Non-threatening information is normally dampened in the spinal cord when a person awake and relaxed. This is the physiology we call posture. However, the whole reason this information at times needs to either be dampened or noticed is that under certain circumstances you might expect something relevant coming from who knows where. An example would be during a sporting event when you have to be aware of everything so you are not caught flat footed. During these times the filter in the spinal cord is wide open, and the information moves up in the brain to your awareness level. We cal this state excitability and in school it was called an a-specific arousal. If this state is very easily provoked it is an absolute guarantee that you will be chronically overwhelmed. Another person who perhaps is almost never in that state would have your exact same life and not be overwhelmed. However that persons oblivion to what is going on is not necessarily good either, which illustrates that information processing is a skill of being able to function at different states like shifting gears while driving cars.
This state of excitability is the first stage of learning. Learning at first should be overwhelming, and eventually you learn to see the pattern of information and work with it enough that you can deal with the same situation with almost no effort. So we will tell you the least technical way to strengthen the brain so that it can deal with close off unnecessary information.
We can start with an example of someone learning to balance. All their attention is on their balance and the information related to their movement and position is under deliberate control. This is the state of excitability.
The next question becomes how to juggle all this information. What follows is an organization of information in the same way you would organize your messy house into categories. The child learns that when the front of the body acts there is a certain reaction compared to the back of their body. That separation had been clarified previously but now the position is different. When the front/back balance is learned the person learning to balance is now a degree more relaxed because he or she doesn’t have to activate the whole brain at once.
Later the information is organized into left and right which enables him or her to move onto one leg. Another level of organization translates to a lower total activation of the brain. This process continues to the point of smooth walking and gradually the controls move from the deliberate, high resolution cortex to lower more gross functions involving primarily automatic functions evidenced by the fact that a person with good balance can walk without thinking about it. Once this level is achieved the person is processing information far more sophisticated than just balancing without being overwhelmed. In fact the challenge for them would the feeling of being bored at this point. A well developed ‘gross’ or posture brain enables pattern recognition and in the same way someone without that organization would be overwhelmed standing up any person would be overwhelmed with any new information.
