Its All In Your Head by Roger Hamilton
Its All In Your Head by Roger Hamilton
“The brain is simply a collection of neurons and other cells,
gathered together in one place to simplify the wiring.”
- Helen Phillips, New Scientist
If our brains are all so similar in size, and if wealth appears to have little to do with intelligence or talent (with fortune eluding many of the most intelligent and talented amongst us), what is the process by which our brain turns success into a habit? All of our actions are based on either a conscious action, based on mental calculation, or unconscious action, based on reflex. Breathing is a reflex action, whereas intellectual argument is a calculated action. Yet when we see a great athlete in action, it is often a reflex action at a critical moment that wins the game.
“In the same way that I tend to make up my mind about people within thirty seconds of meeting them, I also make up my mind about a business proposal within thirty seconds and whether it excites me.”
- Richard Branson
In 1997, researchers at John Hopkins and the University of Maryland using a PET scanner found that we all learn new skills through our outer cortex, but then in repetition these physical skills are stored and accessed through the inner brain, within the cerebellum. Conscious thought operates on the outer layer of the brain. We are masters of pattern recognition and we experience the world by comparing our experiences to the patterns formed by our past history. This is where we conduct our conscious thought. Yet within the centre of our brains, we conduct our unconscious thought.
It was only in October 2005 that a study at MIT found the location where our habits are stored: the basal ganglia, located next to the cerebellum in the inner brain. They found through a series of experiments that at critical moments when a familiar situation was encountered, a lost habit could be automatically re-activated from within our unconscious.
Dr Ann Graybiel, Professor of Neuroscience at MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, said: “It is as though somehow, the brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right habit cues come back. This situation is familiar to anyone who is trying to lose weight or to control a well-engrained habit. Just the sight of a piece of chocolate cake can reset all those good intentions.”
Our actions are fired much faster by the more primitive, unconscious inner brain, responsible for our automatic actions, than by the outer, conscious brain, responsible for pattern recognition or memory. But to ‘program’ our habits at the centre, we need to first create patterns through our experience. To know and not to do is not yet to know.
We learn to drive a car consciously by using our cerebral cortex, until it becomes an unconscious process accessed through the cerebellum and basal ganglia. A footballer learns through practice but scores in the game through instinct and habit. We gain our greatest learning through conscious thought, but at our critical moments we achieve our greatest actions through our unconscious thought. Tuning in is a process of conscious learning, leading to unconscious habit. The more we play the same game, the better we get at that game. Where do we experience flow? Is it a pattern or a habit? Is it conscious or unconscious? Hidden in the very centre of our brains, (above the cerebellum and the basal ganglia) lies the pineal gland - about the size of a pea. The pineal gland, which controls our melatonin levels, looks after our sense of rhythm with nature, synchronizing our internal biorhythms with nature’s cycles.
This tiny pea in the unconscious, automatic part of our brain has been recognized for thousands of years as the doorway to our flow.
Oddly enough, despite being wrapped away in the unconscious centre of our brain it is light sensitive. In Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, since long before the medical function of the pineal gland was known, it has been referred to as the “third eye”. Indian tradition links the ajna chakra (sixth chakra) to the pineal gland. Ajna translates in Sanskrit to “command”. Whereas the base chakras each relate to a different element, the sixth chakra relates to time, and insight through ‘higher knowing’. The Ancient Greeks believed the pineal gland was our connection to higher thought; Descartes called it “the seat of the soul.” The “third eye” became a sign of divinity, or “heavenly eye” in China, the “eye of Shiva” in India, the “eye of Ra” in Egypt (the Sun God - the sun symbolizing gold in alchemy). Combined with the pyramid, a symbol of the trinity and the divine, it became the “all-seeing eye” which we now find on the back of every American dollar bill.
How do we know when we are in our flow? On the one hand, flow is our path of least resistance. At a deeper level, flow is a well-known state that people who become totally immersed in an activity they have mastered, whether a sport or their passion, can find themselves in. When we are in our life flow, we can access this flow state more easily. When we are in it, we change the way we experience time.
The conscious brain experiences time, while the unconscious brain appears to take little notice of it. Jung observed that dreams occur outside of time, with no past, present or future. When we operate in our unconscious, time appears to disappear. When we are in our flow, we experience time quite differently. On the one hand, time seems to fly, as we operate largely from our unconscious. Yet we can also slow time down almost at will, as our conscious mind is freed up to live entirely in the moment. When we are in our flow, quite amazingly, it feels like we can control time.
