Tag Archive for: mind
Memory is everything; without our memory we have nothing. We must have an ability to recall information in order to learn and develop. Today brain research has uncovered fascinating discoveries relating to memory, yet we have only just begun to understand this mystery of the mind.
Most researchers focus on the brain and how the different parts are related to memory. This understanding is very important if we are ever going to truly understand ourselves. I find neuroscience to be a fascinating subject that has helped shape my understanding of the human condition however I don't want to look at the brain in regards to memory.
I instead want to focus on the mind and how it utilizes information in regards to our memory. I want to share my theory on how the two different minds (conscious and subconscious) work together to provide us with the ability of recall.
Most people know about short and long-term memory; and how these two systems work together to give us the ability of recall. I believe there is a third type of memory that I call temporary memory that helps fill in the gap between short and long-term memory. I want to go over each of the three types, show you how they work, and explain how the two minds are related.
Before we can remember something we must first take in the information to be stored. Our DNA does contain some information but for this topic I will be focused on information we have obtained from outside sources; meaning our five senses.
Pivotal Resource Centre Topic MEMORY
Everything we experience in life is the result of information coming in through our five senses. Without these senses we would have no experience of the world or have any information to be processed into memory. This incoming information is first sent to the subconscious mind.
The reason the subconscious gets the information first is because it's the survival mind and is much faster at processing information. We need it this way to allow us to react to events that involve an immediate threat to us such as being attacked or touching a hot stove.
After the subconscious mind determines if any action is needed or not; it sends a small amount of the information to the conscious mind were it becomes what we call our conscious awareness. We are only aware of a small part of what is going on around us. This is why two people can have the same experience yet have two different views of what happened.
The thing to keep in mind is just because the information is not consciously known doesn't mean it's lost. This information is still sitting there inside your head just waiting to be used. At the same time this information is not yet a part of your long-term memory. All this incoming information is stored in what I call temporary memory and is controlled by the subconscious mind.
If information is stored in temporary memory; how do we get it to become long-term memory? My theory is the subconscious mind processes this information and converts it to long-term memory when we sleep, specifically REM sleep. To me this is one of the reasons we have dreams. Dreams are nothing more than us becoming consciously aware of temporary memory being converted to long-term memory.
One way the subconscious processes information to be converted to long-term memory is by using emotional "tags". This means if an event has caused us to feel a strong emotion it gets linked to that emotion. When this information is converted to long-term memory it is arranged in such a way as to be easy to recall. In other words the more emotion involved the more the memory will be put at the "front of the line" and information with no emotions will be move to the back. This makes it easier to recall emotional events which are important when it comes to survival. This is why the subconscious is in control of this system.
Just because the conscious mind does not have direct control over this information, it can access it through a process of requesting information from the subconscious. When the conscious mind requests information the subconscious first looks in this temporary memory because it is smaller, easier to process, and most likely to be more relevant. If it can't find it in temporary memory then it will expand the search to long-term memory which can take longer to find because of the massive size of long-term memory.
That's why you can be trying to think of something and then forget about it, but later the answer will just pop into your head for no reason. Your subconscious continues to search without any conscious awareness of what is going on.
The subconscious also uses the information in temporary memory to influence our decisions and actions. This influence is the basis of subliminal programing and can be very powerful if used correctly. Subliminal programing doesn't turn people into walking zombies but can have a real effect on a person's conscious thought process.
As you can see the subconscious mind is very involved with our memory by working with both temporary and long-term memory. The concept of using temporary memory to hold information before being converted to long-term memory is a wonderful system that allows us to utilize information as its being taken in. The problem is temporary memory is a fixed size and this causes problems.
Have you noticed how you get mentally tired if you don't get proper sleep? A lack of sleep causes the temporary memory to become full which can lead to issues with being able to recall the information we want. Sleep is so important in maintaining a strong memory.
Pivotal Resource Centre Topic SLEEP
Lack of sleep is not the only thing that can cause issues with temporary memory; there is also what environment we find ourselves in.
I skipped over one of the steps in how information is processed because I felt it was too early in the flow of this article. When the subconscious first receives information it looks for any copies of that information in our long-term memory. If it finds an exact copy it will simply reinforce the long-term memory instead of sending it to temporary memory.
This is why we have better recall of something if we can look at the information from different angels or give the information more details. These things cause more copies of the information to be put into temporary memory that will then be converted to long-term memory. If all we do is look at something one way we only reinforce a single long-term memory; and memory is all about the number of links we create. So how is our environment involved in memory?
When you are in an environment you are familiar with you take in more "copy" information because you already have knowledge about what is around you; which causes less information to be stored in your temporary memory. When you are in an unfamiliar environment your temporary memory will fill more rapidly causing you to become mentally fatigued. This is why you feel mentally tired when on vacation or when trying to learn something new.
