On The Train, (Synaptic Learning) Mar 19, 2007

Few years back I learned something important about myself after I finished reading Anthony Robbins’s Unlimited Power. What I learned was I could create tracks in my mind for different feelings that I cold trigger at will. The way to set any trigger is to do something when I am at the maximum feeling of any emotion. When I set the triggers often enough I could just flip from one feeling to another at will just on a flick of my fingers. I did not understand the scientific explanation for that and since then I hardly practice is. Today reading Mind Wide Open it was explained why. The process of creating the ‘tracks’ is called Hebbian Learning, based on the scientist Donald Hebb that discovered the phenomenon. According to Hebb when we were experiencing certain traumatic or high intensity emotion we fire off several neurons on several tracks and during that traumatic event there would be other things happen at the same time in our mind. For instance during that moment a music was playing on the background or something that we were not conscious about or seems to be related to your high emotion event. A few months later when you hear the same song the same feeling of the moment started to swell within you. According to scientist the component of the brain that does this to us is called amygdala

In early 1996 in a dark winter evening I was seating alone in my East Genesse St basement apartment. I had the radio on and was also plucking on my guitar to no particular tune. I looked out of the window the snow is falling creating certain lonely feeling in me. Together with the cold I felt really homesick and at the same time a certain song was on the radio. Until today whenever I heard the same song not only I feel the same intense of homesickness but I would be taken back to that moment with a very clear vision in my mind. With this knowledge any form of narrative extraction with certain degree of contextualization is a possibility