Advancing AwarenessTo Get More Love In Your Life
The Psychology, Technology, Neuroscience and Spirituality of
Reducing Unhappiness by Becoming Progressively Loving
Meta Awareness and the Wandering Brain
Let your brain wander under the watchful eye of your Executive Meta Awareness.
Say ”No” to survival thinking as soon as it starts. Say “BILAMAP” to focus yourself on love.
The Neuroscience of Meta Awareness, Brain Wander and Executive Meta Awareness
HOW OFTEN ARE YOU UNEASY WHEN NOTHING BAD IS HAPPENING AROUND YOU?
You probably won't believe what I am about to tell you -- at first. You may need to spend a little time seeing it for yourself before you do.
But here it is: Your brain is currently set up to take away conscious control of your thinking about 45% of your day. As scientists, we have now come to appreciate and understand this state of awareness to be our "Default Mode of waking consciousness". That is, we go there most naturally and often, without paying much attention to it. It is known as the Wandering Mind. For me, it is better thought of as the Wandering Brain or Brain Wander, since it is your brain that relaxes your self directed, intentional awareness and then begins to think for you. Or, as I often say, "you let your brain think you."
The Default Network is Purple
Here is a simple example that you will immediately recognize as having happened to you many, many times in the past. You are reading and all of a sudden, poof, you become aware that you have been reading the words, and wasting your time because you have no knowledge of what you just read. So you have to go back up the page and you then, rather easily, figure out where you stopped comprehending. This is Brain Wander. And interestingly, after you go back up the page, it may be difficult to even remember what you had been thinking about before you caught yourself not reading.
This is a kind of daydreaming, which takes us out of conscious awareness.
So, your Productive Thinking (your focused and directed thought) was telling you to read, but your brain told you something else and hijacked your conscious intention to read. And here is the tough part: when we Brain Wander, we report being happy only 10% of that time. The remainder of the time, we are emotionally uneasy or neutral. When you become uneasy during Brain Wandering it is often because the primitive part of your survival orientation feeds you information about the possible problems coming up or the possible "perceived danger" around you.
Brain Wandering takes us out of the present moment because it does not use environmental stimulation or cues to think. It takes you inside your head to think about you and what it knows is happening in your life and then starts thinking about you in the future or the past.
There are certainly positive aspects to Brain Wander which include the ability to plan what we need to do in the immediate future and it allows for powerful aspects of creative thinking. So, for example, when we are doing little, we often use Brain Wander to help us decide what we are going to do next in our day, when we have no immediate future plan. And, it allows us to effortlessly interface with the environment. We can do a huge array of things (like walking or driving), and continue to think about entirely different things than what we are doing. So, we can drive, empty the dish washer or take a shower with almost no thought of how to make our body work, while our Wandering Brain is thinking away about what we are going to do when we are finished.
So, like most things, there are potentially good and bad aspects to Brain Wander. The Big Problem is: given enough time on it’s own, the brain will focus you on potential life problems (survival oriented thinking) and cause the stimulation of feelings, from mild discomfort to extreme fear. It is the brain's goal to always make you aware of danger -- so you can survive! The trick is to be aware of when you are going into this type of survival thinking. However, being aware of Brain Wander is not so easy until you 1) understand that it is really happening, and 2) examine how it is operating within you. Then, you can make a conscious decision to recognize it in the future and to not allow yourself to be driven into survival thinking.
Amazingly, Brain Wander is so pervasive, even when we are very consciously focused in working on a task, like gardening, we will slip into Brain Wander about 30% of the time within any given activity. And guess what -- we usually don't even know we are doing it. It is like a tick sucking your blood. You don’t even know it is there once it has it's head buried in your flesh. Most of the time, we don’t even know that we are letting our brain wander. We don't realize we have relinquished our conscious awareness to our brain until we start to feel uncomfortable.
Then, we become aware of feeling the discomfort, and then we often flip out of Brain Wander into intentionally thinking about the Brain Wander thoughts which have stimulated the discomfort. Because we feel bad, we think there is a real problem and we focus our conscious attention on solving the problem. BUT MOST OF THE TIME, THERE IS NO REAL PROBLEM IN OUR IMMEDIATE PRESENCE. We are then unhappy or fearful for no real good reason, because of something that we are anticipating and which is currently not real.
Welcome to worry and rumination. It is the seat of much unhappiness.
This level of unhappiness affects almost all people, except for the highly evolved. For those of you who have spent some time working to understand the concepts of the ego for your own spiritual growth, you know that certain ego needs or expressions interfere with us staying in a connected, loving and "spiritual" place. Here is my proposition to you, in order to help you gain further clarity. I suggest that as you look at your Brain Wander level of consciousness, you will discover, it is in this state where the spiritually destructive part of ego is created.
And the truth is: most of the time we do not need to be worrying about these ideas that come into our mind. And we do not need the unhappiness and fears that survival thinking brings to our awareness. So why do we do it? Because we are designed to "want what we want" and to "get what we want" so we can feel good. And we are designed to be alert and to survive. This was brilliant pre-programmed, brain driven thinking, thousands of years ago, perhaps even hundreds of years ago. But for many people in this day and age, our daily comfort and survival are not really in question -- but our brain still thinks it is.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO GIVE AWAY CONSCIOUS CONTROL OF 45% OF YOUR WAKING DAY TO YOUR BRAIN, LIKE YOU WILL DO TODAY, TOMORROW AND THE NEXT DAY AND THE NEXT. YOU CAN REFOCUS BRAIN WANDER AND CHOOSE YOUR OWN DESTINY THROUGH YOUR AMAZING MIND ABILITY CALLED “EXECUTIVE META AWARENESS.”
