My partner and I were driving along today when my partner remarked that the man in the car we had just passed looked like one of the men in the 118 118 advert. I hadn't noticed this at the time, but I ran back the video in my mind and noticed that, sure enough, he had.
This struck me as a marvellous thing.
I hadn't noticed the man at all, but when asked to recall him, I could.
Something I hadn't remembered had lodged in my mind and being asked about it immediately, I was able to bring it into my conscious awareness.
Research shows that in reality though, after a period of time our memories aren't actually reliable or accurate at all.
Our brains can't hold all of our memories complete, there would simply be too much information
so what they do is take bits of the memory and retain them, then when we need to retrieve the memory, they take the pieces and reconstruct the story around them. This is why sometimes when we remember something we can only remember parts of it and then after we've concentrated on it for a while, the "whole" memory comes back. What we've done, is to re-construct it.
This of course also explains why different people remember the same event differently, we've all "remembered" different pieces and then we each construct our own story around those pieces. In this way, parts of our memories are also the same, giving us enough we agree on (usually) to call it the same event.
When we think about the future we use the same part of our brain as the part we use for memories.
In a study published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the (American) National Academy of Sciences, researchers using high tech brain imaging demonstrated that neurological memory centres are highly active whenever people envision upcoming events.
Lead researcher, Karl Szpunar a graduate student in the department of psychology at Washington University in St Louis said, "It shows us that memory is just as important to imagining the future as it is to remembering the past".
The data shows that neurological memory centres were dominant whether participants were recalling the past or imagining their future. Contradicting the previous assumptions that planning and thinking about the future would mainly activate the frontal lobe.
Interestingly and little known, amnesiacs as well as not being able to remember the past, are unable to think about the future. It appears that if you don't have information about the past, you're unable to construct images of the future.
That sounds like a particularly horrible situation to be in.
Now, in addition to being really interesting, this is also very useful information since it demonstrates something fundamental about the way our brains work.
Our brain, as I said previously, constructs our memories from the small pieces it does retain, this research has been around some time and is well validated.
Your brain constructs your memories, then creates how you think about the future from these memories.
But, how you remember your past is all affected by your filters, how you felt or feel about the event.
This sounds as though it is terrible news, that how we felt about events in our past will influence how we imagine our future. If we had a terrible time in the past (or percieve it to be terrible) then we will create a terrible future for ourselves. But it doesn't have to be that way.
It does mean that we create how we think, feel, remember and behave unconsciously.
It also means that it's possible to change those patterns.
There are techniques to enable us to make this process more conscious, Hypnosis, NLP, Visualisation.
It's extremely difficult to do this using only our fully conscious mind because we need to be set or fixed to deal with the real world and changing the way these filters affect us means working directly with our unconscious; but by using these techniques it's possible to gradually unfasten these constructs, to loosen their hold. If they're getting in the way of us having the good lives we truly deserve, we can create new constructs and filters which support us in making the changes we need to enable us to fulfill our potential.
It's a bit like when you fisrt started learning to drive and had to really concentrate on doing just one thing, but with a good instructor, eventually you became more able to do more things at once, but still it was hard to remember what to do when you focussed on what the other traffic was doing? But eventually, if with your good instructor (or someone who really understands how to work with unconscious minds), you became able to drive and deal with the other traffic and even, to hold a conversation, find your way and notice whats on the radio.
I have obviously simplified the process for the sake of brevity here, and it isn't instant by any means, but it is possible to have considerable control over our unconscious mind, to create the thoughts, memories and ultimately the future we truly deserve.
Now, isn't that a nice thought to encourage you to keep any New Years Resolutions you've made, or Resolutions you've made at any other time of the year?
With thanks to The Hypnosis Network for access to the scientific research and reminding me to talk about the other side of the work I do.
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