Hi and welcome to the In The Cortex podcast.
We are your hosts.
I'm Paloma Garcia.
And I am Dani Perrecone.
And we're the founders of In The Cortex, an online community with programs that show
people the tools that they need to change their lives through brain reorganization, no
medication, just movement.
When you get your brain out of survival mode and regulate your nervous system, you start
to live in the fun, logical part of the brain, the cortex.
Subscribe today and learn how to live your best In the Cortex life.
And now, on to today's episode.
Let's start out with a quick cortex moment from one of our members.
Prior to the ITC program, I was a real people pleaser.
No wasn't a word I used frequently, nor was my voice for that matter.
I never had any self-worth, thus there was never any worth added to the person I was.
As cliche as it may sound, but if you don't find yourself, your voice, your being worthy,
nobody else is going to find you worthy as well.
I never had a lot of boundaries when it came to people.
Thus it was always easy to walk all over the person that I was.
Engaining as much as I did since joining the ICT program and being dedicated to my brain
work.
Change after change occurred.
I started to develop self-worth and along with it self-love, respect and so much more
followed.
Today, I respect, love and appreciate the woman I am.
Thus proper, rational boundaries are set for those around me.
It feels incredible when you add worth to who you are as a person.
There is a sense of feeling whole and adding worth to who we are gives us a natural ability
to protect ourselves and stand up for what we believe in.
In today's episode, we are going to talk about what is brain reorganization.
How often do we get this question?
I don't know if this happens to you, but I always follow it with a deep breath.
Brace yourselves.
Are you ready to break it down?
What is it?
Absolutely.
We get this question all the time.
I'm sure everybody gets this question is, what do you do for work?
What do you do?
I absolutely do take the deep breath because I know that I'm going to get one or two reactions.
Either people are going to be like, cool, interesting, tell me more.
What's your Instagram?
Or they're just going to be like, what?
And so that's where we're going to start to break down in this very first episode is,
what is brain reorganization?
What do we do?
I go into my little spiel, my elevator pitch.
Let's just imagine it's a really long elevator ride.
We're going on a lot of steps, a lot of different floors.
It's not like a three-floor situation.
Just keep that in mind.
I say what I do is brain reorganization.
Brain reorganization is the concept of giving your brain the neurological foundation it
needs so that your cortex, your higher functioning brain is free to focus on what you want to
do in your day-to-day life and being your best self.
And how do we do that?
Well, when babies are in the uterus through the first and sometimes second year of life,
we're all designed to do certain movements.
And all those movements are developing the primitive part of our brain.
And so the primitive part is really important because it is in charge of all of our automatic
functions, all the things that we're all doing while we're listening to this podcast.
And we're not having to think about everything from regulating our heartbeat to making sure
our eyes are blinking and sitting upright.
That's all done by the primitive brain.
Those are automatic functions.
And so when we're moving, all those cute little movements that babies do are developing this
part of the brain.
So it gets to a point when the baby stands up and walks that all of that stuff is already
kind of taken care of and it's all automatic.
The cortex doesn't have to think about how we're breathing or how we're blinking.
And after on, we're set up for the later stages of development through childhood, adolescence,
adulthood.
However, a lot of us don't move enough when we're babies.
And so what happens is if you didn't move enough when you were a baby, you probably didn't
get enough of this movement to develop your primitive brain.
So what does that mean?
Your primitive brain probably is underdeveloped.
And that's what we call a disorganized brain, which is a brain that is primitive brain is
underdeveloped and it's stuck in that survival mode, fight or flight.
Because the primitive brain's number one job, in addition to all of these automatic functions,
is keeping us alive.
That's why that's a part of the brain that's in charge of all of these automatic functions
and making sure that they're automatic.
It's keeping us alive.
So when our brain, our primitive brain is underdeveloped, it's going to get stuck in
survival mode.
So we are left reacting to the world rather than responding to it.
And that's when people say, whoa, that's interesting.
What do I do about it?
And that's where I say, well, that's where you do our program.
The cool thing about the brain is that it's plastic.
Neuroplasticity tells us that the brain can rewire the way that it is connected at any
point in our lives, at any age.
