The Mind

What is mind after all? Where is it located in human body? How does it function? Perplexing
questions?

When we think of mind, we think of two aspects of mind, the conscious mind and the sub
conscious mind. The conscious mind is located in prefrontal cortex, behind forehead. The brain
behind that is mainly sub conscious mind. The conscious mind is the YOU, the creative and
imaginative. It is your identity. The sub conscious mind is from where patterns and habits come.
It has little creativity. It is basic operating system of the brain computer. The operating system
slogs on at the back end. But it is much powerful than the conscious mind. The conscious mind’s
prefrontal cortex can process and manage about 40 nerve impulses per second. The 90% of
brain that constitutes, the sub conscious mind can process about 40 Million nerve impulses per
second. It is a million times powerful than conscious mind. This is sheer raw processing power. It
learns to control the body and respond to our experiences. When we learn something complex
our sub conscious mind learns it as a program. When you are not conscious you default into
your subconscious program.

Some interesting features of human brain:

John Von Newman calculated that in a life time human brain stores 2.8x10 20 bits of information.

Brain stores almost 1 million traces of information per day. It has a capacity to store 70 trillion
traces. So during life time (Say 70 years) an average human being hardly uses 0.04% of brain
capacity.

There are 100 billion nerve cells or neurons in the brain with 150 trillion synapses (space
between adjacent neurons through which electrical activity passes on).

Transmitting

Receiving

Fig: Neurons in Brain

Researches in to the electrical activities of brain with EEG’s (Electro Encephalograph) reveal a
graded range of activity in the brain.

Individual neurons exhibit spontaneous, rhythmic patterns of electrical activity in the form of
action potentials. The synchronized bursts of electrical activity generated by large neuronal
populations containing millions of cells are known as brain waves which can be detected from
outside the skull using two brain imaging techniques, EEG (Electroencephalography) and MEG
(Magnetoencephalography). With these techniques we have known that brain waves have
distinct patterns or brain rhythms. The brain rhythms have three properties, frequency,
amplitude and phase or timing.

The different patterns of brain wave oscillations are:

Beta - Low amplitude oscillations with a frequency between 12 and 30 Hz. They are linked to
the alert state of normal, waking consciousness, and are produced in the frontal lobes when we
concentrate and generate voluntary movements. This is the level of complete consciousness.
We function at this level approximately 16 hrs a day. The main purpose of this level is to
regulate life controlling bodily functions such as heart beat, breathing, kidney function,
digestion etc. About 75% of the beta level, or conscious mind proper, is spent monitoring these
vital bodily functions. Thus only 25% of the conscious mind is left to deal with what we know
our as our conscious thoughts.

Alpha - Low amplitude oscillations with a frequency between 8 and 12 Hz. They are associated
with a calm, relaxed state and are generated primarily in the occipital lobe. Alpha corresponds
to sub conscious mind. This level is characterized by 95 to 100percent concentration efficiency.
Examples of activity on Alpha level are hypnosis, meditation, biofeedback, daydreaming crossing
over to natural sleep and awakening.

Theta - Low amplitude oscillations with a frequency between 4 and 8 Hz. They are particularly
strong in the hippocampus, and are connected to learning and memory. This is the part of
unconscious mind that functions in light sleep.

Delta - Low amplitude oscillations with a frequency between 0.5 to 4 Hz. This corresponds to
deep sleep. At this level unconscious mind is obtaining the greatest amount of rest. This level
lasts thirty to forty minutes each night.

Gama – High amplitude oscillations with a frequency between 20 and 100 Hz. Gamma waves
triggered by the occipital lobe have been associated with attention, and it has been suggested
that those in the 40Hz frequency band play an important role in consciousness.

The Connection
It is argued that once parents bestow their genes on their children they take a back seat in their
children’s lives. It is their pre programmed genes that lead them.

