How the Mind Works
Essay Preview: How the Mind Works
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Mental Patterns
Mental pattern is a memory trace formed in your brain tissue to record something that you have experienced. As you see, hear, feel, smell, sense or taste something over and over, your brain builds a pattern of it.
When you experience it again, or something like it, your brain activates the existing memory trace or patterned thinking and you go on autopilot.8
Your Brain Can Process Only Positive Information
The language of brain are pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells, i.e. inputs from your senses. Your brain cannot work with negative information, i.e. inputs you havent experienced. It can work only with positive information, i.e. “information from the experiences of your five senses, which it then manipulates in the emotional blender we call the imagination.”4
Can You Reflect and Act at the Same Time?
Well sort of. Reflecting and acting at the same time is very difficult as our mind can only hold one thought at a time. You can be going through periods of reflection and action at the same time but at any specific moment in time you are only spending energy in one of these two areas. You need to be focused on either reflection or action at one point and then be able to switch quickly and effortlessly to the other polarity when required. This is an important point to remember when you are considering focus and balance your life.9
Left Brain / Right Brain
Research on brain theory helps you understand why some people are excellent inventors but poor producers or good managers but weak leaders. The research indicates that the brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and the right, and that each hemisphere specializes in different functions, processes different kinds of information, and deals with different kinds of problems. The left brain works more with logic and analysis, the right works more with emotions and imagination.
“As we apply brain dominance theory to the three essential roles of organizations, we see that the managers role primarily would be left brain and the leaders role right brain. The producers role would depend upon the nature of the work. If its verbal, logical, analytical