Researchers have long sought a factor that can trigger the brain’s ability to learn – and perhaps recapture the “sponge-like” quality of childhood. Neuroscientists at Children’s Hospital Boston report that they’ve identified such a factor, a protein called Otx 2. Otx2 helps a key type of cell in the cortex to mature, initiating a critical period–a window of heightened brain plasticity, when the brain can readily make new connections.

And where does this protein come from? Interestingly enough, it is developed in the cornea. Basically, when the eye opens and is functional, it tells the brain to start receiving data and learning.

“The eye is telling the brain when to become plastic, rather than the brain developing on its own clock,” says Hensch, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and at Harvard University’s Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology. In essence, the eye is telling the brain, “The eyes are ready and seeing properly — you can rewire now.”

That finding is very significant to Rapid Eye Technicians because it may help explain the phenomenon that occurs when their clients blink their eyes rapidly in response to the instruction given them by their technician.

As of yet, no study has determined that rapid eyelid blinking can generate the Otx 2 protein identified by the researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston. However, given the anecdotal evidence of thousands of clients reporting significant change in their lives after RET sessions, I feel confident in suggesting that perhaps the basic RET process of rapid eyelid blinking, eye movement, and strong directional languaging, affects a release of Otx 2 and a triggering of the brain into rewiring plasticity.

“The nervous system is recycling an embryonic factor to induce brain plasticity,” says Hensch.

As the brain is triggered into rewiring mode by the rapid blinking process, suggestions given by the technician by way of direct commands to “release” old programming followed by instructions to rewire in a new frame (called “reframing”) offers the client the best conditions for setting real change into their brain. As the brain rewires, so does conscious perception – and eventually subconscious underlying belief.

Article adapted and commented upon from original press release.

“Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories.” (Karl Szpunar, lead author of a recent study on the relationship between memory and future thought and a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.)

Suicidally depressed people “don’t remember particularly what happened last month and they can’t really tell you much of anything about what they envision happening next week.” (Szpunar)

What happens when many of your memories are of traumatic events? Might that mean your future thoughts will also be trauma filled? Or maybe you don’t recall things because of drug-related memory loss. Or perhaps your childhood has become amnesic due to childhood illness or psychological issues.

We tend to live out our future thoughts in the present – something like self-fulfilling prophecies. Much of that is due to our self-image or sense of identity. Traumatic events – particularly those that occur repeatedly – tend to taint our self-image. Memory loss as part of trauma or other issues can leave us with no future – a situation in which suicide seems plausibly logical.

So it seems to me we have a double-whammy – two major parts of us working against us. When we want to achieve something important to us, we are faced with interference from our tainted memories and future thoughts. I think that just plain sucks!

What can you do about it? How can you lift the onus off your back?

Well, I hope it’s fairly obvious.

Have or make better memories!

“How can I change things that happened to me?” you might ask…

And I’d answer that you are remembering YOUR interpretation of what happened to you – rather than what happened to you. Memories are based on PERCEPTION rather than reality.

Perception is made up of many elements of mind and body. For traumatic events, your body gets involved in memory in a special way – it remembers how it felt and behaved during the traumatic event and uses that “memory” to build future thought, including motivation and belief in success – as well as automatic behavior.

Perception is malleable – changeable. You can literally mold memory by changing your interpretation of your perceptions.

That’s why I recommend sessions of Rapid Eye Technology. RET activates central brain areas responsible for memory and can release the negative energies associated with traumatic memories. You can literally change your memories – and thus your future thought – and your future.

Change your perception of the past and you can take charge of your future.

A study shows that the senses of "hearing and sight are deeply intertwined" - as they are in Rapid Eye Technology.

The process of Rapid Eye Technology marries visual perception of rapid motion with rapid emotion-laden auditory input to affect an emotional release. The technique has proven successful for many clients seeking relief from emotional troubles and for those seeking to improve themselves in a number of areas.

Another study on the relationship between visual and auditory channels used in RET has emerged from UCLA.

“Most of us understand that smell affects taste. But people tend to think that what they see is what they see and what they hear is what they hear.”

The findings of a study at UCLA, published by the American Psychological Assn, concludes,

“…that, even at a non-conscious level, visual and auditory processes are not so straightforward,” says cognitive neuroscientist and study co-author Robyn Kim. “Perception is actually a very complex thing affected by many factors.”

 

“This study shows that at least in regards to perception of moving objects, hearing and sight are deeply intertwined, to the degree that even when sound is completely irrelevant to the task, it still influences the way we see the world,” Ladan Shams, a UCLA professor of psychology says.

The relationship between sight and hearing is, indeed, a complex one. Both senses are tightly connected to the emotional centers in the brain. The UCLA study shows just how tightly entwined sight and hearing are – similar to the close relationship between taste and smell.

