About the brain

As children all that matters to us is our own survival because we have no concept of the world outside ourself and our needs. I am sure you as parents or onlookers have witnessed your own or someone else’s child in the supermarket screaming as if he was being tortured because he didn't get what he wanted. If you are a parent then I am sure your child has cried as if his heart was broken if you took something away from him that was dangerous for him to have been playing with.

Let's also ask the question; have you as an adult ever had a tantrum like a 3 year old? If so, this is why;

The Frontal Lobe –' I can't make  head nor tail of it!'

The reason for these tantrums and seemingly selfish and irrational behaviour is  that our Frontal Lobe (FOL) - the front part of the brain - which is responsible for logic and reason - also referred to as the conscious mind - is the last part of the brain to grow and does not start developing until we are around eight years old; in fact it is not fully mature until we reach our early 20’s.  Perhaps that’s why up until fairly recently, 21 was called ‘The age of reason’.

The Frontal Lobe processes all we absorb through all of our senses; every sight; every taste; every smell; every sound; every experience; and every feeling we have ever had or ever will have!  Some of this information we are interested in, some not.

The information in which we are not interested goes sailing over our heads like clouds on a windy day. A bit like being in a Math's classroom! Because you are bored and uninterested in the information you are receiving, you allow yourself to start day-dreaming about the next football match or the party you’re going to on Saturday instead of paying attention. Which is why, if the teacher asks you to explain an algebraic formula, you couldn't tell her if your life depended upon it!

Our FOL is also designed and responsible for planning and predicting our future, which, if we have a lot of negative informationbeliefs stored in the  Neo-Cortex, can lead to us making unwise and self-defeating decisions and sabotaging our own future.

In Daniel Gilbert’s enlightening and entertaining book ‘Stumbling on Happiness’, he explains how the Frontal Lobe is responsible for our ability to predict or anticipate outcomes that might have no foundation in reality.

‘The greatest achievement of the human brain - the Frontal Lobe -  is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real world and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. The human brain is an ‘anticipation machine’ and ‘making future’ is what it does. The variety of future we human beings manufacture or imagine depends largely on our family of origin. This frontal lobe, the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature and the first to deteriorate in old age, allows us to predict what  our future might look like long before it happens.

Let's take a look at The Neo-Cortex