That was the first book that I read that sparked some kind of light on my own mental and emotional experience. That was the book that really gave me hope that a change is in fact possible. With a simple statement:
Thinking certain thoughts does change the physical structure of the brain, which in turn affects the future thoughts.
It was a discovery. That does sound like "your thoughts influence who you are", but I always thought that it's just a proverb without real evidence. And here the author claims that everything that he writes in the book has been result of analysing fMRI bran scans, not pure theoretising. The book also explained a few other things to me. What I found the most interesting for me at the time of reading was:
It is possible not to remember a situation from my past even though I was completely aware during it.
The part of the brain responsible for storing memories is hippocampus. If, for whatever reason, it did not "record" the events that were happening at that time, the memory of those events will just physically not be there. The reasons of why hippocampus may "switch off" is high stress / adrenaline levels, or even alcohol. That is why sometimes people do not remember traumatic experiences, as they usually include a lot of distress and negative emotions. It is not that they hide them from themselves, it is just that those events have not really been recorded into their memory.
It is possible to be affected by events that I do not remember.
Apart from the memories that have been stored by the hippocampus ("explicit memory"), there is another kind of memory, referred to as "implicit memory". The simplest example of such memory is knowing how to ride a bike - even if I do not remember how I learned it, today I just "know" how to do it. This "knowing" is part of the "implicit memory". So are the influences of the events that happened when I was very little or even before I was born. So are the fundamental things I learned about love in my early years. This is also where the "intuition" comes from, as we are mostly unaware of what is in our "implicit memory". I think that this is exactly what Vipassana refers to as the "subconscious mind".
And now comes the mind blowing fact: regardless of whether there is something happening in the present, or an event is recalled from the "implicit memory"..
..exactly the same neural path is taken as a reaction to it.
Which means, that it is physically impossibile for any human being to distinguish whether they are projecting some event from the past or whether they are really reacting to what is happening in the moment. Woa! That also means that I have been unnecessarily feeling guilty for not being able to distinguish between projection and a valid reaction just by focusing on it more and more. No, that is not the way to go. Only logical analysis of the possible reasons for an emotion that appeared can do that1. It also explains why my intuition is sometimes wrong - sometimes it is based on some condition from the past that is not valid in the present anymore.
I was actually now forced to take a look into that book again, and I think I need to read it again. It's priceless source of dense information about how the brain works, from the perspective that is on the intersection of the fields of neurology and psychology. I think that is what makes it especially valuable. There is not many people who tackle subjects on the intersections of different fields, so when someone finally does, there is usually a lot of new results there.
A very cool site related to the topic http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/.
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1) I would go even further, and say that the right way is to process the emotions connected with the projection, so that they simply stop coming back