Bruce McNaughton, a professor of psychology and physiology, and his colleague David Euston have shown that, during sleep, the reactivated memories of real-time experiences are processed within the brain at a higher rate of speed. That rate can be as much as six or seven times faster, and what McNaughton calls "thought speed."

If you've had a similar experience, an imagery or concept can be transferred nearly instantly – 6-7 times faster than real-time. This means you can read a book at super speed (called speed reading). You can also do Rapid Eye Technology, which uses a rapid visual and auditory script and process.

Memory stores patterns of activity in modular form in the brain's cortex. Different modules in the cortex process different kinds of information — sounds, sights, tastes, smells, etc. The cortex sends these networks of activity to a region called the hippocampus. The hippocampus then creates and assigns a tag, a kind of temporary bar code, that is unique to every memory and sends that signal back to the cortex. Each module in the cortex uses the tag to retrieve its own part of the activity.

The brain uses this biological trick because there is no way for all of its neurons to connect with and interact with every other neuron. It is still an expensive task for the hippocampus to make all of those connections. The retrieval tags the hippocampus generates are only temporary until the cortex can carry a given memory on its own.

The temporary nature of this tagging system means you can quickly change your mind repeatedly, reinterpret memories, and supercharge learning. Can you read at 25000 words per minute? Yes you can! And your brain will help you do it.

Source: David R. Euston
University of Arizona

There’s just nothing quite like a good massage…

Thomas Gilovich, Cornell University professor of psychology and Travis J. Carter, Ph.D., also from Cornell, studied the relationship between spending and satisfaction with consumer purchases. They found, as is no surprise to many of my readers, is that spending on experiential purchases – like massage or hypnotherapy or Rapid Eye Technology – left consumers feeling happy with their spending choice – and that their happiness grew with time after their purchase in comparison to spending on material goods like flat screen TVs where spending felt good at first but quickly gave way to less happy feelings.

“Buyers’ remorse” often sets in after buying a material good. Consumers ruminate about better deals and more features they may have missed later. However, such feelings rarely come up after spending money on a massage or after doing a Rapid Eye Technology session. Quite the contrary, according to Gilovich and Carter -~ “Consumers found that satisfaction with ‘experiential purchases’ – from massages to family vacations – starts high and increases over time. In contrast, spending money on material things feels good at first, but actually makes people less happy in the end”

It’s fine to purchase items that you can enjoy with use – and, in fact, focusing on the enjoyment of use makes the purchase choice sweeter and so much better emotionally over time.

Still, there’s just nothing quite like a good massage…

Study Paper: “The Relative Relativity of Material and Experiential Purchases,” – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, American Psychological Association, January 2010.

The Three Amigos – left hemisphere, right hemisphere, senses – give us our sense of “reality”.

Your brain’s cortex is divided into two hemispheres – right and left. According to Orrin Devinsky, MD, professor of Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery and Director of the NYU Epilepsy Center at NYU Langone Medical Center, the right hemisphere of the brain dominates self recognition, emotional familiarity and ego boundaries. The job of the left hemisphere is to make sense out of sensual input and information from the right hemisphere – it is the story teller.

There is a complicated interaction between right hemisphere, left hemisphere, your senses, and the animal brain within you. Theories abound as to just how that interaction occurs. Recently, Dr. Devinsky conducted a review of many studies of hemispheric interaction in an attempt to better understand this interaction – focusing on right hemisphere lesions and left hemisphere delusions.

“…delusions result from the loss of these [right hemisphere] functions as well as the over activation of the left hemisphere and its language structures, that ‘create a story’, a story which cannot be edited and modified to account for reality. Delusions result from right hemisphere lesions, but it is the left hemisphere that is deluded.” Lesions in the right hemisphere can cause delusions as the left hemisphere goes to work making sense of distorted identity and emotional information it gets from the injured right hemisphere.

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

“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.

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A worker who seeks and gets help for psychological problems is more productive, better equipped, and a far more valuable company asset. So why the bias against therapy?

HealthDay/BusinessWeek reported a survey from the American Psychiatric Association that found: “More than 40 percent of the 1,129 respondents said their employer was supportive or extremely supportive of their workers seeking care for health concerns. However, the online survey also found that barriers persist for workers who said their workplace is unsupportive of employees seeking treatment, especially for mental health concerns.” Among those surveyed, 76 percent felt their work status would be damaged if they sought treatment for drug addiction, compared to “73 percent (who felt that way) for alcoholism, and 62 percent for depression, compared with 55 percent who thought seeking care for diabetes would affect their work status and 54 percent for heart disease” (Preidt, 1/31).

The problem, as I see it is a general public bias against those who seek help for mental health issues. I don’t see a quick fix for that.

One “work-around” -
For those providing therapy, I recommend telling clients/patients who come for sessions that they tell their friends and especially co-workers that they are doing “job enhancement” or “personal development” or “performance enhancement” work with a specialist or coach.

This is called a “reframe”. And it’s the truth!

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