Fourteen people attended the two day workshop on NVC, entitled From Conflict to Connection. If you are interested in their reactions and comments or if you had wanted to come along and are hoping there will be a repeat, then please visit www.nvc-shanghai.org.

So why do our minds work the way they do?

In this article i will give a brief introduction to how and why humans developed to have the sort of minds we have, and how we have a brain that didnt develop for use in the 21st Century. I believe that the better we understand ourselves, the more power we have to change behaviors that dont work for us. I hope this article helps you understand yourself better and leads to you having more power to create the life you want.

Several factors contribute to the amazing success of humans on this planet:

1. Hands - Freed from the ground by our upright posture, this makes possible our opposing thumb and all the available actions that arise from this.
2. Speech - The vast array of sounds that humans can make leads to a complexity of communication not before managed by any other creature.
3. Faces - The interpretation of the facial expressions of other humans is essential for the survival of the individual in the group.

All this led to us having a very large brain, which, because of our upright stature, needs to be delivered through a small birth canal. The baby therefore has to be delivered early in its development and is totally dependent, not only for survival but even for understanding and operating its own body. The brain takes approximately 15 years to reach physical maturity. Even in earlier less sophisticated societies a child was incapable of survival without adults until it was nearly 20 years old. Dependency is the name of the game for humans throughout the process of development. Our psychology is formed from a prolonged period of being at the mercy of others who themselves went through the same process. It is any wonder that we do not have a perfect society or a perfect understanding of ourselves?

The architecture of the brain and the way this creates our emotions.

The human brain is made up of three areas that represent our evolutionary development from early animals.

First we have, at the top of the spinal cord, the brain stem. This controls all necessary body functions like breathing, heart rate and other matters like hunger and sleep. These functions are pre-programmed which explains why it is so difficult to alter or override them. This area is common to all but the most simple animals with nervous systems. It is often called the reptilian brain. This part of the brain cannot learn

Next we have the nose-brain and Limbic system. This is the first learning brain and grew out of the need to analyze information coming via the sense of smell. Let us remember here that we are descended from the creatures that survived, not the ones that got killed. The ones that survived were the ones that responded fastest to their environment – if they encountered something that was food they had to eat it quickly before it went away, and if they encountered something that was predator they had to get away themselves. This determined that a rapid system for processing the information was best – i.e. the fewer nerve connections between the input and the output the better. In other words, this is not a sophisticated arrangement and there is a limit to how useful it is when responding to complicated situations. I said that the Limbic system is a learning brain, this means that new situations are compared to previously encountered ones. In other words, memory. The emotional content of all memory, if not the whole memory, is stored in the Limbic system. As the Limbic system developed with the early mammals, it formed connections with bodily functions so that the smell, sound or sight of danger led to a whole series of bodily changes to prepare for fight or flight, like increased heart rate, tightening of the gut to release blood for the muscles, and hormone release to increase muscle power. Powerful responses would also be initiated by the Limbic system when encountering situations of food or sex. We humans have a fully functioning Limbic system.

Finally we have the Cortex. This is a more recent evolutionary development which builds upon what was there already. This area enables a much more sophisticated processing of information and in humans the great expansion of the Neocortex allows for extracting information from the environment, and creating models with that information. This is what enables our language and imagination, and it is the cortex that performs the thinking processes

Emotions

So now lets talk about emotions. The word emotion comes from a Latin root which means ‘impulse to move’ and you can see from the previous section that it is the Limbic system that is the source of these impulses. Lets use an example to understand this.

When, in the poor light of early evening, we see a person running towards us with their arm raised with a stick ready to strike, our first response is a bodily one – we draw in breath, our heart rate goes up, our general muscle tension tightens up and our pupils dilate. Our attention fixes on the person and our whole body and mind prepare for defensive action.

This is fear and is it generated by our Limbic system. It is a very rapid response and all cuts in before we are aware of it, even before we recognise our friend Jim waving the rolled up newspaper. That moment of recognition is when the cortex does a more accurate assessment of the information which takes so much longer than the limbic system – only fractions of a second, but very significant in terms of survival. When we talk about emotions we do so in terms of feeling them. This is exactly correct because the Limbic system has such a direct and fast relationship with the body that all of its activities have a bodily component. Fear is felt as tension over the whole body including the face, grief is often felt in the chest. We all know where sexual attraction is felt.

It is really important here to note that all Limbic emotions are about life or death; they are about survival. That is because that is the level on which the Limbic system works. The Limbic system was developed at a time when survival was the issue, not at a time when we needed to worry about which school our child will go to or whether or not to apply for a particular job. The Limbic system sees everything in terms of physical safety, eating, mating, territory, protecting young and survival.

