Perhaps you already know that you have two hemispheres to your cortex. Although each hemisphere seems to govern certain types of thought patterns, they communicate with each other to such a degree that it is hard to discern their separate functions. However, by taking charge of those hemispheres you can take charge of your mood, your choices, and your communications – making it easier for you to function, achieve goals, study, interact, and communicate with yourself and others.

You don’t need to be a neurosurgeon or brain specialist to take charge of your brain. Just as you don’t have to understand how a computer works to make it work for you, you can obtain substantial benefit from your brain without having to understand how it works. You just need the right “software” a program you can run. And just as with your computer’s software, which program you run and what you input into the program can make quite a difference in the output you get.

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And what to do about them.

Based on the work of Aaron Beck and others, in Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, David Burns outlines 10 common mistakes in thinking, which he calls cognitive distortions.

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING – Also called Black and White Thinking – Thinking of things in absolute terms, like “always”, “every” or “never”. For example, if your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. Few aspects of human behavior are so absolute. Nothing is 100%. No one is all bad, or all good, we all have grades. To beat this cognitive distortion:
   • Ask yourself, “Has there ever been a time when it was NOT that way?” (all or nothing thinking does not allow exceptions so if even one exception can be found, it’s no longer “all” or “nothing”)
   • Ask yourself, “Never?” or “Always?” (depending upon what you are thinking)
   • Investigate the Best-Case vs Worst-Case Scenario NLP Meta program
2. OVERGENERALIZATION – Taking isolated cases and using them to make wide generalizations. For example, you see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat: “She yelled at me. She’s always yelling at me. She must not like me.”
   To beat this cognitive distortion:
   • Catch yourself overgeneralizing
   • Say to yourself, “Just because one event happened, does not necessarily
     mean I am (or you are or he/she is…[some way of being])”
   • Investigate the Big Chunk vs. Little Chunk NLP Meta program

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The dread of having something hanging over your head is too often worse than the thing that you are dreading…

In order to better understand how people make decisions when the outcomes are known to be unpleasant, a team of Emory neuroscientists led by Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine the areas of the brain that are activated when someone experiences dread. The study, which was supported by the National Institutes of Drug Abuse (NIDA), was published in the May 5, 2006 issue of the journal Science. The study was part of a research program in the growing field of neuroeconomics, an area in which neuroscience methods are being applied to economic questions.

“Most people don’t like waiting for an unpleasant outcome, and want to get it over with as soon as possible,” explains Dr. Berns, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. “The only explanation for this is that the dread of having something hanging over your head is worse than the thing that you are dreading. It is a commonplace experience, but standard economic models of decision-making don’t deal with this issue. So, we decided to take a biological approach and see what happens in the brain that might cause people to make such rash decisions.”

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Cause-effect relationship #1 – because you have come this far in life, you can achieve ANYTHING – poverty or riches, heavy or light, health or illness, whatever you truly wanted you have achieved.

Maybe you made some new year resolutions – expressing ways in which you would like to see your life change for the better. Maybe this will be the year you quit smoking, or get that raise, or lose that weight. Whatever it is, your first action is to NAME the change you want to make. This is the action part of the manifestation formula. You have done this part so often that you maybe now take it for granted – meaning you have become oblivious to it.

You are already taking action on what it is you really want – it’s automatic – you do it unconsciously. Based on your beliefs, you take action that is appropriate with what you accept as true – your beliefs. You don’t even have to think about or plan anything – you do it automatically. You don’t have to take specific action – just recognize that you already are [taking action].

Why, then, do you not get what you want? The truth is – you mostly DO get what you want (or at least are satisfied with). You just don’t recognize it – because you are so used to getting what you want from life.

If you continue to act (behaving) as you have acted in the past – based on what you believed to be true in the past – you will tend to continue to get what you have always gotten in the past. You’ll continue to take the appropriate action to achieve whatever it is that you have gotten in the past – you do those actions so well  by now that you are unconscious of them – you’re a master at doing whatever it is that you do to achieve what you are currently experiencing. How about that, boys and girls?!

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Directing a person’s eye movements or attention in specific patterns can also aid in solving complex problems.

A new study appearing in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, is the first to show that a person’s ability to solve a problem can be influenced by how he or she moves.

“Our manipulation [of the body] is changing the way people think,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras, who along with Vanderbilt University postdoctoral researcher Laura Thomas, conducted the study. “In other words, by directing the way people move their bodies, we are – unbeknownst to them - directing the way they think about the problem.”

“The results are interesting both because body motion can affect higher order thought, the complex thinking needed to solve complicated problems, and because this effect occurs even when someone else is directing the movements of the person trying to solve the problem,” Lleras said.

According to Lleras, this type of consciousness, “embodied cognition,” describes the link between body and mind in a new and insightful way.

“People tend to think that their mind lives in their brain, dealing in conceptual abstractions, very much disconnected from the body,” he said. “This emerging research is fascinating because it is demonstrating how your body is a part of your mind in a powerful way. The way you think is affected by your body and, in fact, we can use our bodies to help us think.”

In one experiment dealing with a problem in knot tying, subjects were more successful if they swung their arms than if they stretched their arms. “By making you swing your arms in a particular way, we’re activating a part of your brain that deals with swinging motions,” Lleras said. “That sort of activity in your brain then unconsciously leads you to think about that type of motion when you’re trying to solve the [knot tying] problem.”

According to Llares, previous studies have demonstrated that body movement can assist in learning and memory or can change a person’s perceptions or attitudes toward information.

Other studies by Lleras and his colleagues have shown that directing a person’s eye movements or attention in specific patterns can also aid in solving complex problems. This is the first study to show that directed movements of the body can, outside of conscious awareness, guide higher-order cognitive processing, he said.

“We view this as a really important new window into understanding the complexity of human thought,” Lleras said. “I guess another take-home message is this: If you are stuck trying to solve a problem, take a break. Go do something else. This will ensure that the next time you think about that problem you will literally approach it with a different mind. And that may help!”

Thomas and Lleras’ article in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review is titled “Swinging Into Thought: Directed Movement Guides Insight in Problem Solving.“