Brain 101 - How to Play the Brain Game for Fun and Profit

By Dr. Michael Hall

So you want to run your own brain? Good for you. What a wonderful objective! And so rare. Many people talk about running their own brain and taking charge of their own mind, but just watch them when criticized or insulted. They go to pieces. Let one of their closely held beliefs be questioned, and watch out. Sudden it becomes semantic reaction time. They explode with rage, anger, stress, fear, shock, etc. If they truly "run their own brains," how is it that they lack state management skills in the moments when managing one's reactions really counts?

Running our own brain, and thinking freely in independent ways apart from rehashing worn-out or spoon-fed thoughts necessitates several things. It necessitates that we develop mindfulness about our brains (or more accurately, our minds) so that we actually develop state management skills. It means we learn to play a new Game, The "Running My Own Brain" Game. So, with that in mind:
· What do you need to understand about brains to be able to run yours?
· Would you like to play the Brain Game?

SEVEN BRAIN FACTS
Here are seven things about your brain. They provide a description about how brains work. They also establish an understanding of the Game of Running Your Own Brain and so lead to the Rules of the Game.

1) Brains Follow Directions
Brains follow directions. They take the directions that you give them and they follow them.

"John, did you see that red, white and blue cat yesterday? Yes, red, white and blue -in fact, the American Flag colors were bright red, white, and blue. Someone in the neighborhood must have thought it would be a patriotic thing to do. Where did I see it? On Linda's yellow car. It was being chased by a pair of French Poodles across the greenbelt by the swimming pool. That was just before King Kong climbed to the top of the school and beat his chest at the circling plane."

Provide a little description and the brain goes to work representing the information on our internal mental screen. Like a movie director, brains use the information as instructions for our mental Cinema. This explains why the following are very important questions for our states:

· What directions are you giving your brain?

· What are the default instructions that you've learned to give your brain?
· What instructions did your parents or teachers provide you about yourself, life, others, etc.?
· How useful, ecological, healthy, balanced, valuable, true, etc. are those instructions?
· Do those instructions create empowering states for you?
· Would you want to give those instructions to your children?
· Do they map out an exciting and loving life?

Why are these questions so important? Because the quality of our lives is a function of the quality of the information processed by our brain. The quality of that information flows from the quality of its instructions. The most important thing you do in life then are the instructions that you give your brain. Are the instructions those that you would use to create a world-class movie?

Recently a young man wrote to me.
"I'm an extremely shy person. When I see a social situation, I avoid it because I say to myself that I'll have nothing to say and that I'll be a complete idiot because they will find me boring, then I'll feel depressed. So I just don't go. Every time I make a mistake, I feel stupid, then depressed. And that's what causes me to procrastinate. It's really stupid, and I know better, and I see it causing me to produce sub-optimally. I feel like these are insurmountable problems...."

I copied the words from the email, cut and pasted them back into my reply. I then asked him to step back from the words and view them as brain instructions.
"Just pretend for a moment that these are instructions for your brain. Are these ideas healthy or sick ones? Would you recommend this way of thinking? Suppose the most popular kid at the university thought this way. How much of a party would these instructions make his or her life?"

There's a principle in this. Namely, feed your brain toxic ideas and you enter into a toxic world. Your brain will go there because that's what brains do. Brains go places. Just this week I caught a Brain (thank God it wasn't mine) going to "Worst Case Scenario!" The person was talking about terrorism in the world. He then entertained unimaginable scenarios. Then he freaked out. Then he said, "This shouldn't happen!"
I can tell you, these instructions did not put him in a very resourceful state.

Brains use words, pictures, sounds, tones, volumes, smells, tastes, all kinds of things as the basis for swishing us places. Mention a word and off your brain goes. But where? It depends on your learning history, experiences, memories, imaginations, hopes, etc. Brains are phenomenal at linking things. They do so very, very quickly. Actually, this is one of the chief problems we have with our brains. The problem is not that they don't learn, but that they learn too quickly. It's just what they learn that often times is just not true or useful.

Brains are also incredible instruments that never shut down. Even in sleep, we dream as brain wave activity continues. This becomes a problem if we don't give the brain lots of interesting things to process. The stimulus hunger of brains will trigger them to play the old B-rated movies or hallucinate freely.

2) Brains Externalize Instructions
We can see a person's internal world of ideas and frames by noticing the person's external Games. External life reflects internal frames. The behavioral, speech, and action Games that we play on the outside are expressions of our internal frames of mind. They go together. Games and Rules of the Games.

The old proverb put it this way: "As a man thinks in his heart, so is he." The Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius put this yet another way:
"As thy thoughts are so will thy mind be also; for the soul takes it's coloring from thought."
"If you are pained by an external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you-but your judgment about it." (The Meditations, 160 AD).

Brains manifest internal representation into the external world so that we externalize our internal frames and representations. What does this mean? Namely, that our external world will only be as exciting, vibrant, dramatic, and powerful as our internal frames of mind. So, as you decorate your internal world of mind, imagination, and memory with hopes, desires, wonders, delights, etc., you alter the quality and content of the instructions that you give to your brain.

