The Secret of the Spaghetti Monster
Tommy just took his date out for some fancy Italian food. As they were talking, the topic came up that Tommy doesn’t like Spaghetti. “Why don’t you like spaghetti!?” she asked.
His date, “Why don’t you like Spaghetti?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Well, there is this one memory that is coming up. God, I haven’t thought of this for years. When I was a kid, probably about 6, I remember hearing a loud noise. It was scary for a young boy, but I went out to the living room. I saw my mom standing there in the living room. It was dark, and there looked to be spaghetti on the floor. I asked my mom, ‘Are you making spaghetti?’ She yelled at me, ‘Go back to your room!’ and then the police came to the house.”
“Why were the police there?” she asked.
“You know, this is going to sound stupid, but I always believed that she had called the police because I got out of bed when I wasn’t supposed to and asked for spaghetti. As I say that out loud, obviously she didn’t call the police on me for asking for spaghetti. I don’t know why she called the police.”
“So you haven’t eaten spaghetti since then?”
“I haven’t.”
“We need to get to the bottom of the secret of the spaghetti. We should call your mom right now.”
Tommy called his mom and put it on speaker phone. His mom answered, and Tommy relayed his memory of the spaghetti.
“Oh honey,” his mom said. “I thought you didn’t see that. We never talked about it, and because it was dark, I didn’t realize you had seen.”
“Seen what?” Tommy asked.
“Someone had broken into our house that night. I shot them in the living room. I shot them in the head, and I guess your mind interpreted it as spaghetti.”
The Origin of the Spaghetti Monster
When Tommy experienced fear from the loud noises and went to the living room, his mind was analyzing his situation. His mind was looking for potential catastrophes to be avoided. The brain is very good at making sure that you stay alive (and reproduce…), so it is always cataloguing these types of experiences. In this case, when his mom yelled at him and the police came, Tommy experienced emotional pain from being rejected instead of comforted when he was afraid. All of this came together to create a strong thought-memory in Tommy, so that if anything like this ever happened again, Tommy could prevent himself from being in a dangerous situation that causes him pain.
The memories of what was happening and how it made Tommy feel became a thought tree. In your brain, thoughts are protein and chemical structures that have tree-like structures. The root of the tree is the origin story. How it all started. Then, the branches and leaves of the trees are the associated memories, emotions, and bodily sensations. Have you ever said, “Man, I can still feel the fear of it?” or, “I can still taste it!” That’s because your body has literally snapped an Instagram story for you to relive another day.
Once a thought tree takes root (there is an origin), you can either water or starve the newborn thought tree. You water the tree by feeding it mental energy. This could mean thinking about it more, or it could mean having additional, later experiences that your mind thinks are like the original experience. In Tommy’s case, the root of his tree became spaghetti. And he immediately watered it by attaching strong emotions to it. His strong emotions grew the thought tree with the memories of the event and the sensations of fear, of his mom yelling at him, and what he wrongly believed was his mom calling the cops on him for asking for spaghetti.
Re-Learning the Secret of the Spaghetti
The interpretation that Tommy’s 6 year old mind made of this event was that Tommy should not eat spaghetti or else his mom might yell at him and the police might come. This interpretation of the events becomes a belief.
Obviously, this belief is wrong. But this is the important part: Tommy’s brain would not have made that belief if it did not believe it at the time. 6 year old Tommy thought that it was true, so Tommy began acting and living his life in a way that was consistent with that belief.
For Tommy to change his belief, he had to first become aware of the belief. Your thought trees, which are the home for your beliefs, live in your nonconscious. Your nonconscious brain is always active (except when you are incapacitated drunk or under full anesthesia). It is even active when you are asleep.
Your nonconscious brain is the main processor in your brain. It processes a million operations a second. It multitasks, and it processes way more than your conscious brain can process, and it does it faster. Your nonconscious brain is like your 99.9% brain, and your conscious brain is like your 0.1% brain. But, all that you are normally aware of is your conscious thoughts, so it’s natural to think that that is all there is. Your consciousness is the story you know. But in reality, your consciousness is only a small part of you.
