The Language of Comfort: A Tribute to the Genius of Dr Morton Korenberg: The Comfort Doctor

By Uri Ravel

When we try to change our unwanted habits, what factors operate to help us or to hinder us in our efforts? Why do some individuals appear to encounter little difficulty when they set out to change long-established habits, while others appear to struggle in such efforts with little or no success? Does the sheer strength of your will determine whether you are likely to succeed? Can we identify particular traits or aptitudes that play a key role in driving and maintaining behavior change? In this book we turn to the Comfort Doctor to answer these questions and many others. We invite our readers to take up the tools of change and to learn the language of comfort.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483512426

Book preview

Israel.

CHAPTER 1

BRAIN POWER

The brain is a marvel of sophistication.

Let’s use this declaration to mark the start of our quest for the language of comfort. As a first step, this chapter introduces the reader to a number of basic concepts and observations about how our remarkable brain works when we perceive and interpret the moment-to-moment information that we encounter in our environment. We then go on to explore how our reactions to events in our environment are assessed and interpreted by our brain, and how our consequent behavior is shaped by that interpretation. If you find the technical material in this chapter somewhat tedious or hard to follow, you may prefer to begin instead with Chapter 2.

To illustrate the remarkable capabilities of our brain, we begin with a common experience. Suppose you are walking down a street with a fairly constant flow of traffic passing you from behind. You are preoccupied with finding an unfamiliar address and your attention is focused on this task. As you walk, you hear the characteristic sound of each passing car. Yet because your attention is not focused on these sounds, they are recorded by your brain only as part of the background noise in your immediate environment. Let’s stop here and review the meaning of the last sentence. Let’s say that we stopped you and asked, Did you hear the whooshing sounds made by each of the last five cars that passed you by? And you would then say that you were entirely unaware of those sounds. In that case, how do we know that the sound made by each car was actually picked up by your ears and registered by your brain – even though you were clearly unaware of this process?

The answer to this question lies in the following observation. Again, suppose that you are walking along the same street and, having concentrated on your address search, you are unaware of the five cars that produced their familiar whooshing sounds as they passed you by. But now imagine that the sixth car emits an unfamiliar clunking sound. You immediately focus your attention on the new sound and you turn your head to see the source of this noise. Why? Because the new sound, having been instantly registered by your neural machinery, was perceived to be very different from the familiar sounds of the other cars that passed you earlier. In other words, your brain registered the clunking as an out-of-the-ordinary sound, and activated a neural mechanism to draw your attention to it. This point is central to our discussion, so let’s explore its implications and see how it helps us to explain the neural activity that occurs when sense data are processed by your brain.

A set of neural events explains why you first ignored the whooshing sounds and why you then focused your attention on the clunking sound. First, your sense organ (ear) picked up each sound and transmitted it to areas of the brain which are responsible for processing incoming sounds. Next, the new sound was analyzed and classified, like a new book in the hands of a librarian. Along with its classification, the sound’s meaning was established by comparing it to a vast array of sound data that had been stored in your brain over the course of your life. Once established, the meaning of the sound determined your particular reaction. The whooshing sounds of the first cars were interpreted as ordinary and therefore not worthy of your attention (take-no-notice), whereas the clunking sound of the next car was interpreted as unusual and therefore worthy of your attention (take notice). In general, when a perceived sound is unfamiliar, attractive or threatening, you will react by quickly focusing your attention on its source, whereas your reaction to a familiar or recurring sound will be to ignore the source of the sound and to continue with your ongoing activity.

Let’s examine the astonishing complexity of this neural activity. We already described how information received by your brain in the form of sense data (sound) is registered and interpreted before you react. This means that you react to the sensations of the world around you only after you interpret their meaning. Your reactions to events in your environment are neither random nor automatic – they are thoroughly assessed and interpreted, and your consequent behavior is shaped by that interpretation. This chain of events explains why your response to one type of sound is so different from your response to another type of sound. Before we continue, however, it is important to emphasize that such reactions are very different from another class of reactions that are defined as reflexive. An immediate change in the size of your pupil in response to a bright light is an example of a reflex. It occurs reflexively, without the intervening neural activity that is associated with meaning and interpretation.

It is helpful to note the major difference between the two reaction types. In the case of a reflex, our body reacts following the activation of neural pathways that always lead to the same consistent and predictable outcome, without the possibility of nuance or variation. The neural circuitry that controls this response can therefore be characterized as fixed. In contrast, the other type of reaction occurs following an interpretive process which may lead to any number of outcomes, depending on the nature of the given interpretation. The neural system that allows this intricate process to take place can therefore be characterized as plastic. It supports your ability to respond to your environment in a variety of ways, and it provides the flexibility that you need to adapt your behavior to the constantly changing world around you. In our imaginary example of the noisy cars, this flexibility explains why you were first able to ignore the familiar (and unimportant) sounds of the whooshing cars, and, when the sound of the clunking car came within hearing range, you were then able to change your response and turn your attention to the new (and significant) sound.

Now let’s consider what we have learned so far, and ask how it relates to our subjective experience. What do we experience when our brain is busy receiving and interpreting sense data from our environment? Turning again to our imaginary example, we can be sure that you did not experience the complex neural activity in your brain while the sounds of the passing cars were being duly processed. One obvious reason for this is the blinding speed with which these neural events occurred. There was literally no time to experience anything from your instantaneous perception of the sound to your ensuing response. In the case of the whooshing cars, you were not even aware of your do-not-notice response. And in the case of the clunker, you turned your head so rapidly after the incoming sound, that