In this week’s Friday guest post Lenny Deverill-West, returns for a second time. This week he shares his thoughts and knowledge about memory and how new discoveries in neuroscience can be helpful to coaches and change workers.

The Black Box

by Lenny Deverill-West

I am still blown away at the amazing results coaching and many other types of change work get. And for a long time I had no idea why or how what many of the techniques and approaches, like coaching, NLP and hypnosis really worked. Of course I had all the metaphorical explanations, which I was given, but at the time no one really knew exactly what was really happening in the brain and why people changed?

It was explained to me once that it was like the brain is a black box and we don’t know what happens in the black box. At one end we can use suggestions, coaching or techniques and what come out of the black box, is the result, which gives us clues weather what we are doing is having the desired effect.

And you can work this way and still be a coaching or therapy genius. For a long time I did this learned what worked and what didn’t work and often acted intuitively sometimes with no idea as to why used a certain technique or asked a specific question. I just sort of knew what I had chosen to do would probably work.

However, we really do live in exciting times where neuroscientists are making discoveries in how the brain really works which can provide us with an understanding to help us use our skills even more effectively.

One of discoveries in neuroscience that really made a difference to the way I work is reconsolidation theory.

Reconsolidation theory came from some experiments in memory consolidation by researchers Joseph LeDoux and Karim Nader.

In this article Ledoux describes the tradition understanding of the mechanics of memory (consolidation)

“Most neuroscientists, myself included, believed that a new memory, once consolidated into long-term storage, is stable. It’s as if every long-term memory had its own connections in the brain. Each time you retrieve the memory, or remembered, you retrieved that original memory, and then returned it.

Reconsolidation theory proposed a radically different idea—that the very act of remembering could change the memory.”

Ledoux and Nader researched this theory with a series of experiments on laboratory rats. The rats had been conditioned to associate a darken box with an electric shock and very quickly the rats learned to avoid the box, and became fearful and froze each time the box is introduced. When the rats where given a drug that prevented them from creating short term memories, the rats still feared the darkened box, because it was now in their long term memory and remained stable.

However if the rats were shown box just before they were given the drug, the rats would lose their conditioned response, they a forgotten that they were scared of it and the memory had been erased.

Our brains record an experience by firing of a sequence of neurons, which leaves them connected. This memory trace becomes more permanent as synapses connect it with other parts of the brain. This memory pattern is built deep in parts of the brain like the hippocampus and eventually migrates out in cortex.

What Reconsolidation Theory shows us is that not only do memories move from the hippocampus to the cortex during consolidation, but are also returned back to the hippocampus by calling them, at this point they become unstable and can be changed, in effect memory is plastic.

It’s a bit like opening a new word document on your computer so you can see it on the screen and then typing on to the new page. Consolidation could be likened to then saving the document to your hard drive.

Reconsolidation would be like opening this document from your hard drive so it appears on your screen at this point you can change the document so when you save it, it will disappear from your screen and be saved in your hard drive.

So how is this information useful?

As coaches and change workers many of the problems we help our clients with, will often to be connected to how they perceive past events in their life, because our brains like certainty and will quickly create behavioural patterns to maintain this.

It’s pretty cool that when we recall a memory that is the reference experience for a problem we have later in life, the possibility exist to change the meaning of that experience so it is no longer a problem.

So if you’re working with a client with a memory or belief that is a problem for them in someway then here’s some ideas of you can use this.

• Make the memory weaker by challenging generalisations that may underpin the beliefs that are connected to the memory.
• If it is a positive experience amplify the memory to make it more powerful
• Change the meaning of the memory by reframing it and therefore completely transform the impact it has in the clients life

About the Author/Further Resources

Lenny Deverill-West is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, NLP Practitioner, Coach and Corporate Trainer based in Southampton.

Lenny spends most his time seeing clients at his Southampton practice and is also developing trainings courses and Hypnotherapy products that are due out early next year. For more information about Lenny Deverill-West visit www.startlivingtoday.co.uk.

Read Lenny’s first guest post from 2010 here.