How To Use Your Brain To Eliminate Pain An Interview With Anat Baniel

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In Conversation

When my mind was quiet and I felt safe, I could distinguish between one thing and another. Until I reached that level of processing, all incoming stimulation felt like pain. When I felt the pain, I disconnected and became unavailable to learning. In order for your brain to learn, it needed to turn the raw stimulation into information that it could use. It needed to begin perceiving differences in the flow of stimulation coming in. I worked with a child who had extreme spasticity in his legs, and he always moved them together.

His brain mapped the legs as one thing, rather than as two things. When I helped him feel and realize that he had two legs instead of one, he was then able to move each leg independently, and learned to stand up. Anat, give us a movement example of how we can set our brain up for success using the principles mentioned above. Sit comfortably at the edge of a chair with your legs shoulder width apart and your feet flat on the ground. Gently turn your head to the right and observe how far you turn, and then do the same to the left.

Be connected to yourself , pay attention to what you are feeling, and don't force it. Place your right hand behind you on the seat of the chair and lean on it. Lift your left arm, bent at the elbow, and place your chin on the back of your left hand and lean your chin on it a bit.

In this position, begin to gently turn to the right your left arm together with your head and shoulders and come back to the middle. Turn only as far as it is easy. Continue leaning on the right arm behind you as you do this movement slowly back and forth five times. Do not exhaust yourself ; instead, simply pay attention to what you feel is happening in your body as you move: Stop, come back to the middle and rest for a moment. Pay attention to whether you feel a difference between your right and left side.

Is one shoulder lower? One buttock more solid on the chair? Or any other changes? The next small step: Get back into the exact same starting position, turn your left arm and head to the right as before while leaning on the right hand, notice if you're turning a bit further without trying harder, and stay in the twisted position.

With your eyes closed or open, gently and slowly move your eyes, not your head or shoulders, to the right and to the left four times. The women would sort of get it, and then the men. She understood what I'm doing. Now do it badly another way. She says in five minutes, women know how to do it. So she's been trying to teach it correctly. Three days, it didn't work. She asked them to do it this way, this way, badly.

She brings a few of them to the stage. You're going to change how you teach. I can see that now. You're starting to understand it. Sometimes, just for the film, I ask for people. Show me how you are depressed. Show me being depressed one way, another way.

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I'm going to talk about it. I talk about a real case where — never mind the whole story — they put the baby in a cast, a healthy baby. So it didn't have the random movements.

It didn't have the variation. When they took the cast off, his brain didn't know how to do it. Without variations, we can't learn. How much is two plus three? How much is that? They know what I do. But in the beginning, parents would come to me, fly. They pay me a lot of money, and I'm teaching their kids the wrong thing. I already know it. You don't have to give me the correct answer because I know it. This is one of the biggest crazy things that teachers do. How much is one and one? Why do I have to tell you? You already know it.

I get every child to understand numbers. I've not had a child yet that I couldn't get them to understand numbers, including genetic this and da, da, da. Not all of them become brilliant mathematicians, but they understand numbers. They can do basic manipulation. Then I reverse it. They ask me, and I make mistakes. Of course, the beginning mistakes, I make them big enough so they can feel the difference. Why not have three plus four be 25, for now? Well, I do all kinds of stuff, and I keep moving them so their brain can sort information better.

I get them there. I talk about that too. But I'll tell you a story, a child on the autism spectrum, Andy. I did this, I don't know, a few months ago. He couldn't write letters, and he didn't. He recognized letters when I wrote them, but he couldn't write, and he couldn't read. He couldn't put it together. So first, everybody does the opposite of what I described to you.

So first, they gave him a sheet with two lines, two lines, and told him to write inside the lines because it was so messy. So that didn't work. This is force, by the way. When you can't keep something in a certain, and you try to force it into there, it's a form of force. Force is not just mechanical force. I didn't know if he was going to recognize it. I have no idea. So nobody ever asked him to write badly.

