What You Don’t Know Can, In Fact, Hurt You

German physiologist Manfred Zimmerman, of the Neuroscience and Pain Research Institute, estimates that every waking second, our eyes process ten million bits of information, our skin one million bits, our ears and nose one hundred thousand bits each, and our tastes buds, one thousand bits. That’s a totally sensory input of 11,201,000 pieces of information per second! But only about 77 bits per second are actually processed on a conscious level. That means every second we’re taking in over 11.2 million pieces of information we know nothing about, consciously! Wow!

Just living our day to day lives in the 21st Century means constant sensory bombardment. What if some of that information we’re taking in is inaccurate, incomplete, overly specific or generalized, or in some other way contaminated? If our conscious mind is not aware of these 11.2 million pieces of information per second, how do they get assessed as to their value or accuracy? Guess what – they don’t! And therefore, every one of us is running around with literally trillions of bits of bad data.

Leslie Feinberg, D.C., developer of the Neuromodulation Technique, says these pieces of data become “pernicious synaptic patterns” or “PSP’s” for short. Feinberg explains that PSP’s are “unintended and inappropriate clusters of data” that can behave as instructional scripts to the autonomic nervous system, thereby creating or exacerbating all sorts of physical and/or emotional problems.

For example, someone treats you rudely and one of the PSP’s that comes from that experience is “I deserve bad treatment.” As that totally unconscious thought travels through the synapses, it creates a sort of track or groove. The next time something similar happens, it deepens the groove. Pretty soon, that pattern is cycling through your synapses and become part of your autonomic programming.

One of the most dramatic examples I’ve seen of the effects of treating and disorganizing PSP’s was when Dr. Feinberg was working with someone who was in chronic pain from an autoimmune disorder. He had successfully performed many interventions that had caused all other symptoms to resolve, but the pain remained. He started to delve, via muscle testing (or applied kinesiology) and found there were PSP’s around issues of feeling he deserved the pain because of an event years previously. This idea had become a part of his autonomic programming, even though he had no conscious awareness of it. After the PSP’s were disorganized, he was completely pain free.

Whether you suffer from allergies, arthritis or other autoimmune disorders, an injury that won’t heal, or even something as common as frequent sinus infections – or if you’re depressed or anxious for no apparent reason – you can bet there are pernicious synaptic patterns at work. Dr. Feinberg’s Neuromodulation Technique is a wonderful addition to mind/body medicine in this regard. Remember, just because you don’t know the content of those 11.2 million pieces of information you take in every second, it doesn’t mean they can’t harm you!

Dr. Bowers is a medical psychologist in Villanova. She has studied NMT with doctor Feinberg. You can contact her at: 610-520-0443, leebowers@comcast.net, or www.drleebowers.com. n