For many years, I’ve wondered why the Rapid Eye Technology Release & Gather process affected the physical body so much. Most clients who experience R&G tend to have mild physical reactions to it – usually pleasant. In addition, most report experiencing visual “waves” – often quite pleasurable – during the process.

Now scientific evidence suggests that our brains process stimulus in wave patterns of excitation – like the “wave” cheer at a football stadium. This is very intriguing as it provides some scientific background for the phenomena often experienced by RET clients. Although this report is about the visual cortex, I see no reason why it could not be extended to other brain regions and functions.

Further, I believe the “brain wave patterns” described in this article could also be enhanced by RET processes including the RET “basic pattern” and the RET rapid eyelid blinking pattern. This is all very promising, imho.

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People who complain that they are more sensitive to sadness or frustration than others and report feeling “hurt” may be telling the truth.

There are approximately three billion base pairs (connections) in a strand of DNA. That represents a virtually infinite number of possible combinations. The variation between each of us, although nearly infinitesimally small, is so significant that no two of us in the world population of nearly 7 billion humans is exactly identical. Even identical twins are different from each other.

It is that small variation in each of us that is the result of and contributes to the evolution of the specie. In a study by UCLA researchers, publishing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Markus Heilig, Faculty Member for F1000 Biology, and Chief of the Laboratory of Clinical and Translational Studies at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Bethesda, MD, report that they have identified a genetic factor that causes some people to actually experience stronger physical sensations associated with emotions (in the study case, the emotion was rejection).

There is apparently a wide variation or spectrum associated with the feeling (physical sensations) of emotions. Therefore, some people who complain that they are more sensitive to sadness or frustration, for example, than others and report feeling emotionally “hurt” may be telling the literal truth.

Can these genetic factors be moderated through training or experience? What do you think? Are we “hard wired” – or can we significantly affect our emotional states in spite of genetic predisposition or genetic variations?

An abstract of the original paper, Variation in the micro-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) is associated with dispositional and neural sensitivity to social rejection is online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/19706472?dopt=Abstract&holding=f1000,f1000m,isrctn.

Spending time with a grandparent was found to equip adolescents with better social skills and fewer behavior problems.

“Grandparents are a positive force for all families but play a significant role in families undergoing difficulties,” said Shalhevet Attar-Schwartz, PhD, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “They can reduce the negative influence of parents separating and be a resource for children who are going through these family changes.”

The study appears in the February Journal of Family Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). The researchers found that children and adolescents whose parents have separated or divorced see their grandparents as confidants and sources of comfort. Spending time with a grandparent was found to equip adolescents with better social skills and fewer behavior problems, especially among those children living in single-parent or stepfamily households.

As in previous studies, this research found that grandchildren are closer to their maternal grandparents and closest to their maternal grandmothers.

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Red is the most effective at enhancing our attention to detail, while blue seems to work better at enhancing our ability to think creatively.

Which color enhances mental abilities? It depends on the context. A new University of British Columbia study finds that red is the most effective at enhancing our attention to detail, while blue seems to work better at enhancing our ability to think creatively.

Red and blue activate different unconscious motivations, says Rui (Juliet) Zhu, noting that color influences cognition and behavior through learned associations.

“Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution,” says Zhu, “The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.”

Blue, on the other hand, encourages us to think outside the box and be creative, says Zhu, noting that the majority of participants in her studies believed incorrectly that blue would enhance their performance on all cognitive tasks.

“Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquility,” says Zhu, who conducted the research with UBC PhD candidate Ravi Mehta. “The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory. Not surprisingly it is people’s favorite color.”

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Teenagers tend to pick up the “vibes” of their friends more strongly than do younger children or adults.

It is a well-studied and known phenomenon – teenagers pick up the “vibes” of their friends more strongly than do younger children or adults. During adolescence, we bond very closely to friends. We pick up on their hurts and joys, sharing them in a much more psychologically intimate way than at other times in our lives.

I believe we may also pick up our friends’ traumas and make them our own. More than once have I worked with a client reporting childhood, teen, or young adult trauma that later turned out to be “ghosts” – imaginings based on a friend’s childhood trauma introduced to the shared sensitivities of an intimate group of young friends.

In other words – a false memory. Still, a memory with all the power and influence of a real trauma. And I, as the clinician, treated the symptoms of that trauma as though the original trauma belonged to my client. My client “owned” it, so why not treat it as thought it belonged to my client? Made sense to me. The mind is unable to differentiate between real and imagined when it comes to trauma.

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