What is integration and why does it matter to our children?

 What is integration and why does it matter to our children?

 

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Most of us don’t think about the fact that our brain has many different parts with different jobs.
For example, you have a left side of the brain that helps you think logically and organize thoughts into sentences, and a right side that helps you experience emotions and read nonverbal cues. You also have a “reptile brain” that allows you to act instinctually and make split-second survival decisions, and a “mammal brain” that leads you toward connection and relationships.
One part of your brain is devoted to dealing with memory; another to making moral and ethical decisions. It’s almost as if your brain has multiple personalities — some rational, some irrational; some reflective, some reactive.
No wonder we can seem like different people at different times!

  The key to prosperity is to help these parts work well together - to merge them. Integration takes the distinct parts of your mind and helps them work together as a whole.
 It is similar to what happens in the body, where there are different organs that perform different functions: the lungs breathe air, the heart pumps blood, and the stomach digests food.
In order for the body to be healthy, all these organs must be merged. In other words, each of them needs to perform their individual job while working together as a whole. Integration is simply: connecting different elements with each other to make holistic works fine.
Just as with healthy body performance, your brain cannot perform at its best unless its different parts work together in a coordinated and balanced way. This is what integration does: it coordinates and balances the separate regions of the brain that bind them together. Easy to see when our children are not integrated - they feel confused, emotions and chaotic. 

Can not respond calmly and ably on the situation at hand. Tantrums, breakdowns, aggression and most other difficult parenting experiences - are the result of loss of integration, also known as lack of integration.

 We want to help our children integrate better so that they can use their entire minds in a coordinated way. For example, we want to be merged horizontally, so that the logic of their left mind can work well with their feelings in the right brain.
 We also want to be vertically integrated, so that the upper parts of the brain, which allow them to think about their actions, work well with the lower parts, which are more interested in instinct, intestinal reactions and survival.
The way in which integration is actually done is great, something most people don't know. In recent years, scientists have developed a brain scanning technique that allows researchers to study the brain in ways never before possible. 

This new technology has confirmed much of what we previously thought about the brain. However, one of the surprises that shook the foundations of neuroscience is the discovery that the brain is actually "plastic" or moldy. This means that the brain changes physically throughout our lives, not just in childhood.