By discovering this, by noticing that you have some disorganization in your brain and
deciding to do something about it, you can go and recreate those movements that you might
have missed as a baby to fill in those neurological developmental gaps in your brain and give
your brain the foundation that it needs to truly live in the cortex.
That's why we're called in the cortex.
The cortex is where we have higher thinking, we have logical thought, all of our higher
thinking, and that's really where we want to spend the most time to be our most authentic
selves without our primitive brain kind of getting in the way.
Oh, I love that.
And I often get followed up with the question of like, so the people who are getting this,
they're following, they're nodding their heads like, yes, yes, yes, I understand you're
talking about, they're like, oh my gosh, my baby or I didn't crawl as a baby.
Is this what you're talking about?
So yes, that's one of the movements.
But to break this down, so now that we have the amazing backstory of what happens in the
primitive brain, we talk about four different pillars that in the cortex.
And those are the four things that are in the program that we break down and help you
make sense of and teach you how to correct it in the sense of like, and we never say
that there's anything wrong.
We never say that you missed anything.
We never want to shame or guilt anyone.
So if you're listening to this and you're like, oh my gosh, my parents put me in a container
and I never crawled.
We never want you to go back to your parents and say, I can't believe you did this to me,
you ruined my whole life.
I don't know why I have whatever.
And so the first part, the four pillars of in the cortex, we break them down to two lower
centers of the brain, the ponds and the midbrain.
The ponds is supposed to be on an active from zero to five months of life.
That is the position babies assume on their bellies and they're supposed to be moving
from point A to point B. Oftentimes, if you go to your doctor, they call it tummy time,
but we call it creeping.
And that is a foundational movement that puts those automatic functions in place.
So like Paloma said, a threat comes to you when you're walking at this point, because
you did enough of that movement as a baby.
If a threat comes at you, your brain now knows, is this a true threat?
Is there a tiger staring at me?
Do I need to run for my life?
Or did my boss just tell me there's a deadline for work and my brain goes into panic mode.
And so if your brain's going into panic mode, when your boss tells you there's a deadline
that you need to meet at a certain time, that's a sign that that part of the brain didn't
get enough of this movement called creeping.
And it's not saying that we don't want your adrenaline to kick in and have you get that
oomph to get the work done.
We're just saying, do you panic?
Do you go to fight mode where you start arguing about the deadline?
Or do you flight and just come up with excuses and just peace out and maybe you get sick
and you're like, now I can't meet the deadline.
So there's different things that we will be breaking down for you, but that's that first
part of the brain.
The second part of the brain we talk about is the mid brain.
And this is ideally working from six to 12 months of life.
And we say ideally, and that goes for both the pawns and the mid brain because it's
very general on the time frames.
And we never want you to think, oh my gosh, I have to hit it at six months.
My baby's not crawling by six months.
There's a problem.
No, it's a very general time.
So from six to 12 months, that part of the brain is on, it's active.
And the way it's developing is through crawling.
That is on your hands and your knees.
And that is when babies become mobile.
They're moving throughout the house.
We think it's so cute.
They're also getting into a lot of trouble in that stage of pulling things out and you're
basically trying to keep them alive, right?
But that's a really important phase of how that movement pattern is so critical for putting
all these automatic functions in place that we're going to talk about later as well.
So that's those two first parts of the brain.
The third pillar in the cortex are the primitive reflexes.
These are automatic instinctual movements designed to keep you alive.
Now there's this amazing choreograph that's going on of the primitive reflexes, the pawns,
the mid brain, all of this happening in utero for the first two years of life.
When reflex is turning on and doing its job for a specific time, maybe it's turning the
baby's head so it can get air at a certain place and when it's laying on its belly.
And then it has to do it enough until that job is now complete.
It can lie dormant, but at the same time, those lower centers of the brain are also doing
their job.
So there's a lot of nuance going on within this time period.
And there's general guidelines of when these primitive reflexes need to be on and then
need to be inhibited and then turn off and kind of lie in a dormant sense.
So like the example I mentioned earlier, if a tiger is approaching you and you're in
the wild for whatever reason, I'm talking about tigers today, it could be like a bus
on the street or something.
It could be a bus.
It could be.
It could be literally anything other than a tiger, but a true survival situation, right?
You want those survival parts of the brain to turn on and get you to react.
