Mimi Herrmann (1931-2007) was a researcher and problem-solver. An education in psychology and educational administration, combined with a long career in healthcare administration, brought her to understand that none of these fields solved the problems she encapsulated in the phrase "the human predicament."
Her research that resulted in Quanta Change began with her lifelong question, "Why do people get sick?" She answered this question for herself through the discovery of the source of stress, and a new understanding of human development and the work of human energy. At that point, she went far beyond just answering the question for herself. This understanding gave her a way to work with the source of the human predicament and change it, permanently.
Mimi's research spanned 20 years. It included a several-year study with the Humana Heart Institute, a 7-year mentoring relationship with neurophysiologist Patrick McGraw, PhD., and work developing the process in an applied research center, the Quanta Center for Learning and Development.
Read Mimi's exciting research and discovery story below, excerpted from her book, Opening Your Black Door.
I was excited. The statistician had just called to say he was ready to share his analysis of my data. It was 1989 - the second year of my formal research project. I had been funded by a heart institute connected with a major healthcare entity in Louisville, Kentucky to look for something new regarding health. I had worked in the health arena in Michigan the previous twenty years where we treated symptoms well, but had little time for or interest in addressing the source of those symptoms. This was a special time for me. I had left the employment world to look for the source of sickness - of what I saw as non-well-being - being quite aware that no one else thought there was anything to find. I was going on my belief that all complexity comes from simplicity. I was looking for that simplicity.
I met with my statistician only to hear him apologize. I had collected heart-risk information (age, gender, smoker or not, heart-disease or not, etc.) along with actual cholesterol readings and specific Self-Descriptions from my two research groups. He was telling me he was unable to find any correlation with sickness in this data. When he saw I was not devastated with his news, he got excited, saying he had analyzed the Self-Descriptions separately from the heart-risk and cholesterol information and was
convinced that he was measuring something significant. By this time, I was smiling because I was off in another time.
As a youngster, my father had given me little problems as he put me to bed to ensure that I would stay there while he put the four older kids to bed. Amazingly, he and I both took this problem-solving situation seriously. He always asked me for my answer at breakfast and always praised me for my creative approach to finding an answer. One of my major breakthroughs regarding problem-solving was when I learned to look for what I came to call a non-obvious commonality - like when my father asked me one night to insert the number 11 appropriately in this series of numbers: 5,4 9,12. Finding the right place for number 11 (at the beginning of the series) was easy when I stepped away from the problem as numbers and saw it as words - words that had the non-obvious commonality of being alphabetized.
I was back now as my statistician was asking me to name what his computer program was generating as statistical significance. He was not able to say what was significant from the Self-Description perspective. He had no idea that I had revisited my earlier problem-solving days and was already thinking in terms of a non-obvious commonality. The Self-Description tool I had chosen to use in my research had been designed and validated to address the concept of stress that had been introduced to the scientific community in 1936 by Hans Selye, M.D., Ph.D. I had studied Selye's work in the early '80's when I worked for a major hospital system's new Stress Reduction Center and had been certified to teach Stress Management. My current research would be on Selye's original definition of stress as the "rate of wear and tear" going on in the body.
Selye had spent fifty years looking for the source of the "rate of wear and tear" that he had uncovered, but his inconclusiveness, even up to the point of his death, had allowed the concept of stress to become overly generalized to refer to anything that caused conflict and confusion in one's life. By the time of my work, stress had become just another symptom that the health-care system was treating.
To my way of thinking, Selye had not known to look for a non-obvious commonality in his search for the source of stress. He had become one of the most prolific scientific writers and researchers of his time as he continuously searched to understand why the body's ability to deal with what is a natural and daily wear and tear was being compromised. His concern, interestingly, was not with the wear and tear going on in the body, but, rather, with the "rate" of something that was exhausting the body's natural ability to repair and rejuvenate that wear and tear. Selye was convinced there was an invisible force at work, but after those fifty years of research, still was unable to identify it. I had decided to look for what Selye could not find - the source of stress - believing it would lead me to the source of sickness.