The final piece of this memory puzzle is of course short-term memory. The conscious mind uses short-term memory to process information it receives. Because of the highly analytically nature of the conscious mind it can only keep track of a very small amount of information. Short-term memory is the only form of memory that is controlled by the conscious mind.
If all of this seems confusing or overwhelming let me offer you a metaphor on how all this works that will make it easier to understand.
Your mind is like an office. Information comes in and first goes to the inbox (temporary memory). From there some of the paper work gets move from the inbox to the desk top (short-term memory).
With any desk top there is very limited space so you must work on just a couple of things at a time. You can move papers back and forth from the desk top to the inbox but can only work with a few things at a time.
Just as with temporary memory an inbox can only hold so much before it becomes a disorganized mess. To keep the inbox from getting too full papers are moved to a filing cabinet (long-term memory). From time to time we do move papers from the filing cabinet to the desk top as we need them (consciously becoming aware of something from long-term memory). However it can be hard and time-consuming in finding just what we are looking for.
I hope this metaphor helps with understanding how the three parts of memory work together to give us this amazing ability of recall. Memory is still a mystery yet we are moving in the right direction.
ARTICLE AUTHOR: Jeremy T. Jordan is a dynamic Speaker and Personal Life Coach that specializes in the areas of Success, Happiness, and Fulfillment. He is the founder of Why U Can Life Management; a personal development system designed to empower people with the knowledge and skills of self-mastery. For more information on Jeremy T. Jordan or the Why U Can Life Management System go to his website http://www.whyucanlifemanagement.com
CHANGE BY CHOICE OR YOU'LL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO CHANGE
One of the most effective ways in dealing with stress is to change by choice. You see, if you don't change by choice, sooner or later, you'll have no choice,but to change. What do we mean by this? Our own conscious mind is constantly giving us feedback. It's like a barometer. How we're tracking in our life.
We need to look at this both in our personal life and we can look at it in business life to make things more effective and give us more options. When you change early, you have many options available and the job is easier. While we tend to resist change, let's face it, change is the only constant. Night changes into day, day into night. We change our clothes every day. We change the food we eat.
These are things that are easy to do, but when it comes to more serious things in our life, we tend to stick to our old ways because it takes more effort to make those changes. Let's look at it more in our personal life to begin with. What if you're put on a few kilograms, if you'd take note of this, your own conscious mind is giving you a signal, manifesting as a physical sense in your body that what you're doing isn't working.
It's easier to reign in when it's just a few kilograms, but if you ignore it, and the weight becomes more of a problem, it becomes a harder task, doesn't it? Also, other health problems may come into play. Then you not only have to make changes with how you're dealing with food, but now you have to change how you're going to deal with these other health problems. This compound becomes more difficult. Your options become restricted.
What do you do about if you know you need to lose weight? Instead of changing to the next fad diet that comes along, you need to change the relationship you have with food, because you know the last 20 diets didn't work, so why would you expect something different? If you have aches and pains in your body and you have a belief that it's just your age or it's just a part of your life and you adhere to this, and maybe it's even reinforced by other people telling you the same thing. The same limiting beliefs.
What if you were to change the way you think about. What if you will do things to become more flexible? Develop a more flexible body, and usually a flexible body and a flexible mind go hand and hand. Just as the same as a rigid body and a rigid mind go hand in hand and we get stuck in our ways.
As things get worse, become more complicated, our options become fewer. To the point where you have no more options. You either change or you pass a tipping point where nothing else can be done. By developing a flexible body and a flexible mind, this allows you to bend more before you're going to break. Work easier, cope with stress more effectively.
If you're suffering with stress, if you don't do the necessary things to deal with stress, then as the systems become overloaded, it could turn into anxiety if you don't deal with this effectively and pull it back to normal states of stress.
The final stage, when the resources run out more and more, this can lead into depression. This is when all resources have run out and the unconscious mind says, "I have nothing else available to you."
Let's look at this in the business world. There are always disruptors. We're seeing it in the transport industry at the moment, and the resistance to women in the boardroom, from those trying to adhere to the old ways, "We have always run the system, and we won't change. If they don't change, they'll have no more options and soon they'll be out of business.
To give you an example from a book of Forbes which is going back a few years now but it's still quite relevant. In 1987, Forbes celebrated their 70th anniversary and they put out a list of the top 500 companies. By the year 2000, just 13 years later, more than half of those companies were out of business. These were the companies that refused to change. They rested on their laurels and thought, "We've been successful. We don't need to change."
