THE TAMING OF THE BRAIN

We’re all familiar with optical illusions and those “find the hidden faces” puzzles.  They’re fun when you know that you’re being challenged to see things differently.  What if you could live your entire life that way?  

Of all the input you’re receiving every moment, the little bit you notice is regulated by just one small part of the brain. It’s called the Reticular Activating System and it’s worth your while to understand how it works.  When you understand how the RAS thinks, you can literally alter the entire trajectory of your life and make it go the way YOU want to go. 

So what’s a Reticular Activating System? 

The Reticular Formation is found just north of the brain stem, and is a cluster of neurons about the size of your pinkie finger.  It regulates various states of consciousness and is housed within the Reticular Activating System which connects it to the cerebral cortex.  The RAS is responsible for mediating and routing incoming sensory data.  As you couldn’t possibly manage ALL of the sensory input you’re receiving in any given moment, the RAS has the function of alerting you to information it deems relevant. 

Great.  How does the RAS determine what’s relevant? 

1. The RAS is hardwired for novelty.  This is because anything new and unexpected may pose a threat, and threats are always prioritized. 

2. The RAS is also hardwired to prioritize things that you have PREVIOUSLY deemed relevant.  It reasons that if it was relevant in the past, it’s relevant now. 

Here’s what happens.  Your new puppy starts barking joyously as you arrive home.  The RAS alerts to you to that sound, focusing your attention on it.  The RF starts pumping out dopamine and oxytocin in response and you feel as happy as the puppy does.  This is a self-reinforcing system that encourages you to notice him even more.  In fact, your RAS will being to alert you whenever there’s an adorably cute dog behaving like an adorably cute dog in the vicinity.  And eventually just dogs in general.  You won’t understand why other people don’t notice or care about every dog in a 12-mile radius.  In fact, some of them only notice when there’s a dog that evokes a threat response in them.  More often than not, they’ve had a bad experience with a dog, or heard terrifying stories of dog attacks on family members, and experienced a rush of stress hormones.  Some may not be able to distinguish between a joyous bark and a threatening one.  To them, ALL barks are threatening.  Eventually, all dogs are threatening.  That’s the RAS at work, too. 

Remember that threats (real or imaginary) have an unfair advantage in this system.  

The RAS is constantly mediating incoming data and determining what makes it all the way to your conscious awareness, based on what you have deemed relevant IN THE PAST. 

The emotional states produced in response to whatever the RAS prioritizes encourage you to notice more things that match those states and simply reproduce them. 
In other wrds, it often behaves like a dog chasing its own tail. 

Unfortunately, most of us are very well-conditioned to experience the external stimulus as the “cause” of our emotional state.  From our perspective, it’s quite true.  Some of us say things like:

I’m afraid of dogs.
I don’t like dogs.
Dogs don’t like me.
Dogs are dangerous. 

All of those things might be true, but they are not The Truth.  They’re just OUR truth.  And they’re likely to remain our truth until we actively decide to change our minds.  If we change our minds about the danger of barking dogs, we begin proving to ourselves that not all dogs are dangerous, not all barks are warnings, and that we can also experience great love and happiness in the presence of a friendly dog.  At that point, we stop producing the fear response and the dogs stop responding fearfully to us. 

But first, we have to understand that the dog was never the *cause* of our fear response.  The RAS, inside our own brains, was the cause.  It might have been quite right to produce that fear response once, but that doesn’t mean it’s always right to produce that response. 

You get to DECIDE what you pay attention to and direct your RAS to look for those things.  Fortunately, the RAS is designed to do just that.  So it’s very cooperative.  And when you change your mind, the world around you changes in response. 

Which is a LOT easier than trying to change the world around you.  You are never going to get those dogs to stop being afraid of you if you are afraid of them.  They will meet your expectations 100% of the time. 

And so will your money.  And your health.  And your relationships. 

I’m not talking esoterics here; this is science.  As Shawn Achor pointed out in his book The Happiness Advantage, most people think they’ll be happier when they achieve a goal or acquire an item, but the science has proven over and over that the exact opposite is true.  People are much more likely to achieve goals and acquire the items they want when they get happy first.  This is because the RAS begins to prioritize data that matches that happy state, and it notifies them when opportunities arise.  Because they are drawn to those states, they move toward the opportunities to get MORE of that state.  On the flip side, people who are accustomed to experiencing unwanted feelings tend to notice information that reinforces those feelings.  So when and if they achieve their goals or acquire the desired items, they rarely get any real joy out of them.  Instead, they’ll experience a significant degree of dissatisfaction with their performance, or the goal itself, or the newly acquired house/job/car/boat/spouse/whatever. 

It’s not their fault.  They just haven’t learned how to tame their brains. 

Hypnosis Frederick can show you how.