Nothing Positive Ever Comes From Negative Thoughts⁉️
The Schachter and Singer two factor theory of emotion was presented by researchers Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer in 1962. The theory suggest that emotional states contain two components, one physiological and one cognitive. In the case of experiencing a physiological arousal which has no obvious explanation, the individual will attempt to label or describe the state based on the explanations available to him or her, but where an explanation is necessary, not cognizing as to an explanation is needed.
The theory also states that physiological states can arise from a cognitive evaluation of an event or situation. The theory suggests that we cannot control our external events but we can control our internal responses. Basically as humans when we experience life, we are doing it in the “now.” However, we live based off of an accumulation of what ever we live through. That’s why we tend to repeat things unknowingly (unconsciously).
This theory proposes that when something happens , that we LABEL it (oh this is scary, this is sad, this is happy) that we then physically feel that way. (Our heart jumps, sweaty palms) This theory then proposes the idea that when things happen in our lives, we can change the physical end reaction based off of how we think and choose to label events/ give it meaning. Your life truly is all about perception and how you CHOOSE to SEE and UNDERSTAND yourself and the world around you.
Schachter- singer two factor theory- our interpretation of emotion leads to a cognitive “I’m afraid” label plus our bodies arousal equals actual Emotion ● Zajonc and Ledoux- emotions occur before our conscious interpretations or appraisals of the event ○ with Lazarus emotion that requires cognitive appraisal even if interpretation don’t reach conscious awareness. Question: “Why does God allow sickness?”
“The man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as the man with no secrets to keep.” —E.W. Howe
● Happiness, well- being and health (correlation research) ● Happiness ○ Easy to make decisions, satisfied life, perceive to world to be happier ○ Feel good-do good phenomenon: when we are happy we are more willing to help others ■ Volunteer 4 hours ○ Subjective well being- self perceived feeling of satisfaction with life ● Our positive moods rise 6-7 hours after waking up ● Eventually our emotions balance and people adapt to bad situations ● Wealth and well being
○ Money brings temporary happiness ● Lottery winners going bankrupt in five years ● Students who value love more than money has higher life satisfaction ● Adaptation-level phenomenon – people adapt to income levels ● More we make the more we spend Relative deprivation- we are worse off than those we compare ourselves with ● Stress (adrenal gland release stress hormone (cortisol a glucocorticoid)) ○ Independent risk factor- uncontrolled risk factor.
○ How you cope with environment threats & challenges ○ If it’s short it may help prolonged it’s harmful (maladaptive) ○ Psychological stress causes physical illness ○ Causal relationship ○ Measuring stress ■ Physiological- self reported ■ Physiological- immune, endocrine & cardiovascular functioning and also musculoskeletal ■ ALSO Behavioral – directly observe individual and clinical interview ○
Stressful life events ■ Catastrophics events (community event)- earthquakes ■ Significant Life changes- death of aloved one ■ Daily hassel -rush hour traffics ○ Triggers Fight or flight response which can be good ■ Walter Cannon – fight or flight ■ Evolutionary response- wired to respond to threats ■ Physical stressors – threats to physical safety ■ Symbolic stressors- threats to self-esteem ●
Memories of past hurts ○ Increases risk of illness and health problems ○
Outpouring of epinephrine and norepinephrine from adrenal glands, increases heart rate and respiration ○ (HPA axis ) Hypothalamus( fast acting) initiates stress reactivity pathways ■ Endocrine system (slow acting, fight or flight.)
Type A personality – hostility, impatience, difficulty expressing emotions, competitiveness, drive, perfectionism and an unhealthy dependence on external rewards such as wealth, status, or power.
Type B personality – is that these people do not get irritated or angry easily. They are laid back and relaxed. They rarely tend to be aggressive or frustrated. They are very calm as compared to their highly strung counterparts (type A). They are very patient and usually have a lot of self-control.
