25 February 2008

How Your Brain Works? Part II

How Your Mind Works Part 2
In Part I we have concluded that behaviour of one self is directly related to the function of the mind. The mind basically creates two reservoirs of patterns. One is the reactive pattern and the other is the analytic pattern. The former is formed by the conditioning of the brain to a fixed way of thinking and coming to a conclusion.

Analysis is all about breakdown, dissection, division, inquiry, investigation and religiously speaking it is all about reasoning.

A manager of the building received a telephone call from his tenant that the tenant’s child was locked in the apartment. The manager rushed to scene and heard a loud cry of the baby trapped within her own house. The mother was standing outside in tears holding an access card key of the apartment.

After much scrutiny, the manager realised that the handle to the door was missing and the complainant informed him that she had taken out the door handle, which has dropped due to shoddy riveting, and left it on the side table inside her apartment. As she got out of the house, leaving the baby inside, the door shuts behind her. She managed to put the card access inside but the door could not be opened without the door handle.

The above was a real life incident that I faced when I was a manager of a residential building. I received many suggestions from my working colleagues such as:

Tie a rope and swing into the apartment
Break the door with an axe
Call 911

The impediment to analytic thinking is emotion. The mother’s worry, the crying of the baby and the panicky commotion of my colleague are all emotive behaviours. It will not solve the problem. If you want to use the analytic part of your brain you have to avoid all emotion- if not the negative ones.

The brain is just like the shredded ice ball. If you pour hot coloured liquid sweetener over it a depression is formed on the ice ball. Pour red colour – a red depression is formed. Yellow depression is formed by the warm yellow liquid sweetener. Blue depression is formed by pouring the hot blue liquid sweetener. Similarly the patterns in the brain are created by the experience we have had in our daily lives from birth.

You can also read about reactive thinking
here . Proactive is a vague term. Thinking analytically gives you the boost to think in an acceptably detail manner.

By staying calm, I had gained access the analytic part of my brain to solve the above mentioned problem. The crying of the baby is not a problem. The teary mother is not a problem. The noisy colleague is not a problem. The missing door handle is the core of the problem.

I unscrewed the neighbour’s door handle and was able to open the door of the complainant and managed the problem well.