How our mind works

Below are some concepts of how our mind works:

1. Mental Patterns

Mental pattern is a memory trace formed in your brain tissue to record something that you have experienced. As you see, hear, feel, smell, sense or taste something over and over, your brain builds a pattern of it.

When you experience it again, or something like it, your brain activates the existing memory trace or patterned thinking and you go on autopilot.⁸

2. Your Brain Can Process Only Positive Information

Basically, there’s only one way that our mind can recognize informations. That’s input from our senses, such as , sounds, feelings, tastes and smells. They all come from all of our senses which must be positive informations. Brain cannot process the negative ones, inputs you haven't experienced. information from the experiences of your five senses, which it then manipulates in the emotional blender we call the imagination

Reflecting and acting at the same time is very difficult as our mind can only hold one thought at a time. You can be going through periods of reflection and action at the same time but at any specific moment in time you are only spending energy in one of these two areas. You need to be focused on either reflection or action at one point and then be able to switch quickly and effortlessly to the other polarity when required.

3. Left Brain / Right Brain

1. The left brain works more with logic and analysis

2. The right works more with emotions and imagination.

4. Our Brain Cannot Think While It Focuses on Two Sensory Inputs

Research shows that when a person is thinking actively and then focuses on one perceptual happening such as sound, the brain waves remain basically the same and thoughts continue flow through the mind. However, when the human mind focuses on two distinct sensory inputs at the same time (a sound and an image, for instance), all thoughts almost immediately stop flowing through the mind.

5. The Brain Likes to Race Ahead

Once your mind gets moving in a direction, be it a left-brain direction (logical, mathematical, judgmental, analytical activities) or a a right-brain one (creative, visual, spatial concepts), it tends to keep going. To illustrate this, try this easy test suggested by Timothy Foster⁶:

What do you call a funny story? – joke

What are you when you have no money? – broke

What's another word for Coca Cola? – Coke

What's the white of an egg? --------------------

It isn't yolk, it's albumen. Were you tricked? Most people are. The brain likes to race ahead, because it already knows the answer.

6. Capacity of Our Working Memory

The maximum amount of items we can store in our working memory, or conscious mind, is three or four. If you need to hold more items in your mind at one time. use tricks like repeating items over and over or grouping items together, like we do with phone numbers.

Intelligence is related to working memory. The more information you can hold in your mind at one time. the more information you can interrelate. If you have a better working memory your creative problem-solving abilities are better.