THINKING IN A RIGHT-HEMISPHERE WAY! - An small TIP to improve

Everyday we use our keyboard (PC, laptop, notebook,..) to navigate through the Internet, checking our inbox, meet friends on facebook, work with our spreadsheet, word or pdf document, etc...

So it is a very common situation. Watch this picture... What can you see?

 

The left hemisphere just notices that a toy is on the keyboard

EXERCISE: You must try to notice other aspects of your keyboard as your right-side mind would do:

1. The shape and colour of every key and the accumulated dust around them.
2. Watch you finger pressing every key. Press them very slowly. What do you feel?. Hear the sound hitting the keys. Is it similar to others you have used before?
3. Do you like the colours of the little plane?
4. Touch the plastic recovering the screen of the laptop.
5. Make a copy of the keyboard on a sheet of paper. As precise as you can draw it. Draw every detail. The letters and signs of each key must be place properly.
6. Play a little with the plane, landing on the keyboard. Do you like it? The screen could be a great barrier to pass over.
7. Use and watch your LEFT HAND!! (it is driven by your right hemisphere!!)
8. Type very slowly watching your fingers hitting the keys.
9. Notice your fingers moving from one side to the other of the keyboard to press the keys.
10. Summarizing: Feel your laptop as a physical object!

CAN YOU DO IT?

santos.barrioscanseco@gmail.com

MEMORY AND DEPERSONALIZATION - Why my memory is worse than before?

Who DPDRed person has not complained and thought: My memory is failing more than necessary?

Why is this happening?

Before being DPD we could remember easily everything and now we have many problems even to know where I left the car parked and where I left the house keys at home.

We SUFFER A GREAT INSECURITY.

A part of our consciousness, located in a part of the left brain (prefrontal cortex) seamless access to encyclopedic information, logical, rational type.

However now we can not easily access to the spatial-based, based  on personal examples and particular cases of our right side de the brain (strongly connected with our lymbic system, and therefore with our emotions and personality).

Those two memories usually works as a team in a normal person. Every "word" (allocated in left side) should evoke on us an image, an emotion, a past and personal experience with that word. Now we are lacking that connection and feeling weird.
 

EXAMPLE: What did you eat yesterday?

THE "LOGIC" ANSWER " from a DPDR person:
 

MENTAL PROCESS

Uffff. I don't remember. Does it matter? Why must I do that effort? Well, let's see...

Today ... What day is it? I will look at a calendar/watch/smartphone because I do not remember ... aha, it's Tuesday (It is the same for me. It means nothing)
So yesterday it had to be Monday (pure logic) What do I usually eat on Mondays ...? Vegetables (more logical again), but in fact I can not remember well, I CAN'T SEE IT FINE. 

ANSWER:

Yesterday I must have been taken vegetables, but I'm not sure . What does it matter what I ate yesterday ?, Who cares? 

WHAT A  NORMAL PERSON THINKS:

 

MENTAL PROCESS

Ok. I will remember it.
Today is Tuesday (usually already knows, does not have to look at it) and yesterday ... (he evokes the image from the dinner of yesterday seeing itself pricking the fork to eat ... "vegetables", and seeing what they ate and drank like a movie. He is able to rewind and fast forward what happened at dinner EFFORTLESS ...

 

ANSWER:

Yesterday I ate vegetables, 100 % SURE 

OTHER EXAMPLES DAILY "BAD" MEMORY:

• Do you remember 100% if you've locked the car, or the front door of your house ?, Are you sure ?, Do you usually go to check if you have closed them?
• When you go to a restaurant and choose the dishes you are eating. . Do you usually doubt what you have chosen ?, Do you find it difficult to remember it clearly?
• In a meeting, do you usually feel uncomfortable because you have been just introduced by someone and have not been able to retain its name? Face/Feeling - Name association is not good.

