disorder, such as a phobia or an obsession, this itself can be an overwhelming, mentally debilitating phase lasting hours, days and months, even when working daily to achieve transfer.
With these conditions you are not simply going into some negative feelings - you are turning the Unconscious in on itself - all anxiety disorders are caused by ‘Secondary Emotional Responses’; emotional responses designed to defend against Primary Emotional Responses.
These Secondary Responses are held in place by powerful Unconscious beliefs that need to faced, challenged and changed by your Unconscious seeing repeatedly that you can experience these intense energies and remain alive.
By ‘feeling’ the body transfers information, at the same time as releasing vibrational energy from the body’s cells, up into the Limbic Brain and the Right Neo-Cortex where it presents as images. The Left Neo-Cortex makes sense of the images, translates them into words and the cycle completes once all the driving energy has left the body.
Shifting from Automatic Emotional Response to Automatic Thinking Response - and then Forgetting
The Thalamus switches the direction in which it sends fresh incoming information once it has seen the emotional energy cycle has completed in regards to the particular type of information concerned and the information is being processed by your thinking brain.
Discharging the emotional energy attached to negative images and thoughts turns them into bland thoughts which are managed mostly by the Left Neo-Cortex.
Now, when the signals arrive in the emotionless Left Neo-Cortex, you get asked if you want to produce an emotional response by sending the signals to your Limbic instead and you actually get to say no. You can resist the previously automatic habit of sending the information to the emotional brain purely using thought and, finding you are now able to do this you don’t get emotional about the threat of getting emotional and so don’t produce secondary emotional symptoms.
Given the trouble you’ve gone to get the Thalamus to change the direction it sends these signals in its unlikely you’ll agree to hand the information back to the Limbic for management - but if this happens anyway and you produce another unwanted emotional response it means you simply have some more emotional energy to discharge through feeling before the transfer becomes permanent.
If the emotional energy attached to the information or issue has not been fully discharged you will still feel an ‘internal pull’ created by the Limbic which means either it has not yet completed its role in regards to this particular information or you have accessed another emotional layer that needs discharging (I write about emotional layering elsewhere).
If it’s quite a low level ‘pull’ you can pretend you didn’t notice it but personally I choose to schedule time to discharge all emotional energy.
Doing this, even with the lowest level intensity of emotional responses, allows you to complete an emotional cycle and ‘forget’ it - which means you store it away in long term memory unless required later.
While it is very unlikely you will ever require the issue at the centre of the emotional blocking disorder later, usually because the issue itself no longer exists in reality, what you do want to remember is the process.
It is this process and using it as your automatic approach whenever you experience intense emotions that gets you back to being unconditionally happy as quickly as possible.
Regards - Carl
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