If you are continuing to question the validity of what I am saying, here is another exercise that you can do right now to experience your Brain Wander and recognize how little control you currently have over your wandering brain.
To very quickly appreciate and more deeply understand how the brain and Meta Awareness work in relationship to each other, spend a minute or two doing the following.
Wherever you are, stop reading. Just close your eyes and become aware of all of your senses and stay aware of your senses.
That’s right, just begin to notice what you are hearing and what your body is feeling and notice any smells. Feel the various pressures against your body. You can even notice the light coming through your closed eye lids. Experience as many of your senses, as simultaneously, as possible. And finally, just sense and experience these sensations and do not think. Just be aware of your senses without thinking about what you are experiencing. If you realize you have thoughts and are no longer paying attention to your senses, then gently return to sensing and feeling your senses by redirecting your awareness and maintaining your focus. As often as necessary, stop your thinking when you realize it, and then refocus on experiencing. Do this for a minute or two. Then pick up reading just below.
When you start reading again, I think you will find that I pretty accurately guess what type of interaction went on between your brain and mind in doing this little sensory exercise.
So stop reading now and just experience your senses picking up the information from the world around you.
You should now have done this little exercise before you read further!
So, I imagine that you began to focus on one or more of your senses and were successful at just sensing for some number of seconds. But fairly quickly, you realized all of a sudden, that there was a thought in your mind that was stopping you from really noticing your senses.
But even before that, when I was giving you instructions, you probably thought to yourself, “Ok, I can certainly focus on my senses”. You might have even thought you could do it without thinking, as instructed. And then you were probably surprised at how quickly you had a random thought, even though you told yourself to just experience your senses. And there it was, in the middle of you consciously focusing, a random thought appeared.
Even though you had plenty to be aware of and I asked you not to think, you found yourself thinking anyway. You then probably began to think, “Oh, I’m thinking and not just noticing my body.” And then, if you remembered the instructions, you thought to yourself that you should return to just noticing your senses again.
If these different experiences played out as just described, then you experienced three different states of awareness, each controlled by different parts of the brain. The first state is that of Pure Awareness. A total awareness of your body sensing the cues from the external environment. Eventually, your Wandering Brain made itself known with the random thought that popped into your head. I call it random because it just appeared to you -- didn’t it? You didn’t intentionally think it. You were trying to stay focused on the feelings, sights and sounds.
So, what happened was your brain sent you a thought, which had little to do with what you were consciously intending to do (stay focused on feeling your senses). This was your Brain Wander in action.
At some point you became aware that you were thinking because you knew that you were not supposed to be thinking. Aha! “I’m thinking, not sensing”, you thought. This was your Meta Awareness recognizing that you were off task and not doing what you intended to do. This is the human mind ability of Meta Awareness. It allows us to think about our awareness, and to evaluate what we are thinking about. We are perhaps the only creature which can reflect on our own thinking, feelings and behavior. (Dolphins and whales may also have this level of consciousness.) This is self awareness!
Back to the sensory exercise through your own self realization, you became aware of your own thoughts, especially that random thought from your brain. When you finally observed that random thought you were then able to control your thinking. So as directed, you may have told yourself to return to sensing your senses. And you went back to sensing again. That was more Meta Thinking. If you did this exercise long enough, you probably watched yourself fight with your Wandering Brain for conscious control of your focus . This wrestling for your own awareness might have occurred over and over again between your Meta Awareness and Wandering Brain.
So, you can come to understand that there are multiple ways in which we think. There are multiple levels of awareness, each using different parts of the brain. For those who care, here are the areas of the brain which function to support our various states of awareness. "Pure awareness" occurs primarily in the temporal and parietal lobes and is dependent on external stimulation. "Brain Wander" occurs in the default network of the medial prefontal cortex and dramatically reduces awareness of external stimulation. Our task oriented, "Productive Thinking Awareness" is more external stimulation dependent and uses the executive network of the frontal lobes. Finally, Meta Awareness is also driven by the frontal lobes but also can be quite independent of external environmental cues, being activated by the internal cues of Brain Wander.
Green are Frontal Lobes, Home of Productive Thinking
When you really begin to analyze your daily awareness, you can see how many different brain areas are turning on and off, to allow you to shift your awareness between being conscious of your senses, then effortlessly using your senses to do things while continuing to think (like walking) and then intentionally thinking about things you really want to think about. There is an amazing amount of brain shift power going on here.
This back and forth interplay between your brain and mind works out pretty well for a select number of people. This small group generally starts with people who are at least very happy and content with their current life circumstances and who have had very few bad things happen in their lives. That is, they have little to no psychological trauma.
But for most people, this natural shifting of thinking, doesn't work out so well. Here seems to be the problem. The energy of fear is much more powerful, in the short term, than the energy of love. So fear will easily be noticed in our awareness, and rather capture our attention and override the energy of love. It then becomes easy for the brain to keep finding fearful information which ultimately clouds our ability to see, feel and be in love as clearly in the future.
The good news is there is now a way to learn to override your survival thinking. It involves creating an Executive Meta Awareness. An Executive Meta Awareness sees the survival thoughts as they arise and determines if they have any validity. If they do not, Executive Meta Awareness directs you, with focused intention, to think about what feels good. I have a specific suggestion – create an Executive Meta Awareness based on the 3 Mindful Practices and BILAMAP. The GetLuvGetLuv phone app will also be a fun and helpful part in focusing your efforts.
