Dr. Daniel J. Siegel uses his “hand model” of the brain to show schools kids, and the rest of us, how we need all three of the brain’s main parts to be working, and to work together. Say the wrist is the spinal cord. Then the palm represents the reptilian brain stem, the thumb is the emotional limbic brain, and the fingers are the thinking frontal cortex. Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD-lfP1FBFk
But last week, in Dan Siegel Part 1, he said that neither the brain nor the mind can simply create memories like a video camera makes movies. Instead, first we receive a flood of raw sensory data packets from the outside world which is scattered around the body, the nerves and the primitive reptilian brain stem. And the primitive brain stem (palm of hand) doesn’t think — or have conscious memories.
For real permanent memory, which he calls “explicit memory,” Siegel says we need the hippocampus, which is up above the brain stem, in the limbic emotional lobe (thumb). The hippocampus is responsible to A. integrate the raw sensory data into a coherent picture, and B. put a “time tag” on it – transfer it into long-term permanent memory, where it can be retrieved later. That’s the only way to get it into conscious thought, which occurs in the frontal cortex, the highest cognitive part of the brain (the fingers in his model).
Explicit memory is what we usually “think” of as memory; it’s a “thinking memory” or “cognitive memory,” a memory we can remember in our thinking brain. It’s “the whole movie,” for which a caption of sorts has developed in the higher parts of the brain to say: ‘this is a dog, and it’s this particular dog right now” – as opposed to that dog you saw in 1994.
But there are (at least) four ways in which the hippocampus may not be available – which means, humans easily may not remember traumatic events, Siegel shows.
Read More: http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/Daniel-Siegel-2/
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