Theory behind Rapid Eye Technology holds that because of the very close relationship between sight and hearing, and their proximity to emotional content, they make perfect avenues for emotional release. However, using only one sense without addressing the other, does only half the job.

Ref: Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. (2011, December 5). “Sound And Vision Linked In Perception Of Moving Objects.”

3-part strategy for keeping the current belief system stable, safe, and secure:

1. It (life) is as it is and – [belief system needing protection against change]

2. I can’t change it (life) because – [initial protection layer - cause]

*I’ll die (or someone else will die) [ultimate physical fear - result]

*I’m too afraid [based on predictions leading to "I'll die" - result]

*It’s impossible [based on assumption that if I do, "I'll die" - result]

3. Because – [justification - kills desire for change]

Examples:

Life is as it is and I can’t change it because:

I’ll die (or someone else will die) because—

I’ll be alone…
Nobody will like me any more…
I won’t be able to make a living…
I’ll starve to death…
The pain will be too great…
I’ll deprive them of what they need…
I don’t have the answers I [they] need…

I’m too afraid because —

It might come back again later…
I’ve failed at this before so I’ll just fail again…
I’ll be out of control…
I’m too old, too young, too sick, too ugly, too tall, too short, too…
I might be wrong…
I might be right…
It won’t work for me…
I’ll get hurt…
Someone I care about will be hurt…
I’ll lose something or someone I care about…

It’s impossible because —

It’s not my fault…
This is the right/only way (or the way it’s always been)…
It’s in my nature…
I’ve always been this way…
I’ve got a really good reason…
I’m not really doing that (denial)…
It’s in my genes (DNA, hereditary, parents)…
No matter how hard I try, it just won’t work…

Another study, this time from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, demonstrates that memories – most particularly long-term fear memories – are encoded when they first happen and then again whenever we re-store those memories. There is a short period of time in which the brain must chemically “prepare” and then “store” the memory. Whenever we bring the memory back to mind, it must go through the same process to re-store it in the brain. In both of these labile phases, the memory is vulnerable to change.

This research strongly suggests that memories are not, therefore, permanent structures in the brain. Their emotional content can be removed by interrupting the labile phase of long-term memory storage.

I wrote about the brain’s file cabinet in another post (Click here to read). Basically, the brain requires a chemical to access memories and to code them back after accessing them. It’s as though we take each memory, like a file, out of the long-term memory cabinet, close the cabinet, look at the file, use it, then open the cabinet again to put the file back in. If I understand Kindt’s research correctly, interrupting that process at the “putting back in” phase can, in theory, stop the perpetuation of the effects of fear memories by eliminating the fear in the memories.

According to the Universiteit van Amsterdam study by Merel Kindt, et al, published on 15 February 2009 on the website of Nature Neuroscience as an Advance Online Publication, chemically (using propranolol) interrupting the fear memory labile phase caused human subjects to lose their fear responses while retaining their memory of events connected to them.

I contend that without using propranolol it may be possible to bring forth an emotionally charged memory, deflate it of emotional energy, and then re-encode it back into long-term memory – without the emotional element attached. I’ve seen this process thousands of times in Rapid Eye Technology sessions and in my own work with clients complaining of irrational fears of all kinds.

My hope is that some ingenious scientist with the proper laboratory setup might experiment with more than Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that was mentioned in the study article and look at the many types of alternative therapies around. Certainly, with the basic structure of the study in place, substituting an injection of propranolol with a technique like Rapid Eye Technology or Emotional Freedom Technique or hypnosis could easily be done and results scientifically observed and measured.

Study resource:  Merel Kindt, Marieke Soeter and Bram Vervliet at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research

Dark chocolate – good for stress? Yes! Good for you? Maybe not so much.

Maybe. Maybe not!

A recent article by the American Chemical Society (ACS) purports to extol the virtues of dark chocolate as a possible cure for stress. Apparently there is some substance to their study as it is getting plenty of press. Maybe that’s because we Westerners do like chocolate – and having a report that substantiates our appetite for the sweet confection adds to its reasonableness as a snack for us stressed-out folks.

Although it is nice that 1.4 oz of dark chocolate a day can significantly reduce stress over a two week period, it’s also true that “nobody can each just one!”

Let’s face it, some of us like chocolate A LOT – so much so that we might find it difficult to cut back to 1.4 oz per day!

I think it’s a bit early to start patting ourselves on the back for eating what is good for us each time we reach for the bonbons.

