Your Mind Is Amazing

I am now going to give you a easy lesson in human biology. It will aid you to understand what's happening to you. Your creator blessed you with the most powerful computer in the world - your mind. Twenty - four hours a day, 365 days a year, you have with you the most powerful learning machine the world has ever seen. Probably you have been told that from the cradle, or at least from your young school days.

Let me flesh out that information with some facts and figures that you probably won't have at your finger tips. The brain is capable of processing up to 30 billion items of information per second. Your nervous system contains about 28 billion neurons, and every neuron in itself is a computer that can process nearly a million items of information. As well as acting independently, every neuron can talk with your other neurons through a chain of 100,000 miles of nerve fibres.

Not too stuffy and technical for you, is it? Contained within this powerful hardware is the software that runs the programmes and creates your behaviour. Throughout your life your software has been downloading information at both a conscious level and an unconscious level. It continues to download every day and will do so for the rest of your life. You can see where quitting smoking fit's into this?

You are receiving billions of pieces of information every second, your software prevents mass overload with an ingenious filtering process called your reticular activating system. This acts like a heat - seeking missile whose role is to notice what is important to you. The software does this when any of the billions of pieces of information meets one or more of the following criteria:

* If your survival depends on it.

* It has strong emotional intensity.

* It offers pleasure and comfort rather than pain and discomfort.

As you can see the strength of your mind is really amazing. Every thought, feeling and aspect of behaviour starts in the mind. Whether it is giving up smoking or losing weight. Unfortunately, unlike you home computer, that wonderful machine inside your head didn't come with a brochure of instructions telling you how to work it. Ever since Homo sapiens became a scientific creature he has been scratching his head to find the best way to organise it and put it to good use.

Your mind is divided into left and right hemispheres and what that division means to smokers. The left side is your logical, analytical side. As this section applies logic it is the side that knows you should not smoke. The right side is your emotional side, the 'feeling' side. Because you human you give into the right side of your mind that makes you think you just want a cigarette or you just need one.

Confused? Sometimes this mental division can puzzle the owner of the brain, it's true. Your mind does send you mixed messages.

One side says: ' I know I should not smoke.'

The other side protests: 'But I just want one.'

The left warns:'I know they are bad for me.'

The right responds appealingly: 'But I just fancy one.'

A constant battle is waging inside, making you weigh up the two sides. You've got your own personal tug of war. It's as if you have a little angel on one side and a little devil on the other. I'm sure you know what I mean, though you may not of thought about it in this way before.


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Douglass Grahame. We all are aware of how the left side of our brain acts different to the right side, when you want to quit smoking you must learn how to use this to your advantage if you are serious about quitting