I've Tried Your Brainswitching Technique, But

Hello Mr. Curtiss, 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading your article, it was very informative with obvious scientific backing. As a type of scientist (petroleum geology) I enjoy reading scientific papers. However, I have tried your brainswitching technique only to find that even if I "scream [the thought] in my mind," there is still the side of my medically diagnosed ADD that remembers, so as soon as I stop "screaming" in my head, I am still in the same position as when I started. The emotional thoughts still return and I find myself still depressed, despite the momentary reprieve I get from distracting myself with logic. I am not asking you to solve my problems, but was thinking how this type of situation fits into your hypothesis.

Any response will be greatly appreciated. J_________

Dear J__________

For one thing most people don't really know how their brain works. That it works by learned association. Most people don't know how they actually get from one thought to the other. What a thought is. What is the role of neurotransmitters. (This is the real problem with so-called medically diagnosed ADD--the brain works by learned association and if you don't direct your thinking, that is, if you don't do on-purpose thinking, you will do passive, re-active, accidental thinking that will follow hap-hazard connections of learned associations.) 

Usually there is no medical evidence of  ADD. And if you don't know how your brain works, you can't know when you are giving it instructions that have it go, neural activity-wise, into places you would rather not go, like into depression.

Most people don't know that depression is only produced in the subcortex that there is never any emotion of any kind in the neurocortex.

Most people don't know that the brain always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. Depression is a dominant neural pattern. However, with effort, you can insist, first on distrating yourself from the acknowledgment in the neocortex that the pain of depression is being produced in the subcortex. Remember there is never any pain in the neocortex, so the longer you can hang out there, in the form of heightened neural activity, the better.

Then, second, you can insist on doing something, some work, some exercise in present reality (depression is not really present reality, it is the past projected as present) and think about what you are doing, thus making these new thoughts dominant by repetitively thinking about them. The chemistry will persist for a while as a cloud around you but as you insist on doing something, your doing will ultimately cause the brain to take a new direction away from its depressive learned associations to the more current pattern of associations.

Ultimately you can prevail because the brain will remake itself along the lines of new thinking and new behavior as it makes new neural circuits based on new thinking and new behavior. We make our brains day by day, neuron by neuron. The depressive neural pattern will always remain but you can make new strong neural patterns that you can insist on using instead of the old one. Hope this helps. At the risk of sounding crass, I could suggest that you read my book Brainswitch out of Depression for a crash course on how your brain works.  A. B. Curtiss

Dear J______

I read over this and decided I should apologize for my comments on ADD. They are my opinions but they seemed a little insulting under the circumstances. I’m Sorry. A. B.