The Stress of the Unthought Known

There’s an unpredictable neural trickster living inside each of us, taking up residence in the dendrites and synapses that weave their way through the right side of our brain. It’s been living there since before we were transformed from embryos into fetuses – between weeks seven and eight in utero. By then, great learning has [...]

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The Cost of the Cut: Reflections on Infant Circumcision

by Jeanne Denney
I remember the day after my first child was born. A well-known “OB to the Stars” in New York City who delivered my son came in to see what we wanted to do about circumcision. “This is completely up to you,” she said with authority. “But it only takes a minute and he [...]

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Our Greatest Human Failing …

… could also be our greatest growing edge. What is it? I can’t really speak for you, so I’ll speak for me. My greatest human failing is this: for most of my life I’ve been a very poor contingent communicator. In a graduate school clinical psychology class, where the professor invited each of us to [...]

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Grokking the Gray Side of Social Neuroscience

Last week I read a scary news report. It bought to mind totalitarian images of George Orwell’s 1984 or Phillip K. Dick’s Minority Report. Since I’m trained by people like Pema Chödrön and Robert McKee and Natalie Goldberg to pay attention to the stories that scare me, I did what anyone in their right mind [...]

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Food-Rehabbing My Big Fat Brain

As I’ve mentioned here from time to time, I grew up in a housing project on welfare. Such beginnings provided their fair share of allostatic load resulting in a lot of less-than-best early brain conditioning. One area where me and my brain currently struggle mightily is in the area of food and nutrition.
Life on welfare [...]

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