“Wealth is controlled time.”
- Buckminster Fuller
We have all had an experience when “time flies”. This is when we are doing something we love, our unconscious mind is operating and our conscious mind is at rest. We have also all had the experience when we can “slow time down” – especially at critical moments when you are entirely in the moment, and are able to recount every step of the instant. What exactly is it that makes time appear so relative?
Deepak Chopra, in his book “Synchrodestiny”, recounts: “The physical world is made up of nothing but information contained in energy vibrating at different frequencies. The reason we don’t see the world as a huge web of energy is that it is vibrating far too fast. There is an analogy that illustrates this point. Scientists know that it takes a snail about three seconds to register light. So imagine that a snail was watching me, and that I left the room, robbed a bank, and came back in three seconds. As far as the snail was concerned, I never left the room. I could take her to court and she would provide the perfect alibi. For the snail, the time that I was gone from the room would fall into one of those gaps between the frames of flickering existence. Her sense of continuity would simply not register the gap.”
“So the sensory experience of all living beings is a purely artificial perceptual construct created in the imagination. There is a Zen story in which two monks are looking at a flag that is waving in the wind. The first one says, “The flag is waving”. The second one says, “No, the wind is moving.” Their teacher comes over and they pose him the question, “Who’s right? I say the flag is moving. He says the wind is moving.” The teacher says, “You are both wrong. Only consciousness is moving.” As consciousness moves, it imagines the world into existence.”
Time is a phenomenon of the conscious. Flow is a phenomenon of the unconscious. When we are in the flow, we have plenty of space to slow time down. In the words of Ayrton Senna, one of Formula One’s most successful motor racers: “When I am competing against the watch and against other competitors, the feeling of expectation, of getting it done and doing the best and being the best, gives me a kind of power that, some moments when I am driving, actually detaches me completely from anything else as I am doing it. I can give a true example of this - Monte Carlo 1988, the last qualifying session. I was already on pole and I was going faster and faster. One lap after the other, quicker and quicker and quicker. I was at one stage just on pole, then by half a second and then one second and I kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my teammate with the same car. And I suddenly realized I was no longer driving the car consciously.”
“I was kind of driving by instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel. I was just going and going, more and more. I was way over the limit but still able to find more. Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realized that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down. I drove back to the pits and I didn’t want to go out any more that day. It frightened me because I realized I was well beyond my conscious understanding.”
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
- Douglas Adams
Sports psychologist, Dr Costas Karageorghis, adds, “Flow state is an optimal psychological experience. It’s when you’re functioning on auto-pilot when everything clicks into place and goes right.” Bill Russell, one of American basketball’s most prolific players, said in his biography, “At that special level all sorts of odd things happened.... It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken.” Professional archer, Tim Stickland tried to describe the process by saying, “Your conscious mind always wants to help you, but usually it messes you up. But you can’t just set it aside. You’ve got to get it involved. The thing you have to do is anchor it in technique. Then your unconscious mind, working with your motor memory, will take over the shooting for you.”
This may all sound quite fuzzy, so it is timely that we return to a quote by Albert Einstein, which he used to explain relative time: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”
When you are outside of your flow, time passes slowly and it is all-too-easy to miss your critical moments. When you are in the flow, time passes quickly, yet appears to stand still. You have the space to notice the critical moments and to slow down time when they occur.
“You have the sight now Neo.
You are looking at the world without time.”
- The Oracle, in the film “The Matrix”
Its All In Your Head by Roger Hamilton - To learn more about this author, visit Lisa McCarthy's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
How do we tune in to the rhythms around us? How do we synchronize our frequency with the changing frequencies in time? The four sides of the Wealth Dynamics Square match the ‘four sides’ of the brain: our frontal lobes (located on the front and top of the brain) are the centre of our creative thinking and intuition; our parietal and occipital lobes (located at the centre and back) are the centre of our sensory function; our left hemisphere is responsible for analysis, with one input at a time; and our right hemisphere is responsible for our relationships, with multiple inputs at a time.
“The brain is simply a collection of neurons and other cells,
gathered together in one place to simplify the wiring.”
