The difference among body, brain, and mind

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Aug 7, 2022 01:08 PM

Following is the excerpt from the chapter 1 of NLP: The Essential Guide — the book I am reading.

Each of us is a blend of three different parts: the body, the brain, and the mind. These all work together and influence each other. A problem in one area affects the others. For our purposes right now, here’s how to think about these parts:

THE BODY

The body is your physical body, your nerves, muscles, and circulation. Your body includes your endocrine system and other organs that are constantly adjusting your bloodstream to make you as effective as possible. Ever miss a meal or a good night’s sleep and then discover that you just aren’t “up to par” the next day? You may have all the information you need to solve a problem and yet the solution just doesn’t come. What’s happening is that your body is producing fatigue toxins, your blood sugar is low, or you’re having an insulin reaction, and that chemistry is affecting your mind.

THE BRAIN

The brain is the three pounds of stuff inside your skull. This amazing organ is where most of your consciousness takes place. The brain uses 25 percent of the total amount of oxygen you breathe. It is composed of about 100 billion neurons. Each neuron has one to ten thousand connections to other neurons. A single human brain equals the entire computing power of our planet in 2007. The human brain can perform 100 trillion calculations every second. What’s it do with all of that processing power? A staggering amount of work!

The brain handles all of the information about how your body is working and feeling, and all of the information about the outside world that is fed into the brain. That’s a total of two million bits of incoming information per second! But most of this data is handled automatically. We are only aware of a tiny fraction of this information at a conscious level.

If we have a brain malfunction, either physical or chemical, it affects our feelings. Things seem real to each of us in a way that no one else can possibly understand. And once our mind is engaged with a negative thought, the body is triggered to produce chemicals that can increase the negative effect and we spin out of control. Physical brain problems can be the result of disease or injury. Chemically, this can happen with too many martinis, prescription drugs, and even some foods.

THE MIND

When someone has a sudden scare or flash of anger, it triggers a reaction in the body. Their bloodstream is flooded with hormones and chemicals. Their heart races and their eyes narrow. Their breathing increases and they get ready to fight or run away. Chemicals like these go into the brain and change the way it works. Then those parts of the brain devoted to higher functions, like creative thought, shut down and other, more basic parts take over. When this happens, you become a specialized survival machine. Back in the days when we were running around in the tall grass and might easily become lunch for something bigger and hungrier than we were, this was a good design.

This design is not as useful when we’re on the way home in commuter traffic and someone cuts us off. Using our higher brain functions might be more optimal when we’re driving two tons of steel down the freeway. This survival design also isn’t very efficient if we’re in a work situation and some unexpected remark triggers our “fight-or-flight” instinct. When that happens, we lose the ability to think rationally and express ourselves persuasively. Again, it’s how we interpret our situation with our mind that causes our brain to revert to our flight-or-fight instinct.

So, body connects to brain, and brain to body. And your mind, the part that feels like “you,” is a pattern of nerve connections in your brain. You are housed in your brain and your body.

But if someone were to cut open your body or brain, they wouldn’t find a picture of your home, or the taste of chocolate milk, or the sound of birds singing. All that you experience, all that you think, you create in your mind.

The bits of data are stored in the brain, in billions of neurons, but to make the connections and to create the experience that make up our lives requires “us.” The brain is not a hard drive that can operate on its own. It takes our conscious minds to make everything work so that we can ride a bicycle, go shopping, enjoy a meal, or make music.