If you’ve had children or spent much time around very young kids, you probably noticed that they seem to have amazing memory in their first years of life. You tell them stories, and they can parrot back to you, perhaps word for word, details of the story you just told them. What you likely don’t now remember is that you once had such a memory, and could learn at a tremendous rate. Then you got older. What happened to that super memory and learning ability?
As you grew up, your brain didn’t lose its abilities. Brain decline is real, but begins usually after age 30, and you can take steps to slow that process. Brain decline isn’t even an issue during early adulthood. What happens is your brain got more sophisticated. In early age, you had not developed critical thinking. When that develops, information doesn’t just pour into your brain without consideration and filtering. You no longer just accept everything you see and hear. At young age, you are taking in everything and trying to make sense of it all. Then the understanding that you build becomes your filter for new information. This is a necessary process to approach maturity.
Yet sometimes you may wish you could have some of that super memory and hyper learning back. You envy the child’s learning speed, and would love to be able to learn a new language quickly or remember a lot of details when at work. Can you hyper learn now? You can, but you might not find the cost worthwhile.
If you consider the types of brainwaves that you produce (gamma, beta, alpha, theta, and delta, in order from high to low frequency), the higher frequencies generally correspond to higher thinking, awareness, and critical thinking. The lower frequencies correspond to more primitive functions and lower awareness. If you suppress the higher frequencies, you are less conscious and more primitive, and you are also dropping your critical thinking filters. Information pours in unencumbered.
Theta waves are the hyper–learning brainwaves. Delta waves, which are even lower frequencies, are more associated with deep sleep and healing. Some learning techniques attempt to capitalize on this, even going so far as playing simple teaching phrases during sleep. Some drugs suppress higher brainwaves and leave theta active, and some people feel they learn better when slightly impaired; actually, they would do much better with prayer and meditation, removing distractions, and letting the brain fire on all cylinders. There is another way to bypass critical thinking and stimulate the theta learning state: fear.
Primitive fear is an emergency mode meant to allow you to take in a maximum amount of local environmental information quickly and process it in limited ways which promote “flight or fight.” If you are walking in the woods and suddenly hear a lion roar, you enter that state very quickly: you stop everything else, listen and look intently, and prepare to do whatever it takes to survive. You aren’t planning strategically at that point beyond where you can run to get away from the lion. Some people say that after an experience like that, they remember everything that happened — all the sights, sounds, even smells — in exquisite detail, like time had slowed down or events were played in slow motion.
Surely invoking primitive fear isn’t a great learning technique. The opposite — relaxation — is much better, plus it promotes healing instead of tearing down, which fear does very effectively, especially if sustained. The concept of bypassing higher thinking counts in terms of removing distractions and conflicts, but you don’t want to remove your mental filters and become a learning sponge. Not all information is valuable, and you want your filters to keep out the garbage.
Fear not
If you are threatened by imminent danger, fear is appropriate. But in the modern world, most of our fear is of the future, not of an immediate threat. So what does fear do to us when it is really worry about future events? It does the same things that fear always does — prepares us for fight or flight. Our critical thinking is diminished and our primitive mind emerges. Theta waves increase and we are soaking in information without proper filtering. We are distracted. We don’t think clearly, but we react emotionally. We are likely to make bad decisions. And all the while we are tearing down our health over something that may be out of our control. Fear is all about quick reaction, and we tend to fear things that we can’t control now, so fear stays with us without resolution.
Researchers can understand primitive reactions by studying simpler forms of life, which largely react instinctively. In one study published in Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Tokyo, Japan explored the instinctive tendency for animals to avert their glaze away from scary or threatening situations. This reaction might seem odd — you might think the animals would want to consider the threat to determine the best way of escape. Instead their brains tell them not to focus on the fear-inducing threat, and instead prepare to flee. The researchers found a correlation between theta wave activity in the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex portions of the brain and the threatening sight, linking theta wave brain activity with visual aversion.
Don’t look now…
The study was finding that the sight of something fearful would cause a corresponding increase in brain activity that showed up in the form of increased theta waves, indicating entering the hyper–learning state. The animal senses a threat, then becomes very alert, but doesn’t focus on the threat. That would be a distraction. Focusing upon the threat would increase fear, and the animal needs to fully focus on escaping the threat. Focusing on the fear would result in not focusing on the best way of escape. This would be deadly in a primitive environment.