EVERYTHING COMES FROM THE FACT THAT OUR MEMORY IS SOMEWAY SPLITTED IN TWO INDEPENDENT PIECES. WE CAN NOT ACCESS TO THE NECESSARY VISUAL AND EMOTIONAL SUPPORT INFORMATION TO LINK IT WITH THE LOGIC INFO.

GOOD NEWS! :

YOU WILL RECOVERY YOUR GOOD MEMORY WHEN YOU REMOVE THE BLOCK AND THE CONNECTION BE REESTABLISHED.

santos.barrioscanseco@gmail.com

RECOVERY PHASES - From the DP / DR state to the normal state

The effects of doing the exercises of this blog can be shown in the following graph:

We distinguish three distinct phases in the recovery of DP / DR:

I) Initial state of consciousness depersonalized and derealized: . Over the years you learn to live with just the left hemisphere input, emotions are simulated, you learn to ignore and manage the annoying situations (avoiding crowds, view of landscapes and open spaces, and lots of other things ..) and can live without thinking much about it . BUT ALWAYS  BEEN AWARE THAT YOU ARE NOT WELL YET. Periodically the DP / DR will occupy our minds and we could try again a search to raise a solution, without finding it so far. When work, studies, demand our attention we will forget the issue and will continue living on our own.

II) Phase of conscious exercises: We can start with exercise No.1 ,1/2 hour every afternoon and consciously facing the objects and examining our moving body. We often will become frustrated and return home with apparently no improvement at all. But if you remain doing efforts based on (1) asking for the brain that perform functions that are only known by the right hemisphere and (2) remembering how you did when you were alright we will open a minimum neuronal path to the information stored there.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO IS PRECISELY THE ACTIVITIES THAT INCREASE THE DP/DR FEELING. WHEN WE ARE MORE CONSCIOUS THAT WE ARE IMPOTENT TO FULFILL THEM. SO THEY MAY INCREASE YOUR LEVEL OF ANXIETY. => That's why these exercises" can not be take us more than  1/2 hour at first, until we get to Phase III.

This phase is critical. It is when we will be tempted to give up. Again resignation. We still will be well, perhaps not yet feel almost emotions but notice that something is going well . We will be forcing the right hemisphere to work. " i.e. evoking images and objects from the past and retrieving memories associated with color shades we perceive " .

 

Don't GET OBSESSED WITH THE RECOVERY, IT IS A TIME TO RELAX, TO HAVE A WALK,... USING YOUR SENSES, TRYING TO DO THE EXERCISES AND HAVING FUN. YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO LOSE.

During this phase we will alternate outdoor exercises with others that can be done at home. This phase may be long, in my case from six months to a year.

III) Initial phase of normality

There will come a day when, by repeating the exercises, surprisingly, we can do them even outside the half an hour and with not too much difficulty. We will return to normalcy, improve our vision, our memory will be reinforced, time perception will return to normality, our memory, our tastes and preferences and the most important thing, we will be able to access the emotions . WE WILL BE A COMPLETE PERSON AGAIN AND FINALLY WE WILL BREATH AND FIND THE PEACE INSIDE. 

 santos.barrioscanseco@gmail.com

HOW IS YOUR THOUGHT NOW? - Basic stages towards permanent DP/DR

So ... What happened to us? How could it be possible? There are several known reasons:

1) Taking chemical substances as weed, LSD,...
2) Suffering a big trauma (car accident, death of a loving being, abuses, tortures, being kidnapped,...)
3) Long lasting anxiety.

In this post I focus on reason nº3, my own case.

Consider this drawing illustrating 3 simple steps within the path that leads to a DPDR stroke:

1. NORMAL THOUGHT: Our conscience freely access both hemispheres in a more or less balanced way depending of personality. 
2. UNBALANCED THOUGHT : Due to anxiety  , always coming to the point, for every matter,  denying our emotions for long periods of time, our consciousness began putting aside information that came from the right hemisphere .  Emotional info useless/conflicting for our logical target! At this stage we still have control. "We were ignoring real things and their details , we were passing from our body, ..., from anything not essential to solve our problem. "
3. CIRCULAR THOUGHT: At some point the way was closed
   
   (Stunted by "non-use") to our consciousness for accessing to:

• Our emotions (connected with amygdala)
• Our personal history (located in the hippocampus) and emotions associated with it.
• As "collateral" damage other functions are visibly affected as the 3D view and calculation of distances and sizes of objects, pattern recognition / face / body itself, the ability to perceive time, understanding art ...