Any company that thinks "We've always done it that way, we're not going to change because this is a way it is and we've been running the industry are in for a rude shock. Well, the disruptors have always been there. Go way back to Gutenberg. The invention of the printing press. Look how amazing the invention of the printing press was, what a great disruptor it was at the time, but how it empowered people so much.
Nowadays, we have modern day disruptors. In the transport industry, and in the accommodation industry. Those that try to hold on those old ways, those who resist change, eventually get squeezed out because their options become fewer and fewer. Instead of resisting, play the same game, learn what the new rules are. When you take action early, this eliminates the stress because the bigger the problem gets, the more stress is involved. Then you've got to start putting more things into play to the point where you either change by choice or have no choice but to change.
Many people have the attitude that "If only the world would change, my life would be better".
You see, when you change, you alter the dynamics, so people, circumstances and events have no choice but to change. This empowers you to influence things for the better.
Over the next few years, 40% of jobs are just going to disappear. What are you going to do to stay ahead of the game? You need to be constantly looking, how can I improve things, how can I tweak this, what changes do I need to make NOW
SO, YOU HAVE THREE OPTIONS:
1. Do nothing, hold on to your limiting beliefs, and think you have no control over things.
2. Wait for the inevitable, to the point where you really do have no option but to change.
3. Change early, when you first get the sign, empower yourself, and take control of your life.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO
Start looking at things in your life. Take notice of what your unconscious mind is telling you. These things that are manifesting in your life. Learn to read your barometer, know what to leave and what to change. Change early, change by choice or know that you eventually have no choice but to change.
Which choice are you going to choose?
Copyright 2016
Ray Goslin is the founder of Allstressmanagement.com Specialising in stress and pain management systems which allows you to Change by Choice with the "Lifestyle By Design Project" For more information go to https://allstressmanagement.com
Tips and healthy snacks to help calm you down.
The essence of being happily human is to be creative. Few things in life are more fulfilling than transforming something old or non-existent into something new, better, faster, less expensive, more lucrative, joyful, efficient, effective, etc. And the secret to creative power is to get lost in what you're "creating." Getting lost is necessary to finding what's new.
Why? Because you can't come up with something new, different or original using your same old thinking mind. The metaphor and cliché for this concept is "thinking outside the box." But that's a misnomer because creativity is only partially about thinking. The purpose of thinking and feeling is just to get things started, get the creative process stimulated -- not to get the answer directly. This is where you may be going astray. The answer cannot be completely thought out no matter how smart you think you are.
Outside-the-box means outside the conscious, personal, thinking mind and into the subconscious, knowing mind. That's where all the creative power and action is. That's the faculty the answers come from. That's the higher level of consciousness you want to operate on all the time to be creative all the time. This is a form of meditation, perhaps the highest form.
All your thinking mind has to do is just get out the of way and let the creative process unfold. It unfolds from the subconscious by itself to the degree your personal, thinking/feeling mind is out of the way -- your ego is out of the way! Don't try, push or stress. That's the catch: Your effort needs to be effortless for it to work.
First, think or brainstorm about the new thing you strongly desire to create. Once it's clearly in mind and you're satisfied it is, then let it go. Drop it. Detach from it. Let it incubate. Let it sink into the subconscious for advanced processing.
Finally, just be calmly and patiently receptive to the answer -- which is guaranteed to come to the degree you are persistent and convinced that it will come.
You become a creator, inventor, explorer of that which is new and different -- that which has never been produced or expressed exactly this way before. Your getting lost in uncharted, unknown territory is the great joy, thrill and adventure of creation. You were created to be a creator, and fulfilling that purpose is what the good life is all about.
Author: William F McLaughlin. Bill is a stress and meditation expert with a focus on the law of detachment and how to apply it to personal & professional excellence. He's the author The Power of Personal Detachment: Letting Go of Everything All The Time. - About how to be your higher self by keeping a distance from your lower self. Visit Bill at http://www.AdventuresInSelfUnderstanding.com. - A website dedicated to the study of detachment and how to apply it to resolve any personal or spiritual difficulty. Contact Bill with your questions and comments at ZenWilliam@yahoo.com.
We live in a time of vast changes. And those changes call for entirely new ways of learning and thinking. In "Five Minds for the Future," Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead: the Disciplinary mind--mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics, and history) and of at least one professional craft; the Synthesizing mind--ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others; the Creating mind--capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomena; the Respectful mind--awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups; and the Ethical mind--fulfillment of one's responsibilities as a worker and citizen. World-renowned for his theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner takes that thinking to the next level in this book, drawing from a wealth of diverse examples to illuminate his ideas. Concise and engaging, "Five Minds for the Future" will inspire lifelong learning in any reader and provide valuable insights for those charged with training and developing organizational leaders--both today and tomorrow.