The amygdala, considered the seat of emotions in the brain, is always involved in fear response; and the hippocampus, part of the limbic system involved with learning and memory consolidation, reacts. We learn to associate certain things as threats, which invoke a natural fear reaction in us. The association is stored in memory, so when we see or perceive a situation like that memory, we see it as a threat because we’ve learned that is a threat. The process is reversible however, and we can unlearn that something or some situation is a threat. Scientists call this “fear extinction.” Something that was once considered a threat is no longer. This mechanism is explained in a study published in Natural Neuroscience, where researchers from Tufts University, Boston, MA conducted animal studies on interneural activity associated with the amygdala during fear extinction learning, where the animals were repeatedly exposed to the same fearful situation in which nothing bad actually happened, so the animal disassociated the sight of the perceived threat with the actuality of it being a threat. As they noted, “Previous studies found that extinction learning does not lead to an erasure of the fear memory, but instead causes its suppression through the acquisition of a distinct memory.” The researchers found that parvalbumin-expressing (PV) interneurons in the basolateral amygdala mediate the conflict of the old fear memory and new extinction memory, that hippocampal theta wave activity contributes to both fear learning and fear suppression, and that even after fear extinction, the fear can be readily relearned by a reversal of the communication of the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex(mPFC). Normally fear extinction learning involves signals from the amygdala to the mPFC. Since the medial prefrontal cortex puts context to information given to the hippocampus for storage, as well as context to memories retrieved, reversal of communication — mPFC to amygdala — means new context is being placed on the memory. The brain determines that the situation that it remembers is threatening after all. It essentially writes an addendum to the memory.
Fear can be learned, fear can be unlearned. We learn something is fearful when we associate bad consequences to it. We associate a “daddy long legs” spider with other spiders that have a painful, venomous bite, but a child might safely play with one and show no fear. The daddy long legs spider is harmless, has no way to bite, no venom, and feeds on other spiders, insects, insect eggs, and decaying plant material. They are good spiders, but some of us would need a lot of fear extinction exercises to let them crawl on us.
What happens if a daddy long legs spider crawls up your arm when you are driving? If your fear reaction kicks in, this harmless spider might put you in a car wreck. Fear is primal distraction. And what does sustained fear do to you? It’s at best an ongoing distraction, and at worst it is tearing down your health and may even wreck it. Fear is meant to be satisfied in short order, either through action to flee the threat, or to remove it; either way, the threat should soon be gone and you soon return to normal. Chronic fear is debilitating; we are not meant to be living in fear.
So unless you can take action to remove the threat, you would be better served to learn fear extinction. Most of those things we worry about and fear have no immediate fix, and they are instead dangerous and harmful distractions. You can’t just tell yourself to drop the fear, but you can unlearn it, make it extinct. This starts with considering what is really true. Is this thing you worry about really such a threat? Can you take steps to do something about it, or is it something over which you really have little control? If the latter, worrying about it will only harm you. What’s really important? Is your life safely in the hands of your God, your loving Father, or are you at the mercy of whatever comes? If your perception and belief is the former, you really don’t have anything to fear.
Dr. Nemec’s Review
A very important lesson is learned in the Nature Communications article: when something stimulates fear, take action, but don’t keep looking at the fearful thing. Don’t keep thinking about it over and over and over again, don’t meditate on it.
Even the animals know this. When they see a fearful situation, it triggers their system to high alert, but they absolutely do not keep staring at the distraction, or it would paralyze them. This would not be good for survival for them, nor for you.
