November/December 2008 Spirituality
Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative

by Rick Hanson, Ph.D.

Unfortunately, the brain emphasizes negative experiences. It's the negative experiences that signal the greatest threats to survival. So our ancient animal and human ancestors that lived to pass on their genes paid a lot of attention to negative experiences.

Consider 80 million years or so of mammal evolution, starting with little rodent-like creatures dodging dinosaurs to stay alive and have babies in a worldwide Jurassic Park. Constantly looking over their shoulders, alert to the slightest crackle of brush, quick to freeze or bolt or attack depending on the situation. Just like any mouse or squirrel you might see in the wild today: the quick and the dead.

Today, that same neurological circuitry is loaded and fully operational as you drive through traffic, argue with your mate, hear an odd noise in the night or get an unexpected letter from the IRS.

First, the amygdale - the switchboard that assigns a feeling tone to the stimuli flowing through the brain (pleasant, unpleasant and neutral) and initiates a response (approach, avoid, move on) - is physically primed to label experiences as frightening and negative. In other words, it's built to look for the bad.

For example, when someone - a parent, friend, lover or boss - gives you feedback, doesn't your mind go to the hint of criticism surrounded by praise? (Mine sure does.) It gets signals from an adjacent node in the brain called the hippocampus, which compares current perceptual information to memories of previous threats and whenever it discerns a match - BOO! it shouts to the amygdala, "Warn the whole town!"

Second, when an event is flagged as negative, the amygdala and its neighbor in the brain, the hippocampus, store it carefully for future reference. Forever after, the hippocampus-amygdala circuit compares current perceptual information to the record of old painful events, and if there are any similarities, alarm bells start ringing. Once burned, twice shy. In short, your brain doesn't just go looking for what's negative; it's built to grab that information and never let it go.

As a result, your own personal training in the negative - whatever it's been - can't help but leave lasting changes in your brain that shape your view of the world and yourself, and your personality and interpersonal style and approach to life. (In extreme cases, if a person has a serious history of trauma or depression, the hippocampus can actually shrink 10 to 20 percent, impairing the brain's capacity to remember positive experiences.) Your brain is like velcro for negative experiences and teflon for positive ones.

What to do about this?

You can help emphasize and store positive experiences through conscious attention. As you know from school (and this is corroborated by hundreds of studies) you remember something best when you make it as vivid as possible and then give it heightened attention over an extended period.

That's exactly how to register positive experiences in your implicit memory, which will slowly but surely change the interior landscape of your mind. Three simple steps:

  1. Help positive events become positive experiences. Pay extra attention to the good things in the world and in yourself. Focus on the sensations and the feelings in a positive experience since they are the pathway to emotional memory.
  2. Savor the experience as a kind of concentration practice - keep your attention on it for many seconds while letting it fill your body and mind.
  3. Sense that the experience is soaking into you, registering deeply in emotional memory. You could imagine that it's sinking into your chest and back and brainstem, or imagine a treasure chest in your heart.

The deliberate internalization of positive experiences illustrates the oneness of the brain and the mind, and the power of using the mind to change the brain.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, author and teacher with a great interest in the intersection of psychology, neurology and Buddhism. Visit www.wisebrain.org. Excerpted from Measuring the Immeasurable: The Scientific Case for Spirituality with permission by Sounds True, www.soundstrue.com.