I based my research on the work of Clayton Lafferty, Ph.D., a behavioral psychologist in Michigan, who had studied with Selye before launching his own research regarding stress. Lafferty had collected the words his clients used to describe themselves, using them as the basis of his research-based Self-Description instrument that reflects how a person thinks about life's personal situations. Lafferty's approach to understanding stress had not been applied in the health arena in relation to sickness. After studying with Dr. Lafferty, I decided to use his Self-Description tool in my own research project. I was hypothesizing that the words he had collected and used as the basis of his tool actually were reflecting the sense that something is wrong with the self that might have something to do with sickness. Little did I know that this early hypothesis would be the key to the non-obvious commonality regarding sickness for which I was looking.
My statistician brought me back to the meeting we were having and to what I was sensing regarding Lafferty's Self-Description tool. He said his tool was capturing how people were thinking about the stress of their lives. It occurred to me that the words he had collected were reflecting how these people were feeling about the stress of their lives. The words were telling me that these people felt there was something wrong with them. I was realizing the words Lafferty had collected were reflecting the brain's recall of the stored sense that something is wrong. The words were reflecting that each person's brain
had learned that being the self as they were was not good enough. Because of my early problem-solving training, I was seeing a non-obvious commonality. I turned to my statistician, telling him that he was measuring Learned Distress - the sense that something is wrong that is being stored by each person's sensory brain.
But so much for my breakthrough understanding at that moment. Despite another year and a half of funding by the heart institute to allow for further data-analysis and confirmation of my theory, I could generate no real interest in my discovery of Learned Distress. Eventually, I was told my funding would be discontinued, at which time I was left to convince myself of what I had found. I wanted to believe that the non-obvious commonality of Learned Distress not only was the source of sickness that I was looking for, but also was the source of the rate of wear and tear that Selye was looking for.
Interestingly, just as my funding was ending, my work, being original and unpublished, was accepted for presentation at a World Health Organization's regional health education conference in Singapore. I made my presentation in Singapore realizing that it was not for me to convince others of what I thought I knew but, rather, to convince myself. Shortly after returning from Singapore, I was introduced to Patrick McGraw, Ph.D., Professor of Neurophysiology at the University of Louisville's School of Medicine. Seeing that I was focused on understanding learning as a function of the brain, Dr. McGraw was intrigued with the concept of Learned Distress and offered to assist my understanding of it and of the sensory brain. His offer led to an incredible seven-year research-mentoring relationship and friendship, during which time he honored my questions and my curiosity as he guided me to think scientifically.
One day, after spending time in Patrick's brain-lab as the medical students reviewed the physiological functions of specific slices of the brain, I concluded that knowing what the brain was doing physiologically was not important to me. I wanted to know why the brain was doing as it was. Right then, I asked Patrick to tell me, in one sentence, the purpose of the brain. Patrick said the purpose of the brain is "to monitor homeostasis." I was stunned. His three-word answer would change everything I was about!
The word "homeostasis" had been used frequently during the years I was involved in the health-care arena, always in reference to a natural state of health. I remember wondering back then what had gone wrong with that natural state that so many people were sick. Patrick's statement regarding the brain's purpose confirmed for me that the brain was not monitoring a natural state of health but, rather, a state of non-well-being reflecting itself as the learned sense that something is wrong - as Learned Distress. Everything was coming together. I knew that what the brain would monitor as homeostasis could only be relative to what the brain was storing as the learned sense of self. I needed to better understand this process called homeostasis.
I learned that in 1932, Walter Cannon, M.D., an American physiologist, had identified the body's natural tendency of physiological stability and had chosen homeostasis, Greek for "staying power," to represent his concept. Dr. Cannon had discovered that the brain's hypothalamus was responsible for insuring the equilibrium of the body's vital systems. I understood how this balancing process could be seen as a state of health, but my concept of Learned Distress brought me a totally different view of the process. Both my study regarding homeostasis and my research regarding the learned sense of self and the self-description it generates were telling me that while this amazing physiological process of homeostasis is meant to maintain a state of health, it actually is maintaining a state of non-well-being.
I had made an unconscious shift in my thinking while I was studying the homeostatic process. Still very much aware of Selye's observation that the "rate" of wear and tear was inappropriately exhausting the body's finite supply of life force, I realized I was dealing with invisible forces: the work of homeostasis, the "rate" of wear and tear, the actual energy of life and of course, Learned Distress. I found myself focusing on the non-obvious commonality of these invisible forces.