Now the Limbic system does not operate in isolation, because the cortex grew out of the Limbic system and there are strong connections between them. The bulk of the connections pass between the Limbic system and the frontal lobes – the major area for thought and skilled emotional responses. That is how the recognition of Jim prevented us from running away or hitting him first. There is a two way relationship between the cortex and the Limbic system such that our thoughts are affected by our feelings and our feelings are affected by our thoughts. We can also have thoughts about our feelings and have feelings about our thoughts, we can even have feelings about our feelings. This last one is not strictly correct in that what we have are feelings arising from our judgements about our feelings.

So how does this operation of the Limbic system affect us and our emotions? During infancy the brain stem completes its development first, and the Limbic system reaches maturity at the start of puberty. The frontal lobes continue developing up to adulthood.

So lets imagine we have a small girl with minimal language skills, immature frontal lobes, and a strongly developing Limbic system. The child experiences repeated capricious violence from a drunken father.

The Limbic system logs all this in its memory but without any of the clarity that comes with language and maturity. The Limbic system cannot distinguish between this father and all men, or between factors within the child’s scope and those outside. This child grows up and the Limbic system carries a memory against which it compares all future events.

So this girl grows up and, as a woman, she freezes every time a man comes running towards her. She does not know why. She cannot articulate the feeling, she cannot control it and is embarrassed about it. In her early thirties she goes for therapy and talks about her father week after week. After 16 months of therapy she thinks that she has gained control over this until an incident in the park in which a jogger accidentally knocks over her four year old daughter and she attacks him.

Changing our Habits and Behaviors

So why is it so hard to change our behaviors or give up those habits we cannot stop?

Here we have another factor from our development. We are born with many more neurons than we actually need and many more connections between neurons than are appropriate. At around 7 years, and again at puberty, large numbers of neurons die and many more connections wither. These are the ones that did not get stimulated or used. Our range of behavioral options has now been somewhat reduced. In the case of the little girl, the neurons and connections associated with feeling safe around men did not get stimulated, and the ones that ended up dominant in her Limbic system were the ones connected to fear of men. In other words the tendency to fear men has been hard wired into her brain. I am not saying here that there is no way of learning or adapting her behavior, what I am saying is that in her Limbic system the quick response to men is fear. This response can be overridden by the frontal lobes, as when we recognized Jim earlier but the frontal lobes have to be trained so that their influence over the Limbic system is faster and more powerful.

I said earlier that we can have feelings about our thoughts. Well this is the area in which the more subtle emotions arise. In the example of Jim and the newspaper the feeling arose before the thought so the feeling was a simple fear. However most of our feelings arise in the process of daily living and in connection with thoughts – as in the example of choosing a school. So our experience is one of thought and emotion arising together and can be described using a more accurate emotional language as say apprehension or worry.

It is in this area that we have most power to influence our feelings and improve our experience of life. The approach of Dao of Love is an educational one rather than a therapeutic one because the way to change our experience of ourselves is to retrain our thought patterns (which themselves have been trained, altho unconsciously, by our parents and society). Our realization of the way we relate to certain things does not in itself change that way of relating, what we need to do is learn and practice new ways of relating.

So finally, if you have habits that dont serve you and you want to change them, dont expect an easy process. Like learning anything, it takes time and practice. But also, like learning anything else, it can be done, just dont give up.

Good luck. We hope to see you at our workshops and trainings.

Abel B’Hahn

© Abel B’Hahn 2004

So here we are, in the year of the Ox. Happy Niu Year to you.
I hope you had a nourishing holiday and feel excited about the coming year. I am excited by the prospect of building new relationships with many people i dont yet know. I recently finished writing my first novel, which was a long term project. It took me nearly 18 months. I guess all things of value take time to grow, including relationships. If you are like me, and take time to get to know people, then you understand how long it takes to develop the intimacy and understanding that makes a successful relationship. Having lived over fifty years and had my share of failed relationships, i watch people jumping into a committed relationship before they even know each other and it worries me. My hope for people is that they take their time and get to know the other person before committing to them. The ox moves slowly but it gets there without fuss.
So i wish you good luck and careful choosing.
And have a great year.
Abel

Hi All
It is Wednesday and tomorrow my wife and i leave for Sydney, Australia for two weeks. China has provided us with an exciting, challenging and productive year. Dao of Love is now up and running and i am looking forward to teaching many people some of the skills that i learned in UK over the last ten years, and that have contributed so much to the joy and understanding in my relationships with my wife, my son and my business coleagues.
I wish all you who read this, a joyful few weeks and may 2009 bring you more joy, more excitement and more prosperity.
Abel