So it caught his attention. See, it's a form of movement. It's ideation of movement with attention. So he thought and thought and thought and thought. So he had to run some images in his head. He had to do something in relation to that letter. So he started to notice bad, good, worse, better. Then he went, and he just did a dot. Then what I did. Until we did all kind. He chose a letter, and I wrote it badly. We went back and forth, and then I created the square. I could see he's holding his breath. He already knows he's going to fail. This is an autistic kid that didn't used to look in your eyes.

They're out to lunch. He looks at me. I knew that we were done, because now he knows where is above, below, to the side. So she does work with him in the hotel. I bet you he's going to take the paper and write letters inside the lines. His brain could make sense of it. Variation is very important. Now I'm going to run through the other few because I've got to leave.

I don't know what you're going to do with this interview. I don't know if. So we've had movement with attention to what you feel, slowing down, reducing the force, variation. The next one is flexible goals. I don't know if I'm saying them in order, but the next one is flexible goals. Flexible goals mean we want to have goals. But again, we cannot put the goal in the front. The goal should be thrown out like you're going to fish a fish.

You have the intention, and then you hold. You keep that intention with you, your dreams. You go to a movie, something somebody said, something you did. Your brain will start picking bits and pieces from your daily life, of what's relevant, to getting there. A lot of times, you can't know in advance what is going to be relevant.

You just don't know. You understand that because you've already done a big. What you've accomplished already shouldn't have happened according to a linear. Michael Merzenich, I read his research. It started about 15 years go. But how am I going to meet him? Then sure enough, this happened, then that happened, this and that, and then a phone call. Now here we are and now we're doing research together. It took 10 years, but so what?

Some things take five minutes. Some things take 20 years. I didn't stop doing stuff in the middle. I didn't sit and wait. I did everything else in the meanwhile. You get a child that can't crawl or can't walk or can't write. If you try to make them crawl, try to make them. If she could, she would. So if I try to do this with my hand, but my hand does that, and I have the intention to do this, and my hand does that again. Next time I think of doing this, I'll do that.

The brain doesn't know anything else. It learns based on what it experiences. So we have to do a process. It always starts where we are. Always connect to where we are or connect to the person where they are, and start moving around there. Expand it and move, and then we hop, and we start moving there. Then we hop, and we start moving there. That's how we really can make big progress very, very, very quickly.

The process, we can really create a fantastic process, but we can't control the outcome. It happens when it happens. My experience is that when I work with a child to be able to do, or an adult, to do this, the outcomes are a lot more than what we planned for and, a lot of times, things we didn't even think about before. So it becomes like magic. The next one is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, I see it as an action, not as a reaction.

I got my ice cream. Enthusiasm is actually a mechanism to amplify differences. So for instance, if I wanted to learn to do something, and all of a sudden, I do it in a new way, a little bit better. It's like you take away the oxygen. You put down the lights. Because the brain amplifies what it deems to be successful and help our survival. It actually creates inhibition, and it shifts the attention of the child from themselves to outside, to approval. If you want to be really a powerful person, whether people approve you or not doesn't matter. You can care to empower other people.

You can decide to be a good human being, but not because they approve of you.

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So one way, for instance, an exercise you can do, is you can go to the supermarket, and you can buy some things. You stand in line, and you decide. Decide to find something that you really like about them. You don't have to talk to them. It can be the button on their shirt. It can be their hairdo. It can be their voice. Just learn to look at them and be enthusiastic and something you really are enthusiastic about. Every time there's rain.

I heard the news yesterday to know what the weather is going to be. It's not going to be so great. Every drop is a celebration.

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We need the water, and it smells good, and it cleans the air. I get a little wet. It's the hardest to celebrate the self. I'm talking from experience. The hardest is to celebrate the self, because we internalize the criticism and all that crap.

Yeah, celebration in terms of things. So for me, I don't even experience it so much as celebration, but when I work with people, very often I see the miracle before they get it that it's amazing. I see into the future. I see the trajectory. I see where it's heading. So when the child could write a letter, half-in, half-out of the box, I knew that he was going to be able to write now.

