Sunday Jul 09, 2023

”Beyond Our 5 Senses: Understanding and Using the Six Higher Faculties of Our Mind”

Welcome back to Season 10 of The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, where we connect the science-based evidence behind social and emotional learning (that’s finally being taught in our schools today) and emotional intelligence training (used in our modern workplaces) for improved well-being, achievement, productivity and results—using what I saw as the missing link (since we weren’t taught this when we were growing up in school), the application of practical neuroscience. I’m Andrea Samadi, an author, and an educator with a passion for learning and launched this podcast 5 years ago with the goal of bringing ALL the leading experts together (in one place) to uncover the most current research that would back up how the brain learns best, taking us ALL to new, and often unimaginable heights.

For today’s episode #294, we are going back to the basics, with the Fundamentals of Understanding How Our Mind Works, that started for me with Bob Proctor’s Youth Mentor Program, that I was the Executive Director with, until the program dissolved with the Sept 11^th, 2001 tragedy. This weekend I reviewed ALL of these cassette tapes, and when I got to the last one, the tape broke. I didn’t want to miss anything that might be important that I could share with you here, so I watched a YouTube video on “how to fix a broken cassette tape” and what do you know, it worked! Times really are different than the days we used to carry these cassette tapes around, with our Sony Walkmans, but what came through loud and clear to me, was that the messages and lessons we were teaching those teens were timeless, and it all began with an understanding of our mind, how it works, and how to use it. The program consisted of 6 SERIES: SERIES 1, The Fundamentals (you can see these tapes in the image in the show notes). SERIES 2 went into the importance of your attitude, SERIES 3, Your Self-Image, SERIES 4- How to Set and Achieve Goals, SERIES 5- The Laws of the Universe and how to use these laws for your health and relationships and SERIES 6 reviewed all lessons, with the goal that the teens would experience PRAXIS, or they integrated their beliefs with their behaviors.

It was strange for me to hear some of these tapes that were recorded back in early 2001, using conference calls, but what was interesting to me, was hearing the teens explaining exactly HOW these timeless principles were helping them.

Teens would call into a conference call line, from around the world, and meet with Bob Proctor monthly, to review these lessons, and how they were applying them. Nothing made him happier than to hear someone applying what he had dedicated his life teaching, and I know it surprised him that the teens seemed to pick these concepts up quickly. This makes sense to me now that we know how neuroplasticity works, as it’s much easier for a young person to learn something new, because their brains are more plastic, and they also have less habits to overcome.

I listened to one call, and there was a young guy named Greg who shared how he used visualization to go from the last place on his golf team to be the 3^rd highest on his team. I wondered why he picked the 3^rd highest, and not first on his team, but anyway, that was his goal, and he achieved it. We asked him “what exactly did you do when you were visualizing?” and he said “he put himself at the 5^th hole on the golf course, then pictured himself hitting the club, feeling the wind on his face, and imagined where the ball would land.” His vision was clear and specific, and listening to him talking was something else. He was confidently telling the others how he achieved his goal. Greg had mastered TAPE 2 of the Fundamentals thinking in pictures, TAPE 3, using his conscious mind and his senses (to set his goal, he even showed us how he felt it), he used TAPE 4 when he threw his goal into his subconscious mind, and TAPE 6, Greg was able to review exactly what he had done, inspiring others on this call.

No wonder these kids caught my attention. There’s nothing like hearing how young people, from countries around the world, were helping each other to create exciting lives. If you look at the date on the cassette tape, it was just months before September 11^th, 2001, and the program would dissolve before SERIES 4, 5 and 6 were even created, but I hope that sharing these ideas with you, will help someone, somewhere in the world, to implement these ideas in your own life.

So for today’s episode, #294, we will cover TAPE 5 and dive into “Going Beyond Our 5 Senses: Understanding and Using the 6 Faculties of Our Mind.”

We will cover:

✔What are the 6 Faculties of the Mind, and How Do They Relate to Going Beyond Our 5 Senses?

✔Where Napoleon Hill talks about these 6 Faculties in his best-selling Think and Grow Rich Book.

✔Where neuroscience fits into our understanding of these Faculties, to help us to understand our inside world, and how physicist Albert Einstein used these faculties.

✔A starting point for all of us to DEVELOP and PRACTICE using our own 6 Faculties of the Mind, giving us an edge as we are working on our 2023 goals.