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There are in fact, many ways how you can remember important information such as numbers, events, errands and names. The challenge is how to make all the information easy to retrieve, out of the top of your head in a random situation.
Memory techniques work on anything that you like to master. There are things you may need to work on in memorizing something for the first time but all information has techniques on how they can all be memorized. It just takes a lot of interest and enthusiasm to be able to absorb all the information we want to understand and remember.
Creating an absurd and outrageous story from a list of non-related items will do well enough to stick in your head. What else is that it stays there in your memory the way the story is created, the chronological order and even the positioning of the character! The fun part about this technique is that there’s no limit to how you want to create the story and the sillier it is; the easier for you to remember it and the keywords that comprise it.
Now you’ll say what if you need to memorize an entire chapter of items and information; surely you can’t create a novel out of this. True. But in fact, what you can do to get around this problem is to break down all the information you need to remember. Try to put the related or similar items in one cluster and name it. Do the same with the rest. You can also create acronyms out of the clusters you have made and then, create a silly story using the acronyms or the cluster of words you’ve created.
Once you have this ready, you can then associate mental images with the story and each key word you’ve made. It has been proven that the imagination, especially when there’s clear images associated with it works efficiently – efficient enough to be remembered.
Following these techniques for the first time may come a bit slower and difficult but practicing them can gradually increase your expertise over any memorization tasks. Learn more important details regarding memorization improvement techniques.
If you watched the swimming events at the [Olympics], you probably observed the incredible focus the medalists demonstrated. Sure, they're strong and fast. But when hundredths— maybe even thousandths—of a second are all that separate the winners from the losers, it's obvious that something besides strength and speed is at work.
A comment by Flip Darr, a former collegiate swimming coach who played a part in training eight Olympic medalists, sheds some light on what that critical ingredient might be. "I felt in my coaching career that if I would work on [the swimmers'] head[s], their bodies would come along," he said. "A lot of coaches work on their bodies and then at the last moment try to do their heads. The thing is, if they are working with their heads all the time, and working with their head over the body, mind over matter, they will have more confidence when they walk up to the block."
What a great illustration of the value of good thinking. Athletic ability is important, but preparing for the biggest race of one's life is as much mental as it is physical—if not more so. As Bill MacCartney, the former head football coach at the University of Colorado, once told me, "Mental is to physical what four is to one."
That's a powerful argument in the case for good thinking—on the football field, as well as in your office at work. The specific thoughts that increase your effectiveness as a leader might not be the same as those required for an Olympic medal, but the overall commitment to thinking is identical.
As we continue the discussion about thinking that we began in the last issue of Leadership Wired, here are five statements that further underscore the importance of solid contemplation.
1. Everything begins with a thought. Every great invention, every technique, every conversation, every leadership practice and every bit of personal growth starts in someone's head.
2. What we think determines who we are, and who we are determines what we do. What kind of person do you want to be? What do you want to accomplish in your life and career? Are your thoughts paving the way for you to achieve those goals, or are they getting in the way?
3. Our thoughts determine our destiny, and our destiny determines our legacy. That's pretty sobering, especially for those of us who have already passed life's halfway point. The good news is that, no matter how old you are, it's not too late for good thinking to influence your legacy in a positive way. This quote by James Allen says it well: "You are today where your thoughts have brought you, and you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you."
4. People who go to the top think differently than others. There are many reasons for this, but it's absolutely true. As William Arthur Ward said, "Nothing limits achievement like small thinking, and nothing expands possibilities like unleashed thinking."
5. We can change the way we think. This is a comforting thought, especially in light of the previous statement. One of the best ways to change the way we think is to invest in resources that help us improve our leadership methods, our relationships, our technical competencies, our time-management skills, our ability to handle conflict, and so on. Over the years, I have been helped tremendously by books and tapes that cover such issues. They boost my thoughts and add great value to my life.
Before I close, I want to highlight the positive influence other people can have on our thought processes, and the critical impact we can have on theirs. For example, Flip Darr understood that one of his functions as a coach was to help his athletes develop the mental stamina necessary to win the big races. That's why he spent so much time "working with his swimmers' heads." As leaders, one of our jobs is to help our people learn how to think for themselves so they can perform successfully when we're not around.
At the same time, we also need to spend time with people who help us think better. I love interacting with good thinkers. They energize me. They stimulate my thoughts, challenge my ideas and stretch my mind like nothing else can. That's why I like to say that some of my best thinking has been done by others!
The bottom line is this: When it comes to success in life, the ability to think well isn't just an asset; it's a necessity. And when you make good thinking a priority today, you lay the groundwork for success tomorrow.
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"This article is used by permission from Dr. John C. Maxwell's free monthly e-newsletter 'Leadership Wired' available at www.MaximumImpact.com."