His mother couldn't know that. So I carry the enthusiasm for other people. Oh, I did that. Now you do that. Do you like it? Don't you like it? When it's something that doesn't work for me, I'm very open about it. I worked with a boy that was really pretty destructive, a couple weeks ago. You're doing little jokes on people. You like it, or you don't like it. This is disgusting behavior. This is being polite. This is being destructive. So you know what he could do? He could stop being destructive. Because most people, when they're destructive, they don't know it.

It looks like they know it because you see it, but they don't see it. People do bad behaviors.

People fail because they're lacking sufficient differentiation. They are lacking sufficient perception of differences. So they don't have the road to get there. So the next essential, because I really have to leave. So we are movement, slow, variations, force, goals, enthusiasm. We have three more to go. The learning switch is a bit harder to talk about. Physiologically the brain is either in a learning mode or is not in a learning mode.

I talk about organic learning, personal learning, learning where you change as you learn. So I'm not talking about memorizing the date of when Napoleon went to Russia or something, invaded Russia. It's also important learning, but I'm talking the kind of learning that each time you do this little piece of learning, you're a different person.

It's who you are. It's a discovery within yourself. That is a feeling I know when I'm in a learning mode. Your learning switch right now is way up. I can see you processing. I can see the breathing. You can't take it in fast enough. I can feel her on the side. I just don't look at her because I know I'm supposed to look towards the camera. So a simple example is if we're sick, if we have fever, if we're tired, if we have distraction, our learning switch is not on.

If we're fearful, we are not going to learn the kind of learning we are talking about. We're not going to. The brain is in survival mode. So that's very easy to see that it might learn certain things that you learn under traumatic conditions, but that's a learning that reduces differentiation and throws the brain off a good track, brings it to post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that.

So I'm not talking about that now.

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Then the brain can be in a learning mode. In a learning mode, it can be different levels of potency.

Find out how I went from shy bad about myself to speaker and successful entrepreneur:

Again, it's an action. You learn to learn. You learn what it feels like to learn, and then you do it more and you become a really potent learner. So I work with people. The thing I do, from the very first moment I start working with them. I don't really care in the beginning.

The arm is here. The leg is there. I'm not worried about that because I know that if their brain is going to be a good brain, they're going to learn it. I rely on the brain. That's why Merzenich wrote that my work helps people have a stronger, better brain. Am I in that mode where I can be receptive? If not, don't do it that time. Do it another time. All the essentials that I just mentioned, all of them also awaken the learning switch. The learning switch gets more potent.

The next one is imagination and dreams. Imagination is by itself. When you intentionally use imagination, you upgrade your brain. Yeah, but it is. The brain doesn't really know the difference. When you dream a dream at night, and then you wake up, when you were dreaming the dream, you didn't know you were dreaming.

The brain doesn't know. It just does what it does what it does. So it's brilliant, and it's an idiot at the same time. So we have to make sure we use it in a good way. Imagination upgrades the brain, training ourselves to really close our eyes. It's not simple to do, really. One of the easy ways to train imagination is when you decide to do a movement. You do it, and then you stop, and then you imagine doing it, because it's so concrete, and it's so immediate. You can make it even better, in the sense that you want to bring the feeling of doing it. Then you do it, and then you want to do it differently.

So you want to bring variations, not just go in a narrow funnel. But yes, that's one of the reasons it's so powerful. Then you go back, and you imagine it. I'm going to move it like this. So I'm showing you. Then you move it like this. Then you go back and forth. Another very powerful thing to do is to imagine on one side. So you learn to do a certain movement. I don't know, whatever you want to learn to do, but you do it on one side only. It's very good to do it lying down, because then you take away the demand of the gravitational force, the balance demand.

So the brain is much freer to take risks. You lie down, and you do a movement, and you get yourself. I do that in my tapes, in my DVDs and so on. I have a lot of stuff also on YouTube that people can see. You do that, and then you imagine it on the other side. You do a movement, and then you imagine it on the other side. Either you do a whole sequence on one side, and you imagine it only on the other side.

