The Brain Game

Reconnecting the mind and body

Summary:

Have you decided ever to never feel anything again? Suppressing the emotions block the inputs from the body sensations to travel through the brain stem through the limbic brain into the context areas where awareness happens. When an intense event occurs in our life, the overwhelming feelings spread from the senses to your nervous system to our brain stem to limbic areas to the cortex, but it does not reach the insula where the awareness occurs. As the ACC gets delinked, the live experience of emotions is hindered. Shifting from the right brain (feelings) to the logical left brain (thinking), we escape the sensations. All addictions roots from the from this fanatic escapism. The repression of emotions continues and spoils the internal system of the person. This shuts down the bodily awareness from the neck down and helps us isolate yourself from the pain, the negative emotions, disappointments, guilt, and so on. The implicit memories profiler through a lack of awareness and kicks in the automatic repetitive destructive reactions. 

Resolving the traumas from the past leads to healing these memories and helps in reprogramming of the brain. In the new memory structure of fresh beliefs and convictions, implicit memories are connected to new explicit memories leading to new life experiences and manifestations. Neuroplasticity derails the neural circuits of the past trauma and causes a memory modification harnessing the power of the hippocampus. This leads to the creation of a new neural synaptic network. Health and beauty improve. The person moves out of the victim state of mind; repeated negative life events reduce; progressively integrated reconstruction of the entire personality happens. 
 

Description:

In order to defend ourselves from pain, we use different mechanisms to keep ourselves happy and to act in the world as though we are a strong person. As we escape from the current feelings recurrently, we gradually shut the emotional system off. When we thus constrict the areas of the neural passage that transmits energy and information from the sub-cortical regions to the cortex region, we block the impulse to act. Thus, we modify our neural firing patterns into indecisiveness, procrastination, and inefficiency. For example, when we get news about the loss of a job, immediately we feel disappointments that lead to fear of future. We burden ourselves with negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, pessimism. Thereby, we overload the neural pathway, inhibiting the transmittance of the impulses. We escape the emotional sensation by various methods such as consoling ourselves with positivity and hope, engaging in conversations and discussions, indulging in intense tasks without a break, addictions, etc. 

So what are the disadvantages of emotional repression? Research has shown that even without being conscious of the stored past emotions, the whole collection of unprocessed feelings influences the mind (thoughts, calculations, reasoning, planning, thinking, and effective decision-making). This cuts us off from the parts of the prefrontal regions that mediate awareness with mind and body. Therefore, unprocessed emotions can lead to foolish decisions in life. Based on the worldview based on past stored emotions, I have made unconscious decisions that have led to failures in life. Thus, failure of intelligence happens regularly in me as the emotional charges mature and show up.  Past related emotions form a cluster and form a belief system. The belief system powered by the painful emotions form convictions that have the power to manifest negative events in life. Life spirals out of control by these unconscious emotional dynamics.

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) mediates the neural connection between the middle prefrontal cortex and the sensations from our physical body. ACC connects or links the cortex brain that is responsible for thinking to the limbic region that is responsible for emotions. It also regulates our focus of awareness. Through the resonance circuitry, we connect to others through our feelings. The insula part of the cortex brain helps in the formation of the present moment awareness. We get the ability to generate the map of our internal world and as we access it, we get the ability to access the internal world of someone else. Insula and ACC function together to create the self-awareness. If we shut down the ACC part of the brain through stress, we shut down our awareness of the pain. The pain remains out of our conscious experience. The bad feelings remain unfelt and it leads to a deadened emotional life. It also cuts off from the wisdom of the body. As we banish our emotional sentiments, negative emotions take control of us. When the primary emotions such as fear, hurt, anger, hatred, disgust, or shame are eliminated from the ebb and flow of energy information, we lose the music of our mind. Due to constant thinking, these primary emotions get suppressed and the mental activity (the play of past collection of memories) takes domination. This leads to an interiority that is normally mechanical, uncontrolled, and destructive. 

The reactivation of the insula in combination with ACC restarts the sensational abilities to witness. This can lead to the opening up of the unfelt emotions and can create chaos if all the bottled emotions start erupting instantly. ‘Introception’ is a gradual process in which we become aware of the sensations in our body in steps. We become aware of the threats that have been highlighted by the brainstem area. As we get free from the constant perceived threats, the limbic and cortex functions regularize effectively. During a threat, the brainstem sends the signals through the autonomous nervous system to the spine. The body produces adrenaline and stress hormone cortisol to mobilize the body into a fight-flight-freeze mode.  In fight mode, the body is prepared to attack and in-flight mode, to flee.  In freeze mode, the brain and the body become dysfunctional, the body simulates death so that attacker finds no more interest in the live prey. It is an escape method to avoid the present moment challenge. Thus, the brain stem plays a major role in shaping our states of mind. alerts according to the external according to the sensory inputs. By the activation of the Insula, awareness breaks the involuntary bodily reactions.   

