Follow your Heart

You have heard the phrases “Trust your gut”, “Listen to your heart”.

Most of us are conditioned to dismiss what our gut tells us, and would rather “use our head” to think logically and rationally instead.

We are conditioned to think that "using our head" is a sign of maturity. Only the feeble minded, let their heart and gut "mislead" them.

It may surprise you to learn that modern neuroscience has discovered that following our gut or our heart may not be so far fetched or frivolous after all. Neuroscience has validated what the ancients from across the world had understood all along. Neuroscience has confirmed that the ancients’ belief that the heart and gut have a mind of their own is not a misunderstanding of the human anatomy. Trusting in our heart and gut has basis in how the human mind works.

First, let me ask “Where is our brain”?

Many would say that our brain sits on top of our shoulder, inside our skull.

While it is true that our brain has the highest concentration of nerve cells in our body, nerves cells are spread throughout our body. Besides our head brain, our intestines and stomach, and our heart also have high concentrations of nerve cells. Like our head brain, our gut and heart are truly equipped to think and feel.

Neuroscientists estimate that the nerve cells concentrated in our gut have about the same capacity as a cat’s brain. Hence, our “gut feel” has basis in neuroscience.

In 2002, there was a case of a heart transplant recipient reporting a new found love of certain kinds of music and food, and the memory of certain places which he had never experienced before, prior to the transplant.

The heart transplant recipient’s new tastes remained a mystery until it was revealed that the heart donor was a music and food connoisseur and adventurer, and had loved those music, food and places reported by the transplant recipient.

It seemed that the loves and passions of the heart donor were stored in his heart and they were now transferred to the transplant recipient along with the donated heart.

So listen to your heart, it truly has a mind in its own right. Give your heart a voice in your decision making that it deserves, as your cognitive brain in your head is not the only seat of intelligence that you have.

Following your heart is not a sign of feeble mindedness. Indeed, it is a mark of true wisdom.

NEURAL FILTERS

When there is an external event, our sensory input channels Visual (sight), Auditory (hearing), Kinaesthetic (feeling), Olfactory (smell) and Gustatory (taste) will pick up the information and send it to our reticular activating system or RAS for processing.

The key function of the RAS is to filter the constant torrent of sensory information brought to it by our senses. Our senses can pick up millions of bits of information each second while our conscious mind can only handle 7 (plus or minus 2). Our RAS, therefore has to drastically reduce the information it receives before channelling it to our conscious mind. Otherwise, we will be paralysed by information overload.

Our RAS does this by deleting, distorting and generalising the massive volume of information it receives into manageable chunks.

The RAS delete, distort and generalize information using neural filters. The filters are our personal intentions, beliefs, values, attitudes, memories, language and meta programs.

Our minds construct our mental model or internal representation of an event that is occurring right now based only on the information allowed into our conscious mind by our RAS. Our perspective of the world, what we see is therefore determined by our neural filters.

This created mental model or internal representation put us in a certain mental state and create certain feelings in our body.

What we see, our emotional state and how our body feels in turn combine to generate our actions.

The good news is that we can have control over our neural filters. We can therefore choose those supportive neural filters that will get us the results we want.

BRAIN BASED SUCCESS FORMULA - OUR RETICULAR ACTIVATING SYSTEM

Click on this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4

Did you see the moonwalking bear on the first viewing? Most people don’t.

What happened? How did most people miss the BIG moonwalking bear?

The secret lies in the workings of our Reticular Activation System or RAS. It is the part of our brain that automatically filters out what we consider unimportant to us, and brings to our attention, only things that we consider important to us.

Because of the way our RAS works, we will see what we are focusing on (consider important) but will miss even BIG things like the moonwalking bear, if we are not focusing on it.

The way our RAS works has far reaching implications on the success or failure in all areas of our lives e.g. relationships, health, wealth, career etc.

This post is the first of a series of postings on a success formula that is based on the way our brain works.

Our RAS plays a central role in our brain based success formula.

Our RAS is located in the brain stem at the base of the brain. It is shaped like our little finger and is about the same size. Our RAS consists of a network of neurons and neural fibres running through the brain stem. These neurons radiate from brain stem and connect with other parts of our brain.

Our RAS is involved in many critical functions including breathing and the beating of the heart, sleep and waking, and behavioural motivation.

For behavioural motivation, the most important function of the RAS is its control of consciousness – its ability to consciously focus attention on something.

All of our senses - sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, gather information and send this information to our brain for processing. Our brain receives millions of bits of information every second.

To cope with this constant torrent of information, our brain extracts only what is important to us at any given moment. It has an system to sort this information and that is our reticular activating system or RAS.

Our RAS functions like a sorting office, evaluating incoming information and picking out only those that need our conscious attention. The rest are shunted to our unconscious. If we had to attend to all incoming information at once, we would simply break down.

Have you ever noticed that once you have decided on the make and colour of car you want to buy, every other car on the road is the make and colour you are thinking of buying?

That is your RAS at work. Filtering out the other cars (the irrelevant information) and bringing the car of your thoughts to the forefront of your mind i.e. your conscious mind. The numbers of that particular car have not increased since you took that decision; it’s just your filtering system or RAS in action.

Our RAS acts as the filter between our five senses and our conscious mind.

Our RAS recieves instructions from our conscious mind on what to leave in and what to leave out. For example, the instruction might be: "I am thinking of buying that car, take note of them on the road, I want to make sure I really do like its looks".

Our RAS gets to work and flags up that instruction as an important "TAKE NOTE" thought.

Another example.

Remember when you were waiting to board your flight at a busy, noisy airport passenger terminal?

All the noise - hundreds of waiting people milling around chattering, others dashing to the gates, boring background music, yelling taxi touts, constant interruption by announcements in multiple languages of last calls, lost and found items, lost children. How much of this noise do we consciously pay attention to? Not much.

But when a new announcement comes over the public address system - saying our name or our flight. Our RAS picks that up and suddenly our attention is full on.

Our RAS recieved the instructions from our conscious mind: "Listen out for anyone saying my name or my flight".

Our RAS gets to work and flags up that instruction as an important "TAKE NOTE" thought.

As you saw, the good news is that we can deliberately programme our RAS to look out for things that will support our goal.

When we set a goal that we are passionate about, our RAS will focus our mind. We suddenly become aware of things that we may not have paid any attention to previously, but are now important and relevant to us and our goal.

In future postings, we will explore how we can capitalise on the natural functioning of our RAS to create a powerful brain based success formula.