CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT mBRAINING

An NLP Trainer of considerable skill in presentation elegance and NLP knowledge is Marvin Oka of Melbourne Australia. I originally met Marvin at the 1997 Visionary Leadership Conference in Santa Cruz California and quickly came to appreciate his skills as a presenter and him as a person. Fast forward 17 years and last week at the London NLP Conference I had the privilege of hearing him again. There he presented a seminar that he calls mBraining. I heard the first 2 ½ hours of that seminar and then left to participate in the NLP Leadership Summit.

The presentation was very good even though it was not interactive, not a single question was allowed during that time. Otherwise I would have raised some questions. The “m” in mBraining stands for multiple brains. This is central and based on the assumption that we have three brains. From that Marvin and an associate have designed several integration techniques for aligning these three brains. He calls this mBit which stands for Multiple Brain Integration Techniques.

Marvin began by attempting to convince the audience of his basic premise, namely, that “we have three brains.” To do this, he used colorful and fascinating images in his PowerPoint presentation of the brain— of neurons, of neuro-pathways, etc. Very impressive! He then put up a quote from a 1912 book where the author called the “heart” a brain.” Okkkaaaay. He then defined “the brain” as a complex neural network, which really isn’t a definition, but a description of its composition. Then lo and behold, with that “definition” sudden the heart is declared to be a brain! He drew his conclusion with a dramatic flare: “That means that the heart is a ‘brain!’ Because it is a network of neurons, it is able to receive input messages from the rest of the body and to send out output messages.” Marvin noted that it also has the ability to “remember,” and therefore it is another “brain.”

To further his argument, he quoted some antidotal stories about a man who had a heart transplant and who later experienced “strange thoughts and feelings,” only then to discover that his donor was a woman. “Wow! Was her heart— as a ‘brain’ communicating her thoughts and emotions to him?” Taking this to the next level, Marvin then asserted that the “gut,” the digestive system, because it also is “a complex neural network” and because it is comprised of millions of neurons, it must also be a “brain.” It receives input messages and sends out messages.

Now if this line of thinking makes sense to you, that’s okay. You are probably simply going with it to see where these thoughts take you. That’s a sympathetic way to listen to someone and says you are seeking to understand the person’s concept and/or conclusions. That’s what I did as I first listened. When that was complete, I then began thinking through this line of thinking. As I then began using the critical thinking questions of the Meta-Model, I began to sense all sorts of problems about this. Do you? You might want to stop here and check it out. If there is something wrong with

that way of thinking, what is it? What are the problems that appear to you about all of this?

The first and primary thing for me was the label of “heart.” In NLP we know that words are just labels, a way of mentally mapping something. So just using a word or label doesn’t necessarily make it so. So consider the label and metaphor of “brain.” Yes I know that we in the West, and especially English speakers, use the word “heart” for emotions. And on Valentines day we go crazy with “heart” as a synonym of emotion, caring, and love. But that is a cultural fact which arose in Europe and England a few centuries ago. Today western English speakers think of this as an universal fact. But it is not. Back in biblical times, for example, the Hebraic way of portraying the heart was completely different: “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” (Proverbs 23:7). In the Bible “heart” never did service for “emotion,” it was the cognitive center. The emotion center was the “bowls,” the liver, the kidney, the lower stomach. The head served as the “self” or “self-esteem” center— to turn away one’s face is to shame someone, to be honored is to have one’s head lifted up. (I have a whole chapter on this in the book, Emotions: Sometimes I Have Them/ Sometimes They Have Me.)

Then there’s that thing about heart transplants and picking up on another person’s thoughts and emotions. So if the muscle that we call “the heart,” which pumps blood which carries oxygen and nutriments to every cell of the body and transports toxins away from the cells, is the place of “the emotional heart,” then what happens when a person gets a plastic heart rather than a heart transplant? Does that mean that the person will not have an “emotional heart?” Will that person not feel emotions any longer? We know that’s not the case. Nor is “the heart” the place where our emotions are primarily created. Instead they are created in parts of the brain: in the limbic system, in the thalamus, the amygadala, the hypothalamus which excites the sympathetic nervous system, etc.

Nor does the heart process cognitive knowledge. It processes information about pumping more blood, less blood. Nor does the digestive system process cognitive information. The information it deals with has to do with breaking down food for nourishment and rejecting what does not serve the body. With most of the immune system cells there, it is a first-line defense sorting out “me” and “not me.”

Three “brains” is an interesting metaphor, yet that is all it is–a metaphor. We do not literally or actually have three (or more) “brains.” Is there “intelligence” in our body and its functions? Yes, of course. But what intelligence? And what kind of intelligence? That’s the question. We have to be careful about the entailments when we use a metaphor like “brain” or “intelligence.” Sure the body “knows” things– all kinds of things— as its “intelligences” facilitate self-healing and automatic functioning. While a person may accommodatively use “brain” as a metaphor about heart or gut, we cannot expect the label “brain” to carry with it all of the other metaphorical connotations.

Later I heard from several people at the Conference that they liked many of the techniques that came out of this work. They said they were processes for alignment and congruency, and of course, one cannot go wrong with that. But “three brains?” When I meta-model it for precision, and challenge the metaphor for its references, the kind of intelligence in the heart and digestive system is hardly a “brain” in the way we think of brain. Being like a “brain” in one aspect doesn’t make it a brain.