Does Stress Damage Your Brain?

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Military combat often causes extreme stress, leaving many diagnosed with the psychiatric condition of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. PTSD is associated with several brain structure and function abnormalities. “Although it is tempting to conclude that these abnormalities were caused by the traumatic event, it is also possible that they were pre-existing risk factors that increased the risk of developing PTSD upon the traumatic event’s occurrence,” explains researcher Roger Pitman. Drs. Kasai and Yamasue and their colleagues at the Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo in Tokyo, Japan, sought to examine this association in a new study published in the March 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry.

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Rumor Brain Game

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How much do you trust your senses?

How much do you trust your senses?

Remember the game you played as a kid where someone came up with a story and whispered it to his/her neighbor; then the person receiving the story would in turn whisper the story to the next person; and so on and on around a circle or group of people until it came to the last person. In every case, the story told by the first person was materially different from that told by the last person to hear it. That’s because each person would introduce an error (in some cases many errors) into the story. The more complex the initial story, the wilder the outcome story.

According to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization at the University of Gottingen and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Gottingen, this chaotic messaging system is exactly how the cerebral cortex of our brains communicates. Further, they discovered that the information each neuron receives is lost rather quickly after receiving it. And, there appears to be no error correction system. In effect, the cortex is dealing only with occasional quick snapshots rather than a continuous input of sensory data and those snapshots are distorted by the cortex’s chaotic communication system. This could explain sensory illusions…

Approximately one bit of information disappears per active neuron per second. “This extraordinarily high deletion rate came as a huge surprise to us”, says Wolf. It appears that information is lost in the brain as quickly as it can be “delivered” from the senses. (Out Of Mind In A Matter Of Seconds, Medical News Today, 25 Jan 2011 – 3:00 PST)

My interpretation of the data is that we are mostly NOT sensing our world. We are taking short snapshots of it – the rest we make up!

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Eliciting Emotions in 3D

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Emotion is 3 dimensional.

Emotion is 3 dimensional. Eliciting emotions in a 3D way mimics this.

According to a study out of Yale University School of Medicine, published in Biological Psychiatry, human emotion can be thought of as three distinct systems:

  1. attention (“I feel [emotion]“)
  2. categorization/judgment (“good”, “bad”, etc.)
  3. intensity (“how bad” or “how good”?)

“[Our] findings suggest that self-reports of emotion – while seemingly simple – are supported by a network of brain regions that together take us from an affecting event to the words that make our feelings known to ourselves and others. As such, these results have important implications for understanding both the nature of everyday emotional life and how the ability to understand and talk about our emotions can break down in clinical populations.” (Ochsner)

It occurs to me that eliciting emotions is central to most emotion-based change therapies, like Rapid Eye Technology (RET) and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and therefore might find a 3D model of emotional reporting useful.

Basically, the clinician might elicit in this fashion:

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Seven Stages of Projection to Celebration

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Why leave your happiness up to someone else when you can account for it yourself?

Why leave your happiness up to someone else when you can account for it yourself?

Sometimes we get caught up in the blame game. We are so sure that it is someone else’s fault that we are poor, or angry, or left out, or disrespected, or unappreciated, or ugly, or fat, or clumsy, or afraid – we are the victim of somebody else’s bad behavior. Because we are the victim of somebody else’s actions, someone else’s mistakes, we are helpless to change our circumstance and must take what comes our way.

Blaming makes us feel better temporarily, but somehow, blaming others never really satisfies us for long because blaming others never brings about a change of condition. After a while, we grow accustomed and maybe even addicted to the blame game.

You can only change that which you own. So long as you give your power for change to another through blame, you are powerless to effect change. You will continue to be the victim of others to whom you have given your power.

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Could RET Improve Academic Performance?

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A study into the relationship between emotional intelligence and educational achievement, presented at The British Psychological Society’s Education Section Annual Conference, found that emotional intelligence predicts exam success. So, the answer to the question is – YES!

A significant relationship was found between boys’ and girls’ emotional intelligence and their SAT and GCSE English scores. Those with higher emotional intelligence scores fared significantly better than those with lower emotional intelligence scores.

What does that have to do with Rapid Eye Technology? Plenty!

Rapid Eye Technology, Emotional Freedom Technique, and Self-Hypnosis, are great for training teenagers how to manage their emotions – in other words, improving their emotional intelligence levels.

“Further detailed analysis of the results [of the studies] suggests that emotional intelligence may moderate the effects of IQ on academic achievement. Faced with failure, a student low on IQ but who is emotionally intelligent will be able to manage their emotions surrounding failure, reconcile poor performance and work to improve; a student low on IQ and low emotional intelligence may find failure more difficult to deal with, which undermines their academic motivation.”

Those students with better emotional management strategies in place are more likely to do better academically than their peers with fewer such inner resources.