This brings up several excellent questions for those of us who want to run our own brain to create a quality life:
· What kind of images, sounds, words, sensations, etc. do you have running on the inside of your brain?
· What kind of internal movies are you showing in the Cinema of your Mind?
· Who does your interior decorating?
· Does your internal world of frames need some better interior decorating?

3) Brains Run on Representations
The cognitive and neuro-sciences have discovered that brains represent our external sensed experiences. It is not that we literally have an internal movie screen in our mind, yet it seems that we do. This phenomena of consciousness is how we experience thoughts and awarenesses. It seems that we internally recall what our home, car, work, friends, parents, dogs, etc. look like, sound like, smell like, feel like, taste like. This sensory awareness on the inside of our brain has led neuro-scientists to designate parts of the brain the visual cortex, auditory cortex, the cortex where we process smells, tastes, sensations, balance, etc.

Korzybski and others noted that we operate upon the world, not directly, but via a map of the world. In NLP, Bandler and Grinder revolutionized psychology by putting the foundation of thought in terms of the sensory representations systems and using these modalities of awareness as the first "languages" of the mind. This facet of running our own brain seems so simple, yet it is so profound.

If we picture a beautiful day with blue sky and billowy white clouds and a green grass lawn facing the white sands of a gorgeous ocean view and imagine feeling the warm ocean breeze blowing through our hair and the smell of the salt water and the sounds of children playing and enjoy our favorite drink while getting a neck and back massage from our special loved one ...

Well, it doesn't take long before our body and neurology responds to those representations as if they were instructions about how to feel. Because brains run on representations, the more expressive, vivid, dramatic, and sensory-specific, the easier it is for us to tell our brains where to go and what to feel. Then the screen play is clearer and easier to follow.

Our brains represent things as it were on a mental screen of the mind. It's like there's an internal movie playing and we fill in the sensory details of that movie. Of course, we do not play out everything in that Cinema. We can't. We can't even input all that comes in. Our eyes only scan a very narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our ears only receive a very narrow band of sound wave frequencies. So we have to be pretty selective, as a movie director, about what we play on our internal Cinema. Choose well. It's your brain.

4) Brains Transition In and Out of the Present Moment
With that last induction (three paragraphs above), did you leave where you are now and go somewhere else? If you didn't, perhaps you could use the words to do that. Try it out. Because we represent things, we can represent realities that are not immediately present and go there. This is the foundation of all day-dreaming, night-dreaming, fantasizing, learning, creativity, invention, thinking, conceptualizing, mathematizing, theorizing, etc. This is what we humans do best. We can leave our current situation and travel to distance places, times, and worlds.


We call this thinking. It's also hypnosis. It's also trance. It's many things: imagination, fantasy, creativity, and hallucination. This means that we are not stuck or limited to his present moment. We can represent things not present, never present, and even impossible things. What freedom of mind we have! It's a freedom of consciousness that's unique to our species. We have a consciousness that can transition from our current state to other states, hence the word "trance." Anytime we shift our awareness to something that is not part of our current awareness, we enter a trance state.

This means that most of our states of mind are trances. We mostly live in hypnotic states not sensory aware states in this present moment. Hypnosis is the norm, our default situation, not present time sensory acuity. We call hypnosis or trance "downtime" in NLP because we are down inside ourselves thinking, feeling, and experiencing other times, places, people, and ideas. We call present time sensory acuity "uptime" because we are "up" and noticing what our eyes see, ears hear, skin feels, etc.

"Hey, Tom! Tom, Earth to Tom!"
"What?"

Our brains love to zone out. Doesn't yours? It happens when you drive on long trips, it happens even when you drive to the grocery store. It happens when you wait in line, in an elevator, and when you're listening to a speech. Brains do that. It's no big deal. Well, it's not unless you have no guidance or control over it. Then it is a big deal. If you lack awareness of when you are present and when you're off on some mind-trip, then you are doing out-of-control hallucinating.

We all hallucinate. Those who do so mindfully and by choice are our greatest scholars, inventors, creators, designers, teachers, CEOs, etc. Those who don't do it by choice suffer from under-achieving and the ineffectiveness of not being able to manage their own mind. They don't run their own brains.

5) Brains Induce States
Brains put us into neurological states. They affect our physiology, breathing, movement, and internal chemistry. To work up a good mad, we only have to think angry thoughts of injustice and violation. We only have to think about a dangerous threat and off we go into a fear state. And some representations of sexuality can induce our body to experience desire and lust.

Brains do this because they are part of the body. They sit at the top of the spinal cord and nervous system and bring in all of the nervous impulses processed by the end receptors. Out of the structure of our multi-layered brains emerge our sense of awareness we call "mind." Mind is an emergent property in the neurology of our brain. So it is always mind-body or body-mind, and never one without the other.

