Brain Fact Friday on Our Conscious Mind and Five Senses

Welcome back to Season 10 of The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, where we connect the science-based evidence behind social and emotional learning (that’s finally being taught in our schools today) and emotional intelligence training (used in our modern workplaces) for improved well-being, achievement, productivity and results—using what I saw as the missing link (since we weren’t taught this when we were growing up in school), the application of practical neuroscience. I’m Andrea Samadi, an author, and an educator with a passion for learning and launched this podcast 5 years ago with the goal of bringing ALL the leading experts together (in one place) to uncover the most current research that would back up how the brain learns best, taking us ALL to new, and often unimaginable heights.    Today we’re going to go back to where we left off with EPISODE #291 “Unleashing the Power of Our Subconscious Mind” where we covered: ✔ A review of where our podcast began, and where we are going. Each episode we create, it becomes clearer to me that social and emotional skills are important for understanding who we are, and are crucial for propelling us forward. Social and emotional competencies form the backbone of who we are (our identity), along with our character, and I’d like to continue to uncover how science can strengthen this understanding, (with the topics I chosen listed in the diagram in the show notes) expanding our awareness as we move towards our goals, or whatever it is we are working on.     I remember professor of psychology, Maurice Elias summed it up well when he spoke about where SEL began for him in the mid 1970s. He saw a need for these SEL skills back then, (decades before they were infused into our classrooms) saying these skills “could propel someone forward” but he mentioned the importance of “character to steer our direction.” I’ve not forgotten about Character, it’s an important topic that I’ve been writing about in my spare time. We’ll cover the basic character traits in the future, showing were character fits into this equation. I know there’s a lot to the formula for success, and I don’t want to leave any stones unturned. For today’s episode #293, we are going back to the basics, with the Fundamentals that started for me with those 12 teenagers all those years ago. When I was speaking with Brian Proctor, on our last episode, #292,[i] it hit me that some concepts we had both heard over and over again (like the hour glass that Brian put on the cover of his book that represented staying in the present moment- I had forgotten that’s what it meant. I would have told a story about it representing the fact we only have a certain amount of time to live our life, and to live each moment to the fullest) reminding me of the importance of reviewing these lessons. Or some of the phrases we used to hear over and over again like “you don’t need to know HOW you are going to do something, just figure out what it is that you want, and the how will show up.”  All of the concepts that we heard, that yielded results for anyone who studied and applied them, were ideas that were simple enough to understand, yet most people never followed through with them. This is what Brian Proctor wrote about in his book, and there were many lessons he learned that went much deeper than the usual topics like goal-setting, or confidence building, but there was a foundational level that everyone started with, and I’d say it was with those Fundamental lessons that we taught to the teens. We recently covered “Diving Deeper into Our Subconscious Mind”[ii] (which was the 4th tape the teens learned). Today we will cover some of the important concepts of “Using the Conscious Mind and Our Senses” and in a couple of days (when I’ve written the next episode, we’ll cover)  “Going Beyond Our Senses: Using the Faculties of Our Mind.” This will provide us all with the solid background of these success principles that I s