- Helen Phillips, New Scientist
If our brains are all so similar in size, and if wealth appears to have little to do with intelligence or talent (with fortune eluding many of the most intelligent and talented amongst us), what is the process by which our brain turns success into a habit? All of our actions are based on either a conscious action, based on mental calculation, or unconscious action, based on reflex. Breathing is a reflex action, whereas intellectual argument is a calculated action. Yet when we see a great athlete in action, it is often a reflex action at a critical moment that wins the game.
“In the same way that I tend to make up my mind about people within thirty seconds of meeting them, I also make up my mind about a business proposal within thirty seconds and whether it excites me.”
- Richard Branson
In 1997, researchers at John Hopkins and the University of Maryland using a PET scanner found that we all learn new skills through our outer cortex, but then in repetition these physical skills are stored and accessed through the inner brain, within the cerebellum. Conscious thought operates on the outer layer of the brain. We are masters of pattern recognition and we experience the world by comparing our experiences to the patterns formed by our past history. This is where we conduct our conscious thought. Yet within the centre of our brains, we conduct our unconscious thought.
It was only in October 2005 that a study at MIT found the location where our habits are stored: the basal ganglia, located next to the cerebellum in the inner brain. They found through a series of experiments that at critical moments when a familiar situation was encountered, a lost habit could be automatically re-activated from within our unconscious.
Dr Ann Graybiel, Professor of Neuroscience at MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, said: “It is as though somehow, the brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right habit cues come back. This situation is familiar to anyone who is trying to lose weight or to control a well-engrained habit. Just the sight of a piece of chocolate cake can reset all those good intentions.”
Our actions are fired much faster by the more primitive, unconscious inner brain, responsible for our automatic actions, than by the outer, conscious brain, responsible for pattern recognition or memory. But to ‘program’ our habits at the centre, we need to first create patterns through our experience. To know and not to do is not yet to know.
We learn to drive a car consciously by using our cerebral cortex, until it becomes an unconscious process accessed through the cerebellum and basal ganglia. A footballer learns through practice but scores in the game through instinct and habit. We gain our greatest learning through conscious thought, but at our critical moments we achieve our greatest actions through our unconscious thought. Tuning in is a process of conscious learning, leading to unconscious habit. The more we play the same game, the better we get at that game. Where do we experience flow? Is it a pattern or a habit? Is it conscious or unconscious? Hidden in the very centre of our brains, (above the cerebellum and the basal ganglia) lies the pineal gland - about the size of a pea. The pineal gland, which controls our melatonin levels, looks after our sense of rhythm with nature, synchronizing our internal biorhythms with nature’s cycles.
This tiny pea in the unconscious, automatic part of our brain has been recognized for thousands of years as the doorway to our flow.
Oddly enough, despite being wrapped away in the unconscious centre of our brain it is light sensitive. In Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, since long before the medical function of the pineal gland was known, it has been referred to as the “third eye”. Indian tradition links the ajna chakra (sixth chakra) to the pineal gland. Ajna translates in Sanskrit to “command”. Whereas the base chakras each relate to a different element, the sixth chakra relates to time, and insight through ‘higher knowing’. The Ancient Greeks believed the pineal gland was our connection to higher thought; Descartes called it “the seat of the soul.” The “third eye” became a sign of divinity, or “heavenly eye” in China, the “eye of Shiva” in India, the “eye of Ra” in Egypt (the Sun God - the sun symbolizing gold in alchemy). Combined with the pyramid, a symbol of the trinity and the divine, it became the “all-seeing eye” which we now find on the back of every American dollar bill.
How do we know when we are in our flow? On the one hand, flow is our path of least resistance. At a deeper level, flow is a well-known state that people who become totally immersed in an activity they have mastered, whether a sport or their passion, can find themselves in. When we are in our life flow, we can access this flow state more easily. When we are in it, we change the way we experience time.
The conscious brain experiences time, while the unconscious brain appears to take little notice of it. Jung observed that dreams occur outside of time, with no past, present or future. When we operate in our unconscious, time appears to disappear. When we are in our flow, we experience time quite differently. On the one hand, time seems to fly, as we operate largely from our unconscious. Yet we can also slow time down almost at will, as our conscious mind is freed up to live entirely in the moment. When we are in our flow, quite amazingly, it feels like we can control time.
“Wealth is controlled time.”