Very often, by doing it on one side, you know what to imagine. One of the problems of asking people to. Then do you do what you imagine on the other side? I started with that. That in this side. You can do what you want. You can sometimes just to one movement to see how well you imagine. Sometimes you just sequence imagine, but you do it one time to test it, to check it, to see how good your imagination worked, whether what you thought was useful or not. Yes, if you are up to it. It's amazing because you really train your way of thinking. You train your thinking that way.

Because it's connected to movement and the feeling of movement, it's real. They talk about quantum physics, which is basically the model of the brain. Most people just don't because it's not enough to just have the idea. You have to take action, and you have to be good at how you take action. That's where the essentials come in. Yes, and make it closer and closer. Think of it as thinking. Thinking, true thinking, leads to a change of action, in action.

So last question is a short question. If I am an entrepreneur, and I have a lot of ideas, to train that, it could be to try a lot of my new ideas. We have to take it case-by-case. It's a little hard to generalize. It depends what your ideas are. What am I going to do? You imagine, and then you test it out. Then you come back. You do little tests. There's little elements that you can test. I'm understanding why I improved a lot in public speaking. I was shy, and I started to do one conference each day, during one year.

So a lot of conferences I did. Each day, I was looking for just one thing to try differently. That's what I'm talking about. So here you have it systematized and associated to brain science, basically, because I have a ton of research quoted in the back of both of the books. Now I think of awareness not as a passive thing, but as an action. Every one of my essentials is action-based. I do make a difference.

I write about it. Most people say it's one thing. I use it as two different things. Consciousness is a general sense of orientation in space and so on. So if you have a dog, the dog knows where the food is.

If you pack your bags, the dog is going to get sad. The dog is conscious enough to notice, to react to the fact that there are suitcases. They're going to leave. I'm moping because my owner is leaving. My ability to observe myself and know. So I know I'm moving my hand like that. I know I can see you. The ability, the skill.

Awareness is a skill that can be and needs to be developed. Human beings and dogs that are unaware are painful. For example, in the [inaudible Yeah, and to see, but it also gives you freedom. It gives room for invention. It gives room for the unexpected. So awareness, I believe, is a byproduct. The skill, the ability for awareness is a byproduct of the hugeness of the size of the brain in terms of the connections, the complexity. So the more we evolve ourselves, and the more we feel what's going on, then the more we differentiate. The more we are able to notice what's going on. It's, of course, perception of differences, big time.

It's the youngest function in the brain. It's the slowest function in the brain, and it's the one that humanity could use a lot of. It's a Hebrew word. What it means is increased improvement and increased refinement through increased complexity. Improvement and refinement, increased refinement, through increased complexity. That means that if I want to be able to do a refined movement, if I don't have enough differentiation, it can't be very delicate. So the complexity, the differentiation, the size, the freedom that it gives to just do it just the way you think it, just the way you hear it, or in a whole new way.

What can I learn? Where am I not developed enough yet? Where have I neglected myself? Which aspects of myself. It's still a chunk. It doesn't have bits and pieces I can play with to form sentences, to form poetry, to form ideas, to form movement, to form emotional differentiation. People tell you that you are the least.

The most trouble, that's where you have least differentiation. Sometimes if you want your business to work better, but you have a lot of differentiation in business already, but you really are not that great with your kids and your wife, if you go and differentiate yourself, your movement, your emotions, your relationship to your kids and your wife, you will find that you will do a lot better in your business, not because that is directly.

It's because you, as a brain, will have now. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Learn more about Amazon Prime. Your body is built to work as one harmonious unit with the brain at the helm as its Chief Executive Officer. So it stands to reason that if we look at how this CEO handles its day-to-day functions, we can improve the quality of the whole team.

That reasoning is one of the key principles behind the Anat Baniel Method. According to Anat Baniel, clinical psychologist and creator of the method, our brain functions in one of two modes — learning or non-learning. Most of us only use our non-learning mode. But in order to be productive, we need to force our brains to stop giving us the same-old, same-old. We need to ask it to give us a different and better pattern.

This is actually counterproductive. If you reduce the effort with which you do things, your brain will be forced to give you a better and easier way. Read more Read less. Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser. Product details File Size: Michael Senoff September 7, Publication Date: September 7, Sold by: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video.

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