The brain is encased in a skull and therefore has no direct contact with the world. From birth our brain needs to guide us to make the right decisions by understanding the information coming to it from both the external and internal environments. It can only do this by making predictions based on past events and the likelihood that it will turn out the same, if it carries out the necessary actions. However these “top down” predictions do not always agree with the “bottom up” information that arises from our senses. The brain/nervous system  needs to correct any errors between the two, and will usually do so by agreeing with its “top down” prediction as it has been built from multiple stored experiences and their outcomes, compared to a one off sensation. There does have to be flexibility in the system and the predictions can be overcome if the “bottom up” senses are giving a signal of high reward or danger, if the stimulus is novel, or the environment we are travelling through is unknown or rapidly changing. The nervous system then updates its predictions to take in this new information. This in a nutshell is learning.

This is a great system to help us get around and perform actions that we need to keep us alive and prospering. As Lisa Feldman Barrett states, this is all in the service of using our bodily resources as efficiently as possible. However glitches can occur. If for example you have experienced anxiety for a long period of time, the feelings arising from your body in a social setting might well be interpreted as being excited rather than anxious. But your brain will go with anxiety as that is what it has got used to feeling as an emotion in that situation. Similarly people who have experienced pain for a long time, can experience fear of lifting, because they predict it will cause them pain, or even something that should not be painful as painful as that is the brains’ prediction.

To step back a second, we can ask how did the brain first start its ability to predict, when there is no real history to build a prediction from? Well new theories of emotion from the field of neuroscience, states that we are born with an understanding of whether something is pleasant or unpleasant (valence) and whether we feel high energy or low energy (arousal). These are our feelings. Emotions are made up of the understanding of what these combinations mean from our culture and the circumstances we are in at a given moment. For example, if our mother is sitting at the end of our bed and singing to us, we might feel it as a combination of pleasantness and low energy and this can be learnt as “I am calm , soothed or loved”, whereas a dog running after us may create an unpleasant, high arousal state and may then be identified as terrified, nervous or stressed, or indeed high arousal and pleasant feelings as you have been bought up with dogs in the family, which mean you are excited or joyful.

These feelings arise from combinations of bodily messages, from, for example, the heart, lungs, gut, muscles and sexual organs. Our brains will predict what we are likely to feel before we feel it in order to release the necessary hormones, immune responses and bodily actions/behaviours. For example, without the brain getting the blood pressure to rise before we stand up, we are likely to collapse as we stand due to a fall in blood pressure, or running for a bus requires a predicted increased blood flow to the legs, an increase in heart rate, a release of glucose into the bloodstream and a slowing down of function in other organs to accommodate the increase in work rate in your muscles .

The M.A.P. is built around this understanding . In order to experience improved physical and emotional well being we need to keep confounding our problematic beliefs/ predictions, until the brain will extinguish its prior belief and create new healthier predictions. Researchers are looking at areas such as virtual reality and hallucinogenics to help facilitate this change. Robin Carhart-Harris of Imperial College London, believes that taking a hallucinogenic, may be a way of rebooting the brain, allowing for example someone with severe depression to be realise that there are other ways that they can think.

Although mindfulness does not make us hallucinate it does allow us to be with our difficult feelings, thoughts and emotions in a calm and open manner, defying expectations. If you are experiencing physical or emotional pain and suffering, but are able to observe these feelings with calmness, compassion and curiosity, this will confound expectations and over time reboot the system. Researchers are now studying the relationship between mindfulness and interoception and health. (1, 2).

By spending more time with our exploration of feelings we are in a way going back to the raw ingredients of our problems. The wheel shown (known as the “Affect Circumplex’) will be used regularly by people on the programme , as a method of charting their practise . Emotion words are chosen and this is called affect labelling and has been shown to be beneficial to treatment outcomes in psychotherapy (3).

Other elements of the course involve exercise, education, tools for insomnia if needed and positive psychology exercises such as savouring, and gratitude, all of which have been shown to improve mental and physical well-being. (4,5).

This is an exciting opportunity for change and although nobody can truly know how much change will occur, Graham strongly believes that by sticking to the course , every person completing the course will experience benefits.

Graham is strongly influenced by Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work and here is a link to a TED talk she gives

Her groundbreaking book “How Emotions Are Made” is also available and is a very readable science book.

Another important work and again very readable is Antonio Damasio’s “The Strange Order Of Things”

Another influence for the programme is neuroscientist Tania Singer. You can read about her research, called the ReSource Project in a free ebook about training in compassion, which is an important thread in both M.A.P. and the MBLC.
http://www.compassion-training.org/?lang=en&page=download

(1). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00763/full

(2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29974959

(3) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17576282

(4) https://www.jpain.org/article/S1526-5900(17)30224-9/fulltext

(5) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26760592