Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

the idea that developing the reflective skills of mindsight activates the very circuits that create resilience and well-being and that underlie empathy and compassion as well.

When I lost control over the crepes, I was being reactive rather than receptive. Had I remained open and reflective, I might have been able to make our interaction a time of learning for all of us. Instead I was carried away by the intensity of my emotions, my feelings overwhelmed my awareness, a subcortical storm disabled prefrontal integration, a

Information is anything that symbolizes something other than itself.

But with my limbic ball of fire burning, I had no access to intuition—to the wisdom of my body and to a deeper sense of knowing what was true, what was really happening. Paradoxically, however, I might have said that I felt justified in what I was doing, that “in my gut” it felt right. Those statements would have been rationalizations driven by my

Clusters of neurons in the brainstem also come into play when certain conditions seem to require a rapid mobilization of energy distribution throughout the body and brain. This so-called fight-flight-freeze array of responses is responsible for our survival at times of danger.

The posterior cortex is the master mapmaker of our physical experience, generating our perceptions of the outer world—through the five senses—and also keeping track of the location and movement of our physical body through touch and motion perception.

The brain’s complexity gives us virtually infinite choices for how our mind will use those firing patterns to create itself. If we get stuck in one pattern or the other, we’re limiting our potential.

Each of us has a unique mind: unique thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories, beliefs, and attitudes, and a unique set of regulatory patterns. These patterns shape the flow of energy and information inside us, and we also share them with other minds.

This contagion can even make us interpret unrelated events with a particular bias—so that, for example, after we’ve been around someone who is depressed we interpret someone else’s seriousness as sadness.

Notice how your two middle fingertips rest on top of the limbic-thumb and touch the brainstem-palm, and are also linked directly to the cortex-fingers. So the middle prefrontal area is literally one synapse away from neurons in the cortex, the limbic area, and the brainstem. And, as I’ll discuss later, it even has functional pathways that connect u