How Your Mind Works
Your mind is like an air traffic controller, taking in information and directing it according to its current knowledge. New information is stored as it comes in – each time you access it, the more hard wired it becomes.
Access Your Information Highway
Access to hard-wired information becomes increasingly easy because of that neural pathway’s high usage. When you start linking thoughts together and making connections, your mind lays down a neural network. This is like a busy highway with smaller dirt roads running alongside it. The highway carries the information held in the more frequently accessed parts of the brain, and the dirt roads carry information that is rarely accessed.
Hard wiring positive thoughts can become a habit. The more cars/positive thoughts you have, the easier it becomes to access.
What Your Mind Does
Mind and body constantly interact. Your mind regulates your breathing pattern, but you are not consciously thinking about it with every breath. It ensures that your heart doesn’t skip a beat, but if it does, it will come up with an explanation of why. The mind’s capacity is seemingly endless. It has the ability to do complex tasks and take in an enormous amount of information:
The conscious mind can process up to 4,000 bits of information at any one time.
The subconscious has an amazing capacity and can deal with up to 400 billion bits of information per second.
Keep an Open Mind
Your mind runs your life and has the potential to either help or hinder you in your progress towards living a happy and fulfilled life now. It is important to develop thought patterns that will enable you to maintain a healthy and realistic outlook on life. Try to find the positive aspect of any situation that confronts you. You may be surprised to find that you are able to do things that you thought you couldn’t – it is often fear of failure that holds us back.
Accentuate the Positive
Trusting your mind is crucial, but lazy or damaging thought patterns that have become habitual will affect the quality of your life. It is important to learn to recognize these.
Eliminating the positive – I don’t deserve to be successful.
Accentuating the negative – I will never get over this failure and it will blight my life for ever.
Cutting off your nose to spite your face – If I can’t achieve this one goal, I’ll never achieve any of my goals.
Looking at the worst case scenario – Every minor setback that I experience makes disaster inevitable.
Wishful thinking – If only the circumstances were different, everything would be all right.
History repeating itself – If it happened once it’ll happen again, especially if it was something bad or disappointing.
Tip
About 45 minutes is the maximum length of time you should allow for concentrating on one thing – take a short walk to give your mind a break.
Think Effortlessly
The power of the mind becomes apparent whenever you perform a habitual but complex task without having to think about it consciously. When you multiply two figures, you are accessing your memory of multiplication tables. You can do this easily because you learned them as a child through constant repetition until you could recall them effortlessly. The first time you travelled from your house to a regular holiday destination you probably had to rely on detailed instructions and maps. If, after many years, you had to provide directions for friends who are coming to stay, you would probably have to think very hard.
It’s not just luck, there’s a lot of practice that goes into making the pressure shot to win the match look effortless.
Use It or Lose It
We all have days when we just can’t recall something we know. Then in the evening, it simply “pops into our minds”. If you are having trouble remembering a fact, you haven’t actually lost it completely. It’s just more difficult to access rarely used facts. A foreign language will become rusty without use, just as your performance on the tennis court will deteriorate without practice. Start chatting in French or knocking a few balls over the net and ready access to the skill will return.
Case Study: Practising to Make Perfect
Mary took a part-time job in a bakery once her children started school. The first time she had to calculate the price of six buns and give change in return for a note she was quite slow in working out the amount and began to worry that she’d never be able to do it. By the end of the day, after serving a number of customers, she had repeatedly done that sum and several others and it had become easier. As a result of continually using the mental arithmetic she’d learned at school, Mary was soon able to do increasingly more complex sums.
Mary quickly realized that the sums were getting easier and she was soon doing complicated calculations with ease.
Her new levels of self-confidence helped her to explore other opportunities to learn. She enrolled in a book-keeping course and then started her own book-keeping business.