No Payne No Gain: Writer's Block II

During brain surgery, studies report that patients whose brain cells are stimulated with thin electrodes describe reliving scenes from the past. Keep in mind that they are not remembering; they are reliving the experiences. When you control the firing of the brain, you experience sensations that allow you to “pre-live,” in the same way the brain is stimulated with thin electrodes, allowing you to relive the experience. In other words, you can create the future just as you can relive the past. When you “pre-live,” you experience wholeheartedly life before it happens: You “will” it to happen. People that get into the “zone” are actually pre-living; that is, they are seeing, feeling and experiencing future events before it happens. The brain fires in a similar fashion, if not identical, to the way a person imagines something as compared to when it actually happens. The brain cannot tell fact from fiction or imagination from reality. The more the brain fires, the greater its memory and retention. The harder it fires, the greater the memory and retention. Emotion, real or fantasized, causes the brain to fire harder. When an individual gets into the zone, the activation is localized in the brain about the size of a dime. Persons can fire their own brain by imagining success. By imagining success they are pre-living it before it happens.

When an author experiences writers block, he or she is imagining failure. The more one imagines failure, the greater the anxiety. When anxiety reaches a high pitch, the brain shuts down. The brain can shut down so tight it physically will cause paralysis. During writers block, the individual is pre-living failure to such a degree that failure is inevitable.

One way to get the author back on track is to reprogram the brain for success. Programming the brain for success requires the development of confidence and focus. Confidence and focus can be pre-lived. How to build confidence and focus will be covered in Writers Block III.

Dr. James Payne, a nationally-recognized scholar, educator and speaker, is a professor of Special Education at the University of Mississippi and a Fulbright recipient. He is the developer of the PeopleWise Event Management System and the PeopleWise Profile System.