I had a Master's Degree in Education and a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology. For many years, this traditional background had kept my problem-solving focused on a person's behavior - the obvious. Now I was focused on the non-obvious - on the behavior of these invisible forces.
I started looking at the overall behavior of energy itself. I was seeing those invisible internal human forces as the work of energy. I studied the most recent science of energy known as Chaology that had emerged in the 1960's. Looking to explain everyday occurrences, the Chaos scientists had dispelled the assumption that nature's behavior was random. Looking for the explanation for the actual formation of mass, they formulated what they refer to as the Law of Creativity. They recognized that energy particles are "sensitively dependent on the initial conditions" (the chaos) they experience while they are forming into mass - into one of those discrete bundles of energy known as quanta.
When I understood that the Law of Creativity was saying the subtle order among all of nature's systems was this actual quanta-formation process, I started to see the human body as a human quanta that had been formed the same as any other quanta. The Law of Creativity was telling me that the "sensitive dependency" of energy particles is the basis of a sensory learning process that allows each quanta or bundle of energy to be well with the "initial conditions" they experience while forming - whatever those conditions are out there in the external chaos. I was seeing the Law of Creativity as the non-obvious commonality of all bundles of energy. I was seeing sensory learning as the source of well-being in every quanta, including the human quanta.
I could now identify the human brain as a quanta-brain that was meant to be maintaining the well-being of the human quanta according to the initial external conditions stored as its sensory learning. The Law of Creativity was legitimizing my concept of Learned Distress. Because of this Law, I knew that the energy particles forming the quanta-brain have no choice but to be sensitively dependent upon whatever comes to them while they are experiencing those initial conditions. The quanta-brain then has no choice but to monitor those conditions that have been non-rationally - non-judgmentally - soaked up, including the sense that something is wrong out there being human.
In order to further understand all that I had come to know about human energy, I opened and operated the Quanta Center for Learning and Development as my applied research laboratory for the next four years. Still being mentored by Dr. McGraw, I was totally focused by now on the quanta-brain and the development of a process for the un-learning of Learned Distress. I could see that the learned sense that something is wrong was the source of human non-well-being -not heredity or genetics. I knew that non-well-being was un-natural and I knew it could be un-learned. I just had to find the way.
Hundreds of research volunteers provided data that Dr. McGraw and I analyzed regarding my ideas for the un-learning process. It was during this time that I identified wakefulness and sleep as two different energy states and could see the sleep energy state as the sensory state during which the un-learning of Learned Distress could occur. I wrote, tested and evaluated my first Quanta Sensory Message to be used in the sleep energy state with these research participants. My research participants allowed me to know that Quanta Change occurs in cycles - that it really is possible for the sense that something is wrong to be gradually but permanently un-learned.
While all this studying and designing and testing was going on, I was still doing my best to let others know what I had uncovered, believing so totally in its significance. I met with other researchers, with heads of companies and health-care systems, with physicians, and with anyone, frankly, who I thought would benefit from what I knew. I continued to be met with a blank response - with their absolute inability to accept that there could be a simple explanation and solution for the human predicament of non-well-being, however it "looked."
The day came when I no longer attempted to convince other professionals of the significance of what I was now calling the Quanta Idea of Human Well-Being. I finally had accepted what was really important. I knew what I knew. I believed in this new understanding of the behavior of energy and in its application to the behavior of human energy. I knew the time was right to tell you about the Quanta Idea and let you decide whether it is the piece missing in our understanding of human well-being and non-well-being. It is my fervent hope and dream that the Quanta Idea's acceptance will come through a grass-roots movement that you initiate.
It has been many hours, days, weeks, months, and even years putting Opening Your Black Door down on paper for you. I have done my best to tell the story of energy as I see it so you can follow the shift to the non-obvious commonality of sensory learning that it represents. I hope knowing my background story helps you enjoy, accept and even pass on the story of that amazing black door that is just waiting to be opened by you.
Mimi Herrmann
© 2003 Herrmann Unlimited
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