Site Map: MAIN / This Page How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news. Isaiah 52:7

~~^~~ The Doyletics Foundation ~~^~~

Questions and Answers about the Science of doyletics
by
Bobby Matherne
Published by Good Mountain Press in 2007
A Doyletics Essay written by and Copyright 2007 by Bobby Matherne

Web www.doyletics.com

These questions are from the Promotion Material for a Course which I ordered January 24, 2007 from the Teaching Co. Course entitled: "Sensation, Perception, and the Aging Process." After each of Professor Colavita's questions, I answer them using the insights provided by the science of doyletics.

[Details of Course: (24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture), Course No. 1546, Taught by Francis B. Colavita, University of Pittsburgh, Ph.D., University of Indiana ]

Professor Colavita asks several interesting questions in the promotional literature for his course. Since I have just ordered the course and not taken it, I will be interested to find out how he answers these questions. However, I suspect his answers to them would be rather different if he understood the new science of doyletics, because it provides many answers to puzzles he raises in these questions. With that in mind, I will endeavor to answer the questions and provide solutions to the puzzles using the insights of doyletics.

"Why is it that we react to the world the way we do, not only in similar ways -- turning our heads in the direction of a tap on the shoulder or a sudden movement in our peripheral vision, for example -- but often in dramatically different ways as well?"

Such reflex actions are created by the limbic structure of the brain which creates reactions unmediated by the neocortex or higher cognitive brain functions. They are stored during one's lifetime before five years old. We call these doylic memories because they operate like our normal memories, they can be stored and retrieved upon an appropriate signal. One example is the one he gave above: a glimpse of sudden shadow out the side of our eyes can trigger an immediate reaction from our bodies without any thought intervening. Our normal memories are mediated by the neocortex and to distinguish them from doylic memories, we call them cognitive memories or alternately conceptual memories, but these are called simply memories by everyone who has not studied the science of doyletics. Simply put: doylic memories are bodily states, cognitive memories are stored visual and auditory information.

Exactly the same as glimpse of a fleeting shadow in our peripheral vision can cause us to experience a bodily reaction, the arising of a memory (visual and auditory recall) of some scary event can cause us to experience a bodily reaction. This demonstrates that cognitive memories can also trigger doylic memories. Upon further reflection one can imagine that if one turns one's head immediately upon seeing a fleeting shadow, one may start breathing hard right after turning one's head. Scientists call this a fear reaction, but for our purposes, it demonstrates that one doylic memory (the head turn) can trigger another doylic memory (respiration rate increases). Thus, it can be easily seen that both doylic memories and cognitive memories can trigger doylic memories. This insight is vital to understand how one enters a long-term emotional state such as grief, sorrow, depression, etc. -- one doylic memory triggers another one, and a cascade occurs of doylic memories which continue to reinforce each other over extended periods of time. An everyday example is that of a mood, which rightly understood, is a simple cascade of doylic memories which sustains itself for a certain time.

"What causes us to gasp in startled fear at a sharp sound that our spouse, even though blessed with excellent hearing, appears to barely notice?"

All of our doylic memories are idiosyncratic. This is an essential tenet of doyletics. All of our adult feelings, emotions, and automatic physical body states are stored during an original, one-time event that happened to us before five years old. Our bodily reactions to each of these events were stored and remain with us for a lifetime if no intervention occurs to remove them. The entire event is stored including the bodily states of internal muscle tension, respiration and heart rates, internal organs, and primitive storage of visual components of the experience. (Footnote: visual components, pre-five, are likely stored in our sub-cortical visual system which is already known to store reflex visual actions such as eye-tracking, etc. See "Seeing Red". )

When some component of the original event is picked up by the limbic structure or sub-cortical visual system, the doylic memory of the original event is sent out to the limbs, torso, internal organs, heart, lungs, and the entire rest of the body -- to all the parts of the body affected by that original event. What we experience is some subset of the reactions we had to the original event -- without any memory of the original event! We can not have a memory of the original event in the cognitive or conceptual memory sense for this very good reason: a memory must be either a doylic memory or a cognitive memory. It cannot be both. To understand why this is so, consider that a doylic memory is stored in the root brain's limbic region during the pre-five time in childhood while the neocortex is continuing to grow and come up to full operational functionality. Once the neocortex is fully operational, all future original events are simply stored as a cognitive memory or what we normally call just a memory. Thus, it can be shown logically that if we remember an event, there will be no doyles associated with that. By definition an event we recall from our pre-five childhood will not have any doylic memories or bodily states which were stored during the original event which will arise. We may feel good remembering a birthday party at 4, but those good feelings are doylic memories stored earlier.

The answer to Professor Colavita's question as why our spouse barely notices is that we had an original event which caused us to have a startle reflex before five and our spouse did not!

"Why do children twist their faces in disgust when asked to sample the smallest bite of their parents' most recent culinary addiction?"

The whole area of food dislikes at any age are explained simply by doyletics. Food dislikes are doylic memories with sets of muscle tension which make it difficult for us to chew, swallow, or even put food in our mouths. It is not the taste of food, because often the mere sight of the food or smell of it triggers the grimace doylic memories. Try making such a face and then eating any food you like and you'll find how unpleasant it is. In fact, it's hard to do this process consciously, but remember when a food dislike doylic memory arises, it's completely unconscious! To not have a memory of why something is the way it is -- that's one definition of unconscious and all doylic memories are unconscious until an intervention occurs.