Dr.Bruce H Lipton, a stem cell biologist and author of the international best seller The Biology Of
Belief, tells us that our thoughts are our greatest determinants of our destiny. Bruce through his
experiments with cloning stem cells discovered that it was the chemistry in the culture medium
that determined the fate of the cells, not the genes. The fate of the cells is not controlled by
genes, but is controlled by environment. He goes on to prove most excitingly, is equally true of
the human being.

Our lives are not determined by the genes inherited in the lottery of life, but our thoughts,
feelings and beliefs they create. He repeats that we are not victims of a predetermined destiny.
We can change our lives and realize our highest potential.

Dr. Bruce H Lipton

In 1967, Dr. Bruce Lipton began his experiments. He was cloning stem cells. One stem cell was
put in a petri dish. The stem cell divide every eight hours or so. First there is one, and then two,
four, eight like that. The cells were split in to three and put into three petit dishes with culture
medium. The culture medium is where the cells are nurtured. The chemical composition was
changed a little bit in the culture medium in each of the three dishes. In one dish the cells
became muscle, in another they became bones and in the third they became fat.

What controlled the fate of these cells? Earlier it was thought that genes controlled them. But
the genes in the three petri dishes were the same. The difference was the culture medium, the
environment. Yes, the fate of the cells is not controlled by genes but by the environment, the
culture medium. This was path breaking finding.

The human body is a skin covered petri dish of 50 trillion cells and the culture medium is blood.
The chemistry of the blood creates the environment, the controlling factor. Our brain is like a
chemist. The secretions from the brain, or hormones, are what control the chemistry of blood.
It is what the mind is thinking that controls the chemistry of blood. The brain secretes
hormones like Estrogen and Testosterone (Mating), Dopamine (Pleasure and Craving),
Vasopressin (Bonding and Aggression), Oxytocin (The Bonds of Love), Serotonin (Obsession) etc.
Love chemistry generates pleasure hormones and growth hormones generating the feelings of
health, happiness and energy.

If the same person is living in fear, the brain releases stress hormones and inflammatory
hormones. This will cause the cells to sicken and die.

This establishes a clear body mind link. The mind controls the chemistry, and the chemistry
controls the genes and the behavior. Your mind calibrates your blood’s bio chemistry, which in
turn controls your biology and genetics. The mind interprets your perceptions of the world, and
your brain goes to work to produce the bio chemistry that complements your perceptions.
Thoughts and beliefs translate into chemistry and change the health and vitality of body.
Change your mind to change your health. Mind controls the chemistry; chemistry controls the
genes and the behavior.

Now a look in to the womb.

The developing fetus is influenced by more than just the nutrients in the mother’s blood.
Maternal blood also contains a vast array of “information” molecules such as the chemicals, the
hormones and growth factors that influence and control the mother’s emotional and physical
health. The complex, small creatures have a pre birth life in the womb that profoundly
influences their long term health and behavior. “The quality of in the womb, our temporary
home before we were born, programs our susceptibility to coronary artery disease, stroke,
diabetes, obesity and a multitude of other conditions in later life”, writes Dr.Peter W Nathanielsz
in Life in the Womb: The Origin of Health and Disease. Parents have overwhelming influence.
Recently, even wider range of adult related chronic disorders, including osteoporosis, mood
disorders, and psychosis, have been intimately linked to pre and perinatal development
influences. Recognizing the role the prenatal environment plays in creating disease forces a
reconsideration of genetic determinism. Nathanielsz writes: “There is mounting evidence that
programming of lifetime health by the conditions in the womb is equally, if not more important,
than our genes in determining how we perform mentally and physically during the life. In
contrast to the relative fatalism of gene myopia, understanding the mechanisms that underlie
programming by the quality of life in the womb, we can improve the start in life for our children
and their children.”

Awake or asleep, the unborn child is constantly tuned in to their mother’s every action, thought,
and feeling. From the moment of conception, the experience in the womb shapes the brain and
lays the groundwork for personality, emotional temperament, and the power of thought.