10 Surprising Facts About How Our Brains Work!!!
Supporting Evidence
In 1962, Schachter and Singer conducted a study to test their theory. The research included 184 male college students as participants who were told a vitamin compound called Suproxin would be injected to them. However, the injection was not Suproxin; rather, it is composed of either 0.5 mL of epinephrine (experiment group) or 0.5 mL of saline solution as placebo (control group).
Then, the researchers divided the subjects into three conditions:
(1) Informed condition (participants know the potential side effects of the injection),
(2) Ignorant condition (participants do not know the potential side effects), and
(3) Misinformed condition (participants know of the side effects being fabricated). Then, the participants encountered paired stooges whose roles were to act in either euphoric or angry manner. The variable also being manipulated was the “cognitive circumstance”.
The measurement of emotions was done via two processes: semi-private index (one-way mirror assessment) and public index (Likert scale self-report).
The result of the study was that the subjects under the Ignorant condition and Misinformed condition revealed considerably and consistently higher scores on both euphoric and angry conditions as compared to participants under the Placebo condition and the Informed condition.
This proved the original hypothesis of Schachter and Singer, that is, cognitive labelling (informed, ignorant or misinformed) together with general autonomic arousal (euphoric or angry) lead to the emergence of emotions. Psychology: Some people are just genetically tougher. But you can train your brain to better handle stress.
How are Brains keep us Sick!!!
The Central Executive Network(CEN)
The Fronto-parietal Central Executive Network (CEN) handles inhibition, task switching, and updating. It inhibits the default mode network, engages your conscious brain to think and maintains attention on a prioritized task. It’s helpful to think of it as active when you put effort forth to keep your mind from wandering during a goal directed task.
Many psychiatric conditions including ADHD are associated with poor inhibitory regulation of DMN activation by the CEN. The dance between the CEN and DMN are coordinated by the Salience Network which, based on the amount of relevant outside stimulus triggers a switch out of REST mode into cognitive functioning.
http://hypnoticthoughts.com/the-central-executive-networkcen/
http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/the_brain_as_a_network_focusing_your_network
‘My brain simply shut off the pain,’ said Dr. Michael Moskowitz. Pain specialist Dr. Michael Moskowitz was 49 when he and a friend decided to take a look at some army tanks & other armored vehicles that were about to take part in a parade. Dr. Moskowitz couldn’t resist climbing up onto a tank turret.
But as he jumped off, a metal prong caught his corduroys, and as he fell, he heard three popping sounds: his thigh bone was cracking. When he hit the ground, the leg was at a 90-degree angle to the other one. Immediately after the fall his pain was a true ten out of ten (ten is meant to be like being dropped in boiling oil), but as he lay motionless waiting for the ambulance, Dr. Moskowitz felt no pain at all.
‘I had first-hand experience that the brain, all on its own, can eliminate pain, just as a conventional pain specialist, had tried to do for patients by using drugs, injections, and electrical stimulation.’ The brain can shut pain off because the function of acute pain is to alert us to danger. So, as long as Dr. Moskowitz didn’t move, he was in no danger, as far as his brain could tell.
In the aftermath of his accident, Dr. Moskowitz nearly died three times. Yet as the years have passed, he’s had very little pain in the leg. He’d learned another pain lesson: the wise use of sufficient morphine. Had prevented his nerves from becoming over-stimulated and saved him from his acute short-term pain turning into the chronic, permanent variety.
For centuries the traditional view of pain was that nerves send a one-way signal up to the brain and intensity of pain is proportional to the seriousness of our injury. In other words, pain files an accurate damage report about the extent of the injury, and the brain’s role is to simply accept that report.
But that view was overturned in the Sixties – we now understand that the pain perception system is spread through the brain and spinal cord, too, and the brain controls how much we feel. When pain messages are sent from damaged tissue, these messages ascend to the brain only if the brain gives them ‘permission’.
If this is granted, a gate will open and increase our feeling of pain by allowing certain brain cells to turn on and transmit their signal. But the brain can also close a gate and block the pain signal by releasing endorphins, the natural narcotics made by our bodies to quell pain.
