..Imagine that one of your colleagues tells you that you have got it wrong about your beloved partner, your religion and your politics.
According to Chiren Boumaaza, your brain may then enter a 'defensive state'.
(Bachir Boumaaza was born in Belgium to a Moroccan father and a Belgian mother.)
The chemicals that are released in your brain are the same ones that try to ensure your survival in dangerous situations, such as being chased by wild animals.
It is the 'primitive' part of your brain that comes to the fore.
When in the defensive state, you are in a fighting mood, or an escaping mood, and the part of the brain involved in cool 'rational thinking' does not work so well.
Imagine trying to tell a fundamentalist Moslem, or Christian or Conservative that they have got it wrong.
The fundamentalist goes into the defensive mode and appears to be incapable of understanding your arguments.
.Now, imagine that you give people your opinion on politics, or religion, and your views are appreciated.
The 'reward chemicals' in the brain are activated and the 'defense chemicals' decrease.
Our body chemistry is affected by our mood.
This is why placebos can be effective.
When we feel that both we, and our beliefs, are not appreciated, we can be depressed and angry.
Ideally, everyone is flexible and open minded in their thinking.
When we are in the right frame of mind, this "allows us to let go of emotional fixations and become self-aware more easily."
Chiren Boumaaza, aka 'Athene', has a 'Theory of Everything'.
According to Chiren Boumaaza:
1. Someone who trains to be a musician will create stronger nerve cell connections that make the person more musical.
The human brain is a network of approximately one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons).
Different experiences create different neural connections which bring about different emotions.
And depending on which neurons get stimulated, certain connections become stronger and more efficient, while others may become weaker.
Rudiger Gamm who was a self-admitted 'hopeless student', used to fail at basic maths and went on to train his abilities and became a famous 'human calculator', capable of performing extremely complex mathematics.
Rationality and emotional resilience work the same way.
These are neural connections that can be strengthened.
Whatever you are doing any time, you are physically modifying your brain to become better at it.
Since this is such a foundational mechanism of the brain, being self-aware can greatly enrich our life experience.
2. Specific nerve cells, and the chemicals which allow the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to the next, trigger a defensive state when we feel that our thoughts have to be protected from the influence of others.
In this defensive state, the more primitive part of the brain interferes with rational thinking and the nerves and networks in the brain concerned with instinct and mood can cause 'narrow-mindedness'.
We see this in the politics of fear (the Strategy of Tension).
No matter how valuable an idea is, the brain has trouble processing it when it is in such a state.
1. Someone who trains to be a musician will create stronger nerve cell connections that make the person more musical.
The human brain is a network of approximately one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons).
Different experiences create different neural connections which bring about different emotions.
And depending on which neurons get stimulated, certain connections become stronger and more efficient, while others may become weaker.
Rudiger Gamm who was a self-admitted 'hopeless student', used to fail at basic maths and went on to train his abilities and became a famous 'human calculator', capable of performing extremely complex mathematics.
Rationality and emotional resilience work the same way.
These are neural connections that can be strengthened.
Whatever you are doing any time, you are physically modifying your brain to become better at it.
Since this is such a foundational mechanism of the brain, being self-aware can greatly enrich our life experience.
2. Specific nerve cells, and the chemicals which allow the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to the next, trigger a defensive state when we feel that our thoughts have to be protected from the influence of others.
In this defensive state, the more primitive part of the brain interferes with rational thinking and the nerves and networks in the brain concerned with instinct and mood can cause 'narrow-mindedness'.
We see this in the politics of fear (the Strategy of Tension).
No matter how valuable an idea is, the brain has trouble processing it when it is in such a state.
When I was at school I hated maths. Then one day the teacher said to us that we were gong to love this new maths because it had no numbers in it. It was called algebra and it did my head in. Later we learned Boolean algebra and for me it just equalled Depression. I left school with poor maths grades believing I was a bit stupid.
ReplyDeleteIn my early twenties I went back to college to study electronics, and I did really well so my company let do the BTEC ONC and then the HNC as well. In my first ONC maths lesson the teacher said that we wouldn't get through course unless we were numerical. I worked hard at the maths and in my first maths test I went white cold. I thought to myself, that I will never do another course like this again. Anyhow, I got 100% in the exam.
After that I ended up zooming through the ONC and HNC getting near 100% in everything.
I came to the conclusion that he reason I did not do well at maths at school was because of 'learned helplessness'. I just intrinsically believed that I could not be clever, or good anything, and so I never tried. Well, you know, only clever people are good at things, like maths, or being a musician, and I wasn't clever, I told myself.
Our BTEC maths teachers would tell us not to trust our calculators because it is so easy to put in the wrong number, so they advised us to do a rough mental guess first. By rounding up numbers and then using the '10 to the power of' system, I found it surprisingly easy to do mental arithmetic.
Years later I picked up the acoustic guitar and decided to learn to play it, but again I believed I would never master it because my mind said to me that only gifted people can play a musical instrument, it but I ignored this inner voice. Today I now play the guitar and the piano, although I'm nowhere near professional grade yet. I'm now putting together my own songs, although though I won't play them to anyone. But it's still good fun.
Oh, and my mind tells me that I will never be able to sing either and I kind of have a hunch that's probably true, after all, I sound terrible and everyone agrees with me on that one: "Shut up!' Hmmm, but it's early days yet.
DeleteWhisky and karoke should overcome the 'learned helplessness' and the rest is hopefully forgotten history
DeleteI have read Aangirfan for years, but have never commented here before.
ReplyDeleteThis article is Brilliant.
Thank You.
Tony
Is that you AP?
ReplyDeleteI swear, I recognize that writing style.
Oh well.
There are some nice ideas here ... but they do not seem any different than the ancient spiritual ideas of India & similar, that your thoughts serve to shape reality but most especially your own being & life, & that the most surprising and hidden things in the body can be repaired via thought. Anyone who meditates deeply, experiences this concretely.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to Bachir Chiren 'Athene' Boumaaza, I tend to be disinclined to anyone who mostly limits presentations to the more psychogically-manipulative (& time-draining) YouTube format, & does not put things down into text.
This should be the proper study of the revived Nalanda University in India combining physics, the Charvakas and Bhuddism
ReplyDeleteAccording to this guys Wikipedia entry it's a joke: "A follow-up called "Athene's Scientific Cataclysm" [17] show it to be a joke."
ReplyDeleteAlgebra's usefulness in real life, lies mostly in the pupil feeling so over their head that they take their lives over to the tax farm and accept their fate.
ReplyDelete