So what therapeutic advances have occurred as result of all this frenetic scientific activity? Numerous therapies are now part of the neurologist’s toolkit, whereas in earlier years his or her role was to diagnose and prognosticate with virtually no therapies to offer. Good morning, men. Please turn in your Bibles to Colossians 2:8. Four months ago, I was having a conversation with a really good friend and during the course of that discussion, he said to me, “I don’t feel like people care about me, only what I can do for them,” and I was flabbergasted. I mean, I know that I care very much about him. I know his wife very well and I know she loves him to death. I know his children, I know they idolize him and love him deeply. I would actually end up jeopardising my relationships because I didn’t want them to leave me – so I left them first.

Neuroscientists calculated that the brain processes about 11 million bits of sensory information per second. Imagine yourself at a party with loud music, stroboscopic lights, many people around, noises, smells, touches… Yet when a friend calls your name, you instantly hear it. The TikTok Sound Library is a great place to start when looking for sounds. It is a collection of sounds that are available to all users. With TikTokSounds you can browse by category, popularity, or title. Cognition works by creating concepts—abstract groups of similar objects, events, people, or ideas. Concepts band together into prototypes, which are mental images of particular things. Concepts and prototypes allow us to think fast and save processing time—but they also lead to misjudgment when we are faced with something “out of the box.” If I were a young clinician or scientist wondering which area of research to enter there would be no hesitation – the mysteries of our most complex organ and the seat of the soul await.The voice of the world wants to tell you that you can’t make a difference and that’s an example of how human traditions and the elemental spiritual forces of this world try to influence the narrative that’s inside of your head. The second voice that we want to take a look at in this overview … We’ll do a deep dive on each of these four voices in the weeks ahead, but the second voice, the first one’s the world, the second one is the flesh or the sinful nature. You really are your own worst critic. And the danger is, sometimes you can start to honestly believe what you are thinking is true. Recently, Hurlburt has begun to combine DES with scanning people in an fMRI. He ran a study that involved training five people in DES, and then recording what went on in their brains while they underwent an fMRI scan. Though the number of participants was small, the results, published in 2018, suggest that what people say they are thinking about and what’s going on in their brains does match up. In other words, humans and other creatures combine both physical and mental properties. The mind and the body interact with each other, hence the name of the theory— interactionism.

If you’re experiencing anxiety, it can be helpful to know that you’re not alone. Many people experience some form of anxiety at some point in their lives. Symptoms of anxiety can vary, but some common symptoms include feeling nervous, restless or tense; having a sense of impending danger, panic or doom; trouble concentrating or thinking about anything other than the present worry; and having difficulty controlling worry. If your anxiety is severe or impacting your daily life, it’s important to seek professional help. A therapist can work with you to identify the source of your anxiety and develop a treatment plan to help you manage your symptoms. How do I get rid of the feeling in my head Are you able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s simply your inner-critic’s opinion? Cognition happens through thoughts, experiences, and senses. It involves attention, memory, language comprehension, knowledge, reasoning, judging, problem-solving, and decision making. The world will tell you that you’re too young to make a difference. I remember when I was first getting started, how I was told that maybe you did have a lot of promise, but you don’t have enough gray hair and people will never listen to you. They told me, the world, the voice of the world was saying, “You’re too young.” There are peaks and valleys of focus throughout the day, and this corresponds with the ebb and flow of our attentional resources,” Mark explained. “And so to me, it makes the most sense for people to become aware of what your own natural rhythm is, for when you are best able to apply your attentional resources and also when it’s time to pull away to replenish.”

Later studies suggested that some of these changes may have been temporary—and part of his social functions had also recovered over the years. Nevertheless, the case of Phineas Gage shows us that personality (which is something non-physical) can be affected by changes in the physical body.