If I were to ask you, can you name the higher faculties in your mind, I’m pretty sure that maybe on 2/100 could list them off. This is something else that blows my mind, as I clearly remember being taught all about our 5 senses in school, tasting salt and sugar, and writing about these senses, what we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch, that allow us to make sense of our outside world. But what about our inside world?

If we can learn to understand, fully develop and then use our higher faculties, we will experience life at higher levels, than just living through the 5 senses alone, that we saw on our last episode #293[i] with David Eagleman’s work, there’s much more than our human eyes can see.

Napoleon Hill talks about these higher faculties in chapter 5 of his best-selling book, Think and Grow Rich when he says:

Just as we have 5 senses that help us to experience the outside world, we also have non-physical, creative faculties that help us to experience our inner world. When I first learned about these faculties, I got really excited. Look how Napoleon Hill describes our imagination. He says:

When you start to use your imagination, like Greg did with his golf game, changing your results, and entire future, with this skill, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t get as excited as I do, and wonder how you can use this “marvelous, inconceivably powerful force” in YOUR life.

When I started to see that science could explain some of these ideas that might seem kind of spiritual in nature, or my friend Greg Link[ii], who worked with Dr. Stephen Covey would say “woo woo” it just helped me to have more confidence as I continue to develop and use these faculties. They started to become my superpower, and what’s interesting that I was reminded of when I listened to those teens talking about how they used these faculties to improve their relationships, get better grades, or like Greg’s story, where he used these ideas to improve his results in sports that helped get him into the College he wanted to attend, we ALL have the ability to use, and develop these faculties for outstanding results, or a razor’s edge advantage in our own lives.

Before diving into our 6 Higher Faculties (Our Reason, Intuition, Perception, Our Will, Memory and Imagination” let's see what science has to say about our higher faculties.

What Does the Research Say About Our Higher Faculties?

We know that many visionaries have used their intuition and dreams to create life-changing ideas, but Albert Einstein would say something profound about one of these faculties. He said “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

I know that Stanford Professor Dr. Andrew Huberman has covered what happens in the brain during visualization on his podcast on “How to Learn Skills Faster”[iii] and he talks about 3 components of learning any new skill:

Sensory Perception: Where you are perceiving what you are doing using your 5 senses.
Movement: That involves our CPGS (central pattern generators) located in our spinal cord and generates repetitive movements like walking, and running etc. When we are really good at something, this part of the brain controls our movement.
Proprioception: That he says is like a 6^th sense, or knowing where your limbs are in relation to our body.

I’m always looking to see if the research could possibly support the results I’ve seen working over and over again over the years, and while Dr. Huberman goes deep into the way our brain works while acquiring a new skill, and what part of the brain is active when we become really good at a new skill, to me, he also explains that when learning a new skill, we can use our 5 senses, and our outside world, (called sensory perception) and that we can also look outside of ourselves, with what he called proprioception. He also explains what part of the brain becomes active with visualization, and I think the key is that with practice, we move from using our upper motor neurons in our brain to a whole new area he called the Central Pattern Generators, when the skill becomes highly developed.

I thought about Greg talking about his golf swing that he practiced using visualization, until he had mastered the skill enough to take his results to new heights, going from last place to 3^rd from the top. Over time, he began using a different part of his brain for playing golf. This practice he was doing, would change his future, and put him in the College of his choice. I wish I had kept in touch with all of the teens from this program, I only follow the original 12, but I would bet that Greg continued to use this skill for the rest of his life for improved results in College and into his career.

Then I looked at another episode that Dr. Huberman did with Rick Ruben, an American record executive, on “How to Access Creativity”[iv] and I did cover some of Dr. Huberman’s research on PART 4 of The Silva Method[v], but I thought it was fitting that Rick Rubin, while discussing the creative process with Dr. Huberman, says that It’s important to “pay attention to physical sensations in your body in your creative pursuits.” And neuroscientist Antonio Damasio actually coined this term to be called “interoception.”

So, I know I’m not too far off from what the research says as we cover the 6 Faculties of our Mind, and how to develop them for a razor’s edge advantage.

REASON: We talked about our ability to think, and reason on our last episode #293[vi] which is a skill that can help us to understand things on a deeper level. We have the incredible ability to THINK, and then we can decide if we like an idea, and accept it, or we can reject an idea. We use this ability to put our thoughts together, and create ideas.