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very essence of our survival as a human species and is "wired" into literally every sensory response we have.

Not surprisingly, past emotional trauma seems to be a factor in a person developing "runaway" or "hyper" pattern recognition. A poorly functioning anterior cingulate and/or the nucleus accumbens leads to a person having poor emotional regulation, with a host of dysfunctional behaviors to boot. What could very well have helped the caveman survive is the same emotional-behavioral pattern that modern day doctors call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Even as early as 1995, the work of Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., shows that persons suffering with PTSD produced brain scans with low activity in their anterior cingulate. This suggests that the anterior cingulate is not allowing the right and left hemispheres of the brain to share information, as this is one of the roles of this brain area.

In fact, from an archaic reference, the caveman with hyper pattern recognition was the one that survived the arduous conditions of the time. A caveman who did not possess this ability might have ignorantly walked into a dangerous animal den, for instance, even after a previous experience (such as watching a neighbor be killed by the wild animal living in that den) had shown him that it was unsafe to do so. Of course, this caveman was more prone to die off, thus did not contribute his slower-to-recognize-patterned brain to the gene pool. Furthermore, the caveman's average life span was 15; there was no need for long-term planning, so you could say that, with regards to the Law of Attraction, our ancestry is "stacked against us."

FAILURE TO EVOLVE:

People with hyper pattern recognition tendencies do not thrive well in today's world. Such persons may be in enormous debt and have a history of bad relationships. They are more likely to use drugs or alcohol in order to quell anxiety and feed their need for instant gratification. They may have gambling or sex addictions, or be hopelessly overweight due to an inability to control emotional eating (which is, again, governed by the decision-
making ability of the prefrontal cortex). Sadly, these patters are pervasive and endure even after years of cognitive-behavioral interventions, including LOA. Furthermore, our survival instinct is intimately connected with the same areas of the brain that generate extreme pleasure, the nucleus accumbens. The irony is that LOA states that we want to "feel good" in order to send out the magnetic

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