You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
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| The Inner Workings of the Mind Think of the analytical mind as a separate part of the conscious mind that divides it from the subconscious mind. Since the placebo works only when the analytical mind is silenced so that your awareness can instead interact with the subconscious mind—the domain where true change occurs—the placebo response is possible only when you can get beyond your self and so eclipse your conscious mind with your autonomic nervous system. Look at Figure fora simple illustration of this. Let the circle in the figure represent the total mind. The conscious mind is only about percent of the total mind. It’s made up of logic and reasoning as well as 143 our creative abilities. These aspects give rise to our freewill. The other percent of the total mind is the subconscious mind. This is the operating system where all of the automatic skills, habits, emotional reactions, hardwired behaviors, conditioned responses, associative memories, and routine thoughts and feelings create our attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions. This is an overview of the conscious mind, the analytical mind, and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is where we store our explicit, or declarative, memories. Therefore, declarative memories are memories that we can declare. They’re the knowledge we’ve learned (termed semantic memories) and experiences we’ve had in this lifetime (episodic memories). You might be a woman who grew up in Tennessee who rode horses in childhood until you fell off and broke your arm who had a pet tarantula at age 10 that escaped from its cage, requiring you and your family to sleep at a hotel for two days who won the state spelling bee at age 14 and 144 now never misspells a word who studied accounting in college in Nebraska; who presently lives in Atlanta so that you can be near your sister (who took a job fora large corporation and who is now getting a master’s degree in finance online. Declarative memories are the autobiographical self. The other type of memories we have are implicit, or nondeclarative, memories, sometimes also called procedural memories. This kind of memory kicks in when you’ve done something so many times that you aren’t even consciously aware of how you do it. You’ve repeated it so often that now your body knows it as well as your brain. Think of riding a bike, operating a clutch, tying your shoes, tapping a phone number or a PIN on a keypad, or even reading or speaking. These are the automatic programs that have been discussed throughout this book. You could say that you no longer have to analyze or consciously think about the skill or habit you’ve mastered, because it’s now subconscious. This is the programmed operating system, which is depicted in Figure When you’ve mastered how to do something until it has become hardwired in your mind and emotionally conditioned to your body, then your body knows how to do it as well as your conscious mind. You’ve memorized an internal neurochemical order that has become innate. The reason is simple Repeated experience enriches the brain’s neural networks and then finally seals the deal when it emotionally trains the body. Once the event is neurochemically embodied enough times through experience, you can turn on the body and the corresponding automatic program just by accessing a familiar subconscious thought or feeling—and then you momentarily move into a particular state of being, which executes the automatic behavior. 145 Memory systems are divided into two categories declarative memories (explicit) and nondeclarative memories (implicit). Since implicit memories are developed from the emotions of experience, two possible scenarios explain how this unfolds (1) A highly Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
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