By Christoph Schnelle, Australia

I talked to a professor of statistics about PhDs and he told me about one of his PhD students who wants to find out how people make decisions. This student puts people into a FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine and records their brain activity while they make decisions.

Might there be a simpler way to investigate how we make decisions?

From my work with Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine I have learned that it is much easier to make good decisions when I am in touch with my body.

What does that mean in practice?

As an example, victims of major accidents, when interviewed, regularly say that they were either very depressed or very happy, euphoric even, just before the accident. When you are euphoric or very depressed it is difficult to feel your body – there is something much stronger going on – perception is swamped by the euphoria or the depression and it is actually quite impossible to feel anything subtle that may be happening in the body.

It is also true that when people overanalyse a decision they have to make, then the quality of their decision making goes down. When we overanalyse we get very mentally active and involved and thereby lose contact with our body.

If I make a decision when I am emotional, it tends to be, actually it pretty much always is, a worse decision than when I am not emotional but able to feel what is going on. When I am able to feel I am by definition aware of my body, but when I am emotional I have found out (and had it confirmed countless times through my own experience) that I am in a reaction to a feeling. Clearly, when I am in a reaction I can’t feel my body properly – except aches and pains maybe, but nothing more subtle.

As a financial adviser I have also seen that worse decisions are made when people lack confidence. In that lack of confidence we contract; it actually feels like we shrink into ourselves and we lose contact to our body as well. Equally, when we are over confident, we are not in touch with our body and our decisions tend to be impaired.

Other people might also be aware of this connection between being in touch with our body and the quality of decisions we made: have you noticed how many shops play loud music and what that does to how easy it is to feel our body?  More subtly, have we noticed how muzak (the background music played in big shops) may put us into a dreamy state and we later notice how much longer we stayed at the shop and how much more we have spent?