This explains why we mostly think or represent ourselves into our states but why we also can act our way into states. This gives us two royal roads into a mind-body state of consciousness whether it is confidence and joy and love or fear, anger, and sadness. We can use mind and all of our internal representations and we can use body (breathing, posture, movement, activity, etc.).

What state are you in? What state do you go into when any given stimulus or trigger occurs? You need look no further than the instructions you give yourself at the mental dimension or what you do in terms of your posture, muscle tension, breathing, etc. at the physiological dimension.

6) Brains Go in Circles
Not only do our brains represent the world, go places, and put us into states, but brains also do flips, they roll over, they flip back on themselves, they go in circles. As there are feed forward and feedback loops in the physical structure of the brain so that nervous impulses are sent to the thalamus and the amygdala they are simultaneously passed on to the neocortex and after processing there back to the lower brain structures. It's all inter-connected. We even have an associative cortex that keeps everything connected with everything else so that we have more cortical connections in the three trillion brain cells than atoms in the universe.

No wonder we loop around. No wonder we can worry about our humor and wonder if we are caring too much and then become afraid of our worry and then think something must be wrong with us that we are worry about something so silly as that. We get caught up in down spirals of negative thoughts and can become obsessive compulsive. We can get caught up in positive spiral of thoughts and suffer from insomnia due to our excitement.

Our brains are not strictly logical. To think in a straightforward way and to stay on that path for more than a few seconds is very difficult for our brains. That's why mathematics and formal logic seem so foreign to us. It's not the natural habit of our mind. We think in circles. Our brains go around in loops and spirals. We keep reprocessing the same tired old thoughts.

This reflexivity is what allows us to layer thought upon thought, feeling upon feeling, thought upon feeling, memory upon imagination, fear upon anger, dread upon worry, joy upon learning, etc. This creates the whole domain of our meta-states -our states of thoughts and feelings about other thoughts and feelings. And that's what creates the layering effect of our awareness so that we can create great complexity in our experiences.

We begin with a reference experience, bring it in and represent it, then develop thoughts and feelings about that, and so on until what was "out there" becomes a frame of reference, a frame of mind and then the very frameworks of four personality and orientation. This creates the Rules of the Game, or our highest frames of mind.

7) Brains Frame Things
This is one of the greatest powers of our brain for health and sanity and for insanity and destructiveness. Our brains frame. They do so to create contextual meaning. Things, events, people, even words do not mean anything in and of themselves. It takes a brain to create meaning, a "thing" that does not exist out there but is a production of the brain.

Actually, the brain creates two levels of meaning. Associative meaning arises when we link up one thing with another thing. What does a cookie mean? It depends on what you have associated with a cookie. It could mean a sweet or junk food. It could mean reward or lack of nutrition. It could mean delight and fun, it could mean threat to my diet. It could mean survival, it could mean fat.

Because brains link ideas, images, feelings, etc., things easily become associated. This creates triggers or anchors. One thing (a sight, sound, sensation, word, etc.) triggers another thing. Stimulus- Response. In this way we create structures of the mind that we call understandings or knowledge. These are not "things," but organizations of associations-how we have sequenced or ordered the frames in our movies.

What does an "authority figure" mean? Where does your brain go when you think about an "authority figure?" What state does it evoke? Pleasant or unpleasant? Resourceful or unresourceful? Just thoughts ... connected in your brain to memories, awarenesses, meanings.

Then there is contextual or frame meaning. Once we have linked up and associated things and bring that association into our mind as our frame of reference, we develop higher level thoughts about it. We call these ideas "concepts." In this way we now look at things through a conceptual frame of mind. It becomes a filter. We call them meta-states and meta-programs. This establishes a mental context for thinking and feeling. This is how we turn associations into higher level maps. Doing so establishes the mental Rules of the Games that we then play.

We first associate a harsh tone of voice with being spanked. Later we develop ideas and concepts that people who strain their vocal chords are mean, hurtful, and nasty. Then we develop higher frames that "criticism is bad," "confrontation always ruins things," "I'm sensitive to criticism," "I cannot handle that tone of voice," etc. These thoughts create the higher frames of mind about an event and semantically load that event. So when someone strains the vocal chords, the meanings I experience in relation to that event puts me into very unresourceful states. All of this happens so quickly that on the inside it seems like and feels like "the criticism" (or harsh tonality) makes me upset, angry, or frustrated. This is how we set up and play the Games that we do.

Brains deal with data overload by making generalizations. They create categories for items; they organize things into groups. This allows us to develop contextual meanings from our frames, giving us an even higher way to interpret things.
"Oh, that's just information. Good. For a minute I thought that was criticism."

How we categorize a thing determines what it "is" to us- in our neurology. Yet as we frame, so we become. What we organize on the inside, in-forms us. We are all psychologically organized by our belief frame, value frames, identity frames, decision frames, etc. And the thing about the brain framing is that as we frame, so we play the frame games that we do.

PLAY THE BRAIN GAME