There are better ways to de-stress than to add to a chocaholic addiction. I recommend Rapid Eye Technology and self-hypnosis for de-stressing. Neither of them will add to an addiction or make you get fat for taking them…

Click here to read ACS Press Release

Study Source:
“Metabolic Effects of Dark Chocolate Consumption on Energy, Gut Microbiota, and Stress-Related Metabolism in Free-Living Subjects”
- Journal of Proteome Research

Patterns – it’s the stuff of life. We don’t perceive reality – we literally create it with our assumptions – based on our perception of patterns. We assume a pattern as soon as we “guess” that one exists. After that, we tend to “fill in the blanks” rather than test our hypothesis (our “guess”).

To illustrate my point, consider the following pattern:

1, 2, 3…

Can you predict the next number? Of course you can. You assume it is 4. That’s because you perceive a familiar pattern. But, what if it is not 4. What if it is 5 instead? Is the pattern broken? Maybe – unless you can perceive a new pattern, you will not be able to predict the next or the next number.

Prediction is how we survived on the plains 200,000 years ago when we were considered food by many of the then existing fauna. Correct predictions brought about survival. Incorrect predictions often brought about death. Over the course of millions of years of evolution, prediction has become so ingrained in humans as to make it invisible to us.

We anticipate just about everything – and tend to avoid surprises.

Pattern recognition can get us into some trouble at times, too. Particularly when we recognize one pattern when we are faced with another. Or if we perceive a pattern but don’t go back and check our “guess” against prevailing evidence to the contrary.

People like to be right – and we tend to defend our perceptions vehemently. “I’m right!” Further, once we have established a recognition of a pattern, we tend to back it up with supportive evidence so we can justify our rightness (sometimes called “righteousness”) and tend to avoid or ignore evidence to the contrary (called the Confirmation Bias).

As part of our competitive human nature, we want to be FIRST to be right – so we snap to a judgment as soon as we perceive a pattern – sometimes BEFORE we know the pattern for sure. And when no pattern is apparent, we CREATE one based on our past experiences (patterns of sensory interpretation) and how we are feeling in the moment.

One of our most interesting human characteristics is the need to save face. Most people are willing to go to extremes to save face – to avoid embarrassment or exposure. When we fail to correctly recognize a pattern in our life – like when we jumped to an incorrect conclusion and perceived someone as being angry with us when they were not, for example – we immediately go to work to keep ourselves from losing face in the eyes of others (and ourselves). It’s called rationalization. Sometimes even going to great lengths to make sure the pattern we perceive is carried out – even against overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

What would life be like if you could be okay just being you? How smoothly would life work for you if you did not need to protect yourself from illusory enemies? How happy would you be every day of your life if you no longer needed to fight for your “rights”?

How can you beat 2 million years of human evolution? It’s in our DNA for pity’s sake!

And that is the answer to the quandary! It’s in our DNA!

Seek a RET technician willing to work with you on your Inner Child issues. I recommend RET technicians because they have been especially trained to assist you in this way. Using your time line, seek out those early times in your life when you were faced with “Why!” -

“Why did you do that?”
“Why did you do this?”
“Why did you spill your milk?”
“Why did you write on the wall with crayons?”
“Why aren’t you more careful?”
etc., etc., etc…

Then go back and rekindle that pre-three-year-old ability to be truthful, honest, bold, and innocent. Find the child within you who holds the keys to your courage – the courage to say you were wrong – the courage to face the music – the courage to listen when you feel hurt. It takes courage to accept loss of face. It takes real courage to let go of your rightness (righteousness) and be accepting and open when your pattern recognition software within deems it unsafe to do so.

When she entered hypnosis, her eyes became glazed and her blinking rate was significantly reduced.

A study by an international team of researchers focused on a healthy adult woman who is known to be highly susceptible to hypnosis. Specifically, her eye movements during hypnotic and waking state were measured with a special eye tracking device.

When she entered hypnosis, her eyes became glazed and her blinking rate was significantly reduced. Even more importantly, hypnosis induced dramatic reduction in eye movements that are beyond volitional control in healthy adults. None of thirty tested control subjects could mimic these changes in eye movement patterns.

Eyelid blinking and eye movement DO matter – and can be used to indicate levels of hypnotic induction. Further, it may be possible to induce the hypnotic state via eyelid blinking and eye movement (the reverse position).

In a Spongebob Squarepants cartoon, Spongebob gets up one morning and thinks he’ll create a fantastic dessert for himself. Unfortunately, his choice of ingredients cause him to have horrific halitosis (bad breath). Spongebob proceeds to go outside, where he meets several people, all of whom scream and run away from him as soon as he opens his mouth and says, “Hello.”

His conclusion – “I must be terribly ugly!”

Based on his erroneous conclusion, he weighs all evidence only in light of his conclusion (scotoma) – and discounting evidence to the contrary. Every experience he encounters only tends to strengthen his belief that he is ugly rather than stinky. His scotoma causes him to feel less and less self-confident until he at last introverts and avoids others.