The Natural Neuroscience article can be summed up by stating fear extinction, or the removal of a fear program, is only accomplished when a higher program supersedes it. What does this mean?Let’s use the example of the daddy long legs spider. If you’re afraid of spiders — deathly afraid of spiders — then the daddy long legs sets off the fear response immediately. Now let’s say you looked at pictures of daddy long legs, and under each picture, confirmed with research that daddy long legs do not, and cannot hurt human beings — quite the opposite: they can kill the spiders that can hurt you. You see the documented research and you see hundreds of research articles. Then you see YouTube videos of people with pet daddy long leg spiders. They keep them in their house all around their bed — they actually purchased them to kill the deadly spiders that live in their area: these people are so convinced from the research that not only do they not have fear, they actually purchase the spiders for protection. You watch multiple people on YouTube doing this and stating ever since they did this they’ve never had a problem with black widow spiders or other deadly spiders. So, combining the research and the testimonies you rewrite a new conscious program saying, “daddy long legs are beneficial to me and my health,” and because you believe it, and are convinced of it, you no longer are afraid of them, because the fear has been extinguished with knowledge, facts and testimonies. This is what fear extinction is.
What this does not address is the subconscious programming age 0 to six. Subconscious stress programs and subconscious fear programs started early in life when you were in the theta brain state taking in all information unfiltered. Although you were in super–learning state, some of the things you learned would’ve been better off not being learned. For example, if one or both of your parents had issues which were transferred to you because of the environment they made when they were around you that made a program written on the hard drive of your brain — and although you have no conscious awareness of it — it’s still plays 24/7/365 in the background affecting your health and vitality. This is why for the last 40 years at Revolution New Medicine people have come from around the world to participate in our Nemec New Medicine® MBEB protocol to remove and reprogram subconscious stress programs. Most people have no idea if they’re there, but they are slowly destroying their health: causing a diagnosis of cancer, autoimmune disease, chronic infections, either viral or bacterial neurological disease, hormonal disruption and imbalance, heart irregularities, gastrointestinal disease, diabetes, male and female issues, fertility problems — just to name a few.
Most people would never correlate these diseases with anything associated with the mind, but in actuality, 95% of your health is driven by your mind — both subconscious, up to 90% which is the majority; and conscious, which is approximately 5 to 10%
This is the most important aspect of healing, and so many people dismiss it as if it is not that important. We have people contact us from around the world with very major disease processes, and as we consult with them, they explain the long list of all the treatments and therapies and diet changes and supplementation that they have done, yet they still have not healed. They seem quite surprised when we informed them that 95% of their health is written on the hard drive of their brain, and unless that is released and rewritten with new programs, all the diets, supplementations and natural therapies in the world will not heal the disease when the biggest cause is continually stimulating the promotion of the disease.
So if a higher state of health or healing is what you desire, you must address all parts of your being: your mind, both subconscious and conscious, your brain, your diet, and lifestyle. All emotional toxins stored must be released and reprogrammed, and you must physically take care of your body with proper diet and lifestyle. And last, but not least, you must feed your spirit. This has a tremendous impact on your health and healing. For these 40 years at Revolution New Medicine we have always promoted and always will promote a prayer and fasting lifestyle. This is the most important way to balance the body and feed the spirit. The fasting is not only food: it’s other issues that are stimulating an inflammatory response.
Do not fix your eyes on the problem, on the situation, but quickly focus on the solution — this is the only way to resolve this issue in your life.
Give all your fears and worries and cares to God, for He loves you more than you could ever comprehend or understand.
Here are the ways we can help you in your health journey:
- Outpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-has the most benefit of teaching, treatment, live classes and personalized coaching. This program has the most contact with Dr. Nemec with 3- 6 month programs that can be turned into a regular checking and support program for life. This is our core program that has helped so many restore their health and maintain that restoration for years.
- Inpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-is our four-week intensive inpatient program for those that are not in driving distance, usually over 4 hour drive. This is the program that is an intensive jumpstart with treatment, teaching, live classes and coaching designed for all our international patients along with those in the US that do not live in Illinois. This program is very effective especially when combined with our new membership program support.
- Stay at Home Program-is offered to continental US patients who cannot come to Total Health Institute but still want a more personal, customized plan to restore their health. This program also includes our Learn Membership Program.
- Membership Program is our newest program offered for those that want to work on their health at a high level and want access to the teaching at Total Health Institute along with the Forums: both Dr. Nemec’s posts and other members posting. And also, to have the chance to get personalized questions answered on the conference calls which are all archived in case you miss the call. The Membership Program has 3 levels to choose from: Learn, Overcome and Master. The difference is at the Overcome and Master levels you received one on one calls with Dr. Nemec personalizing your program for your areas of focus.
