It’s not as easy as you might think. Turns out it a lot depends upon whether or not your Courtship Command Center’s P1 neurons are hyper-activating your motivation and perception circuitry. If Central Command is flooding your brain with massive amounts of dopamine, chances are increased that you’ll try to put some moves on. But even then, only 44% of the time. Turns out for fruitflies, it’s not about the sex. It’s about the brain – sex is all in their head!
In this spirited TED Talk, physicist Ruben Meerman breaks down the mathematics of weight loss. In the process he exposes a lot of myths and misconceptions about what weight/fat actually is and where it actually goes when we lose it. Hint: You might wonder, but it’s not responsible for global warming.
So, my dissertation research took me around to spiritual communities in Tennessee, Maine, Upstate NY and Sea Ranch in CA. One thing became clear to me over and over: Where and who you live with is as important as how you live. Part of why I stayed at CASBS at Stanford for 10 years (I was only planning to stay for 6 months!) was because of the paradisaical, secure environment up on the top of the hill looking over all of Silicon Valley. No C-Reactive Protein imbalances for me!
Hubris Syndrome: How Power Damages Our BrainIf power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage? Thus begins the opening paragraph of this compelling article. Further, historian Henry Adams described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” Years of lab and field experiments show that people under the influence of power act as if they have suffered a traumatic brain injury. They become more impulsive, less risk-aware, and less able to see things from other people’s perspective. Like the famous Phineas Gage, they’ve got no Theory of Mind!
I can easily imagine a day when we will be able to readily and painlessly metabolize traumatic memories similar to what happens when people successfully move into and fully through a complex grieving process. Gene and protein applications will very likely play a role. And as you might expect, the Military Industrial Complex is deeply immersed in such research for less than suffering-reduction reasons, unfortunately.
A Mind at Home With Itself. To take a look at that 
1. Repetition: the aggression is repeated compulsively.
This is something that the WORLD, and especially the men in it, would be well-served to profoundly and compassionately understand: SEXUAL VIOLENCE PERPETRATED UPON WOMEN IS NOT LIKE OTHER TRAUMA … And the cost is significant to the women affected. Much of the world gets framed through the violation that has been perpetrated upon them and the limitations that result cost the women, their friends and families and the larger culture, dearly. I wholeheartedly believe that if only this shadow-crime were eliminated from the planet, the flourishing of the human race would be unparalleled. Three cheers for whatever the @MeToo Movement can do to bring this violence into the healing light of day. I pray that Dr. Blasey Ford gets her say.
For many reasons Richie Davidson is one of my neuroscience heroes. One of those reasons is because he mentors so many young neuroscientists. In this study, one of his mentees, Regina Lapate, used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), a technique that can temporarily “knock out” or inhibit activity in specific parts of the brain. She and her team discovered that when the lateral prefrontal area – a region known for executive function (attention, focus, impulsivity and more) – was inhibited by the stimulation, participants showed more emotional spillover. What that means is that….crazy can be contagious!
Then I deploy a range of strategies and physical exercise to help regulate them. It’s a lot of work, let me tell you. What this research from the Salk Institute underscores is that fear is essentially a neural net- work phenomenon – one that can be actively worked with. Anti-anxiety meds are one way, but brain plasticity and the potential for organic change invites us to experiment with other ways as well. For example, the Authoritative Communities mentioned in the “Hardwired to Connect” piece that follows. All of us can be calmer together than any one of us alone.
That we can engage in practices that allow us to deliberately and conscious- ly manage the Hypothalmic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis which is primarily responsible for when and how the fear response shows up in our body and brain. In this detailed account of an artist’s response to the Trader Joe’s hostage standoff in L.A. last month, we see how a heart fully operational in kindness and empathy can manage an otherwise completely unmanageable situation. Breathtaking in its beauty.
David Eagleman and Walter Mischel teach us about “Odysseus Contracts” and when we should just “eat the damn marshmallow” (or the ice cream cone). I think their research would find a lot of people who could benefit in our nation’s capital.
Since general anesthesia is essentially a medically-induced “freeze response,” I can’t help but wonder how the adverse effects might be mitigated if a post-operative protocol for “discharging the freeze response” might be enacted. It’s what the body does naturally when it goes into “shock” and begins spontaneously trembling in response to overwhelming, hyper-stimulating experiences.