Your conscious brain can’t be aware of everything that is happening in your nonconscious because it would be too overwhelming. Instead, what your nonconscious brain does is sends up signals through your subconscious. The signals come in four varieties: our emotions, behaviors, perspectives, and bodily sensations. What you can do is start to become aware of when these signals are occurring. Because they are subconscious, you have to be intentional about watching for them. When you find them, then you can use them like a trailhead when you’re hiking. It’s where the path starts. You can then consciously follow the path back through your subconscious to your nonconscious and start to explore the tangled jungle of thought trees for where that signal originated.
When Tommy’s date asked him why he didn’t like spaghetti, his thought tree sent him signals to avoid spaghetti. It sent a behavioral signal: don’t eat that. It sent an emotional signal: I don’t feel good, I don’t like spaghetti. It sent him a perspective signal: spaghetti makes the world a darker place. But Tommy consciously chose to push through those signals to ask “why”. Why was he receiving these signals? Why did he believe that he needed to avoid spaghetti? Tommy followed the trail back to his thought tree.
When you decide to follow a trail head, it’s like bringing that neural network path onto a workbench. Think of a tinkerer, who takes apart watches. He has small tools, and he takes it apart under a microscope, dissecting the parts. The parts of the watch become the focus. Likewise, when you start to put your neural network under focus, it becomes malleable to you. It becomes like putty. Your applying your conscious mind energy to it.
And here’s the kicker: your conscious brain can direct your nonconscious brain. Your conscious brain can change your nonconscious brain. You have the power to root out the interpretations and beliefs that you made from thought trees and replace them with different interpretations and beliefs. This process is called neuroplasticity.
One method of conducting neuroplasticity is to try to fully activate the thought tree that you are analyzing. Trace the trail back to the origin of the thought tree and allow yourself to feel the emotions, bodily sensations, and remember the contextual information that is associated with that thought tree. Then, you can consciously choose to reprocess those emotions, bodily sensations, and contextual information into a new interpretation.
In Tommy’s case, he remembered being that 6 year old boy, but he had new information that 6 year old him didn’t have. Tommy knows now that his mom wasn’t going to call the police on him for asking for spaghetti. Tommy also knows now that spaghetti isn’t inherently something to be feared. He can take this knowledge and reinterpret the events of the shooting. He can tell his brain, he does not have to be afraid of spaghetti.
Conclusion
You can conceptualize your brain in three parts: your consciousness, your nonconsciousness, and your instinctual drives. This post focused on the first two concepts.
Your consciousness has the power to choose. If you body is sending you a behavioral or emotional signal, you can choose to override that. You can choose to not act out of fear but to act with intentionality. This is why I call your conscious brain your agent brain.
Your nonconscious brain is the part of your brain that is always on, always learning, and always trying to prevent you from experiencing pain. It uses fear to stop you. It has good intentions for you, but sometimes the fear is counterproductive to living the kind of life that you want to live. Sometimes, the nonconscious brain wrongly interprets things and fears things that it should not. This is why the nonconscious mind is depicted as a person screaming, barely visible, hidden in the background of the dark semi-circle. I am calling your nonconscious brain your automatic brain.
Your automatic brain grows up like a jungle. It is wild, entangled, and unruly. It becomes a place of danger. It is the job of every human to become aware of their nonconscious, automatic brain and to engage in neuroplasticity. Clean up the jungle. Clean up your mental mess so that you can become the type of person that you want to be, not the person that you have nonconsciously become.
Further reading
Processing Information with Nonconscious Mind
Building an AI Robot: Understanding your mind in an IFS context
https://drleaf.com/blogs/news/what-is-a-thought
https://drleaf.com/blogs/news/the-main-signals-of-depression-how-to-find-healing