As the situation calms down and our threat assessment system makes us feel safe, our muscles relax, and we enter into a calmness. As in Buddhist vipassana practice, we bring conscious awareness into different parts of the body. This is an indication of the opening of the neural channel.  As the sub-cortical impulses reach the cortex brain, we get the ability to use our will to create a voluntary response. We start to sense our gut sensations or intuition more. Through awareness, a gap forms in between thoughts. Through the gap, the impulses from the subcortex region reach the insula and we are able to make matured intelligent decisions. 

When introception is done in a safe loving secure place we start sensing the internal flow of energy and information - mindsight development starts. We regain our artistic abilities. Our prefrontal cortex can create abstract representations of the external environment and affect our nervous system and create artificial feelings. When artists start creating from the cortex areas without the coordination between the cortex, the limbic, and the brainstem, then the music becomes absurd.  The integration between the layers of our inner world helps in creative works. This creativity is important in all respects of our life. Art is nothing but applied intelligence in constant creativity through the interplay of emotions.  The cascading beliefs of a person camouflage the real potential of the being. Through introception, the luster of a new life sustains.

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In the emotional process of healing traumas, we recalled the memories of the relevant memories from the past to the present moment awareness and we experience the fear of the pain that we felt when the event occurred.  Experiencing them through the present moment awareness breaks the neural networks. Human beings generally forget the childhood experiences which happened below seven years of age. The past memories are clustered as different episodes in our brain – mapping past events leads to the recollection of nostalgic autobiographical memories or. When the neural firing patterns are integrated into form memories, our moment to moment experience gets arranged in a timeline. The hippocampus area of the brain organizes the building blocks of our memories in the right hemisphere and the corresponding knowledge, facts, language, and perceptions in the left hemisphere according to the life timeline. In order to heal, we need to re-organize re-assemble the puzzles in a new way. Attention activates the hippocampus to compile the puzzle pieces of the implicit memories to form new synaptic programming. For example, if one has to get free of the reactions based on the implicit memories, he has to first decode the previous pictures which were assembled by the hippocampus, bring the images and sensations to his awareness. Awareness breaks the linkages of the neural clusters. When this reassembling happens, one becomes free of fear. For example, when one of the students got used to our pet dog recently, the whole hippocampus re-organized the puzzle pieces and created a new implicit memory film. Based on a new set off the neural cluster, now she reacts with love and affection to all the dogs. Her convictions, perceptions, prejudices changed along with her attitudes and beliefs, which caused the manifestation of new emotional reactions, pleasant behavioral patterns for the same external occurrence. 

 

In order for the regeneration of the existing neural network to happen, hippocampus needs to function well. However, stress hormones block the hippocampal function and it leads to blockage of the explicit memories. This is what we sometimes call blackout. And the implicit memories sustain and reproduce the sensations that occurred during the actual traumatic event. The memories get scattered and the person can be unstuck in time, or in other words, the person loses the mental ability to track his past in sequential order as and when it happened. In the event of disassociation (happens when high levels of stress hormones are released through an overwhelming experience) the brain takes the focal attention away from the threat by a mechanism of dissociation. This could explain why people tend to disregard the threats in life and fall into traps. However, the trauma still imprints the implicit experience in the brain and when triggered. Implicit memories can flood into awareness as flashbacks and one can feel threatened. Apparently, if one escapes the past experience through imagination, the formation of explicit memory will be hindered. This is the reason sometimes the implicit memories do not reveal the causal explicit memories.  Implicit memory is nothing but the reminiscence of the internal experience of the bodily sensations, the emotions, the feelings, the prejudices, judgments, assumptions, stories, etc.  As the explicit memories are disassociated from the implicit memories, the ability to become free from the clutches of the trauma becomes extremely difficult. Independent implicit memories prompt hyperarousal and emotional outbursts even during a safe event. These people are generally vulnerable to be further exploited in the future as they almost go into freeze response in the face of similar assaults. 

 

Healing the past traumas happens as the hippocampus dismantles and reorganizes the past memories. During the process of the healing, the therapist normally helps create a dual focus of awareness where the person is in the ‘here and now’, and simultaneously in ‘there and then.’ As one navigates the past memories in the process, the scattered memories are brought to the surface, disintegrated, and then re-organized. During this rejuvenation process, the fragmental implicit memories are reintegrated and are connected to new explicit memories through conscious awareness. The unblocked hippocampus produces new electrical signals and gene-activations. As the hippocampus rearranges and reorganizes the neural clusters, the existing packets of neurotransmitters alter initiating a totally new memory bank structure. This leads to the rejuvenation of relationships, work-life, and health which were spoiled by past negative experiences.