I found a fake TV device that basically you plug it in, close the curtain and from the outside, it looks like there’s a TV flashing in the room, that somebody is inside. We have a yappy little dog who goes bezerk. I’d never want to burglarized my house with that yappy little dog and then we put everything that we have of value, which is really just papers into a safe deposit box. My wife doesn’t have any jewelry. We don’t have any art, but whatever we do have of any value, we put it in a safe deposit box. The consciousness and the mind are related concepts—although not entirely the same thing. Being conscious means being aware of yourself, your feelings, thoughts, sensations, memories, and environment. But those categories leave room for variation, too. Take inner speaking, which can come in the form of a single word, a sentence, some kind of monologue, or even a conversation. I was able to, instead of blaming my wife and telling her that it was her fault, which is what my sinful nature wants to do, the flesh, I was able to tell her, “Patsy, I have stumbled here and I need you. I need you to reach out your hand and grab my arm and steady me so that I don’t fall to the ground.” Huge difference. Like qualia, each one’s consciousness is subjective and unique. But you can describe almost any experience by words—it is also a part of your consciousness.

Now I want to give you the Big Idea and the premise for the entire series. Here it is. The four voices in your head are the world, the flesh, the devil and the Holy Spirit. Your job is to figure out which one is speaking and make the adjustment. I want to leave that up on the screen for a minute so you can write that down and I’ll say it again. The four voices in your head are the world, the flesh, the devil and the Holy Spirit. Your job is to figure out which one is speaking and make the adjustment. But Mark set me straight. “Humans can’t do two or more things at the same time in parallel. We’re just not built like that. What we’re actually doing is shifting our attention,” she said. When life gets you down, are you able to turn that negative voice inside your head into something positive? Solomon developed several mnemonic techniques to help him remember things through associations. He used his ability to take part in performances and scientific experiments. There are other people in the world diagnosed with hyperthymesia—they are just unable to forget anything they experienced. Have you ever noticed how a strong smell can bring about specific memories? This phenomenon is not as rare as you might think—the olfactory nerve (the one responsible for delivering the information from the smell receptors) lies near the hippocampus, where the memories are consolidated. That way, a smell can “build itself” into a memory. In the real world, our motivations for inner speech are many and varied, in the same way that we use external language for lots of different reasons.

Here in Melbourne we had our own wins with Professor Sam Berkovic and his team of collaborators discovering the first genes responsible for epilepsy. So multitasking doesn’t make us happy, faster or more efficient; instead, it makes us stressed and more prone to errors. When considering the drivers of the tremendous advances in neuroscience in this fairly brief period of time, imaging is an absolute standout. The other two critical components have been the unravelling of cellular biology generally and the revolution that has occurred in the genetics of disease. In DES, you carry around a device as you go about your normal day-to-day activities. When it beeps, you tune into what was going on in your mind right before the sound. At the end of the day, you debrief with a psychologist who asks questions to get at exactly what was in your head in that moment, and what form it took: words, pictures, an emotion, a physical sensation, or something else.While these extraordinary advances were occurring in imaging the entire brain and its function, similar developments were occurring in imaging individual cells and their function. A 2013 review by Hurlburt and his colleagues points to huge individual differences between people in how much time they spend talking to themselves in their head that have been uncovered through studies using DES. The average frequency of inner speaking across those who took part in the research, at 23%, masks a huge range: from 100% – i.e. for some people, every time they were sampled they had some kind of internal monologue or inner conversation going on – to 0% – i.e. some people were never speaking to themselves internally. Heuristics are simple strategies that allow us to speed up a decision. However, sometimes the decision turns out not as accurate as when following the complete logical path. Heuristics are often connected to our intuition. Activities that help include taking enough breaks during any project, including going out in nature, to rejuvenate ourselves. Also, she said, “if you have some really important task to do, take a really good break before you begin it. Make sure you’re really, refreshed and ready to do it.” At about the same time, another technique, Positron Emission Tomography (PET), a nuclear imaging technique, was developed which allowed the distribution of chemical reactions within the brain to be mapped. The sky seemed the limit.