You don't want to sit there and start analyzing, huh, that looks like I'm going to die, you
know, and start breaking down what could possibly happen.
We want that adrenaline to kick in.
We want the cortisol to kick in.
It's a true survival situation.
Survive, fight, flight, freeze, fawn.
But we don't want it turning on throughout the rest of your life.
So that's why it's so important that babies are moving because they're integrating all
these reflexes.
They're doing their jobs.
They're setting themselves up for later in life.
So that way the brain can really tell the difference between real threats and perceived
threats.
A perceived threat is when you see somebody having road rage, just for example.
That is a situation where they have created a whole story in their mind that the world's
against them.
They must fight and race you, cut you off, tailgate you, teach you a lesson on how to
drive better, right?
And you're like, whoa, we're all going to different locations.
We all have our own stories.
There's no reason to have that extra rage within us.
We're going to break down more examples of the ponds, the midbrain, and the primitive
reflexes.
Those are very much rooted in movement, and that's the very beginning part of our program.
The fourth pillar of in the cortex are the subconscious beliefs.
And this is where we really tap into the filters on how you see the world.
And this is all designed in our first seven years of life of just absorbing the information
from around us.
That's from our caretakers.
That's from our school.
Whatever environment you're in, you're just absorbing that as the way you see how life
works.
And we will give examples of this also throughout our podcast, but that is a big piece because
those are shaped through traumas, whether they're small or big traumas.
Those are shaped with just everyday experiences on how we're perceiving the world because
we don't have our fully developed brains in place yet.
So we just think that this is how you respond to situations without all the tools and having
access to information.
So we're going to break down what that means, how there's an impact there, and how that
emotional part of your brain really can turn on all that survival that we just talked about.
And we're going to help you make sense of that.
So that's the deep breath that we always take because it's so much information.
But once you understand all of this, we then share with you, hey, this can work at any
age.
Absolutely.
And this works at any age because think about this, if the brain is disorganized, then that
means that the cortex, like we talked about earlier where we have logic and a lot of our
higher functions, language, that's usually having to compensate for all of the primitive
brain's jobs.
So all those jobs that should be automatic are not automatic.
So your brain's actively having to think, even though you don't notice, actively having
to think, how do I sit up straight?
How do I make eye contact with this person?
How do I breathe?
How do I blink?
Right?
And this is stuff that is taking over the available space that the cortex has.
And so the cortex is left with less and less bandwidth to do the things, the higher functions
that it's meant to do.
So if we have somebody that has this disorganized brain as a child and it's not addressed, this
is going to become a teenager and then an adult with a disorganized brain.
These are challenges that might be masked through different compensations.
We might find something that works for us for a little while, makes us feel better,
makes our life a little bit better, or we might be going into that flight mode where
we're actually just avoiding it completely.
Anything that's hard for us, we're going to avoid it and we're going to find different
patterns of escape to not have to face it as an adult.
But the challenges can present differently, right?
It can be something like having anxiety or having stage fright all the way to having
challenges with motor coordination, dyslexia, or even being a huge procrastinator, that
was me.
It doesn't matter how old you are though, the brain is plastic throughout our entire
lives.
And the brain is going to respond to the input that it gets in the same way.
So when you're recreating those movements, the primitive brain is coming online and developing
and understanding the same things that it understood when you were a baby and you were
moving, and it's going to organize its foundation so that your cortex is finally free to focus
on the higher functions.
And this is why we always say living in the cortex is where your best life happens because
you're able to choose how you show up in the world and truly be your authentic self.
And that truly is why we're doing this podcast.
We want to talk about all of the different components of not just what we do, but other
amazing modalities that are out there and other ways of helping people understand there's
nothing wrong with you if you have some of these challenges and there's so much that
we all can do.
We all have the tools.
You have the tools inside of you in the cortex is just showing you what they are and how
to use them.
And so we're all about inspiring people and sharing the hope that the brain can change
and life can get so much easier.
We're so grateful that you're here with us.
Thank you so much for listening to our very first episode and we will see you next time.
Please make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and share this episode
with your friends.
We are on social media as in the cortex underscore us.
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You can also find us at our website www.inthecortex.com.
And because you're listening to our podcast, you can use promo code Brainiac for $10 off
your first payment of our program.
Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time.