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By Bob Docter
These functions—thinking, feeling, behaving and spirituality—are all linked. They’re all housed in the brain.
Plato had a nice image of parts of the body that contain thinking and feeling. Poetically, he was correct, but physiologically he was wrong. For years we assumed that the body and brain were separate entities. Not true. The actions of the brain do trigger different parts of the body as we respond to thoughts and feeling, but it all starts in the brain and they link closely together. So take care of your brain. It becomes your mind. Avoid harmful acts, dangerous substances and stupid decisions.
For instance, how’s your prefrontal cortex (PFC)? Did you play too much football, drink too much alcohol, drive too many race cars (like the one sitting in your garage), or take way too many physical risks? Is your PFC functioning as it should?
You sure better hope so. It manages what you do and that starts with your thinking. It’s the CEO of the brain. It’s very involved with complex planning and plays a major role in the development of your personality. It takes in information and helps you decide what to do with it. It manages your social behavior, helps sort out conflict in thoughts and in choosing a course of action—including deciding between right and wrong.
I’d say that hunk of brain matter, just behind your forehead, is pretty important. Protect it.
Our thoughts contribute mightily to our feelings. Most of the time we feel what we think. Not all the time. You didn’t plan to stub your toe. There was no thought connected to it. It was pain by itself followed by a lot of anger and self-condemnation. So the “deeper” emotions like fear or pain often are stimulated without thought. We often call this the “fight or flight” response.
Let’s assume that some event happens in your life, and you must respond. Maybe it relates to some interpersonal activity such as working with a committee or having an argument with someone. Maybe it involves only you, like thinking through a problem or planning a speech. Whatever it is, it all starts in the brain.
As you might expect, the fastest concentration of energy (think brain activity) has to do with our thinking processes. A short time later we begin to feel emotions. Their energy patterns have farther to go through the body.
Often, we tend to behave (act) on the basis of our feelings. Somebody says something about which you fundamentally disagree. Your brain functions at lightning speed, thoughts carom around, anger arises, and you respond in a rapid, highly critical, and sometimes even highly personal manner. That’s acting from feeling alone. (Ugh! This is getting close to home.)
Well then, are we at peril to our prefrontal cortex? Of course not! It’s not in charge. You are!
Its executive function can help a great deal. It can contribute the opportunity to have a “second thought”—an evaluation period before you put your foot in your mouth. It’s called cognitive appraisal and makes it possible to assess how you perceive what you are about to do in relation to your goals and motives. It asks: “By doing or saying this will it help me get where I want to go? “And if you want, it will also ask: “Is this the ‘right’ thing to do?” Humans find themselves facing significant interpersonal difficulty on the occasions when they act out of feeling and ignore the opportunity to evaluate consequences afforded by cognitive appraisal.
Additionally, the act of cognitive appraisal allows us to evaluate our self-talk. Our brain, a sensory receptor mechanism made up of nerve tissue, becomes our mind—the seat of intelligence, consciousness, thought, memory, and so on—when we use its power in conjunction with past learning and experience.
Our world would be a much better place if we all had had someone to teach us at age 3 and beyond that: “You is kind, and you is smart, and you is important” (The Help).
In life, we all get “messages” from others that affect us greatly—some positive and some negative. We choose to generalize them to parallel thoughts of worth and esteem. We accept their validity on faith, without evidence, and integrate them into our identity. So faith and our spiritual beliefs begin in the brain and live in the mind.
A personal example: I must have felt great love in my infancy and early childhood. From this, I must have developed thoughts of worth without perfection and confidence with caution. I learned the power of the will, the value of perseverance, and the importance of a Christ-based belief system—a religion based on positive human relationships of genuine love and caring.
I have never stopped growing and learning. This allowed me to grow from mistakes, select positive experiences, take rational risks, establish an identity and choose to surround myself with people who tend to send positive messages. I have found them in a dedicated and caring mother, a brilliant father whose warmth and love greatly inspired us, a twin brother who independently models his individuality and shows us continuing love and strong Christian values, from colleagues at work, at my Salvation Army corps, with Diane, the champion wife, mother and grandmother—what a positivist—and from our children and grandchildren, who somehow have caught the best of both of us.
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