Knowing that switches exist is one thing, knowing how to turn them off when you are in agony is another. And that’s where the brain’s ‘neuroplasticity’ comes in. Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change its structure and how it works in response to mental activity and experience. Each time he got an attack, he began visualizing his brain in chronic pain. Then he would imagine the problem areas shrinking!
Dr. Moskowitz, who originally trained as psychiatrist, specializes in treating patients with intractable pain in California. But he became a world leader in the use of neuroplasticity for treating pain after making discoveries while treating himself.
Three years before his fall, Dr. Moskowitz suffered another accident when water-skiing with his daughters. He flipped off an inflated tire behind a boat, hitting the water with his head bent backwards. The resulting pain dominated his life. Morphine and other heavy-duty painkillers and treatments including massage, self-hypnosis, ice, rest and anti-inflammatory drugs, barely touched it.
That pain tormented him for 13 years. Dr. Moskowitz was 57 when he hit rock bottom – and then began researching the discovery that the brain is neuroplastic and seeing how this might relate to him. The role of acute pain is to alert us to injury or disease by also sending a signal to the brain.
But sometimes an injury affects the body and the nerve cells (neurons) in the brain. As acute pain continues, these neurons become hypersensitive, firing more easily with less stimulation. This is where the brain’s ability to change becomes a curse — because the neurons keep firing, the connections between them become stronger.
As a result the acute pain develops an afterlife: it becomes chronic pain. The area of pain begins to increase. Ultimately, the pain neurons fire so easily we end up in excruciating, unremitting pain over a large area of the body – all in response to the smallest stimulation of a nerve. So for Dr. Moskowitz this meant that every time he felt twinges of neck pain, his brain’s neurons got more sensitive to it, making it worse – his brain was learning to feel more pain. The name for this neuroplastic process is ‘wind‑up pain’. I don’t believe in pain management any more. I believe in trying to cure persistent pain.
In 2007, he then began reading 15,000 pages of research to try to understand the laws of neuroplastic change. He realized that many of the areas in the brain that fire in chronic pain also process thoughts, sensations, images, memories, movements, emotions, and beliefs – when they are not processing pain that is. This explains why, when we’re in pain, we can’t concentrate, tolerate certain sounds or light, or control our emotions well.
Because areas that regulate these activities have been hijacked to process the pain signal.
Dr Moskowitz’s strategy was simple. When his pain started, instead of allowing those areas to be pirated by it, he ‘took them back’ for their original main activities, by forcing himself to perform the activities, no matter how intense the pain.
In April 2007 he put his theory into practice using visualization exercises to overpower the pain. He knew two brain areas process both visual information and pain, the posterior cingulate and the posterior parietal lobe. Each time he got an attack, he began visualizing his brain in chronic pain. Then he would imagine the problem areas shrinking.
‘I had to be even more relentless than the pain signal itself,’ he told me. He greeted every twinge with an image of that area of his brain shrinking, knowing he was forcing his posterior cingulate and posterior parietal lobes to process a visual image.
In the first three weeks he also noticed a very small reduction in pain. After a month he never let a pain spike occur without doing visualization. It worked. By six weeks, the pain between his shoulders in his back and near his shoulder blades had disappeared, never to return.
By four months, he was having his first totally pain-free periods throughout his neck. Within a year he was almost always pain free.He shared his discovery with his patients, helping with chronic conditions including low-back pain, cancer pain, irritable bowel & arthritis. Opioid narcotic drugs, such as codeine or tramadol ‘ can make chronic pain worse.’
So, is it just a placebo effect? The placebo effect generally doesn’t last long. And unlike medication or placebo, patients who use the neuroplastic technique can reduce their use of it over time. Dr. Moskowitz also thinks once the patients have learned and practiced the technique over hundreds of hours, their unconscious mind takes over.