Mothers and fathers are in the conception and pregnancy business together, even though it is
the mother who carries the child in her womb. What the father does profoundly affects mother,
which in turn affects developing child. The essence of conscious parenting is that both mother
and father have important responsibilities for fostering healthy, intelligent, productive, and joy
filled children. Science has kept our attention focused on the notion of genetic determinism,
leaving us ignorant about the influence beliefs have on our lives and more importantly, how our
behaviors and attitudes programme the lives of our children.

The developing child receives far more than nutrients from the mother’s blood. The
development of fetal tissues and organs is proportional to both the amount of blood they
receive and the function they provide. When passing through the placenta, the hormones of a
mother experiencing chronic stress will profoundly alter the distribution of blood flow in her
fetus and change the character of her developing child’s psychology.

Evolution has empowered our brains with ability to download unimaginable number of
behaviors and beliefs in to our memory.

A baby is born with no experience. It doesn’t know anything about life. A baby cannot be
conscious because it has nothing to think about. EEG studies show that, in the womb and
throughout the first year of life, the human brain predominantly operates at the slowest brain
wave frequency, 0.5 to 4 Hz, the delta waves. This is not surprising because babies sleep a lot; in
adult delta waves predominate during our deepest sleep. From two to six years old, a child’s
predominant brain wave is theta, 4 to 8 Hz, a vibrational frequency associated with the state of
imagination. This is the stage of development when a child’s delightful imagination runs wild. In
this wonderful stage of life, when theta waves dominate brain function, imagination and reality
becomes entangled. In this stage in the child’s mind a broom may become a horse. Theta brain
frequencies are also associated with the state of hypnosis during which information can be
directly downloaded into the subconscious mind. To induce this imaginative, suggestible state in
adults, hypnotists use methods designed to drop their clients’ brain wave frequencies down into
the mellower theta range. So a child under seven is in a state of hypnosis. That means it doesn’t
have to learn like in a school. All it has to do is to observe. It observes and records. It observes
its mother, father, sister, brother, community. A child is going to be a member in of a social
group. It has to learn thousands of rules to exist in the society. How can it learn that much
information? Hypnosis is the only way the infant can learn such enormous amount of
information.

For the first six years of life, children do not express the quality of consciousness associated with
alpha, beta, and Gama EEG activity as predominant brain states. Children’s brains primarily
function below creative consciousness. In their highly programmable theta state, children
record vast amounts of information they need to survive in their environment, but they do not
have the capacity to consciously evaluate the information being downloaded.

While the conscious mind is creative and can use that creativity to learn, the subconscious mind
primarily learns through either hypnosis or the creation of habits. Before you were seven years
old, your subconscious rapidly downloaded beliefs, because your brain was predominantly
operating in the hypnotic theta EEG frequency. After age seven, the subconscious mind’s
primary source of learning is through habituation. You learned multiplication tables by
repeating the sequence of numbers over and over and you eventually memorized the pattern
and could repeat it unconsciously. Repetition leads to habituation, and that is the fundamental
mechanism for programming sub conscious behavior pattern.

The creative thinking mind can instantly learn from a variety of inputs. The conscious mind can
acquire new beliefs from school and public lectures, reading books, or going through the
psychoanalysis of formative experiences. Educating the conscious mind does not automatically
reprogram the sub conscious mind.

Hypnosis and habituation are the primary means of programming behavior in to the sub
conscious mind. That is why conscious mind efforts, such as giving yourself a “good talking to,”
reading a self help book, or posting sticky notes have little influence on changing undesired
subconscious programs unless they are regularly repeated so as to create a new habit.