Spongebob’s close friend, Patrick, who as a starfish, has no nose, can’t smell the bad breath and so assumes his friend is correct in his assumption that he is ugly. Together, Spongebob and Patrick attempt to overcome the “ugliness” through a series of humorous, yet reasonable, methods. They try positive affirmations, “I’m ugly and I’m proud!” etc. Again, all their efforts are aimed at correcting what they believe to be the fundamental problem – that Spongebob is ugly.

At long last Patrick tries some of Spongebob’s “dessert” and finds that he, too, has become “ugly.” Everyone runs away from them whenever they open their mouths. When Patrick then speaks to Spongebob and Spongebob gets a whiff of the odorous mouth, he finally gets it that he’s not ugly – his breath stinks – and together Spongebob and Patrick celebrate the fact that “we stink!”

This is a fine example of what happens when we make an erroneous conclusion from the data we observe. Compounding the problem of erroneous conclusions is that we make many of our life-determining decisions based on data we evaluated and made conclusions on when we were VERY YOUNG or in our infancy – a time in our lives when we were physically and psychologically poorly equipped to make such conclusions. Further, we did not have sufficient data to make such life-determining conclusions. And so we find ourselves living our lives based on erroneous conclusions of ambiguous data (life experience) we made long ago – so long ago we don’t recall them – but we are living them out nevertheless.

So, what do we do about it? How do I become aware of that of which I am unaware. I’m even so unaware that I’m unaware that I’m unaware. Egad!

Here’s what I recommend:

Develop a healthy skepticism about your own decisions and decision making processes. Question yourself often, “Am I sure about this?” “Could I be wrong about this/that/them/you/me/us?” etc.

LISTEN to those closest to you. Consider criticism as golden nuggets of awareness about that which you are unaware. Spouses especially are goldmines for such info. Especially if you feel threatened – the surest sign that gold is afoot. Defending yourself against your loved ones shuts the doors and windows of awareness.

LISTEN to your “enemies” – they will tell you what you don’t want to hear. As such, they can be your best friends – at least when it comes to information about you. You don’t have to give in or give up – just pay attention. “Could what they say about me be true – to some extent?”

Speak the words, “Thank you” to those you feel are attacking you. Be genuine – no sarcasm or brushing off. They are doing you a favor – it’s just good manners to show appreciation. Besides, it shifts your thinking mode from emotion to reason – a good thing during communication.

Deal with your emotional triggers. I recommend you get help with them – to avoid missing those that hide from you. Seek out a therapist who works holistically – treating the entire being – someone skilled in rooting out those hidden emotional “secrets” that come forward when triggered.

Chronic stress kills.

According to Nicole Vogelzangs, PhD, of VU University Medical Center in The Netherlands and lead author of a study on the subject, high levels of the stress hormone cortisol strongly predicts cardiovascular death among persons with and without pre-existing cardiovascular disease. “Previous studies have suggested that cortisol might increase the risk of cardiovascular mortality, but until now, no study had directly tested this hypothesis,” said Vogelzangs. “The results of our study clearly show that cortisol levels in a general older population predict cardiovascular death, but not other causes of mortality.”

Chronic stress induces chronic high levels of cortisol in the bloodstream, which in turn predicts cardiovascular death. Chronic stress kills.

“Cortisol is an important component of the stress system of the human body but in higher concentrations can be harmful,” said Vogelzangs. “Our study shows that older persons with high levels of cortisol have an increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. This finding significantly adds evidence to the belief that cortisol can be damaging to the cardiovascular system.”

High blood cortisol levels should indicate immediate work on creating an effective strategy for calming down in the face of stress.

Especially for those over 45, I recommend Rapid Eye Technology, Emotional Freedom Technique, Hypnotherapy, and/or Yoga to calm the body and mind; then Skills for Life training from the Rapid Eye Institute to learn how to deal with daily stress to lower blood cortisol levels and keep them low. All these techniques and processes may be used right along with medications. You’ll probably want to work with your physician to make sure you’re not over-medicating as you progress with your stress reduction strategy.

To test your cortisol level lowering strategy and to monitor your progress, check your blood cortisol levels regularly and work with your physician for best results.

This is a life-or-death matter – your life-or-death. If you have chronically high levels of cortisol in your bloodstream, calm down! Maybe you’ll live longer.

Study Source:
Other researchers working on the study include: Aartjan Beekman and Brenda Penninx of VU University Medical Center in The Netherlands; Yuri Milaneschi and Luigi Ferrucci of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, Md.; and Stefania Bandinelli of Azienda Sanitaria Firenze in Italy. The article, “Urinary cortisol and six-year risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality,” appears in The Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).