Mind Magic

about 99.9995 percent of the stimuli reaching our brain are processed below the level of consciousness. Among the overwhelming barrage of internal and external stimuli we are encountering at any given moment, the SN identifies what is

When we are in flow, we often experience a state of self-transcendence: the inner critic’s needling voice dies away, our habitual worries and self-consciousness fade, and we feel at one with the moment, with ourselves, and with our environment.

Crucially for our purposes, the DMN is negatively correlated with the attention network (AN), meaning that the more it is activated, the less access we have to the power of our attention.

In a sense, the flow state translates to the complete alignment of our conscious and subconscious minds in service of our intention. In flow, we have a special kind of access to the deeper resources of our subconscious and can draw upon them more directly. We can also seek this kind of VIP access to the subconscious via the techniques of hypnosis,

Researchers continue to study the neural correlates of flow, but there is a general hypothesis that periods of flow are characterized by lowered activity in the frontal lobes that produce the sense of conscious control.

The more fear we bring to an event, the more we are telling the amygdala that the salience of the event is very high and very threatening; and the less fear we bring, the less we are going to activate the threat salience, leaving our attention free to be directed as we choose.

Later, the human nervous system evolved further with the addition of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), also known as the rest-and-digest response, whose job is to return the body to a peaceful resting state, a process known as homeostasis. The switch to rest-and-digest is accompanied by a wide variety of physiological changes to promote bal

most relevant, or subjectively salient, and guides behavior accordingly. The

Using functional magnetic imaging, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, researchers at Stanford University monitored the brains of patients under hypnosis and observed several distinct phenomena. First, a decrease in activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate, part of the brain’s salience network, was evident. The reason