Such effects last. He has patients who’ve maintained their reduction in pain for five years, though many still have damage in their bodies (which can on occasion trigger acute pain).
One of his most important insights is that opioid narcotic drugs, such as codeine or tramadol can make chronic pain worse.
The brain adapts to being inundated by long-term opioids by becoming less sensitive to them, which can make chronic pain worse. The problem exists, says Dr Moskowitz, with all pain medicines. ‘I don’t believe in pain management any more,’ he says. ‘I believe in trying to cure persistent pain.’
One of the extraordinary people I’ve met during my research is John Pepper, 77, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s more than two decades ago. He was put on medication, but because of a program he developed was eventually able to stop taking it 9 years ago.
Yet he does not appear to have the classic symptoms: no shuffling gait or tremor; he has good balance and seems to walk perfectly normally. When Pepper, a businessman who lives in South Africa, was first diagnosed, he spent two years slumped in a chair, ‘feeling sorry for himself’.
He then pledged to alter his attitude. ‘Because it is a movement disorder, I assumed the more I moved, the slower the Parkinson’s would be able to take over my life,’ he said.
He broke down the normally complex automatic activity of walking into various parts and analyzed each and every muscle contraction, movement & shift of weight.
It took him more than a year of practicing to internalize these changes. His walking also became normal, as long as he concentrated .With change happening gradually, Pepper only belatedly began to realize one or another of his Parkinson’s symptoms, such as his tremor, had either improved or disappeared. Walking is one of the most powerful neuroplastic interventions.
When we walk fast, we produce new cells in the hippocampus, the brain area that plays a key role in turning short-term memories into long-term ones. Walking may promote brain growth factors – or specifically a brain chemical called glial-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF). This helps promote the development and survival of dopamine-producing neurons, the cells that die off in Parkinson’s. GDNF helps the nervous system recover from injury.
100,000 is the number of miles of nerve fibres in the human brain.
Research in laboratory animals has shown exercise can boost the production of GDNF, although Pepper did not know this when he began his walking regime. He told me: ‘I walk 15 miles per week, in three sessions of five miles. The GDNF produced in the brain appears to have restored the damaged cells. But they do not cure the cause of Parkinson’s, and if I stop exercising, my condition goes backwards.’
He has now taught hundreds of fellow Parkinson’s sufferers how to move more freely.
Science is finally catching up with him. In 2014, a study of Parkinson’s patients by the University of Iowa found that six months of walking three times a week for 45 minutes improved their symptoms and reduced fatigue.
Not all neuroplastic changes are beneficial, however. With our frequent use of computers and screens, we are rewiring our visual systems to fixate on what’s in front of our eyes.
U.S. children are thought to spend up to eleven hours a day looking at screens.
Their peripheral vision is being underused, meaning they are less able to see things at the edges of their vision – vision loss more traditionally seen in older people. However, computers can help rewire people’s eyes and brains to use their peripheral vision fully.
U.S. neuroscientist Dr Michael Merzenich and his colleagues developed computer-based neuroplastic exercises to expand peripheral vision in elderly people to keep them driving (one involves watching cars on a screen and taking into account images on the side).
Another company, Novavision has developed brain exercises that can help people who had strokes, brain injuries, or brain cancer surgery that have radically reduced their vision.
It’s another example of the potential of neuroplasticity, and proof that many ‘incurable’ or ‘irreversible’ problems can improve. The brain really can heal itself.
If you listen to Forrest Maready you know that hypersensitivity to taste & texture can be a vaccine injury. He says if he puts a Dorito in his mouth it feels like there is a flamethrower being held against his tongue. We never know what torture a child is experiencing when we force feed them.
EXTRACTED from The Brain’s Way Of Healing, by Norman Doidge, published January 29 by Allen Lane, price £20. Copyright © Norman Doidge 2015. Offer price £16 until January 28. Pre-order at mailbookshop.co.uk, p&p is free for a limited time only.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp-8tgehFU4