Understanding the brain helps us appreciate how mindfulness works. Understanding how the brain is put together can help you harness the power of your brain for greater calm.
To make sense of your world, your brain must process vast amounts of information. It pulls data from within your body, outside your body, from interactions with other people, and from multiple regions within the brain.
All this is achieved with an organ roughly 1kg in weight, which in a living person has the consistency of a soft-boiled egg. Although only accounting for about 2.5% of your total weight, it consumes 20% of the energy you generate. It is always ‘on’.
Your brain is made up of three regions – brainstem, limbic system, and cortex – developed in layers during evolution. The layers work together vertically – the brainstem is under the limbic is under the cortex. And there is a left and right side.
The brainstem – receives information from the body and sends information back down to regulate basic processes, such as keeping your heart beating and lungs breathing. It also regulates energy levels – whether you are awake or asleep, hungry or full. Working with the other parts of the brain, it is your brainstem that decides whether you respond to a threat with fight, flight, freeze or flop.
The limbic areas, deep in the brain, help you evaluate meaning. Is something ‘good’ or ‘bad’? They help create e-motions, they ‘evoke motion’ towards things you like and away from those you do not. It is also the crucial part of the brain for how you form relationships. And the limbic area plays a regulatory role because it is here you will find the hypothalamus, the gland that tells many other glands in the body what to do. It is the hypothalamus that tells the adrenal glands to produce cortisol in response to stress. This can give you great energy to deal with short term, but can leave your cortisol levels chronically raised if you face overwhelming situations which you cannot adequately cope with. Trauma can sensitise the limbic system sufficiently that even minor stresses cause cortisol to spike. Two parts of the limbic system are particularly important – the amydala (involved in your fear response) and the hippocampus (memory formation).
The cortex – the outer part of the brain, most developed in primates, particularly human beings. In this part of your brain, you develop ideas and concepts, you think, you plan. As far as we know, we are the only species that can think about thinking. Problem is, this means we can also think too much.
All the parts of the brain work together to determine how your respond to different events and emotions. For a visual model you always have with you – see Dan Siegel, the author of Mindsight.