What happens when an intervention occurs, you may be thinking. Simply this: the doylic memory is transformed from an original event stored in your root brain into an original event stored in your neocortex. It's exactly as if the doylic memory moves from your root brain to neocortex. Thereafter, whenever a triggering event occurs, instead of the doylic memory causing a bodily reaction, you will simply recall the original event. Often one simply remembers the intervention and what was learned during the intervention about the original event, and soon even that is dropped, just as we drop other memories of events when they are no longer a novel occurrence. Doylic memories cannot be dropped by willing it like we do with cognitive memories. An intervention is required. More will be said about interventions later.

"Though the physical world we occupy may be identical, the reality we experience -- the perceptions created when our brains combine the input from our senses with past encounters with those same inputs -- is very different. And this is true not only from one person to another, but within the same individual, as well. For our various sensory systems can be altered over time, their acuity changing in response to aging or injury, life experiences, evolving personalities, and other factors."

Take this example. A woman, call her Ann, gets terror-tremors whenever she hears a man whistling outside her room or her apartment. It doesn't matter whether she knows the man or not. Other women in the exact same situation have no reactions to the whistling. Ann was sexually molested as a child under five and the man used whistling to mask his covert activities. She doesn't recall the molestation consciously, so she has no cognitive memories of the event, but the doylic memory of her bodily states are triggered by the man's whistling in the now and causes her tremors of fear with heart-pounding reality. In a given culture, children generally are exposed to a common set of original events and store communal doylic memories of joy, happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, just to name a few salient emotional states. If someone has a unique reaction to some event, it indicates that, like Ann, they had some unique event happen to them which is has yet to be converted into a cognitive memory and is stuck in the doylic memory state.

Few individuals past the age of fifty have any food dislikes remaining, even though most of them can remember disliking some food as a child or young adult. What happened to the food dislike? Was their nervous system altered over time? Did their acuity change as they aged? Not so for food dislikes. What happened was an intervention which led to the food dislike doylic memory being converted into a cognitive memory. This happened to me with macaroni and cheese casserole. I hated it as a child and as a young adult in my twenties, it began to occur to me that I like macaroni and I liked cheese separately. Why should I dislike them together? As a logical scientist, this puzzled me greatly over the course of several years. I tried to recall all the times that my mother served us macaroni and cheese together and nothing happened -- I couldn't remember much of the dreaded events except that I went to bed hungry rather than eat the detested casserole. BUT -- over the course of years, sometime in my thirties, I had occasion to actually eat a macaroni and cheese casserole, one exactly as my mother fixed, and I found it agreeable. All my distaste for it was gone! In doyletics terms, I had somehow converted my doylic memories of the hated food into cognitive memories, and now I could eat it and even learn to enjoy it. It has never become a favorite food, but just being able to eat it was amazing to me. It was two decades later that I became involved with establishing the tenets of doyletics that I recalled this event and saw it as an example of an unconscious intervention which changed my doylic memories of the food into cognitive memories and made it possible for me to eat it. My intervention vis-a-vis the macaroni and cheese casserole dish can be considered one of the "life experiences" that Professor Colavita asked about in his question above.

"How do our bodies create motor memories that allow us to learn and then automatically perform the most complex tasks -- such as the laboriously practiced elements of a golf swing -- in one smoothly executed motion, or run through a series of rapid gear shifts while driving on a winding mountain road?"

All of the motorized tasks we performed before five were stored as doylic memories. These motor-doyles become the components of the activities we learn above five for the rest of our lives. The set of motor-doyles we learn are therefore idiosyncratic. Everyone learns a different set of motor-doyles. A boy who is kept in isolation with few interactions except for his mother who doesn't play with him very much will grow up with relatively few motor-doyles and will tend to become introverted and not interested in athletics. Things that athletes find easy and fun to do, he will shy away from, somehow knowing intuitively that he has none of the basic skills to perform athletics sports. If, as an adult, he attempts sports such as golf, he will have the greatest difficulty of mastering the intricacies of the golf swing and will remain a duffer or drop the sport in frustration. Similarly, for the intricate music skill of playing a violin as an adult, he will have great difficulty. But take the same boy at age three and introduce him to the Suzuki method and he will grow up with a great ability to play the violin. The motions of holding the violin and drawing the bow back and forth will come "naturally" to him. The adverb "naturally" is one that we use to describe a motor-doyle activity, that is, an activity whose component parts we stored before five as a doylic memory.

To summarize: Original events before five years old are stored as doylic memories and thereafter as cognitive memories. Doylic memories can be changed into cognitive memories by an intervention and thereafter they will not arise when events which previously triggered occur. All emotions, feelings, motor operations, and other bodily states are comprised of doylic memories. The set of doylic memories is unique to the individual and once they have grown past five years old, no new doylic memories will be created, although through interventions some of the doylic memories can be lost by being converted into cognitive memories, what we call simply, "memories." Examples of interventions abound. These include simple, unconscious interventions such as removing a food dislike. Or they may include long, difficult interventions from various professionals in the fields of social work, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and a host of new fields with acronyms like NLP, EFT, and TA, to mention a few.

Is there a simple memory technique that one can use to convert doylic memories to cognitive? Yes. It is called the speed trace and anyone can learn to use it with only a few minutes of dedicated practice. Once it is learned, any onerous or troubling doylic memories can be removed in under a minute. Understand that although we say we "remove" a doylic memory, in reality, we merely create a cognitive memory of the doylic memory. But that act has the salubrious effect of ensuring that the doylic memory will never arise again to trouble us. That is one of the amazing features of the science of doyletics -- it not only explains how troublesome feelings arise, but provides a handy tool to remove them permanently, quickly and easily.

— Bobby Matherne
Principal Researcher
The Doyletics Foundation

Click Here to Return to Home Page

Web www.doyletics.com

L3xicon.com - A Web Thesaurus and Lexicon e-mediately^tm is a Trademark of 21^st Century Education, Inc. Prototyped 2000.