- Buckminster Fuller
We have all had an experience when “time flies”. This is when we are doing something we love, our unconscious mind is operating and our conscious mind is at rest. We have also all had the experience when we can “slow time down” – especially at critical moments when you are entirely in the moment, and are able to recount every step of the instant. What exactly is it that makes time appear so relative?
Deepak Chopra, in his book “Synchrodestiny”, recounts: “The physical world is made up of nothing but information contained in energy vibrating at different frequencies. The reason we don’t see the world as a huge web of energy is that it is vibrating far too fast. There is an analogy that illustrates this point. Scientists know that it takes a snail about three seconds to register light. So imagine that a snail was watching me, and that I left the room, robbed a bank, and came back in three seconds. As far as the snail was concerned, I never left the room. I could take her to court and she would provide the perfect alibi. For the snail, the time that I was gone from the room would fall into one of those gaps between the frames of flickering existence. Her sense of continuity would simply not register the gap.”
“So the sensory experience of all living beings is a purely artificial perceptual construct created in the imagination. There is a Zen story in which two monks are looking at a flag that is waving in the wind. The first one says, “The flag is waving”. The second one says, “No, the wind is moving.” Their teacher comes over and they pose him the question, “Who’s right? I say the flag is moving. He says the wind is moving.” The teacher says, “You are both wrong. Only consciousness is moving.” As consciousness moves, it imagines the world into existence.”
Time is a phenomenon of the conscious. Flow is a phenomenon of the unconscious. When we are in the flow, we have plenty of space to slow time down. In the words of Ayrton Senna, one of Formula One’s most successful motor racers: “When I am competing against the watch and against other competitors, the feeling of expectation, of getting it done and doing the best and being the best, gives me a kind of power that, some moments when I am driving, actually detaches me completely from anything else as I am doing it. I can give a true example of this - Monte Carlo 1988, the last qualifying session. I was already on pole and I was going faster and faster. One lap after the other, quicker and quicker and quicker. I was at one stage just on pole, then by half a second and then one second and I kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my teammate with the same car. And I suddenly realized I was no longer driving the car consciously.”
“I was kind of driving by instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel. I was just going and going, more and more. I was way over the limit but still able to find more. Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realized that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down. I drove back to the pits and I didn’t want to go out any more that day. It frightened me because I realized I was well beyond my conscious understanding.”
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
- Douglas Adams
Sports psychologist, Dr Costas Karageorghis, adds, “Flow state is an optimal psychological experience. It’s when you’re functioning on auto-pilot when everything clicks into place and goes right.” Bill Russell, one of American basketball’s most prolific players, said in his biography, “At that special level all sorts of odd things happened.... It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken.” Professional archer, Tim Stickland tried to describe the process by saying, “Your conscious mind always wants to help you, but usually it messes you up. But you can’t just set it aside. You’ve got to get it involved. The thing you have to do is anchor it in technique. Then your unconscious mind, working with your motor memory, will take over the shooting for you.”
This may all sound quite fuzzy, so it is timely that we return to a quote by Albert Einstein, which he used to explain relative time: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”
When you are outside of your flow, time passes slowly and it is all-too-easy to miss your critical moments. When you are in the flow, time passes quickly, yet appears to stand still. You have the space to notice the critical moments and to slow down time when they occur.
“You have the sight now Neo.
You are looking at the world without time.”
- The Oracle, in the film “The Matrix”
Its All In Your Head by Roger Hamilton - To learn more about this author, visit Lisa McCarthy's Website.
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David AchesonDavid Acheson is the founder of DCJA Consultancy. DCJA Consultancy is a management consultancy business specialising in B2B sales consultancy. They offer bespoke and packaged sales consultancy including Sales Optimisation Review, Interim Sales Management, Sales & Marketing Review, 1:1 Sales & Management Staff Analysis, Management Training, Solution Sales Training, Creation of New Pay Plan, KPI's, run Customer Feedback Campaigns, assist with Recruitment, Coaching, Appraisals and set up Strategic Marketing Campaigns. David spent his early career in accountancy and then moved into sales in 1982, working in Office Equipment, IT, Advertising, Training, Outsourcing and Consultancy. He has held many Senior Positions in SMBs and Global Organisations including Head of Sales Operations & Head of Business Development. His knowledge, skills and great experience of the Sales Industry has led to David making keynote speeches and running educational sessions to key businesses through organisations including The Chamber of Commerce and Business Link. - Visit David Acheson's Website |
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