How do we go from learning a piece of information and transforming it into a change? And how do emotions help us signal that change?

Did you know that when you learn one piece of information the brain makes 1300-2600 new connections? How amazing is that! Did you also know that these new connections will die off within hours/days if not reviewed or reflected on?

Okay, so let’s say you learned an important piece of information for your health, your mind is engaged but how do we get the body to want to participate in the change? One must connect the mind and body.

Let’s break this down.

  1. You learn something new. “Eating vegetables is good for my health.”
  2. The next step is to apply, personalize or initiate what you have learned into action. The actions need to match the thoughts. “Eating vegetables is good for my health. I like spinach so I am going to make a spinach salad and I make the spinach salad and eat it.”
  3. When the action matches the thought, it creates an experience. We experience both the internal and external environment through our senses.
  4. The incoming information is organized in the brain as a coherent experience. “It was so nice to actually prepare a home cooked meal with vegetables, it tasted fresh; I really enjoyed the experience and feel good about eating healthy.
  5. The experience then produces chemicals in the body. The chemicals create a feeling/emotion. “I feel good about eating healthy.”
  6. So the new info gets transformed from a thought leaving the neocortex into a feeling that enters the deeper layer of the brain known as the limbic, emotional, chemical brain which communicates to our body.
  7. The chemicals/emotions talk to our body and ultimately talks to our genes. When the body and mind come together, we are actually changing at a biological level. “I want to be healthy, so I am eating more vegetables, which makes me feel good about my decision and now my body is changing biologically as a result of my actions.”
  8. From there, if we continue that behavior, it enters into another layer of the brain, known as the cerebellum where implicit memory lives. This type of memory is associated with a habit or skill so we don’t have to think about it. Once the information gets here, it’s a more permanent change.

Let’s think about it another way.

We go from thinking, to emotions, to memory. From “knowledge ® to experience ® to wisdom. From mind ®to body® to soul”.

If you want to make a more permanent change to your health, first gather some knowledge, then implement action, repeat, repeat, repeat and then it becomes the new. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying it takes 21 days to make a new habit.

We can apply this to physiotherapy.

As therapists, we teach and explain what is happening post injury. Then we provide exercise and tips. From there you need to implement and try, you need to practice. The body then begins to respond and you start to see results. How does it make you feel when that starts happening? There is often an emotion because that is how the body understands the mind.

From there, our perspective, as well as our view of the world and our role in it changes. We may appreciate health more or how much we love doing something because we were limited in mobility. It’s that old saying, we appreciate that which we have lost. So when an injury impacts our mobility and activities, when we get it back, we tend to appreciate our health more. The change can even impact our soul in some way, where we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Dr. Joe Dispenza “Becoming Supernatural: How Common People are doing the Uncommon” Neuroscience Training Summit 2017

Learning, change and emotions.