harness and magnify the power of the subconscious to manifest this picture and bring it into reality in our lives. In Chapter 13, “The Supraconscious and Creative Problem Solving,” we will learn the basic operating principle that states, “Any thought held on a continuous basis in the conscious mind must be brought into reality by the supraconscious mind (positive or negative).”
As we proceed through this chapter, we will provide specific examples of how this happens.
The important thing to remember here is that what records in our subconscious mind is not the words that we impart, but rather the pictures (images) the words create and the emotions associated with those images. This has now been proven scientifically by Montreal neurologist Dr. Wilder Penfield. Dr. Penfield would take a person and put him under a local an a esthetic. The person is awake. Dr. Penfield then removes a portion of the skull over the area of the brain that stores memory. He probes into the brain and the subject recites an earlier experience in their life as though it is actually happening NOW ! If it is a happy event, the subject is smiling and laughing. If it is a sad event, the subject is despondent and crying. If Dr. Penfield removes the probe and inserts it in exactly the same place, the subject will express the same subjective experience. It is as though someone punched the rewind button on a recorder.
As we have learned in Chapter 7, everything we have experienced in life and the images and emotions associated with those experiences are all stored in the subconscious area of our mind and effect our current behavior.
The following is further scientific evidence of how visualization can effect performance.
Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone is Professor of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School.
Referring again to Dr. Doidge’s book, The Brain That Changes Itself, Dr. Doidge writes how Dr. Pascual-Leone has transcended the technology developed by Penfield through the process of transcranial magnetic stimulations, or TMS. As Dr. Doidge writes,
Wilder Penfield had to open the skull surgically and insert his electric probe into the brain to stimulate the motor or sensory cortex. When Pascual-Leone turns on the machine (TMS) and makes my finger move, I experience exactly what Penfield’s patients did when he cut open their skull and prodded them with large electrodes.
Dr. Pascual-Leone had great success in accelerating the learning of Braille by blind people using his TMS techniques.
Dr. Doidge continues to discuss Pascual-Leone’s success in proving the power and relationship of directed visualization and performance:
His next venture would break ground in a new way altogether, by showing that our thoughts can change the material structure of our brains.
He would study the way thoughts change the brain by using TMS to observe changes in the finger maps of people learning to play the piano. One of Pascual-Leone’s heroes, the great Spanish neuro-anatomist and Nobel Laureate, Santiago Ranon y Cajal, who spent his later life looking in vain for brain plasticity, proposed in 1894 that the organ of thoughts is, within certain limits, malleable, and perfectible by well-directed mental exercises. In 1904 he argued that thoughts, repeated in “mental practice,” must strengthen the existing neuronal connections and create new ones. He also had the intuition that this process would be particularly pronounced in neurons that control the fingers in pianists, who do so much mental practice.
Ranon y Cajal, using his imagination, had painted a picture of a plastic brain but lacked the tools to prove it. Pascual-Leone now thought he had a tool in TMS to test whether mental practice and imagination in fact lead to physical changes.
The details of the imagining experiment were simple and picked up Cajal’s idea to use the piano. Pascual-Leone taught two groups of people, who had never studied
As we proceed through this chapter, we will provide specific examples of how this happens.
The important thing to remember here is that what records in our subconscious mind is not the words that we impart, but rather the pictures (images) the words create and the emotions associated with those images. This has now been proven scientifically by Montreal neurologist Dr. Wilder Penfield. Dr. Penfield would take a person and put him under a local an a esthetic. The person is awake. Dr. Penfield then removes a portion of the skull over the area of the brain that stores memory. He probes into the brain and the subject recites an earlier experience in their life as though it is actually happening NOW ! If it is a happy event, the subject is smiling and laughing. If it is a sad event, the subject is despondent and crying. If Dr. Penfield removes the probe and inserts it in exactly the same place, the subject will express the same subjective experience. It is as though someone punched the rewind button on a recorder.
As we have learned in Chapter 7, everything we have experienced in life and the images and emotions associated with those experiences are all stored in the subconscious area of our mind and effect our current behavior.
The following is further scientific evidence of how visualization can effect performance.
Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone is Professor of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School.
Referring again to Dr. Doidge’s book, The Brain That Changes Itself, Dr. Doidge writes how Dr. Pascual-Leone has transcended the technology developed by Penfield through the process of transcranial magnetic stimulations, or TMS. As Dr. Doidge writes,
Wilder Penfield had to open the skull surgically and insert his electric probe into the brain to stimulate the motor or sensory cortex. When Pascual-Leone turns on the machine (TMS) and makes my finger move, I experience exactly what Penfield’s patients did when he cut open their skull and prodded them with large electrodes.
Dr. Pascual-Leone had great success in accelerating the learning of Braille by blind people using his TMS techniques.
Dr. Doidge continues to discuss Pascual-Leone’s success in proving the power and relationship of directed visualization and performance:
His next venture would break ground in a new way altogether, by showing that our thoughts can change the material structure of our brains.
He would study the way thoughts change the brain by using TMS to observe changes in the finger maps of people learning to play the piano. One of Pascual-Leone’s heroes, the great Spanish neuro-anatomist and Nobel Laureate, Santiago Ranon y Cajal, who spent his later life looking in vain for brain plasticity, proposed in 1894 that the organ of thoughts is, within certain limits, malleable, and perfectible by well-directed mental exercises. In 1904 he argued that thoughts, repeated in “mental practice,” must strengthen the existing neuronal connections and create new ones. He also had the intuition that this process would be particularly pronounced in neurons that control the fingers in pianists, who do so much mental practice.
Ranon y Cajal, using his imagination, had painted a picture of a plastic brain but lacked the tools to prove it. Pascual-Leone now thought he had a tool in TMS to test whether mental practice and imagination in fact lead to physical changes.
The details of the imagining experiment were simple and picked up Cajal’s idea to use the piano. Pascual-Leone taught two groups of people, who had never studied
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