On the contrary, our consciousness is limited to the "logic" information stored in the left hemisphere. That is our prison: infinite logical thoughts, philosophical way of life in a tireless manner. From this comes the dissociation, we feel we are spectators, we feel we have no control over our body, which moves automatically and is not controlled completely by us. 

The "we" is impotent (no way), locked, unable to find himself , we are a clump of logical thinking. Who can help us to enable that road again? We miss normalcy ... to be "average people". Our right brain still works, of course, BUT WE CANNOT control it, hence come all our symptoms.

THE EXERCISES IN THIS BLOG SERVES TO UNBLOCK THE WAY

LOGIC IS NOT THE SOLUTION!

YOU MUST RELIVING THE PAST TO FEEL THE WAY WE USE TO THINK!

THERE IS A LOT OF HARD WORK !, sometimes you will feel you are failing, but you will get it!!

santos.barrioscanseco@gmail.com

WHAT IS NORMAL THINKING? - Our goal doing the exercises

Have you ever wondered how normal people thinks? Can you remember the way you use to think prior to DP/DR?  I have developed a very simple graphical model for us to understand the stages through which passes a derealized person until  a complete healing.

In today's post we will learn how the two brain hemispheres alternate to participate in the thought of a healthy person complementing each other.

Balanced hemisphere workload = normality

Everyone has two hemispheres that  share the continuous workload of thinking:

• Left Hemisphere : Specializing in words , reading & writing both oral and written, numerical symbols, mathematical concepts, sequential procedures, step by step, left h. is analytical and likes the precision. It is the hemisphere of the logic (cause and effect) and the practical side of things. It likes to generalize and create models. It is more introverted and apathetic.

• Right Brain: Specializing in tasks that require creativity , innovation , taste for art , colors , concepts of space and time , able to appreciate the big picture of things, not be very accurate, it is dealt with linking what we feel with the EMOTIONS. He likes the particular cases and details of things in the real world . It's funny and outgoing. It's dumb, can not speak.

Logical left brain vs Emotional right brain

At the same time, the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body (including the right visual field) and the right h. controls our left side (including the left visual field).

As you can see from the chart , a normal person can not prevent that both hemispheres provide information when making a decision. Here appears the famous saying:

"Thinking with your head against thinking with your heart"

We are even aware when we asked for a logical judgment (cause and effect) and when asked for a emotional trial to our brain. The final decision will depend on what weighs more in our personality (more intuitive and sensitive people vs. more logical).

An ideally situation for an optimal mental health is that both hemispheres contribute roughly the same amount of information to our consciousness. Consciously our thinking comes and goes (access) the information saved in both hemispheres to perceive the world and make decisions, the right hemisphere can even access the emotional register which certain memories are impregnated with .

santos.barrioscanseco@gmail.com

LEFT vs RIGHT - "Logic vs Emotions" - A funny short cartoon

If you wish to understand more about your brain, and your disease enjoy this video!!

Every human has the brain divided in two hemispheres:

• The left one: responsible of logic, words, maths, consciousness, philosophical questions, abstract concepts, secuencial planning, ...
• The right one: in charge of arts, 3dimensional vision, emotions, love, habits, time, physical things, faces / patterns recognition, big picture planning,...

 

WELL, IN OUR CASE THE BLUE GUY CAN NOT ACCESS TO THE RED ONE!!!

 

WE MUST CONNECT WITH HIM DESPERATELY, ACTIVELY AND WORK TOGETHER AS A TEAM AGAIN TO RECOVER NORMALCY

 

santos.barrioscanseco@gmail.com