Evidence of this claim is in my last post regarding ‘Illness recovery’ and the concept of “timeouts”.
There is no difference between a child’s upset mind in terms of brain structure and the adult’s upset mind brain structure, which I term the monkey-brain (I realise that this is sort of already used, monkey-mind, being the part that wants us to keep doing things). But given this correlation, we can now speak of behavioural modification more!
What works with reprimanding children? Screaming at them, kind of, but that doesn’t have positive long-term effects; beating them, probably worse than the screaming option; controlled timeouts, not so effective because you cannot get inside the childs head to make them stop thinking about something; distraction, probably as effective in the short-term as anything else, probably as good as anything else in the long-term.
However, if you could control the childs mind during timeouts (or teach them how to do it) then you could eliminate all stimuli and prevent them from torturing themselves too.
As an adult, you can do this, you can control your thoughts and eliminate stimuli both external and internal. Creating the most dramatic change in structure.
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