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“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the body can achieve.” – Napoleon Hill
When Napoleon Hill made this landmark statement in 1937 in his classic book Think and Grow Rich, he didn’t have the medical science, brain scanners, or technology we now take for granted to prove his beliefs. He claimed that if you could think clearly of something and you really wanted it, you could achieve it. Science has removed much of the mystery and hocus pocus surrounding iconic statements such as this one by Hill, and we now have scientific insights into the processes of achievement, goal-setting, self-fulfilling prophecies, the function of prayer, and the Law of Attraction. Science can now show us where and how success works in the brain. You are about to learn about a remarkable system we each have in our brains – the Reticular Activating System or RAS.
The RAS, located in the brain stem of the mammalian brain, is a bunch of neural fibres commonly known as the Reticular Formation. The RAS plays a part in many important functions in human biology, including sleeping and waking, breathing, the beating of your heart, and behavioural motivation. And the RAS also contributes to sexual arousal, appetite and eating, the elimination of body waste, control of consciousness, and the ability to bring certain things to your attention. Trauma to the RAS can cause a coma and has been linked to several medical conditions, including narcolepsy. Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder that affects the brain’s ability to control sleep and wakefulness.
Brain’s Command and Control Centre
Scientists first became aware of the existence of the RAS in 1949 when, at the University of Pisa, H.W. Magoun and Giuseppe Moruzzi investigated the neural components regulating the brain’s sleep–wake mechanisms and reported their findings in the inaugural volume of the scientific journal Electrocephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology. This early research eventually led to the discovery that the RAS is the portal through which nearly all information enters the brain. (Smells are the exception. They go directly into the brain’s emotional area.)
The RAS is a place where your thoughts, internal feelings, and outside influences meet. It produces dynamic effects on the motor activity centres in your brain and in the cortex activity, such as the frontal lobes. It is a network of nerve pathways that filter all the sensory input your brain receives from your external world. Whatever you see, hear, feel or taste passes through the RAS. Put simply, the RAS is the answer to switching on your brain and is the brain’s main centre of motivation.
How the RAS Works
The brain processes over 400 million bits of information every second but only 2,000 bits can be processed consciously. The remainder is processed without your awareness. In other words, 99.9999 percent of the information presented to you every day goes unnoticed. This is the only way we can deal with everyday life and the millions of bits of information flooding into our awareness and demanding our attention. If you had to deal with all the messages simultaneously, you would not be able to cope and would pass out. So evolution has given us the RAS – the equipment to filter all information and to extract only what is important to us at any given moment.
Your RAS functions like a sorting office, evaluating the incoming information and prioritizing that information in the form of messages that need your attention. It’s a filter between your conscious and subconscious mind, and it takes instructions from your conscious mind and passes them on to your subconscious. Your brain then instructs your body to make the physical actions necessary to comply with the image the RAS instructs. It sorts through your environment for information patterns that best match your beliefs or the things that are familiar to you. Then it links your thoughts and feelings with similar things in your environment. When it finds a match, your conscious mind is alerted.
The RAS is Equipped with GPS & Search Engine
Your RAS responds to your name, to anything that threatens your survival and to information that you need to know immediately. For example, if you’re looking for a computer file that you’re sure you placed somewhere on your desktop, your RAS alerts your brain to search for the name of the file – say, an overseas travel plan – or it will focus on one word in the filename to help you find it. The function of the RAS is also what is often commonly called the Law of Attraction.
Your RAS has a built-in GPS system. With a GPS, you don’t need to know where all the roads are located in a given city. You only need to decide where you want to go. You input the data and the GPS directs you. If you take a wrong turn, it puts you back on track. The satellite software in a GPS works out how to get you there – and that is exactly how your RAS works. With a GPS you need to decide where you want to go, not how you will get there. In exactly the same way, once you’ve decided on your goal, your RAS begins to see everything connected with it. If you begin to go in the wrong direction, it re-routes you.
The RAS is also similar to a heat-seeking missile – you put in the coordinates of where you want it to go, press the launch button and it goes there. On the way, it filters out all the useless information around you and only keeps what’s relevant. For example, the instruction might be ‘Listen for my name’, so if you are walking through a busy shopping mall or airport and your name is called over the public address system, you’ll hear it.
Why You See Your Car Everywhere
Have you ever noticed that once you have decided on the type of car you want to buy, it seems that every other car on the road is the one you are considering buying? You also see it in car parks, on TV, and at shopping malls. That car is everywhere. This is because your RAS is working, filtering out the other cars (the unimportant information) and bringing the car of your thoughts to the forefront of your mind. The numbers of that particular car have not increased since you decided to buy it; it’s simply your RAS in action. If you lose interest in that car, you’ll no longer see it on the roads. Your RAS is why you see your car everywhere you go.
When a woman becomes pregnant, it starts to seem to her as if every second woman around her is also pregnant. If you have a new baby in the house, you may be so tired that you can sleep through the noise of the traffic and noisy neighbors but as soon as the baby begins to cry you are wide awake.
In a very different example, if you choose to believe that the world and people are all bad, every time you turn on the TV or read a newspaper you’ll see tragedy, death, and war. The RAS doesn’t care whether you love something or not, it only looks out for the patterns in your environment that match your dominant thoughts or beliefs.
If you are continually thinking about what you don’t like, then your RAS is being programmed to alert you to see what you don’t like. You will see so much of what you don’t want that it could seem as though you are at war with your environment. This is why it’s important for you to focus only on what you do want, not what you don’t want.
Summary
It turns out that Napoleon Hill was right – and now we have the science to prove it. You program your RAS with your self-talk and expectations. If your expectations are positive, you automatically program your RAS to seek information about positive behaviors and to screen out information about negative ones. Because of this biological filter function, whatever you are thinking about or focusing on will seep into your subconscious mind and reappear at a future time.
The exciting breakthrough is that you can deliberately program your RAS by choosing the exact messages you send to it from your conscious mind. This means you can now create your own reality with this small bunch of neural fibres running through your brain stem – your Reticular Activating System – your RAS. (Excerpt is from “The Answer” by Allan And Barbara Pease).
