So I’m going to be breaking down, piece by piece, what is reality, or rather, what we each call “reality”. This is a giant topic & a very detailed process. I go into it in great depths in my coaching, as it is the foundation of understanding why – sometimes – our soul & our brains are working against each other. I will do my best to get across the more salient points here on IG.
The experience we have everyday of being ourselves is actually a brick by brick construction of purposefully selected choices. We choose what we see, we choose what we pay attention to, we choose what we remember from the past, we choose what to deposit in our memory for the future, we choose how to react, we choose to eat, we choose to move, we choose left or right, we choose angry or sad, we choose all day long.
Actually the number of choices we are faced with everyday is overwhelming. If we were forced to reflect on each decision we would get absolutely nothing done. So many of these choices are automated. Some have been automated by millions of years of evolution: our ability to walk, our fight/flight system, our instinct to eat, our instinct to procreate. Others are automated by conditioning.
Many of our choices are automated through conditioning through experience; either direct or indirect experience. Meaning if you once put your hand on the stove & got burned you learned not to do that again & would archive it as an automatic choice for the future: the brain’s natural instinct is to move away from things that cause it pain. So our brain remembers to choose that hot stove = don’t touch.
Now if you were born into an environment that had told you for years (maybe generations) that only strong successful people survive putting their hands on the stove….you will override your brain’s innate programming & put your hand on the stove anyway. Not only will you do this action, but it will make sense to you & become accepted as a normal/expected behavior.
These automated conditioned choices, similar to the latter case, are produced by input from a thousand different directions: our family, our ancestors, our gender, our socio-economic group, our passions, etc. etc. etc. These conditioned choices filter the building blocks of your reality: where you point your attention & how you categorize/judge the otherwise intrinsically meaningless stimuli around you.
The combination of what draws our attention, what we experience, our reaction, and how we internalize that combination all mixed together form what we individually call reality. But my reality (due to my set of filters) is going to be different than your reality. And this is where things get tricky….but that’s for another series.
Today let’s first meet the different pieces of our brain.
Our brain is the most advance computing entity in existence. 100 billion neurons, 100 Trillion neuronal connections (that’s more than the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy), that can travel up to speeds of 268 mph (431 km). Our brain is no joke.
There are 3 components to the brain. The oldest, is known as our reptilian brain. This is responsible for all of our automatic survival functions – tried & tested over millions of years of evolution. It manages our heartbeat, our breathing, our balance, our need to eat, our need to reproduce…basically things that if we didn’t do, we wouldn’t survive into another generation.
The mid-brain, also known as the limbic brain, handles our memories, emotions, judgements, and reactions, most notably our fight or flight system. The more “recent” part of the brain is the frontal cortex, AKA the reasoning brain. This handles reasoning, language, conscious thinking & executive functions (the ability to select appropriate behaviors & actions.)
All three of these brains are connected to each other. While we would hope that the reasoning part of the brain is always in control, there are 2 issues with this. First being that your prefrontal brain doesn’t finish developing until approximately 20-25 years of age. The second is that the limbic brain can hijack control from the cortex when stimulated, effectively shutting off your ability to reason. When your fight/flight system is activated your ability to reason is off. We’ve talked about this in my fear series – it’s useful in the Savannah, but your FF can be stimulated just by watching the news.
Next we’re going to take a look at how your brain builds the visual representation of what you think you see around you every day.
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