This ingeniously designed behavior downloaded system can be high jacked by hypercritical
parents. Most children grow up in families where they download criticism from parents “You
don’t deserve that. You’re not good at art. You’re bad”. Most often parents don’t mean to say
that their child is unlovable; they are acting like a coach who uses negative criticism to goad his
players into trying hard.
Such parental coaching efforts require that children have the consciousness to interpret the
positive logic behind their parents’ negative critique. But a child’s brain predominantly operates
below consciousness in the first six to seven years of life. During those periods child is unable to
intellectually understand that verbal bars are not true; the parent’s negative assessments are
downloaded as truth just as surely as bits and bytes to the hard drive of a desktop computer.
The child is not thinking, only recording. Critical parents are not aware that in their efforts to
help, they are actually sentencing their child to go through life unworthy. About 70 percent of
programmes that a child gets are negative, disempowering, limiting and self sabotaging.

When your conscious mind is thinking, whatever you are doing is now taken over by the
subconscious programme. If you are talking to someone, and then you have a thought, and you
continue talking, the talk is not coming from the conscious mind but from the programme. You
start talking like your father or your mother. What is more science has now found out that 95
percent of the day our mind is thinking. That means 95 percent of the day your behavior is
controlled by the subconscious mind.

That is the biggest problem of humans today. When I am thinking – I am not paying attention.
So you don’t see if you behave like your father or mother. But everyone else can. If you are then
programmed with behavior that is not healthy, 95 percent of the day, you will be negative, and
you will destroy relationships, break partnership, and you will have no idea why. Your health,
behavior are controlled by the basic programmes in your subconscious.

Subconscious programs of “unlovability” operating 95 percent of the time, unconsciously create

behaviors that reveal how you feel. You may think it’s a secret, deep thought, but it’s playing all
over your face in the words and in the words you unconsciously blurt out and the behaviors you
display but don’t observe. More important, your dysfunctional beliefs and broadcast in your
energy field and can invisibly sabotage your efforts to create the kind of relationships your
conscious mind so desperately seeks.

The sub conscious is a machine. It is neither good nor bad. It is the programmes in the machine
which may be good or bad. When you are mindful you don’t default in to the subconscious
programmes. You create every moment with your conscious mind’s dreams and desires. When
people fall in love, they are healthy, have energy and life is beautiful. When they are in love
their conscious mind don’t wander. When you fall in love, the honeymoon period is so beautiful,
so healthy. When you are with your partner, expressing to each other, you are only using your
creative conscious mind. And things happen just the way you wish. After the short period of
honeymoon, you still have to deal with regular life. The minute your conscious mind starts
thinking, the behavior you are going to express is controlled by your subconscious mind. And
your partner is shocked because she or he has never seen that behavior or that part of you
before. And since you did not see that behavior you are also bewildered and cannot understand
the partner’s response. And that ruins the relationship. But if you stay mindful, the honeymoon
effect will never end. Or if you could change your subconscious programmes and put in positive
programmes, whether the mind is thinking or not, you have same wonderful behavior.

Up to 90 percent of doctor visits are related to stress. Only one percent of disease is governed
by genetics. Under stress the chemistry that is released by the blood does not support health,
because stress hormones are not good for health. When stress hormones like adrenalin are
released, the blood vessels in the gut squeeze shut, in order to push blood in to the arms and
legs. The gut takes care of the body, and when stress hormones are released, nourishment to
the gut is denied. The immune system protecting the body also uses a lot of energy. So when
stress hormones close the blood to the gut, they also shutdown the immune system. That is
why people fall ill when stressed out. These stress hormones are released by programmes in the
subconscious mind, the belief that we are not good enough, don’t have enough.

The message is clear: children’s genes reflect only their potential, not their destiny. It is up to
you to provide the environment that allows them to develop to their highest potential. Let go of
unfounded fears and take care not to implant unnecessary fears and limiting beliefs in children’s
subconscious minds. Most of all, do not accept the fatalistic message of genetic determinism.
One can help one’s children reach their potentials and you can change your personal life.

So, when Nature and nurture compliments, life is beautiful.

To quote Paramahamsa Yogananda: Live each present moment completely, and the future will
take care of itself. Enjoy the beauty and wonder of each instant.

Courtesy:

Biology of Belief - Dr. Bruce H Lipton

Honey Moon Effect - Dr. Bruce H Lipton

Sreekumar R