Objective

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor has put it beautifully in her book about her own stroke, My Stroke of insight:

“Sensory information streams in through our system and is immediately processed through our limbic system. By the time a message reaches our cerebral cortex for higher thinking, we have already placed a “feeling” upon how we view that stimulation – is this pain or pleasure? Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically, we are feeling creatures that think.”

 

Reflective

My father-in-law very casually used to tell my three-year-old to eat well and only then he will be a big boy. The concept of big became so big in my son’s mind that he started using the word big as synonymous to good, tasty or likable. So all the things he talks about now have to be ‘big’ and he only wants ‘big’. I am now trying to widen his horizon and explain to him that good is not equal to ‘big’.

My three-year-olds limbic system is these days fixated on just one question, “Is it big?”

Taylor in her TED talk on her stroke talked about how we have become left-brained people and how we try to keep reason over emotion. She very animatedly says that the limbic system has been nowadays trained in a manner that it is asking us just one question for everything- is it safe?

Probably like a pigeon closes its mind to danger our limbic system is trained to attach a feeling of fear, anger, happiness, despair, to anything that happens, even before our brain actually processes it and decides to respond. This is a very intriguing phenomenon for me, as this means that we are innately biased people and every single reaction or action we have is tainted by our pre-formed perceptions about things.

Wow, sometimes somethings just get into you and you find your reasons for so many unanswered questions that trouble you. This one line made me think and I dived into my world of thoughts, memories and reflections, finding my reasons for so many things that have been there in my mind for years.

In 1994, when I was 12, I lost my mother, and my father lost his beloved wife. He cried for six months continuously, at least that’s what I remember and just said one thing all the time- My life is over and no pain can be bigger than this pain of losing my wife. He was diabetic at that time and then he got depressed. After that for years he tried to do everything that was not good for him, avoiding medicines, eating the wrong food and just sitting so many times in dark corners of the house and crying. His limbic system filtered every single illness he got, every emotion he went through as smaller to what had already happened. His organs started failing him. He had huge abscesses on his body which he would hide from everyone and take no treatment for it. He had lost his wife in a surgery and so he stopped trusting medicines or doctors. He became a great actor at hiding his physical pain. Even when he was bleeding or in deep pain he would just say I am good and just sad for I miss my wife. This is a 20-year-long story of my father, in which, I always wondered why he can’t feel the physical pain. Anyone else would just not be able to bear the pain he hides so effortlessly.

In January 2015, he died of probably his 4th cardiac arrest, I am adding ‘probably’ here as I am actually not sure if he had many more.

When I came across what Taylor says, I realized, it was my father’s limbic system that had made the pain of losing my mother so big in his mind, that no other pain could match up to it.

And today I sit back and wonder, “Oh my God”- so it is actually all in the mind…

Henry K. Beecher an anestheologist at Harvard Medical School, noted way back in 1956 that that intensity of suffering is largely determined by what the pain means to the patient. An oxford team of neuroscientists in 2010 found out in a controlled experiment that the anticipation of pain had the power to make you feel real pain even when there was no reason for it.

Rhonda Byrne’s ‘Secret’ has been very close to my heart always and I have always believed in and professed about the law of attraction. Taylor’s explanation that we are ‘feeling creatures’ is just like an authentication to the law. We are what we believe and thus we can make our life what we want it to be, just by altering our thoughts, and this is not a philosophical jargon.

Maybe, if we can just understand how to deal with the main filter in our brain and keep it clear of clutter, life can be different and so can be this world.

All my life in my home country I saw kids taking education as a burden. I saw so many dropouts. I always felt that school and education became a challenge as students encountered negative learning environments where performance was all about scores and maybe that made them feel unsafe and disinterested in school. When my son was born, I told my family and we all decided not to make him feel that education and play are separate. We have always told him that both lead to learning and thus both are exciting and enjoyable. This idea has helped my son a lot. Though he is just three, he already has good literacy and numeracy skills along with showing a great progress on all aspects of development. He is equally keen to go out and run in the playground as he is to sit and read a book with us.

His limbic system doesn’t attach a feeling of boring or fear to his books or studying.

 

Interpretive

Wow! That was my reaction when I had thoroughly gone through and understood the whole idea. I read about Taylor and the scientific meaning of her quote and my ‘aha’ came when my mind finally said that it’s really scientifically all in our own hands. The little thing called ‘Quality of life” that we keep searching for in external things and systems is actually all about creating it by our own thoughts. It was a true ‘wow’ for me.

Somewhere, I feel that we all understand this, but we do not acknowledge that our perceptions are biased by our feelings. The reason maybe the filter that always tells us that we are never wrong or otherwise.

Maybe it’s really important for everyone to understand the power of the brain and try to find the true reason behind our perceptions and reactions.

The power of the limbic system is immense. It can make a small pin prick feel like an amputation and it can make the biggest pain look small. Similar is its role in all other feelings. A positive set of mind creates and attracts positive and a negative set of mind creates and attracts negative. Thus, it is very important for us to understand how we can train ourselves to deal with tough situations.

This idea is far more important I guess in case of vulnerable minds like the mindset of a kid. When kids are made to feel that something is tough or boring they start viewing that thing or all other activities related to that thing in the same manner.

I realized that I should be careful with my son and make sure that his limbic system doesn’t get trained to say, ‘Is it safe?’ to everything.

I also understood that sorrows can become big or small just by the way we perceive it.

It is a very important insight for me, especially as an educator. Taylor’s quote form her book ‘My stroke of Insight’ may actually give many their stroke of insight. Taylor says that it is important to understand that we have the power to control our brain and how life can be so beautiful if we start understanding and following mindfulness and the 90 second rule.

People love security and safety and as an educator, I think, the best kind of learning environment could be one where the feeling of the students are respected.

Adult students are especially very distracted and divided in their minds as they have so many things to take care of. As an adult educator, I think that making students realize that they are feeling beings, about mindfulness and living in the present moment may be very beneficial to bring them in the moment and engage them in learning.

 

Decisional

We are all feeling beings first and information that we process has an emotion attached to it even before we start thinking about it. Thus past and present experience and how we perceive them has a very important role to play in how we react and live our lives. Understanding this and understanding that we can choose how we feel can have transformational effects on the way we live our life.

Also, students especially young, are vulnerable. In their formative years, how they perceive their environment and situations have lifelong effects on their learning and life. Thus, it is very important for educators to provide a safe learning environment where students can feel good and positive about learning.

 

References

Brown, S.E. (2012). Honoring their beings. Indianapolis: Dogear

Byrne, R. (2006). The secret. Hillsboro: Beyond Words Publishing

Foreman, J. (2014). A nation in Pain. New York: Oxford University press

Merriam, S.B. and Bierema, L.L. (2013). Adult learning: Linking theory and practice. San Francisco: Jossey Bass Wiley

Taylor, J.B. (2008, February 27). My stroke of insight. [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight?language=en

Taylor, J.B. (2008, January 23). The Law of Attraction. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etXYeRQZkOk

Taylor, J.B. (2013, February 21).The Neuroanatomical Transformation of the Teenage Brain. [Video file]. Retrieved from http://ed.ted.com/on/t8xghoxb